Meet Our Members
I grew up in Wynyard on the North West coast of Tasmania and spent many happy hours exploring the shoreline at places like Rocky Cape where I would wander amongst the oyster shells of middens left by the original inhabitants of the island. The caves had been excavated by Rhys Jones a few years earlier and all I wanted to be was an archeologist. That did not eventuate as I finally chose to study medicine and ended up becoming a forensic pathologist.
During my training I was fortunate to work in the Lai Valley of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea which I now realize was my first field trip. I was there in 1976 and witnessed traditional village sing-sings and saw the older men still wearing stone axes in their bark belts. I was the first European to go into some of the villages. In the mornings I would work at the clinic mainly with children with infectious diseases but in the afternoons the men would bring around wonderful artefacts for me to look at and sometimes buy.
One of those was a somp which I had seen in the Moriarty collection in the Art Gallery of NSW; it was a currency piece apparently worth 24 kina shells and half a dozen pigs, and so my collecting began. The locals would still not touch sacred tamberan stones that they kept digging up in their sweet potato gardens.
All images courtesy Roger Byard.
The joy, of course, over the years has been in the hunt for interesting and beautiful pieces and then in learning about them. One of my first shields was an old one from Munhui in the highlands which has bone arrow tips embedded in it from fighting. In one village where I stayed, I was given an arrow by one of the headmen that had a tip made from his brother’s shin bone for payback killing. I grew to love the sophistication of Polynesian pieces and have a number from Samoa, Tonga and the Austral Islands.
My rarest pieces are probably lonuts (friction drums) from New Ireland. I had literally searched the world for decades for one and then a friend whose shop was about two kilometres from my house in Adelaide called me with two. It is sometimes amazing to discover what is sitting on your doorstep. I still am in awe of the sound that they make.