Main image caption: Dr Harry Beran interviews residents of Egum Islet in Milne Bay in October 2017. Photograph: Luke Wong, ABC. Reproduced with permission of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Scholar, author and collector specializing in the art of the Massim area of Eastern New Guinea, Harry Beran died in Cambridge, England on 26 February 2021. He was inaugural President and a key founder of the Oceanic Art Society (OAS). While teaching Philosophy at the University of Wollongong until his retirement in 1998, he referred to his single-minded research of the Massim material as a “hobby”.
From Paris, Anthony Meyer recollected the founding of the OAS, “One day he asked me what I thought about an idea of his – the creation of a club of Oceanic art aficionados … In the end we decided that was a good idea and Harry went on to launch the OAS …. It has become a major and well recognised association over the last 25 years publishing books and organising events such as the milestone 2017 symposium in Melbourne.
Another idea of his was to create the Harry Beran database of early labels and inventory numbers. Once again, we debated it fiercely and, in the end, decided that it was workable. It has since grown and is now in its fifth or sixth mutation on the OAS web site.”
Harry’s introduction to Oceanic art has been told by Bill Evans*, “A native of Vienna, Harry Beran moved to Australia in 1957 at the age of 22. Harry’s interest in Oceanic art began later, in 1969, when he was a university student. He became involved in a cultural program in which he was invited by a Papua New Guinea villager to stay in a village near Port Moresby. He spent two weeks there and then went on … to Kiriwina in the Trobiand Islands, which is in the Massim culture district. He brought five or six pieces back from that visit, but did not really think a great deal about Massim artifacts until November 1976, when the collection of Stan Moriarty, one of the largest private collections of Pacific artifacts … in Australia, was auctioned in Sydney. At this sale, confronted with the entire spectrum of Pacific material, Harry found that the Massim pieces appealed to him the most.
Harry’s research has led him to the identification of an individual Massim carver of the late 19th century known as Mutuaga, who became the focus of his book Mutuaga: A Nineteenth-Century East New Guinea Woodcarver and his Art. Mutuaga lived in the Sua region of east New Guinea from about 1860 to 1920 and carved for at least 40 years. Harry’s research has consisted of both stylistic analysis and specific field research done in a number of trips to the Massim area, some of which was time productively spent and some less so: “In 1989 I had only half a day and I asked two or three people whether they had heard of Mutuaga, and a I met a 100-year-old man named Weibo Mamohoi who remembered him very well. In 1993 I went back … and I questioned other old men. I asked them if they could remember the names of any old woodcarvers, and a few of them said yes, they’d heard of Mutuaga. In each case I asked ‘How did you learn about Mutuaga’ … One of these men said ‘Yeah, I’ve heard of Mutuaga’. When I asked him how he came to hear of the carver, he said ‘Well, I heard about him from you on your previous visit.’”
Speaking at his funeral, Anthony Meyer said, “Harry, you gave me the keys to so many doors. You opened so many passages for us all. Through your work on the Massim, through your work on shields, … you gave us the bricks on which to build our knowledge … Through your collecting you brought to the forefront a whole new world of objects that became sought after and enjoyed. In reality although the Massim people made the artifacts you made Massim art into ART – an art to be lusted after and forever admired.”
Living in Warsaw, Poland, Australian author and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Michael Moran wrote of his “deep appreciation of this remarkable man, his warmth, knowledge, encouragement and inspiration for my own exploration of the fascinating Kula Ring and the beautiful Massim region and the other island provinces of Papua New Guinea.”
*Reproduced with permission from Bill Evans 1996 “Harry Beran” Tribal Arts, Summer 1996 pp 78-80.