76 Plumes and Pearlshells: Art of the New Guinea Highlands ART on View FIG. 1: Female figure. Wiru people, Pangia, Ialibu- Pangia District, SHP, Papua New Guinea. Mid 1900s. Wood, natural pigments, feathers, shells, pig tail, plant fibers. H: 110 cm. Collected by Stan Moriarty in 1967. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Purchased 1977, 242.1977.a-c/ M1652. Photo: AGNSW/Jenni Carter. © Wiru people, under the endorsement of the Pacific Islands Museums Association’s (PIMA) Code of Ethics. . By Natalie Wilson The spectacular highlands interior of the island of New Guinea, with its snow-capped mountains, roaring rivers, kunai grasslands, fertile valleys, and forests ringing with the striking songs of the bird of paradise, is home to more than one million people whose ancestors settled in the region around 50,000 years ago. The earliest agricultural drainage systems in the world, found at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Kuk in the Upper Wahgi Valley of Papua New Guinea’s Western Highlands Province, date to 9000 BCE, when the highlanders cultivated a large variety of fruit and vegetables, including taro and banana. With the introduction of the sweet potato, probably from South America, in the seventeenth century, populations began to swell dramatically and subsequently move across the entire region. Geographical barriers and warfare created isolation between groups, but also resulted in the incredible multiplicity of cultures and languages that can be found across the highlands region today. The extraordinary myriad of art forms that arose from this cultural diversity are the focus of Plumes and Pearlshells: Art of the New Guinea Highlands, an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, until August 10, 2014. Since his early teenage years, Stanley “Stan” Gordon Moriarty had been an admirer of the art of the Pacific. Born in Melbourne in 1906, Moriarty studied art in the 1930s before moving to Sydney, where he established a commercial art studio and began collecting Pacific art in earnest. Much of his early collection was sourced through secondhand shops and the few galleries that then exhibited Pacific art. However, it wasn’t until 1961, at the age of fifty-five, that Moriarty took the final step and decided to experience firsthand the cultures that had captured his imagination for so many years. Sailing from Sydney to Port Moresby, Moriarty flew up to Goroka, now capital of the Eastern Highlands Province. There he experienced the excitement of the annual festival celebrating the diversity of highlands culture, the Goroka Show. It was the first show he was to attend (and later judge) over the fol-
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