Publications

The Art of Oro Province

The art of Oro Province has been very much overlooked in the volume of writing on Oceanic Art – probably because the artists of Oro Province produce relatively few collectable wooden objects besides their rare and valuable lime spatulas and head rests.
On the other hand, Oro is one of the richest sources of personal adornment in PNG, producing fascinating body jewellery, ornate mourning dress and the exquisite Omie tapa cloths as well as utilitarian objects.
This is the first survey of Oro art ever published and incorporates more than 200 photographs and illustrations from the world’s leading museums, including the British Museum, Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the Cambridge Museum, the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, Auckland museum, the Australian museum, the Queensland University Museum, the Queensland Museum and the private collections of Michael Hamson, John Friede and David Baker.

The study is the result of two years of research by Harry Beran and Edward Aguirre and is published on CD as a 130 page Microsoft Word document with text by Harry Beran.

Order your copy of ‘The Art of Oro Province’
Cost including mailing:
Australia AU$14.70
USA Canada, Europe, UK, New Zealand AU$15.
Payment: USA, Europe, UK and other destinations outside Australia - Paypal only to oassydney@gmail.com

Australia only: Cheque to OAS, P.O. Box 678, Woollahra, NSW or Paypal

Adorned: Traditional Jewellery and Body Decoration from Australia and the Pacific

Chris Boylan & Anna Edmundson. published by the Macleay Museum, at the University of Sydney.
The book has been published to coincide with the exhibition Adornment: jewellery, dress and body decoration from Australia and the Pacific at the Macleay Museum at the University of Sydney being held in conjunction with the Oceanic Art Society of Australia.

The exhibition is outstanding and draws on the permanent collections of the Macleay Museum and the private collections of members of the Oceanic Art Society.

The book brings together a wide range of beautiful, rare and historically significant items of 19th and 20th century, jewellery, dress and body ornament from the region of Oceania.
Most of these pieces have never been displayed before.

Shields of Melanesia

This is the first comprehensive compilation on the war shields of Melanesia. The volume illustrates more than one hundred types of shields from all culture areas of Melanesia that used such objects. Approximately eighty percent of the shields illustrated in the book have never appeared in print.

The editors describe why the use of fighting shields in the South Pacific was confined to Melanesia. The typology of war shields used in the book is based on an exhaustive survey of the literature, on the field experience of the authors, and on a survey of the collections of the major Australian museums.

About the Authors:
Barry Craig is curator of Foreign Ethnology at the South Australian Museum. Harry Beran, recently retired from the University of Wollongong, has written numerous publications on the art of Papua New Guinea.

Contributors: Todd Barlin, Harry Beran, Chris Boylan, Eric Coote, Barry Craig, Tony Crawford, Bill Evans, Tim Flannery, Adrienne Kaeppler, Reg MacDonald, Elizabeth Pryce, Noelle Rathmell-Stiels.

The OAS has a limited number of copies of Shields of Melanesia available at AU$110.00 plus postage.
If you would like to purchase a copy please contact us.