WAUCHOPE AND THE AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM Ernest John Luther Wauchope was a member of the Australian army corps (ANZAC) that was deployed in Europe during the First World War. On October 20, 1914, at the age of twenty-three, he left Adelaide as a mechanic aboard the Ascanius, in the company of the 10th Infantry Battalion. A few years after his discharge and return to Adelaide on February 15, 1918, Wauchope left for the former German colony of New Guinea, which had just been placed under Australian control by the League of Nations as part of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, to serve as a modestly paid government worker. He began to invest in gold mining and started the Adelaide Company. His successes in business made it possible for him to buy a plantation for £30,000, but the price of copra crashed soon afterward during the world economic crisis. In the 1930s, Wauchope and his wife managed the Awar Plantation, located in Awar territory in the Hansa Bay, not far from Bogia and Manam Island on the northeastern coast of New Guinea. During that time, the couple offered their assistance to a number of scientists passing through the area, including C. B. Humphreys of Christ College in Cambridge (Fortune 1998: 34) and Dr. Felix Speiser of the Basel Museum.3 They also had ongoing relationships with anthropologists such as Camilla Wedgwood and Gregory Bateson. At the time, Wedgwood was an assistant in anthropology at the University of Sydney and was doing research on Manam Island. Because of this proximity, she had occasion to meet the plantation owners often (Fortune 1998: 56). Bateson was further away, far up the Sepik River in the Iatmul villages of Palembai and Kanganamun, but nonetheless benefi ted from their help in the course of his in situ work in 1929 and 1932. He mentions them in the preface to his famous book, Naven (1936: 8). In addition to collecting orchids and recruiting plantation labor, Wauchope was himself a purveyor of artifacts for various museums. In 1936, Wauchope worked with Lord Moyne to assemble a collection of Lower Sepik and Ramu objects that is now in the British Museum. The Pitt Rivers Museum has about thirty objects that Wauchope collected, which passed through the Beatrice Blackwood Collection. His primary collecting work was for the Australian Museum in Sydney, which holds an important collection of varied objects sourced by him, including fi gures, sculptures, masks, and sago-spathe paintings, as well as an archive of documents relating to the collector himself. A note to the trustees of the Australian Museum reveals that it was Wedgwood who fi rst recommended Wauchope to the museum’s admin- 105 Papua New Guinea Ernest Wauchope
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