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Recollections of a Former Massim Art Collector by Harry Beran

Recollections of a Former Massim Art Collector

by Harry Beran

10 Dec. 2012

Introduction

The great collections of New Guinea art were made mostly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, acquisitions of traditional art in New Guinea by museums, dealers and private collectors continued throughout the twentieth century. From 1969 to 2005, while living in Sydney, I collected art from the Massim region, which coincides roughly with Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea. During those decades, there was still a good deal of old Massim material on the Oceanic art market and some types of Massim art, including kula canoes, were still made to a high standard. In 2005, I sold the collection to John Friede, the world’s foremost collector of New Guinea art. Collecting Massim art for almost forty years was highly enjoyable because the region is rich in art, has interesting cultures, and is composed mostly of beautiful South Sea islands inhabited by warm and friendly people. One of my favorite moments in the Massim region illustrates the last aspect. Soon after my arrival to Gawa Island on one of my visits, the kula canoe master carver Kanamweya arrived to say hello. After a little while, I noticed that he had taken my hand as we stood close together. Collecting the art of a single style region of New Guinea can be an immensely satisfying form of collecting. It makes it a realistic aim to visit most of the region’s parts where art is or was once produced and to view most public and private collections of it. It also makes it possible to read almost everything that has been written about the region’s art and to develop a taxonomy and a database of it. Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founders of modern anthropology, did his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, the best-known part of the Massim region. In Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), he described the kula, in which armshells are exchanged for shell necklaces. He made a large collection of Trobriand art, now in museums in Berkeley, London, Melbourne and Oxford, but published little on art. I visited the Massim region for the first time in 1969, after staying in Gabagaba (formerly Kapakapa) village, near Port Moresby, for a few weeks. In those years, before Papua New Guinea’s independence, Australian university students could volunteer to spend a few weeks in a PNG village either just as a guest or to take part in a simple building project. Someone in Port Moresby matched potential village hosts and visitors and I was assigned to Gabagaba. I concluded the trip with a one-week visit to Kiriwina via Samarai and met the Uniting Church missionary Ralph Lawton and the Medical Officer Fred Gerrits there. Both now live in Australia and in recent years have been helpful in my research, the former with his knowledge of the Kiriwina language, the latter with information on Massim art he collected while working there. During this visit to the Massim region, I bought my first Massim object, a washboard, in Dobu Island

and a few more artworks in Kiriwina from Fred Gerrits. In 1976, I acquired further pieces at the first Oceanic art auction I attended, that of the Stan Moriarty Collection in Sydney, and the idea of collecting Massim art started to take shape. When I bought a fine lime spatula at the sale of the Hooper Collection in London in 1979, I was hooked.

The second visit to the Massim region took place in 1983. On this occasion, my wife, Clare Harding, my ten-year-old son, Stephen, and myself accompanied Jutta Malnic, a Sydney photographer, and John Kasaipwalova, a Trobriander of chiefly rank, on a motorboat trip around the region. At Panaeati, I was so enthralled by the local scene that if the islanders and Clare had not watched Stephen he might have drifted out to the open sea paddling his own canoe. Since then I have visited the Massim region another nine times, for about three weeks each time, on three occasions with Anthony JP Meyer. Anthony’s share of the objects we collected in 1987 is published in his exhibition catalogue of the same year, Le Pays Massim: papua nouvelle guinée. On two more recent occasions I was accompanied by Frederic Mathieu, an Australian collector, and on one of these by Robert Bleakley, formerly associated with Sotheby’s. Robert’s cooking was a great improvement on my Spam à la Gawa (sliced tinned ham fried in curry powder, boiled dried vegetables and fried tomatoes if available). Jutta and John taught me how to travel in the Massim region and I have passed this knowledge on to others.

Myself under a rain-mat in Sudest in 1989. Photograph by Anthony Meyer. Approximately 1,100 Massim artworks and artifacts were collected during these visits, not counting those bought by Jutta Malnic in 1983. A few were retained by the National Museum and Art Gallery of Papua New Guinea, with the great majority cleared for export. My friends took their shares. I kept about 400 for my collection and sold others not essential to it to fund further research and field trips. As the collection grew, I wanted to know more about Massim art than was published in the literature, and I increasingly combined collecting and research. At the same time, the aim of making the collection as wide-ranging as possible developed. However, I also became aware that, at least for a collector of limited means, this is an impossible aim to achieve. One can try to find an example of every category of Massim objects made, for example, in the case of weapons, a shield, a spear, a club, a throwing stick, a sling and a slingshot. But then one would like to have an example of each of the five different types of shields. The best-known of these are the shields of the Trobriands, and a survey of the more than 150 examples extant shows that they can be classified according to relatively small variations in the design painted on them, so it would be good to have an example of each of the major variations of the painted design. But looking even more closely, one realizes that within a given variation of design it is possible to pick out different styles of painting, almost certainly evidence of different artists at work. And once one has identified the works of an individual artist, it would be good to have different examples of this artist’s work. So the collector becomes a writer: If one cannot collect all the variations because one doesn’t have Nelson Rockefeller’s money or because most of them do not appear on the market, one can at least write about them or record them in a database. My professional training was in philosophy. As a historian of Massim art, I am entirely self-taught, or rather taught by friends and colleagues who have been generous in sharing their knowledge with me and by the literature on the art of Oceania, Africa and the Americas. I would not be game enough to call myself an art historian without the imprimatur of a far greater authority, that of the late Douglas Newton. In a review of my sales catalogue for Galerie Meyer of 2000, he wrote (2001: 118–9) that, among writers on Massim art, “Beran can most correctly be called an art historian, because he has been the one who most employed the formal apparatus of art history: the questions of what, who, when, where, how and why.” For a few years I combined writing on political philosophy and Massim art, but this double task became too difficult and in 1998 I reluctantly abandoned philosophy and retired from my university position.

The collection

My collection of Massim art consisted of more than 800 objects and was one of the most wide-ranging from this region in existence. It contained both nineteenth-century and much more recent objects, examples of virtually all types of art and artifacts made there, and examples from most major parts of the region. Because it was a collection created not only for enjoyment but also research, it was well documented. There are, of course, numerous other major collections of Massim material culture. Some of the most important are in the museums in Adelaide, Auckland, Berlin, Brisbane, Canberra, Chicago, London, Melbourne, Port Moresby, Oxford, Rome, Sydney and Vienna. As I became more knowledgeable, I began to collect more information in the field, such as the names of the artists who had made the objects I collected, the names of previous Massim owners, the precise function of the objects and other relevant data. In a number of cases it was possible to establish the previously unknown function of objects I knew from public collections. Interpretations of motifs on washboards and wavesplitters I collected remain mostly unprocessed in my field notebooks. To document at least minimally what happens to New Guinea art after contact with the West, the collection included a few objects made for sale to Westerners, in particular a “zoo” of carved animals, including pigs, a turtle, a tortoise, a mouse and a bowl in the shape of a stingray. Western influence came early in Milne Bay Province. The first successful mission station in the province was established in Suau Island by James Chalmers in 1876, and a group of missionaries led by George Brown established stations in a number of other places in the early 1890s. These included the station in Dobu, established by W. E. Bromilow, and that in Kiriwina, established by S. B. Fellows. The first government officer in the region was probably H. O. Forbes, stationed in Samarai from 1886 to 1887. As missionaries and colonial officials discouraged warfare and certain social practices, such as erotic dancing, the production of many types of artworks declined or stopped altogether in the early part of the twentieth century. The production of most weapons ceased around 1900 and the production of almost all high-quality lime spatulas, used in betelnut chewing, in the next few decades. Hence all the weapons and almost all the lime spatulas in the collection were bought from missionary families or in the art market. On one of our collecting trips together, Anthony Meyer and I did hear of a fine shield that was kept in a village. The two young men who told us of it said that the village was unfortunately some distance from where we were. Undaunted, we tracked for hours over mountains and through valleys even if it was just to see the shield. When we arrived at the village, the young men told us to wait and they would get the shield from their hut. It was a magnificently mounted silver football shield their team had recently won! While the production of many types of artworks has ceased, the kula exchange system continues strongly at the time of this writing and the traditional ocean-going canoes that are needed for kula are still made to a high standard on a few islands, especially the Marshall Bennetts. Hence most of the canoe carvings in the collection were collected in the field. These included the two wavesplitters, two washboards and both ends of a large kula canoe carved by the Gawa master carver Nimoa and named Ukwaena (No. 4).

Canoe-end, washboard and wavesplitter from the root-end of a nagega kula canoe named Ukwaena. 6 feet, 10 ¼ inches (209 cm) long. Carved by the late Nimoa, a Gawa master carver, in the 1980s. John and Marcia Friede (Jolika) Collection, ex author’s collection (HB 850, HB 848, HB 852). Photograph courtesy of John Friede, copyright John Bigelow Taylor. I acquired approximately fifty percent of the collection in the Massim region, some forty percent from dealers, auction houses and fellow collectors; five percent from missionaries or their families and others who had made collections while working in the Massim region; and another five percent as gifts from friends, especially Anthony Meyer. In terms of categories of objects, the collection consisted of the approximate numbers shown in the following list. The list is based on a general classification of objects of material culture developed by Lawrence Dawson and Frank Norick, mainly from a Western viewpoint (Norick 1976: 232–7). The Massim may classify these objects differently; for example, Trobrianders may classify woodcarvings according to whether they are made by master carvers or ordinary ones, or whether they can be used only by people of chiefly rank or by anyone.

List of the collection

1. Utensils, implements and conveyances		385
Hunting and fishing utensils (e.g., fishing nets, floats)	50
Transportation (i.e., canoe components)	90
Household utensils (e.g., bowls, cups, taro mashers)	110
Manufacturing pursuits (e.g., adzes, sewing needles, and shuttles for weaving fishing nets)	75
Weapons (mostly clubs, also shields and spears)	30
Toilet articles (esp. combs)	10
Objects of multiple utility (esp. staffs)	20
2. Secular dress and accoutrements		40
Daily garb	10
Fine accoutrements	30
3. Status objects and insignia of office		10
4. Structures and furnishings		15
Architectural components	10
Furnishings (esp. headrests)	5
5. Rituals, pageantry and recreation		298
Objects associated with magic	15
Objects associated with secular rites (e.g., kula items and dance paddles)	30
Sound-producing instruments	15
Objects associated with stimulants Lime pots Lime spatulas Betelnut mortars and pestles Tobacco pipes	15 170 40 3
Sports and games, (esp. model canoes)	10
6. Child care and enculturation (toys)		1
7. Currency and valuables		20
8. Raw materials		5
9. Objects of unknown function		15
10. Novelties (“tourist art,” e.g., pigs and tables)		30
Total		819

Within each category of objects I tried to identify and collect different types. I had one example each of three of the five types of Massim war shields (Beran and Craig, 2005: 191–98). My example from the Trobriands is illustrated in Hamson and Aldridge (2009: 160–1). The example of the rare oval shields is shown as No. 5.

In many cases, as in that of shields, there was only one example of each type in the collection. However, to illustrate how much the carving style of human figures on lime spatulas varies, there were some thirty spatulas in the collection each with the handle carved as a squatting figure. This included eight spatulas by one school of carvers, the Masters of the Concave Back, identified in my book on Mutuaga (1996: 198). Two of the spatulas by these masters are shown in No. 6.

To illustrate other style variations, the collection included fifteen spatulas of the canoe-end design, including two perhaps by Mutuaga, and twelve clapper spatulas. It is remarkable how much spatulas of a particular design can vary stylistically yet remain fully within the traditional Massim style. Because I tried to make the collection as wide-ranging as possible, I bought mediocre examples of particular types of objects where outstanding ones were unavailable or beyond my means. Over time, I, of course, tried to refine the collection and over the years some 150 objects were replaced by better examples and sold. Aesthetic evaluation of artworks presupposes an answer to the question: What counts as a fine example? Judgments about the artistic quality of New Guinea artworks are difficult. Apart from two essays based on interviews with the late Chief Narubutau (1975, 1979), little information was available to me on how the Massim evaluate artworks and artifacts. Hence, in choosing objects, I relied mostly on Western criteria of artistic quality and desirability, including the following. The aesthetic quality of objects is often enhanced by patina, paint and decoration. An object with patina from use and age is preferable to one without; if the carving is of a type normally exposed to the elements, such as a canoe washboard, one softened by weathering and carrying indigenous paint is preferable to one that has never been on a canoe or carries Western commercial paint; and I certainly preferred kula objects and lime spatulas decorated with shell discs to those embellished with trade beads. A complete piece is preferable to a broken, repaired or restored one. If objects are used in sets, a set of pieces used together is preferable to pieces not used together; for example, I would rather have a betelnut mortar and a pestle that were used together than a mortar and pestle from different sets. Other things being equal, an artwork carved with traditional tools is preferable to one carved with Western ones. However, most of the carvings in the collection were shaped and incised with metal tools, which were introduced to the Massim region in the middle of the nineteenth century. I consider change as normal in society. Hence, I was more tolerant than some collectors toward Western influence on the design of objects. Among my favorites in the collection were two attractively designed betelnut mortars and a pestle by the master carver Urisaku of Gawa Island incorporating human figures wearing shorts or sitting on a chair. He became aware of Western clothes and furniture during World War II, incorporated them into betelnut-chewing utensils carved for local use, and became famous for originality among his fellow islanders. One of the two betelnut mortars in the collection by him was carved as a gift for one of his kula partners (HB 870). It is illustrated in Beran with Tomowau (2007, Fig. 13). The other is shown below No. 7.

Betelnut mortar carved by Urisaku of Gawa (c. 1920–1998) for local use. 7 ¾ inches (19.7 cm) high. Both figures are wearing shorts and the taller figure is saluting in the Western style but with the wrong hand. John and Marcia Friede (Jolika) Collection, ex author’s collection (HB 697). Photograph by the author. The importance of provenance has already been mentioned. Ideally, one would like to know when, where and by whom an object was made; who has owned it; and what important events, if any, it was associated with in the Massim region. The collection included a drum made in the 1890s to mark the founding of the village in which I bought it (HB 360). The name of the person who carved it and its subsequent owners were all recorded; its owner wanted to sell it because he did not have a relative to whom he could leave it. The following were some of the highlights of the collection: the two ends of the kula canoe carved by Nimoa, one of which is shown in No. 4; a Trobriands dance paddle (No. 8); a kula necklace and kula armshell; a freestanding human figure used with protective magic in a dwelling (No. 9); three lime spatulas by the Suau master carver Mutuaga, including an anthropomorphic spatula dating from about 1880, probably the oldest extant (No. 10), and one of the finest pig-handled spatulas he carved (illustrated in Meyer 1995, Fig. 731); a spatula with the handle carved as a stylized canoe-end—a tour de force of curvilinear open-work carving (illustrated in Beran, 1980: 17 and 20); and a group of lime spatulas, mostly of high quality, that exemplify approximately forty of the forty-five types of designs identified in my Betel-Chewing Equipment of East New Guinea (1988). Some of the finer pieces in the collection were published in Anthony Meyer’s book Oceanic Art (Figs. 130, 135, 137, 142, 144, 146, 152 and 731).

Dance paddle, Trobriand Islands. 26 ½ inches (67.5 cm) high. Irene Beard Collection, ex John and Marcia Friede (Jolika) Collection, ex author’s collection (HB 422). Photograph courtesy of Franck Marcelin.

Sculpture of a human figure. 17 ¾ inches (45 cm) high. Carved by Isaac Boitau (?–1975). Collected by Peter Hallinan in Siyausi village, Normanby Island. John and Marcia Friede (Jolika) Collection, ex author’s collection (HB 611), ex Peter Hallinan Collection (H 1650). Photograph courtesy of John Friede, copyright John Bigelow Taylor.

Lime spatula with the handle in the form of a drummer figure, carved by Mutuaga (c. 1860–c. 1920) in c. 1880. 13 ⅛ inches (33.4 cm) high. Sold at Sotheby’s New York, May 14, 2010, Lot 90. Formerly John and Marcia Friede (Jolika) Collection, ex author’s collection (HB 865). Photograph courtesy of John Friede, copyright John Bigelow Taylor. The collection included objects unknown or virtually unknown in other collections, including prehistoric cone-shaped stone objects found in Sudest (No. 11); stone fishing-net sinkers used in Woodlark Island, the Marshall Bennett Islands and Egum (No. 12); and small spindle-shaped coconut containers for shell money used in Sudest Island (No. 13). The coconuts are of the same shape as the marupai of the Papuan Gulf and are produced by coconut palms of a particular variety (Beran, 2005: 8–9). I used to enjoy showing visitors some thirty fishing-net floats of different designs, including a splayed human figure, fish, birds and canoe washboards. One of them is shown in No. 14 and others as nos. 15 and 16. They show what can be assembled by focused research and collecting. Private collectors like to have objects from famous dispersed collections or well-known nineteenth-century dealers. The collection included pieces from the Hooper and Beasley Collections and two pieces illustrated in the catalogues of the dealer W. D. Webster. It also included pieces collected by missionaries who served in the Massim region, namely, Charles Abel, John Dixon, S. B. Fellows, Ralph Lawton and Harry Robinson. I numbered and fully documented the objects in the collection and I still have this documentation. However, the catalogue numbers are not inscribed on the artworks or on labels attached to them, but rather are on the photographs of them.

Prehistoric conical stones collected by Anthony JP Meyer and the author in Sudest Island. 3 ⅛–10 inches (8–25.3 cm) (HB 482, 551–554). They are found in riverbeds and in the ground during gardening and are now used as nutcrackers. An example from Rossel Island is illustrated in Armstrong (1928, Plate XII). Photograph courtesy of John Friede, copyright John Bigelow Taylor.

Four fishing-net sinkers of stone collected by the author. Clockwise from the left: HB 911 from Kwaiawata, HB 743 from Gawa, HB 748 also from Gawa and HB 826 from Egum Islet. They range in size from 2 ⅓–4 ⅔ inches (6–12 cm). Frederick Damon (1990: 242–5) reports that stone sinkers of cylindrical shape are used in Woodlark Island. This is the only report of their use in the literature on the Massim region. He reports that one sinker is used in the center of the bottom of the net and the vendor of the sinker (HB 911) also told me that one stone sinker was used per net. The stone of the sinkers does not occur in the islands where they were collected and they may, therefore, be imports from Woodlark. Photograph courtesy of John Friede, copyright John Bigelow Taylor.

Shell-money container of coconut. 4 inches (10 cm) long. Collected by Anthony Meyer and the author in Gisela village, Sudest Island. Michael Hamson Collection, ex John and Marcia Friede (Jolika) Collection, ex author’s collection (HB 514). Other examples are published in Meyer (1995, Fig. 463) and Beran (1998: 62).

Fishing-net float for a dugong net. 29 ⅔ inches (75.5 cm) long. Collected by the author at Walaulu village, opposite Suau Island. According to the vendor, it had been made by a Rogea Island carver in c. 1940. Michael Hamson Collection, ex John and Marcia Friede (Jolika) Collection, ex author’s collection (HB 606).

The interaction between collecting and research

Once I started research on Massim art, collecting and research became mutually supporting activities. My first publication on Massim art was the catalogue of an exhibition of works from private collections held at the Wollongong City Gallery in 1980. The exhibition later toured public galleries in Melbourne, Newcastle and Brisbane, and was also shown at the Australian Museum in Sydney. The exhibition and catalogue were inspired by Douglas Newton’s 1975 catalogue of an exhibition of Massim art staged at the Museum of Primitive Art in New York. In the following years, I was able to buy some of the pieces that had been lent for the Wollongong exhibition, but it was twenty-five years before the washboard on the cover of the Wollongong catalogue became available (No. 17).

Washboard from the branch-end of a kula canoe. 20 ½ x 29 ½ inches (52 x 75 cm). Collected by Ralph Lawton in Lalela village, Kitava, Trobriand Islands, in the 1960s. Michael Hamson Collection, John and Marcia Friede (Jolika) Collection, ex author’s collection (HB II/16). In the second half of the 1980s, I learnt a great deal about Trobriand artistic practices and the iconography of Trobriand kula canoes from Shirley Campbell’s Ph.D. dissertation, The Art of Kula (1984), and an interview with her. The thesis was published as a book under the same title in 2002. I am indebted to Dorota Starzecka for suggesting to Shire Publications that they commission my Betel-Chewing Equipment of East New Guinea of 1988. It classifies the designs of Massim lime spatulas and betelnut mortars and pestles. Soon after, the British Museum staged an exhibition, for which I acted as a consultant, based on the book. The book was short-listed in 1999—why did it take so long?—in a British competition: the Oddest Book Title of the Year. The winner that year was Weeds in a Changing World, nowhere near as good a title as the 1996 winner, Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers. Once I had developed a taxonomy of lime spatulas, I was able to try to find an example of each type. My 1996 book, Mutuaga: A Nineteenth-Century New Guinea Master Carver, is a study of more than a hundred Massim woodcarvings, mostly lime spatulas, freestanding figures and staffs by an artist from the Suau area active between approximately 1880 and 1920 and his followers. Since its publication, colleagues and I have located another thirty-four carvings that can be attributed to Mutuaga and which I hope to publish one day. As previously mentioned, three fine lime spatulas by the artist were among the highlights of the collection. In 1993, I spent some time in the area where Mutuaga had lived and asked numerous people for the names of distinguished woodcarvers active at the beginning of the nineteenth century. If they could not name any, I would ask whether they had heard of Mutuaga and a couple of people answered, “Oh, Mutuaga of Dagodagoisu village,” so showing that they did indeed remember him or had heard of him. One villager answered the question by saying, “Yes, I’ve heard of him. You told me about him last time you were here.” Charles Abel, who in 1893 took over the Suau mission station James Chalmers had established, was a patron of Mutuaga. Sir Cecil Abel, his eldest son, knew Mutuaga personally and supported my study of him and his works with a great deal of information and by obtaining a grant from the Australian High Commission in Port Moresby. Getting to know Cecil before he died in 1994 has been one of the great pleasures of my involvement with Massim art. His nephew, Chris Abel, a businessman in Alotau, the provincial capital of Milne Bay Province, has been generous in providing logistical support for my field trips to the region. Two other essays on individual Massim artists I have written are “The Master of the Prominent Eyes” (1997) and “The Fame of Urisaku: Master Carver of Gawa, Massim Region, Papua New Guinea” (2007). I was not able to discover the identity of the former but interviewed Urisaku a few months before he died in 1998. I had heard of him as a famous carver, and research in Gawa and nearby islands enabled me to collect canoe carvings made by him and to identify betelnut mortars I already owned as his work. The exhibition catalogue on Massim lime spatulas I wrote for Anthony Meyer’s gallery (2000) shows how much styles of lime spatulas of the same type, such as those with anthropomorphic or clapper handles, can vary and that the styles of individual anonymous carvers or schools of carvers can be identified. The carvings in No. 4 are from the root-end of a kula canoe of the nagega type, while that in No. 17 is from the branch-end of a kula canoe of the masawa type. I use the terms branch-end and root-end, instead of prow and stern, because the two ends of kula canoes are virtually symmetrical. This is so because their single outrigger must always be windward and the canoes are, therefore, designed to sail equally well with either end pointing ahead. However, the Massim can always tell which end of the log-keel of the canoe, cut from a single tree, is from the tree’s branch-end and which is from its root-end. Moreover, there are small differences in the design of the washboards and wavesplitters of kula canoes, explained in my 2011 essay on this topic on the material world blog, and this makes it possible to tell whether they are from one end or the other. In recent years I have tried to find major informants in the Massim region to co-author essays with me. John Tomowau of Gawa, who started as my guide and translator, has helped with research on two essays: that on Urisaku already mentioned and on another entitled “Archaic canoe-shaped bone containers of the Massim region of Papua New Guinea,” presented at the 2003 Symposium of the Pacific Arts Association and now in press. An essay on the gable boards of chiefly houses in Kiriwina, co-authored with Chief John Kasaipwalova and Paramount Chief Pulayasi, was presented by John and myself at the 2005 Pacific Arts Association Symposium in Paris and is still to be published. The most widely discussed iconography of Melanesian war shields is that of the shields of the Trobriands. The speculative interpretation of the design by E. R. Leach (1954) as representing a flying witch is well known and a number of other anthropologists have offered other speculative interpretations of the design. One of these, Patrick Glass, was kind enough to give me a copy of an interpretation of the design Malinowski recorded in his field notes in the Trobriand Islands in 1916, but which Glass found difficult to transcribe. He said I could publish the interpretation should I be able to read the notes. I sat on them for years, but the Trobriand shield in my collection was a constant reminder to transcribe them, which I finally did in 2005. They record a detailed interpretation of the individual motifs on the shields, similar in kind to the interpretation S. B. Fellows had published in 1898, but substantially different in detail. The motifs represent animals and other things that are significant in relation to warfare. During interviews in 2005 and 2006, Paramount Chief Pulayasi told me the interpretation Malinowski recorded was mostly correct and explained why the motifs were painted on the shields. There is no evidence that the design as a whole has a meaning additional to that of the individual motifs, for example, as a flying witch. My essay reporting the interpretation Malinowski obtained from his informants and Pulayasi’s commentary on it was published in 2011. In doing research one inevitably builds up a database. In my case this includes a gradually growing set of documents, each one providing information about and illustrations of a particular type of artwork or artifact; a bibliography on Massim art and related literature; a list of words in Massim languages for the various kinds of art and artifacts made there and for things related to them (mostly in the Kiriwina language); and a concordance of the place names used by the local people and bestowed by Europeans. This concordance is useful, as many Europeans place names used in the early literature have fallen out of favor and are not found on modern maps or in the Papua New Guinea Gazetteer of 1974. The concordance also includes information on the origin of the Western place names. All this should perhaps be put on a website, and one day will be, so that Rossel (Yela) Islanders with access to the Internet can find out that their island was named after a lieutenant on the D’Entrecasteaux voyage of 1793 and the Louisiade Archipelago, of which it is part, after King Louis XV.

The pleasures of a private collection

A private art collection affords pleasures public collections cannot give, except perhaps to museum curators. This is so especially with regard to smaller Massim objects, such as ebony betel-chewing utensils and war clubs. They are wonderful tactile objects it is a pleasure to handle and examine at leisure. Artworks survive longer than their owners and some of the pieces in the collection used to remind me of friends who had died or people I would like to have known. A few dozen pieces in the collection come from the Sydney dealer-collector John Magers. I still remember his phone calls saying, “Harry, I have a couple of lime spatulas for you.” Leo Fleischmann and I were friends in Vienna and migrated to Australia together. In 1980 we made a deal: If he died before I did, he would leave me a few Massim pieces I had borrowed for the Massim exhibition I curated that year; if I died first, I would leave him their value in money; he died in 1993 and did indeed leave the pieces concerned to me in his will. In the 1990s, Ruth McNicoll gave fellow collector Garry Anderson, who was suffering from AIDS, a wonderful Massim lime spatula—because gifts have the power to heal; I bought it at auction after Garry’s death (HB 596). One of the oldest provenanced spatulas in the collection was brought back from New Guinea by Henry Tryon in 1895 (No. 18). He had gone there to collect varieties of sugar cane and is regarded as the father of the Australian sugar cane industry.

Lime spatula collected by Henry Tyron in 1895. 10 ½ inches (26.5 cm) high. Ulrich Kortmann Collection, ex Michael Hamson Collection, ex John and Marcia Friede (Jolika) Collection, ex author’s collection (HB 278), Ulrich Kortmann Collection, Dortmund. As already mentioned, the collection included objects with a number of previous Massim owners whose names are recorded. Peter Hallinan collected one of them, a lime spatula, in 1980. He was given the name of the person who carved it and of the six subsequent owners, suggesting it may have been made as early as 1800. However, the piece he bought was in fact a replacement carved in the late nineteenth century, which took over the magic power of the broken original (HB 626). Many of the New Guinea artworks in Western collections must have had fascinating histories known to their owners at the time they were sold, but lost to us because this kind of information has rarely been recorded for New Guinea artworks—histories far more interesting than those they acquired after their arrival in the West. Art collections do not fall from heaven except for those who inherit them—they have to be paid for. My collection was funded from an academic salary, a small inheritance and by selling field-collected objects not essential to the collection. Occasionally I used to buy non-Massim New Guinea artworks and sell them at a profit to fund Massim acquisitions. Collecting requires not only money but also time and dedication; for every artwork bought, there are ten visits to auctions, dealers or antique shops where nothing worth having is found. During the later years of my collecting career, the supply of New Guinea art in Australia declined and prices for it there and overseas rose dramatically. On a number of occasions I was unable to afford objects that would have filled gaps in the collection. Some of them were bought by John Friede. In 2005, John offered to buy my whole collection and, as part of the deal, to underwrite the book on Massim art I was writing. Part of his collection had gone to the de Young Museum of Art, San Francisco, where it has been on display since October 2005, and other parts of it were intended to go there. I sold the collection, partly because I didn’t have the means, in the face of rising prices, to fill the gaps in it, and partly because the proceeds would give me the money for further research trips and to attend international conferences on Oceanic art. The money from the sale also allowed me to add a few pieces to the 819 listed above, pieces which I had previously not been able to afford. The washboard in No. 17 is one of these; hence it is numbered HB II/16, as it belonged to a small second Massim collection I formed, parts of which also went to John. My decision to sell was influenced by the fact that my wife, Clare, had been telling me for years that after our retirement she would want us to move to England where she had grown up. As she had moved from Hong Kong to Sydney to be with me, I could hardly resist. I couldn’t face the prospect of shipping the collection to England and then selling it at some future time. In 2006 we did indeed move from Sydney to Cambridge. Of course, I would have liked the collection to stay together and end up at the de Young Museum. However, I knew that John’s and my collecting policies were too different for this to happen. I had tried to form the most wide-ranging collection possible, while John bought, or at least kept, only the best and oldest pieces he could find. Soon enough John sold duplicates and lesser pieces from my collection. Then, for financial reasons, he sold a wide range of further objects from his collection not already committed to the de Young Museum, including some of the finest objects from my collection. I enjoy seeing some of these pieces in auction or dealer catalogues, but there is also regret that I can no longer hold and enjoy them. Why did I collect Massim art? I enjoy collecting and especially forming a focused collection. Why Massim art rather than something else? I became aware of New Guinea art when Leo Fleischmann was appointed manager of Senta Taft’s Galleries Primitif in Sydney in the 1960s and its exoticness appealed to me. My visit to the Trobriands in 1969 pointed me in the direction of Massim art. Also, I find the curvilinear and refined style of Massim art attractive; perhaps it reminds me of the art in the Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) I saw as a youth in Vienna. However, I didn’t collect it because I thought it was the greatest art in the world. One can fall in love with the art of a culture serendipitously and without having to regard it as the finest on earth. (If I had seen some artworks in Gabagaba village during my stay there, I might have started collecting Central Province art instead.) I used to say—in jest?—that I would swap my whole collection for a headrest by the African Master of the Cascading Hairstyle. In their sale of 6 June 2005 Sotheby’s Paris called my bluff: They offered a fine example with an estimate that was not entirely out of the question after I had agreed to sell my collection to John Friede. I did not submit a bid. Acknowledgements This is a much revised version of an essay first published in a volume edited by Cochrane and Quanchi (2007). I am grateful to John Friede, Clare Harding, Christina Hellmich, Frances St. John, Michael Thompson and an anonymous reviewer for comments on various versions of the essay.