Elizabeth Durack: A presentation by Dr Chris Ballard

Drawing in PNG History

Since childhood, I have always been fascinated with drawings that represent New Guinea. Drawings illuminate the relationship between the artists and subjects like no other art form. The first representations of the people from Papua New Guinea are drawings by Early European explorers, people like Prado, who in 1606, travelled with Luis Vaz de Torres, along the southern coast of Papua New Guinea from Mailu Island. Prado produced four panels, each with several figures carrying spears, children and billums, these drawings show the faintest traces of local identity. But there is no identity, no individuality in the characters, and there isn’t for many centuries to come.

After Prado there were others explorers such as Schouten, from the Netherlands in 1616, who drew islanders, and Gilsenen in 1643, who sketched New Irelanders. Then the British came up from Australia; Oswald Brierly and Owen Stanley, in the 1840s, mapping the south coast of Papua New Guinea, and producing exquisite drawings with remarkable ethnographic qualities. There are virtually no names attached to these works, they are always titled as “native of … “, this is the period of “Native of…”.

This changes dramatically in the 1870s, with the Russian anthropologist and humanist Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay. He spent 13 years living, off and on, in different parts of Melanesia, most famously along the Rye coast, but also on the south coast of Papua. In New Guinea he produced highly individual portraits. He didn’t have a common language, so he would draw, then ask the name, add these to the drawing. He then included word lists around the edges. The result was an entire ethnography built around a drawing, a portrait of a person; where you can almost reconstruct the tone of the moment, the sweat and evidence of the production of each drawing. But these are also a choreography of annotations and marginalia developing around the central drawing. His writings about the drawings include some beautiful moments, such as when he drew a young girl in Hula. He was drawing a tattoo in her armpit. After he finished she came over and looked at the drawing and said ‘you haven’t got that right.’ So she lifted her arm again, and he had to change it. It’s no accident that we talk about, you take a photograph but you make a drawing – drawings are a co-production between the artist and the subject. Drawing is a powerful tool for communication, for building trust – much more so than the camera and photography.

Elizabeth Durack, was by no means the first female or Australian female artist to go to New Guinea. Before Elizabeth Durack – Nora Heysen, Australia’s first woman official war artist, was despatched to draw nurses and patients in the army hospital at Finschhafen in 1944 – after some debate she was commissioned as a Captain and paid the same rate as male artists. Specific notations were made to ensure this was not to be a precedence for equality of pay rates. Heysen almost ended her military career with a court-martial, when she was found painting a vase full of roses, she wasn’t there to paint Papua New Guineans or roses, only nurses and patients in the army hospital.

Durack’s Commission

In 1968, Western Australian artist Elizabeth Durack was invited to Papua and New Guinea by the Department of External Territories to give her impression of the role women were playing in the development of the Territory. The Department of External Territories was established by the Gorton Government in 1968, formed from the portions of the old Department of Territories that dealt with Papua New Guinea and Australia's smaller external territories and portions of the department that dealt with Northern Territory. The new Department dealt with matters related to the Territory of Papua, the Territory of New Guinea, the Territory of Cocos (Keeling) Islands and the Territory of Christmas Island.

In an interview with the National Library of Australia, Durack discussed her books and how the commission came about:

The first of the “Seeing Through” series of books was one that occurred through a link with the Australian Government, Mr Barnes. Mr Charles Barnes was Minister for Territories at the time and we met in some way … in Canberra and I said, 'I'd love to go to Papua New Guinea'. And then it was worked out through his department that they didn't think that the women ... though the men were coming forward towards the oncoming independence, the women ... were not getting the same amount of attention. He said, 'Do something on the women of Papua New Guinea', and so that's how that ... came about. I went up to Papua New Guinea, and moved right through, drawing the women and that took the shape of a book called ...Face Value... And then on to that I wrote the experiences of travelling through this country which was a marvellous adventure.

Durack was a sojourner, someone visiting Papua New Guinea not deeply invested in it, but someone well placed to do some of the interruptive work. Her work was about presenting Papua New Guinea to Australians, because ultimately Australians were going to make the decisions about Papua New Guinea’s independence. The historian, Hank Nelson, clearly made the point that when independence came to Papua New Guinea, though to some extent there was mutual agreement, the timing was absolutely determined and pushed by Australia.

Travelling by road, boat and air, Elizabeth met and was welcomed by mothers and grandmothers, nurses, wives and teachers, nuns and students, villagers and welfare workers, politicians, gardeners, socialites and market-stall holders.

She started in Port Moresby, then travelled to Goroka, Kundiawa, Mt Hagen, Bulolo, Lae, Madang, Wewak, the Sepik, Angoram, Ambunti and the islands of Manus, New Ireland and New Britain.

She produced these two books: Face Value: Women of Papua New Guinea (Ure Smith, Sydney) and Seeing Through Papua New Guinea: An Artist's Impressions of the Territory (The Hawthorn Press, Melbourne.) Both were published in 1970.

It’s hard not to be attracted to the portraits that are individual, the ones that have the names. What you see very clearly is that the village women are treated generically. “Women of the market, “Women of the highlands”, ‘Old men”, “Drummers” etc.

Village women were seldom identified by name. There is a real focus on the urban elite, the rising women, the educated women, who were themselves teachers or nurses, that her work focuses and that where you see the individuality and real portraiture and these people are all named, as they should be:

• Roslyn Kamava, Florence Inabi, Maisy Talipas, Lina Bebe, Esther Diaia
• Kathy Leahy, daughter of Dan Leahy and Manci
• Mrs Hau’ofa, teacher at Hohola Demonstration School
• and Veita Hauoffer [Hau’ofa].

One lesser known aspect of Durack’s work was her return trip in 1969 for Conzinc Rio Tinto of Australia Ltd (CRA) on Bougainville. Again the result of a chance meeting with Sir Morris Mawby who was on the board of CRA. He invited her to come up and draw the Panguna mine. She started drawing jungle scenes, and the more time she spent up there, the more time she started drawing slightly darker scenes and using enormous Masonite boards, tearing up her jungle paintings and plastering them onto the Masonite boards. Her brother was an engineer and had told her about the conditions there. He said if anything was an argument for environmentalists it is Bougainville Island, ‘You've no idea, to go over the mouth of the river … and see in the mud the crocodiles floating with their bellies exposed, dead'. The desecration was incredible, and there’s a shift in her work. CRA bought most of it, and it is in their collection in Perth or at the University of Melbourne Library.

In conclusion, these are works of their time and have to be understood as such. The fact that 1968 is in the exhibition title makes it very clear what we are looking at. It’s important to appreciate them stylistically, as works of the sixties, and politically, as works by an Australian, groping towards this idea that Papua New Guineans would one day be equal.