Pictures from the past

Arts

By Nicolas Rothwell

Solemn-faced old men sit

ting cross-legged, their

betel-chewing equipment clasped before them; the grand clutter of men’s ceremonial houses on the Gulf of Papua; stately multi-hulled canoes cruising to Port Moresby - these images, seen all too rarely in today’s Papua New Guinea, are preserved in an extraordinary pho tographic archive, brought to light by Australia’s greatest museum of Oceanic art.

The Usher Photographic Collection has been on view for some months in the ornate Pacific Cultures Gallery of the South Australian Musuem. The collection encompasses the unusual, beautifully com posed visual records of an exploration tra

jectory.

In 1914, a pioneering government expe dition was dispatched to the Vailala and Purari rivers in Papua. Its goal was to

search for commercial oil deposits. It was led by Dr Arthur Wade,

geologist, and among his staff was a talent ed surveyor and photographic enthusiast named Ernest Sterne Usher. As the muse um’s curator of foreign ethnology, Barry Craig, points out, Usher’s trove of 560 photographs, most taken by himself, together with others by L L Wrathall, and yet more prints from the negatives of geol ogist Evan Richard Stanley, “recorded an indigenous culture then little changed but now rare or completely disappeared, for example, the men’s cult houses and ritual objects”. Usher’s Papua photographs pre date those of the much more famous Frank Hurley, the Antarctic photographer who made a pioneering cini-film, Pearls and Savages, in the Torres Strait and Papua Gulf region between 1920 and 1923.

These images, then, are precious records, both of a vanishing culture and of a vanishing colonial perspective; formal; inquisitive; well-ordered. The Papuan indi viduals captured in the Usher Collection had been exposed to Western existence since 1870, but were still essentially unaf

fected by its invasive, transforming touch.

In short, they were ripe to be fixed and frozen by the camera lens - and, with meticulous thoroughness, this is what Usher himself, together with his col leagues, did - until September 23, 1916.

Shortly after that date, Usher was drowned while crossing the Vailala River from the western side at its mouth.”

And so the pioneer of PNG photogra phy passed into his own footnote of histo ry, joining his many subjects in a dimly remembered, sepia-toned afterlife. In 1972. Usher’s collection was donated to the museum by his sister. Viewing the Usher Collection in the Pacific Cultures Gallery is a curiously integrated and com plete experience: Elema and Namau masks made by the peoples whose lives are recorded in the photographs are on display nearby, and the atmosphere of the Eravo men’s houses - with their front elevations 20 metres high and their 200-metre-long recesses. It is to be strongly hoped the full publication of the Usher photographic archive will follow the museum’s pioneer ing display. This exhibition, the research material prepared for it, and the gallery in which it stands, a richly crowded diorama of Oceanic arts, demonstrate the depths of Australia’s historical connection to PNG’s and the Pacific realm. A bitter debate has been running all year in South Australia over these plans, which are indicative of the broader Australian turn against involvement with the Pacific on the politi cal, economic and cultural planes.

Also in the Adelaide museum’s Pacific Cultures Gallery at present is the remark able New Ireland Malangan canoe carved by the late Hosea Linge of Libba village, together with a team of apprentices, in 1995. This canoe, named La-Sisi, is the masterwork of one of the greatest revivers of New Ireland traditions, and has done much to reinvigorate the Malangan tech nique. But both these splendid spectacles, of course, are temporary: exhibition man agement today is a field of sharply defined and illustrative priorities. If the museum in Adelaide boasts one of the world’s most impressive holdings of Pacific art, shown in a fashion that itself reveals much about historic attitudes towards Pacific ethnogra phy, then the apparent fate of those hold ings declares, in a subtle but unmistakable manner, the likely trend in Australia’s cul tural engagement with her Oceanic neigh bours. ■