An Artistic

Look At

Shark Callers

Western artists’ interest in Papua New Guinea is by no means a recent phenomenon. Among the masterpieces in the exhibition, Modern Masters —Manet to Matisse, which the Museum of Modern Art, New York, brought to Australia last April was one by Emil Nolde, a German painter who visited New Guinea in 1913.

And other recognised painters, eg Australians Lawrence Daws, William Dobell and Sidney Nolan, have spent some time in the country. Most have gained inspiration from its multi-faceted scenery and traditional art forms, and it is certain that the growing prominence which comes with nationhood will bring an in creasing number of foreign painters and other artists to Papua New Guinea.

True art transcends political and traditional frontiers and, inter culturally, enriches both host and guest. The recently-founded Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies at Port Moresby has already made a valuable contribution in this context.

Few foreign artists have been as ambitious as Glenys Kohnke, whose New Guinean oeuvres are in painting, sculpting and writing. In the Shark Callers, Kohnke, a young Australian who has spent some of her childhood

at Madang and now lives at Port Moresby, tells of the traditional way of catching sharks by a fast diminishing number of men on the west coast of New Ireland.

Shark calling is central to the life of their people—not merely their main source of protein but also an integral part of that synthesis of spiritual and temporal life which is so characteristic of Melanesian com munities.

Abel Janszoon Tasman’s Journal which mentions it and contains a sketch of three New Irelanders in a canoe (April, 1643) is probably the first account by a visitor.

The Shark Callers encapsulates an interview, held over several months, with a man who specialises in the unique technique by which he and certain fellow villagers capture sharks.

With empathy and patience, and able to communicate through fluent use of Pidgin, the lingua franca, Kohnke has obtained an in-depth

account and used her skills as a painter and sculptor to enhance it visually. Most of the paintings are vivid and express the spiritual, which is inseparable from the physical, in shark calling.

A foreigner from a totally alien culture does inevitably see things dif ferently from a local person, and this book needs to be read and looked at with this in mind. Now that more Papua New Guinean artists are com ing to the fore, some strongly in fluenced by their country’s traditional art styles, others using a rather iconoclastic approach, we can look forward to paintings, sculptures and other forms of artistic expression— and to books incorporating them— different from the one under review.

With it will assuredly come an en richment of the aesthetic life of the world at large.

This book is extremely well pro duced, a pleasure to read and look at. Glenys Kohnke has been awarded a young writers’ fellowship grant for 1975 by the Australian Council for the Arts. There is much promise of

it being put to good use.

Harry

Jackman.

(THE SHARK CALLERS, by Glenys Kohnke. Published by Yumi Press, Boroko, 1974 (available from Robert Brown Asso ciates, Port Moresby). $5.95.)