To the Editor of the OAS Journal
One of the reasons the Oceanic Art Society was established was to encourage Sydney’s Australian Museum to put more of its Oceanic Art collection, the largest in the world, on display. Your review of the comprehensive and empathetic book by Maia Nuku: Oceania the Shape of Time, in the latest OAS Journal, highlights stark differences in the contemporary approach to Oceanic museology and curatorship here and in the United States.
Maia Nuku’s book serves (as your reviewer says), “to introduce [The New York Metropolitan Museum’s] significant collection of Oceanic art to international audiences … but arguably … it serves to restore Indigenous knowledges (sic) … to the Met’s collection…”. In effect it is a catalogue of the Met’s travelling collection whilst the opulent Rockefeller wing, where it is normally displayed, is being renovated. The contrast with the Australian Museum’s treatment of its unique collection of Oceanic art could not be greater.
Both the Australian Museum and the Met have as their core Oceanic material, items collected by people with the freebooting colonial mindset of their time. However, the Oceanic collection on display in the AM has been moved from a dusty gallery to an even smaller one in a remote corner, now with prominent and tendentiously political themes that do nothing to restore “Indigenous knowledges”, to most of the art in the collection. Despite the gushing press release that accompanied its opening, unsurprisingly, no catalogue has been produced of this underwhelming, unrepresentative show.
Worse, that part of the Oceanic collection that had been relatively accessible in the AM main building’s storage was hastily moved about five years ago. There was little curatorial oversight and no publicly available cataloguing; the collection was crated up and deposited in an abandoned vault in a remote suburb of Sydney, disingenuously named, “The Pacific Cultural Collections Centre”. This could have been an excellent opportunity to “restore Indigenous knowledges” to the art, but only perfunctory attempts have been made to give access to diaspora Oceanic communities, let alone others. I know of international scholars, writers and diaspora artists being effectively refused access, without “intellectual property” permission – in short, mountainous bureaucracy, delay, expense and frustration.
The Art Gallery of NSW has a somewhat better record of displaying its Oceanic Art collection. Over the last decade an exhibition with catalogue curated by Natalie Wilson was followed by a smaller show that highlighted the former AGNSW Director Tony Tuckson’s role in bringing First Nations art into public awareness. An OAS Forum was held in conjunction with this, at which Maia Nuku was a keynote speaker. Since then, although the exhibition space at AGNSW has been doubled, only Australian First Nations art is on permanent display, and your reviewer, who works there, indicates that most of Nuku’s broader reach to island Oceania is beyond her purview.
The University of Sydney and the National Gallery of Australia have had excellent shows of Oceanic art in recent years – mostly with excellent catalogues – thanks to empathetic curation by such people as Rebecca Conway, Mike Gunn, Crispin Howarth, Jude Philp and Matt Poll. The South Australian Museum has the largest permanent display of Oceanic Art on show in the country; its recently retired curator, Barry Craig also devoted energy to establishing and cataloguing the PNG National Museum’s collection in Port Moresby – an outstanding job. So, we do have the collections and talent to do these things well in Australia. It is to be hoped that the current review of the SAM that is underway will have as its outcome a world-class, permanent, updated Oceanic Art display comparable to the Met’s.
Yours sincerely,
Bill Rathmell,
Terrigal, NSW.