Promoting the understanding and appreciation of Oceanic art.
Image: Mathias Kauage at Ray Hughes Gallery February 1999. Image by Ben Rushton. Mathias Kauage O.B.E. was Papua New Guinea’s best known and most highly awarded artist of the contemporary era. He was artistically active in the six crucial years leading up to 1975 (when PNG became an independent nation), until 2003 when he died. […]
by Bill Rathmell The Tribal Art Fair Sydney, held by the Oceanic Art Society at the National Art School on 17 August, may not be described as the only one of its kind in the world (as is the Parcours des Mondes, elsewhere in this Journal), it is certainly set fair to become the best in […]
One of the early French navigators whose collection will be viewed in La Rochelle on the OAS Pre-2020 Parcours Tour of South West France. By Pierre Laffont Dumont d’Urville survived three circumnavigations of the earth including through the then-unchartered waters of the South Pacific. He named many locations previously unknown to Europeans, most of them with a […]
Pre-2020 Parcours des Mondes If enough members are interested in viewing the Oceanic Art collections from early French navigators and collectors, the Oceanic Art Society, under the direction of Pierre Laffont, proposes to organize a tour in the South West of France in the 4 days preceding the opening of the September 2020 Parcours des Mondes in Paris. […]
by Jim Elmslie Caption: The Awan with Sophie Parker, of ArtLab, Adelaide, South Australia. Image credit: Alice Beale. This large body-mask, called a tumbuan in tok-pisin, comes from the Iatmul people of the Middle Sepik River, PNG, and played an important role in traditional ritual life. Initially it was thought to pertain to the naven ceremony of the Iatmul people […]
Image: Centre: Poka Francis in Koranigle, 2017. Photo courtesy Helen Dennett. Left: Arbelo ensnared by python c2002. Right: Soldier c2002. Poka Francis lives in the village of Koranigle, in Simbu Province, in the mountainous highlands of Papua New Guinea. When he was young, Poka had a vision of a man, and later a woman, walking stiffly […]
Image: Mathias Kauage ‘Independence Celebration 1999’, Andrew Baker Collection. Image by Mick Richards. The desire to know – curiosity – has long been a motivating force in human endeavour. In this issue of the OAS Journal we see that evident nearly 200 years ago in the travels of Frenchman Dumont d’Urville in Melanesia (a term […]
With so much information available in the modern digital age it sometimes feels that we know, collectively, almost everything. In this edition Professor Ian McNiven shows us that this is wrong and that something as simple as the geographic origin of an artefact is still a matter of research. In Ian’s thought provoking paper, Beyond Bridge […]
By Bill Rathmell, OAS President Half-a-dozen members of the Oceanic Art Society were present on 30th July at the opening of the “Cultural Collections Centre”- the new storage for the bulk of the Pacific Island collections of Sydney’s Australian Museum. Since its inception in 1995, the OAS has tried to lobby for this superb world-renowned […]
By Professor Ian J. McNiven, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University, Melbourne During the nineteenth century Europeans became increasingly aware of the extraordinary diversity of indigenous cultures across New Guinea and Australia. Along with such awareness was a desire by museums, especially in England, Europe, and […]
