A paper by Dr Michael Mel, Australian Museum. Reviewed by Bill Rathmell
Michael Mel, the Manager of Pacific and International Collections at the Australian Museum in Sydney, is well known in Oceanic art circles. In an interview in the OAS Journal Vol 23 (2018, #2) he described his childhood and education in Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea and subsequently in Melbourne (performing arts) and in Adelaide where he obtained his PhD degree. Because of the reorganisation of the Australian Museum, he has become responsible for the newly-established Pacific Cultural Collection Advisory Panel which manages and controls access to the Australian Museum’s collection of Oceanic Art currently stored in Rydalmere (OAS Journal 24, 2019, #3). Michael also memorably kicked off Day One of the OAS’s very successful Forum at the Australian Museum last year, not only by his rousing “welcome”, but also with his uplifting description of the role of museology – “Museums and collections are entangled and entwined spaces…where experiences and encounters between humans and material objects provide for new understandings and perhaps new beginnings”.
In his performances and talks over the years, Michael has often referred to the ples namel – a physical space at the centre of most PNG communities where people come to debate, discuss, celebrate, mourn and tell stories from the past. His idea is to transpose all of that into spaces – such as the Australian Museum – which started with collections of curiosities, but are today now dealing with history and culture – dealing with stories that have been brought into the institution. The objects don’t necessarily carry the stories, but the stories have been either written or remembered and recounted by various means, and they need now to be told and shared – and that aspect is very important to the people who created the objects. “If I see an axe in a museum, what is it about? And what was it about its presence here in this building?”
Michael has recently published a paper in a journal, The Contemporary Pacific (Vol. 32:1, pp48-71, 2020). In his paper he describes two exhibitions that he developed and shared in order to recognize and value indigenous ways of seeing and experiencing the world: Ples Namel, held at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1996, and the award-winning Rituals of Seduction: Birds of Paradise, held at the Australian Museum in 2011. In these art gallery and museum spaces, source communities engaged in conversation and dialogue with the institutions and their collections. In order to enable audiences to experience Pacific environments, the exhibitions’ collaborators established the moka pena, or centre space, from the Mogei community in Mount Hagen. In each event, individual experiences, recollections, and knowledge were brought together in a social encounter in this centre space—the ples namel.
This is a timely contribution, as the role of western museums, galleries and public collections of indigenous artefacts is being questioned and debated. Michael’s general approach and contribution gives one hope that this often fractious debate can move up to a more spiritual and mutually-engaging cultural interaction, beyond settler-colonial feelings of guilt and expropriation narratives.
The link to the Journal is https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/37 – here a summary and introduction to the paper may be seen and the article purchased. Michael has given permission for a strictly limited number of PDFs of the article to be made available for distribution on a “first-come-first-served” basis to financial members of the OAS, for their personal use only, on application to [email protected].