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Brisbane
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158
459
Oombulgurri
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Tiwi Islands
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Halls Creek
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Ambrym Island
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Port Arthur
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370
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Nusa
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Trobriand Islands
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381
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New Ireland
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541.5
515.5
Aneityum
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619
490
Fiji
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559
690
Aukland
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About

Oceania forms a vast region, encompassing Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and the tropical islands of the Pacific. The designation was imposed by European observers and cartographers but is today employed as an expedient geographic, political, and cultural link between diverse native peoples. From the late eighteenth century, European empires began to stake claims on the peoples and territory within the Pacific Ocean. By the twentieth century, formal imperial control had been imposed by many powers, including Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, the United States, and Japan.

Trade preceded the flag in the Pacific, and there were already substantial interactions between private traders, whalers, sealers, and missionaries on one side and the native inhabitants of Oceania on the other. This digital interactive presents illustrative examples of some of these encounters, plotted in three set chronologies that roughly correspond to different kinds of colonial entanglements.

The objects and images within this digital interactive are not culturally or historically isolated curiosities. They are instead powerful records of complex cultural encounters that transcend their functional roles and materials. They are themselves frontier spaces where identity is adaptive, fluid, and interpreted among contesting perceptions of tradition, culture, and authority.

Choose one of the three time periods across the top of this interactive to explore different selections of objects placed on a map of Oceania. Learn about each object by selecting it from the sidebar on the right side of subsequent screens. Return to this page at any time by selecting “Frontier Shores” at the top-left of the interactive.

1830

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Contact & Control

Contact between the native inhabitants of Oceania and Europe had been occurring from the sixteenth century onward. Explorers, such as Anthony van Diemen and Luís Vas de Torres, alongside their crews and naturalists, mapped and claimed new lands for their countries. In the second half of the eighteenth century, increasing numbers of Europeans voyaged to Oceania in search of resources to exploit and exchange. This created more opportunities for material and cultural entanglement.

By 1830, most European powers in the area sustained contact with indigenous populations in coastal zones to extract or trade resources without establishing permanent settlements. This is not to say that the impact of such soft imperialism was not profound. The presence of new trading partners, resources, and missionaries ushered in a period of cultural, social, and political change.

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Gov. Arthur’s Proclamation to the Tasmanian Peoples. Tasmania, Australia, 1830. Oil on wood panel. © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, PM 72-21-70 / 6500.

Gov. Arthur’s Proclamation to the Tasmanian Peoples

This proclamation board was one of many made in 1830, issued by George Arthur (1784–1854), lieutenant-governor of Van Dieman’s Land (present-day Tasmania), ostensibly as an attempt to pacify the frontier during a time of increasing conflict between settlers and the Aboriginal population. The British-born Arthur was a product of his times—paradoxically subscribing to ideas of abolitionism and emancipation while effectively presiding over the violent dispossession of Aboriginal people.

Working with Arthur, surveyor-general George Frankland (1800–1838) created the template for the proclamation board, inspired by local tree-bark carvings and petroglyphs. His vision depicted Aboriginals and settlers in friendship and equality under British law. The upper section shows both cultures side by side in an entirely European vision of social unity. The bottom section depicts the consequences of murder, which would be enforced equally. The reality, however, was that settler populations were rarely punished for murdering Aboriginal people.

Contrary to his message of unity, Arthur proceeded to use force to counter Aboriginal resistance. In an effort to “protect” the native population, he engaged every able-bodied male colonist to form a human chain that swept east to west across the island to muster the remaining Aboriginal people to the Tasman Peninsula. It was a costly failure: only one small boy and an elderly woman were captured. Between 1831 and 1835, lay preacher George A. Robinson was sent to speak with the remaining Aboriginal population (of approximately 200); he convinced them to relocate to Flinders Island. Disease further decimated the population. Arthur’s exiling of any remaining people was, in the mind of nineteenth-century Europeans, an act of humanitarianism.

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1879–1893

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Trade & Changing Forms

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was a period of considerable colonial expansion in Oceania, especially in the South Pacific islands. In fact, much of this expansion happened simultaneously across the seas, as in the case of Fiji and Papua New Guinea, both of which had almost a century of trading contact with Europeans and an established British presence by 1874. Although Fiji became a British colony that year, New Guinea faced a mixture of continuing British missionary presence, Dutch sovereignty, and German commercial interests. In 1883, the colony of Queensland annexed southern New Guinea on behalf of the British government. A year later, northeastern New Guinea (later named Kaiser-Wilhelmsland) and the Bismarck Archipelago became German protectorates.

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Tatanua (Mask for Funerary Ceremony)

This crested tatanua mask originates from the northern region of New Ireland and was donned by initiated dancers during mortuary ceremonies. Tatanua masks feature a tall median crest of yellow fibers that simulate a mourning hairstyle of earlier times, when relatives of the dead would grow out their hair and bleach it with lime and other dyestuffs to produce a yellow hue. Mourners would shave both sides of the head and cover the bare skin with a thick coat of lime, adding painted asymmetrical designs and beaded adornment of seed husks. Tatanua masks faithfully imitate this bygone hairstyle while incorporating other attributes collectively associated with an ideal of masculine beauty, including a narrow forehead, a prominent nose with flared nostrils, pierced and stretched ear lobes, and a large gaping mouth of pointed teeth. The eyes of tatanua masks are nearly always set in hollow crescents with pupils of shell operculum.

The production of tatanua involves the work of two craftsmen: a carver who constructs the face with an openwork technique and a painter for the headdress and facial coloring. The openwork carving enables the wearer to see during the funeral performance while disguising their identity from onlookers beneath a visage of contrasting volumes, low relief carvings, and incised designs.

Associated ceremonial activities and material culture were known as malagan, and whether the masks themselves are generally called the same or only in the dances is often disputed. Although the production and use of most malagan carvings falls under the prerogative of individual rights holders, tatanua masks can be made by anyone who possesses the adequate carving skills. This has led to distinct regional differences in performances that are continually contested across Papuan cultural groups.

Tatanua dancers are exclusively male and act as symbolic intermediaries between the living and the dead during final malagan rites. Although tatanua are manufactured in secret, they are normally worn only once and afterward considered void of their sacredness and either destroyed or left to decay. Thus, New Irelanders routinely sold worn tatanua masks to colonial administrators, ethnographers, and travelers in the late nineteenth century.

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Hand Club. Massim, Papua New Guinea, late 19th century. Wood, pigment. Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, ST/ 850.

Hand Club

This club was collected by Otto Finsch in 1884 in Christmas Bay (most likely named by Finsch himself when the steamer Samoa dropped anchor there on or around Christmas day) in the northern coast of Normanby Island (known as Duau to the locals), the southernmost island of the D’Entrecasteaux group, off the eastern tip of New Guinea (current Milne Bay Province). Before arriving in Duau, Finsch had spent a few days anchored off Kiriwina in the Trobriand Islands, where the club probably originated and where he collected similar pieces, as reported in his original catalogue entry.

Before British New Guinea was annexed in 1888 and Governor General William MacGregor first visited the area in 1890, locals still used clubs as weapons in the Massim archipelago, which includes the Trobriand Islands and the D’Entrecasteaux group. Made world famous some forty years later by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, the Massim is the site of the ongoing Kula ceremonial exchange. Although the main items exchanged are mwali armbands and soulava necklaces, many other artifacts change hands during Kula expeditions. Throughout time, those communities involved in the Kula exchange specialized in the production of certain artifacts that were then traded with partners around the Kula ring, allowing the circulation of not only materials and objects but also patterns and ideas. When Finsch visited, Trobriand woodcarvings had already risen to prominence within the Massim, not only among local Kula partners but also the increasing number of foreign whalers, explorers, and traders, who were particularly attracted to the finely executed ebony objects produced in Kiriwina. In the Trobriand Islands carvings were a specialty of Bwetalu village. Trobrianders would visit Bwetalu before entering into Kula exchange to obtain ebony lime spatulas, bowls, walking sticks, and clubs to give as presents to their Kula partners and “soften their minds” to obtain the much coveted Kula shells.

Produced in the Trobriand Islands and collected in the D’Entrecasteaux group, this finely carved, lime-decorated club is witness to the extensive trade networks in the region during the late nineteenth century. The club also evidences how these trade networks were ever expanding through the inclusion of foreign trade partners. As elsewhere in New Guinea at the time, people in the Massim were making objects for outsiders, adopting new forms and materials, and adapting them as mediators of cross-cultural encounters.

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Canoe head carving. Vanimo culture, Angriffshafen, Papua New Guinea, late 19th century. Wood, pigment. Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, ST/1093.

Canoe Head Carving

Contact between different cultures in Oceania was first established through trade and exploration. Traversing the vast swaths of ocean, expert seafarers exchanged goods, cultures, and peoples. This canoe head carving of the Vanimo people of Papua New Guinea acts as both functional object and decorative element. Canoes were an important part of seafaring lifestyles in Oceania, permitting trade and establishing connections between different local populations. The Vanimo relied heavily on the sea for sustenance, gathering turtles, swordfish, and sharks; the hunting trips would last for a day or two.

Canoes acted as expressions of the group’s accomplishments, spectacularly decorated so as to be visible from a distance. Canoe head carvings were an important element of the decoration, designed not only to impress but also to beguile or awe others. Carved and typically painted, the prow would often feature faces or figural elements, such as birds and fish, along with curvilinear forms. Such head carvings were not permanently attached; the canoe acted as a stage on which the Vanimo could display their crafting skill. Although few Vanimo canoes remain, there are many drawings as well as partial survivals, such as this object, that demonstrate the overall aesthetics of the craft.

Canoes varied greatly between different seafaring peoples. Examining the different styles gives insight into the requirements and limitations of the culture group that created them. Vanimo canoes were small, dugouts with an outrigger and a sail. Because the beaches of the Vanimo region are pebbly, smaller sized canoes were built so they could be easily dragged ashore. The lakatoi, however, were immense vessels made by the Motu people, large enough for a man to almost disappear inside the canoe. Different again were the Trobriand canoes, large, elaborate wooden structures also meant to enchant or frighten those who encountered them. The double canoe, used by many groups throughout Oceania and meant for long journeys, allowed a slower yet smoother sailing experience.

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Civavonovono, or civitabua (breastplate). Fiji, late 19th century. Pearl oyster shell, sperm whale tooth, white metal, plant fiber. Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, 80.1/2061.

Civavonovono, or Civitabua (Breastplate)

Civavonovono, or civitabua (breastplates) made from whale teeth, were highly prized ornamental possessions of Fijian chiefs during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the late eighteenth century, Tongan and Samoan canoe builders came to Fiji and began fashioning breastplates from locally sourced material for Fijian elites. Europeans had encountered these objects early on, for instance, during Captain Cook’s third expedition in 1777. His naturalist, William Anderson, recorded seeing a man at a demonstration fight wearing “a very large thick semicircular breast plate made of one piece of bone hung round his neck.”

The making and exchange of civavonovono emphasized reciprocal relationships between different groups as well hierarchies within those groups. The breastplates were constructed using canoe-building techniques, which gave the impression that the objects were held together by supernatural agency. The resulting appearance of the breastplate transferred a sense of the extraordinary onto its wearer. Civavonovono were used on the body to enclose and separate locations of divine mana (one’s divine origin) as a way to bring about actions beyond normal human ability. Civavonovono were associated with the body of the chief, and therefore with the gods, although anyone who was senior in a particular context would be granted the same ceremonial rights.

The two civavonovono on display differ from earlier examples: visible metal elements hold the components together. Although the object still symbolizes the divine power of the wearer, it now also showcases their access to metal through trading contacts. This is a new form of power, explicitly tied to commercial influence. The power of the civavonovono stems from the technical process, which imbues the object with a magical quality. The “value” of the breastplate is a result of resisting difficulties in order to access the object: the difficulty in obtaining the object because of price or limited sphere of exchange, or because the object was difficult to produce. In this case, the civavonovono have overcome both deterrents. The material comprising the breastplates is rare and hard to collect, and the skill required to produce them is highly specialized.

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Woman’s Bonnet

This bonnet is part of a series of objects J. H. Lawrie collected in the South Pacific. Lawrie spent seventeen years in Vanuatu where he conducted missionary work between 1879 and 1896, fifteen years of which he spent on the island of Aneityum.

European and North American missionaries started to settle in Aneityum from the mid-nineteenth century, translating and adapting some local elements to a Biblical context. As Christianity spread on Aneityum, there was an impulse on the part of European settlers in the Pacific to refashion the culture, appearance, and clothing of the local population. For them, clothing was intricately connected to religion, and some of the missionaries writing in the 1850s reported that Aneityumese people wore European-style garments and accessories on the weekends and for special occasions.

Women especially enjoyed wearing bonnets and headdresses, influenced by the European clothes of missionaries’ wives, who constituted a relatively large part of the settlers’ population. The headdresses that they brought with them probably inspired the production of composite bonnets such as this one.

Although the overall design remains European in inspiration, the materials used and technique of fabrication were adapted to local methods of production. The use of pandanus leaves, a material that peoples of the South Pacific had used for centuries for mats, skirts, and other garments, was common in bonnet making. The cotton was either locally harvested, product of an expanding cotton industry on the island, or imported. The lining of newsprint from an Edinburgh paper, however, is certainly a nonindigenous product.

Unlike European practice, a bonnet such as this was worn on the shoulders to accommodate local women’s voluminous hair types. Bonnets became common on the island and increasing demand stimulated the production and market, along with stylized handkerchiefs, dresses and suits. Clothing was one aspect of a complex system of signifiers, which included other visual references such as tattoos and body alterations, indicating class and status within the community. Ni-Vanuatu islanders used European-style garments to reinvent and transcend their place within the hierarchy.

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Kauri heart. Auckland, New Zealand, late 19th century. Gum (Kauri tree); velvet case, silk satin. Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, 80.0/4110 A-C.

Kauri Heart

This heart-shaped gift and velvet case were sent to a New Zealand–American couple to honor their wedding in 1893. Harvested from the sap of a kauri tree while the resin was still pliable, the worked shape reflects the romantic imagery of typically Western notion of love. The object also illustrates a curious intersection of Māori craftsmanship, colonial entanglements, and commercial interests.

Archival sources indicate that the heart was made by Māori artisans from the province of Auckland on the north island of New Zealand. The identity of the gift-giver is less certain, although the language employed in the accompanying letter to the couple (Mr. and Mrs. William Lincoln Balch) makes it likely that it was a Māori. Although the giver was reluctant to part with the item because of its great personal value, he did so because of his admiration for the bride. He may have been familiar with the groom from his time playing rugby for Canterbury College in Christchurch (1890–92).

Blood Kauri—so named because of its vibrant, reddish hue—was of high commercial value. Harvesters of Kauri resin, often known as gum-diggers, acquired the resource in the northern island directly from Kauri trees, or in the marshes and soft earth where the resin fell. Shipped to Britain, the sap was then rendered into a key ingredient in furniture sealant. Both Europeans and Māori saw the tall, straight trunks of the ancient Kauri trees as ideal for ship masts and house posts. Both local canoes and sailing ships were constructed from the wood, which was felled from mature trees, six hundred to a thousand years old, leading to the near exhaustion of Kauri forests as a sustainable resource; today, they are heavily protected.

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Aukland

1896–1954

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Resistance & Representation

By the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Oceania faced a transitional period in the European colonial agenda. European powers divided the region and ruled according to their own priorities. Great Britain, France, Japan, and the United States constituted the major colonial powers in the Pacific South Seas in the interwar period of 1918–1941. The Commonwealth of Australia came into being in 1901 and enacted a series of exclusionary laws directed at Aboriginal and non-European populations to affirm the “superiority” of European Australians. Following the partition of the German South Pacific colonies in World War I, international tensions between Western countries and Japan had direct repercussions on their respective colonies and occupied territories.

When engaging with colonial populations, Europeans had different approaches to cross-cultural encounters, ranging from an ideology of assimilation in French Polynesia to limited foreign administration in the Samoan Islands. Although European powers’ strategies of colonial rule varied, their involvement in Oceania before World War II was amplified, providing them with increased strategic, political, and commercial advantages. Some of the objects in Frontier Shores allude to complex tensions and cooperative relationships between local populations and colonizers.

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Archibald Meston and the Aboriginal Guard of Honor

This staged photograph, dating to 1896 colonial Queensland, reveals a familiar narrative associated with the colonization of Australia: the homogenization of Aboriginal peoples. Throughout Australia, as in other colonized regions of Oceania, colonial powers asserted dominance over native populations to affirm their own authority. The image reveals eighteen Aboriginal men, Archibald Meston’s “Guard of Honour,” gathering to welcome Lord Lamington, the Queensland governor, to Brisbane. Aboriginal society did not possess a warrior caste, but the men in this group were presented as “authentic warriors” in “traditional” garb that was modified to conform to Victorian sensibilities.

A newspaper report—almost certainly written by Meston—mentioned “scattered tribes” and “many dialects” in relation to this event. The author failed to definitively identify any of the individuals with their own communities. Each honor guard’s political and cultural ties were invisible. Instead, after listing a series of disembodied tribes and dialects, Meston recorded the names of the men without specifying which name belonged to which individual. Thus, the men were ambiguously humanized as individuals, but only as broad representatives of “Queensland Aborigines.”

Meston held contradictory beliefs in relation to Aboriginal populations. Years before this photograph, he organized a production entitled the “Wild Australia Show,” which consisted of a troupe of performing “primitive savages” (Aboriginal people and Torres Strait islanders) whose culture had purportedly not been corrupted by European influences. In 1897, while working for the Queensland government, Meston spearheaded a movement that would later become “The Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act.” Although ostensibly benevolent, the legislation established a system to preserve “racial purity” in Queensland that ultimately segregated Aboriginal people from white society. The resulting disempowerment of Aboriginal groups undermined their ability to contest European authority and determine their own freedom.

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War club. Ni-Vanuatu culture, Ambrym Island, Vanuatu, late 19th century. Wood. Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, 80.0/ 696

War Club

This war club, made on the island of Ambrym in the late nineteenth century, alludes to the particular colonial context in which it was produced. The object bears a strong resemblance to weapons from both Europe and the South Pacific and testifies to the entanglement of material culture in the South Pacific at the time.

Ambrym is part of the Vanuatu archipelago, a region that formally came under European control at the beginning of the twentieth century, following years of foreign commercial and cultural influences. A number of missionaries and merchants, mostly English and French, who resided in Vanuatu saw the potential to establish cotton plantations and develop agriculture. European settlers brought with them a variety of tools, unavailable locally, to facilitate land-based activities, among them many iron tools commonly used in Western Europe. This object might mimic those tools or might just as easily have been based on an illustration of a medieval battle-axe and reproduced by local craftsmen.

The introduction of such objects had repercussions on Ambrym’s material culture and doubtlessly inspired Ni-Vanuatu artisans to interpret these in local forms. The top of the war club bears the recognizable shape of European double-headed axes; the lower part is typical of Ni-Vanuatu manufacture.

It is difficult to determine whether such clubs had a practical function (like the European iron axes they resemble) or were purely ornamental or ceremonial. This Ni-Vanuatu club might have had a ritualistic function, for similar weaponry was also used in rituals and popular ceremonies. The lack of use wear on the object makes this the likely explanation, rather than utility. Or perhaps these objects had no function at all and were instead testament to the craftsman’s technical virtuosity.

Such clubs became popular throughout the South Pacific—similar ones were found in Polynesia in great numbers. The reappropriation of the original shape demonstrates the dynamic relationship between the Ambrymese population and the foreign artifacts to which they were exposed.

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Walking stick curio. Halls Creek, Kimberley region, Western Australia, Australia, 1918. Wood, heat-applied incising. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM 32-68-70 / D3946.

Walking Stick Curio

Halls Creek, the town from which this walking stick likely originated, had by 1918 become an important commercial center in Western Australia. Aboriginal people, mainly Jaru, Kija, Kukatja, Walmajarri, Gooniyandi cultures, had occupied Halls Creek for thousands of years. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Australians of European descent settled in the area in search of minerals and land. In 1885 a three-month gold rush attracted thousands of Australians from across the country, along with Chinese and American immigrants, greatly increasing the town’s population.

As a result of such expansion, various commercial activities developed, and Aboriginal artisans found a particularly lucrative market in the new settlers. Because resources were plentiful in the Kimberley region, the production of sandalwood objects started to flourish. Aboriginal communities used sandalwood for many purposes, including making boomerangs, clubs, spears, and walking sticks. Sandalwood acquired a reputation as the “gold digger’s best friend,” for the settlers quickly became aware of the scarcity of gold in the region and saw sandalwood as a profitable and exportable alternative.

This walking stick was created in the context of increasing commercial development. Aboriginal craftsmen still produced walking sticks in large number in the 1930s. This example, most likely made of sandalwood, shows some typical features: the crooked handle, the serpent carving and the snakelike twisted shape of the cane. The serpent remains a central motif of Aboriginal cosmology and is often depicted across different media.

The overall shape of the object, however, is reminiscent of European-style gentlemen’s canes that some settlers  used. Such walking sticks were probably imitations of existing canes brought by the settlers, reimagined by Aboriginal communities. Westerners purchased a number of commissioned canes like this one from Aboriginal craftsmen. Some were far more elaborate, occasionally including sculpted heads and inscriptions of various kinds. This walking stick is comparatively simple in design and decoration, yet it reflects the entanglement of two material cultures brought together through the expansion of trade and commercial networks in Western Australia.

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Commemorative shield. Forest River, Kimberley region, Western Australia, Australia, early 20th century. Wood, pigment. University of Pennsylvania, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 31-33-6.

Commemoration Shield

Shield production in the Kimberley region has a long history, and one shield in particular has a complex and controversial background that reflects the violent legacy of colonialism. Like other shields from the northern Kimberley plateaus, the oval-shaped commemoration shield is made from a single piece of hardwood with a handle carved into it. Many such shields have charred or carved motifs and held both utilitarian and ceremonial purposes; most men owned one. This piece was carved in 1914 and then repainted in 1928 to memorialize a series of tragic events two years after they were believed to have taken place.

Although the Kimberley district of Western Australia did not see extensive European settlement until the 1860s, newcomers had arrived in this remote region for almost a century earlier, drawn by fertile savannahs and grasslands. Violence often resulted in frontier zones as Europeans established themselves on Aboriginal lands. Local Europeans more often than not had the law on their side, regardless of depredations inflicted on Aboriginal people.

In 1926, at the Nulla Nulla station, European settler Fred Hay was murdered. Contemporaneous accounts claim that Hay raped the wife of a local man, Lumbia, who then killed Hay. Hay’s murder initiated a series of events that attest to the strained, and to some extent unresolved, relationship between colonizers and Aboriginal people. Following the discovery of Hay’s body, a police expedition went from camp to camp seeking Lumbia. Their actions, from this point, are contested. Estimates range from zero to three hundred Aboriginal people killed as the party searched the countryside surrounding the Forrest River. The Royal Commission of 1927 attempted to bring the police party to justice; however, the commission was unable to secure a conviction because the evidence was circumstantial and a series of witnesses retracted their testimonies.

This shield was manufactured on the Forrest River Mission, according to the collector, as a local memorialization of the victims of the Forrest River massacres. The commemoration shield stands as a testament to a violent history that has been largely obscured.

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Pukumani, or Tutini (Tiwi mortuary pole). Tiwi culture, Melville Island, Northern Territory, Australia, 1954. Wood, pigment. University of Pennsylvania, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 55-17-2.

Pukumani / Tutini
(Tiwi Mortuary Pole)

Tutini are carved wooden grave poles created two to six months after a deceased Tiwi person’s burial. They continue to be central elements of the pukumani mortuary ceremony, which appeases the spirits of the dead and ensures the deceased’s transition into the spirit world. Since the early twentieth century, the Tiwi have also made grave-posts for consumers, including museums and private collectors.

Poles created for final mortuary rites are commissioned by the deceased’s family, who select the pole cutters from among kinsmen most distantly related to the deceased. Talented carvers are recognized by their peers, and Tiwi communities can easily distinguish one another’s work. The carver selects a bloodwood or ironwood tree and cuts it down, then debarks and shapes it. By the time Jane C. Goodale visited to commission the tutini on display, carvers used metal tools. When shaping is completed, the carvers cover the poles in dry brush and fire them evenly. The dried, blackened surfaces of the poles are then ready to receive paint, typically white, yellow, red, and black derived from natural ochers, charcoal, and clay. Orchid root juice or turtle eggs are used as fixatives.

When finished, the tutini are set in the ground in a single row approximately fifty yards away from the grave mound. The ground around and between the poles and grave is cleared of sticks and stones to protect dancers’ feet during the pukumani ceremony. Following an initial dance by the deceased’s closest kin some distance from the poles and the grave mound, the mourners paint their bodies, obscuring their features to prevent recognition by the deceased’s ghost. Twisted human hair ropes are worn around the waist or head. Close relatives wear braided pandanus leaf bands around their arms. During the final pukumani ceremonies, the poles are placed around the grave and all community members sing and dance for the deceased. After the pukumani is complete, the kinsmen say goodbye to the deceased’s ghost and walk away; the poles remain on the grave mound until destroyed by termites and the elements. Today, such poles are commonly later sold to museums and the collector market.

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