99 collector who acquired the objects. Sometimes these individuals were in a place for just a short period of time and could purchase only at a certain level, while others, often anthropologists, worked in a single environment long enough that they stimulated micro industries and returned with multiples of very similar craft objects. However, others either had better luck or more refined taste. At the Australian Museum in Sydney there is a small but exceptionally fine group of objects from the Murik Lakes assembled by anthropologist Pierre Ledoux, who, with the encouragement of Margaret Mead, left Harvard for the Murik Lakes in 1935 and stayed for six months. Judging the material collected by Ledoux,1 it is obvious he had a discerning eye for the art of the community he studied. One particularly fine example is the stunning kandimbong figure (fig. 1), a personification of a clan founder or other known, deceased individual, which has decades of patination and, unusually, still retains its original decorations, including the human hair beard and topknot. During German colonial rule (1884–1914), the Sepik was seldom visited by non-German scientific expeditions and very little material entered Australian Museums during this time. The majority of the earliest material in Myth & Magic comes from the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force (AN&MEF), a body of some 2,000 men who were sent to New Guinea at the outbreak of World War One in 1914. The short-lived belief that the German Admiralty had hidden warships upriver led to an expedition to the Sepik, where there proved to be no stronghold nor warships, but they did encounter the campsite of Austrian anthropologist Richard Thurnwald, whose photographs they destroyed and whose notes they seized.2 Following this event, the AN&MEF involvement with the Sepik River was largely limited to a handful of punitive responses to reports of headhunting. The objects acquired at this time are not those with the earliest collection dates in the exhibition. An Iatmul mai mask (fig. 4) was acquired in 1909 Captain Friedrich Haug of the German New Guinea Company’s steamer Siar—a well-known name for any person with an interest in early Sepik art. Still more remarkable is a Yuat River flute stopper figure, wusear, that entered the collection of Museum Victoria in 1891. It was acquired from Rev. R. Heath Rickard, who was based in New Britain and never visited the Sepik region. As such, its history remains a mysterious.3 No exhibition of art from the Sepik River would be complete without the inclusion of lower Sepik, coastal, Sepik Masterpieces FIG. 7: Guardian figure, paki. Audua Village, Yuat River, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. Early 20th century. Collected by E. J. Wauchope, 1935–1938. Wood, ochre, paint, shell, iron nails, fiber, hair. H: 100 cm. Australian Museum, E.46361. Photo: Stuart Humphreys, Australia Museum. Ceremonial house finials, paki, are designed for attachment to a roof post or beam; however, neither example in the exhibition exhibits a weathered patina expected in a tropical environment. Villages on the Yuat River were small and there seems to be no record of permanent ceremonial houses. It is possible that these figures were displayed upon the roof of a temporary ceremonial house only on limited occasions.
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