Art Ew - National Gallery of Australia

pacific arts gallery
14 national gallery of australia
Pacific arts in the Gallery
Raharuhi Rukupo
Aotearoa [New Zealand],
North Island, Manutuke,
Rongowhakaata people
Figure from a house post
[poutokomanawa]
c. 1825–1840 (detail)
wood, natural pigments
79.7 x 26.5 x 20.2 cm
National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra Purchased 1981
The National Gallery has a long history in bringing the
arts of the non-Western world to its visitors – from Indian
miniature paintings to faïence figures from Ancient Egypt.
However, until recently, the Pacific Arts collection remained
perhaps the least known of the world’s many spheres of
art to our visitors. With the opening of the new Pacific
Arts Gallery in July, some of the finest Pacific artworks in
Australia, dating from around 3500 years ago to the midtwentieth
century, are now on display. The origins of the
collection stem from 1968 when the first item – a wood
sculpture of a Papua New Guinean woman wearing a rain
cape – was purchased from a Sydney art dealer by acting
chairperson for the Commonwealth Advisory Board,
Sir William Dargie.
In broad geographic terms, the Pacific Arts collection
encompasses around one-third of the world’s surface and
is divided into three main areas: Polynesia, Micronesia and
Melanesia. Within each of these areas exist many unique
cultures, some sustained by less than 100 people and each
with their own artistic forms of expression. Melanesia is
by far the most diverse area of the collection, with works
from New Caledonia, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and
the great landmass of Papua New Guinea where more than
800 languages are spoken. Given the diversity of Papua
New Guinea’s Indigenous cultures, its proximity to Australia
and the long and entwined history we share, it is not
surprising that a greater portion of the collection is from
Papua New Guinea.
The next area of the Pacific Arts collection comes
from Polynesia (meaning many islands), a vast triangular
region of the Pacific with the three outermost points being
New Zealand, Hawaii and remote Easter Island. Within
the Polynesian triangle are the islands that fascinated
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European society
with notions of noble savages and idyllic paradises – Tahiti,
the Cook Islands, the Austral Islands and the Marquesas
Islands. The Gallery holds only a small collection from these
islands yet each work is more than 150 years old. Notable
among them is the very fine Poutokomanawa house
post figure carved by the great carver-priest and warrior
Raharuhi Rukupo in the early 1840s.
The qualities of the collection’s sometimes sublime,
sometimes aggressively confronting works can be
appreciated through their sculptural value alone. However,