ART on View 78 FIG. 3: Benabena dancer with headdress worn by widows and widowers, Goroka Show, 1972. Photo: Stan Moriarty. © Stanley Gordon Moriarty Archive. FIG. 4 (below left): Headdress. Benabena people, Goroka District, EHP, Papua New Guinea. Mid 1900s. Coix seeds, vine, rattan, pig tusks, plant fibers. H: 58.5 cm. Acquired by Stan Moriarty from Mr. Laiyon in 1972. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gift of Stan Moriarty 1978, 231.1978/M2313. Photo: AGNSW/Jenni Carter. © Benabena people, under the endorsement of the Pacific Islands Museums Association’s (PIMA) Code of Ethics. . lowing twelve years of exploration, during which time he also assembled what would become a world-renowned collection of highlands art. Traveling around the New Guinea highlands in the 1960s required patience, resourcefulness, and good relations with the many government administrators and settlers across the region. Moriarty was amiable and endowed with the spirit of adventure and a sense of humor. He dined with dignitaries, camped out on patrol with kiaps (Australian patrol officers), and lived for extended periods in villages, all of which he captured on film through the lens of his camera and on reel-to-reel audiotape. Nothing escaped his attention: the majestic highlands landscape; the quiet beauty of simple domestic chores; and the thrill of the charge of 100,000 featheradorned Highlanders as they surged across the showground at the 1963 Mount Hagen Show. Much of Moriarty’s collection was sourced from the Mount Hagen and Goroka shows, purchased from the elaborate district displays or directly from highlanders who were themselves attending the shows. In 1956—just twenty-six years after Australian prospectors Michael Leahy and Michael Dwyer trekked into the Goroka Valley in search of gold and revealed, to the world’s astonishment, vast populations of previously unknown peoples—Goroka was a bustling township with a well-established population of mostly Australian settlers, who operated coffee plantations and cattle stations and ran small businesses. However, in many parts of the highlands, warfare was still widespread and, in a bid to curb violence between warring tribes as well as between highlanders and colonial officials, the idea of uniting these groups through the time-honored British tradition of the agricultural “fayre” emerged and the Goroka Show was born. Through the highlands shows, not only was the realm of the colonizers brought to the highlanders, the highlanders were themselves revealed to one another. The Goroka Show became an annual event, growing in size and popularity every year. Although the agricultural component was the show’s raison d’être, the introduction in 1957 of the “tribal finery contest,” in which Highlanders were invited to perform customary songs and dances adorned in their finest body decoration, or bilas, became the main event for all future shows, and legends were born. At the 1957 Goroka Show, the celebrated Asaro Mudmen appeared for the first time, wearing their holosa masks and terrorizing showgoers with their mudcaked bodies and grotesque masks. The first Mount Hagen Show followed in 1961.1 One of the most striking (and sizeable) pieces collected FIG. 5 (above): Kompuna (pelvic girdle) by Orgiri Tabzono (born 1940s, lives in Tirokave village). Kafe people, Tirokave, Kainantu District, EHP, Papua New Guinea. C. 1972. Barkcloth, plant fibers, cowrie shells, wood, machine-wove fabric, yellow and red pigments. L: 50 cm. Collected by Stan Moriarty at Tirokave in 1972. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gift of Stan Moriarty 1977, 604.1979/M2331. Photo: AGNSW/Jenni Carter. © The artist, under the endorsement of the Pacific Islands Museums Association’s (PIMA) Code of Ethics.
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