Elizabeth Durack: A presentation by Margaret Jolly

This intriguing collection situates Durack, as a member of a pastoral family of Irish descent, who grew up in the context of the Kimberly’s inter-cultural encounter in Australia, in the rich culture of our closes neighbour, Papua New Guinea. She gained fame as an artist and writer, for which she was awarded a CMG and OBE, despite her notoriety for assuming, what she called her non de plume of Eddie Birrup – an Indigenous male Australian artist. This incident generated a huge controversy amongst indigenous artists in Australia and raises interesting questions about Durack’s reversal of both her gender and racial identity. For some, these drawings cannot be viewed without being impinged by the fate of that controversy. Durack is renowned as an artist and illustrator of books of aboriginal stories etc., but here it is important to see a particular racialised interaction, of a white woman, traveller, and sojourner, in relation to the cultural, social and physical topography of Papua New Guinea.

Many Australians lived and worked in Papua New Guinea when it was administered as a territory of Australia. More than 2000 were Patrol officers, many of whom brought cultural items back to Australia, which have since been acquired by museums and galleries. (1)

This library exhibition has surrounded, at least partially, these drawings with billums and beautiful pandanus textiles that are the creative productions of Papua New Guinea women. This then sets a context of drawings of Womens within the instruments of their productivity within village life.

Chris Ballard spoke of the context and purpose of this exhibition, and like Chris, I was attracted to the idea that these works were borne of one of those Canberra moments, a chance encounter – ‘do something on the women Papua New Guinea’. This can also be read as a confession that the Colonial Government had done very little on the women of Papua New Guinea. This period definitely had a sense of a ‘man’s territory’, not just in the sense of the character of Australian colonialism, but also in terms of how Australian’s were dealing with Papua New Guineans in general.

The nature of research that Durack undertook before going on this physical journey, was itself intriguing. Her rather poor, sketchy reproduction of early maps of Papua New Guinea, and the reading list, including Margaret Mead, Peter Lawrence, David Attenborough, Suttor, and all the rest, suggest anthropological literature to contextualise Womens lives. While it is not clear how much reading she actually did, the range of sources reflects an extraordinary western interest in the indigenous people of the regions and their identity.

These portraits are very sympathetic. They are distinct from a longer history of less empathetic portraiture over the preceding three centuries, which is characterised by ethnic typification. In the preceding years stereotypical women and girls were illustrated and identified not with their names but phrased such as “girl of ”.

Durack’s depictions contrast sharply with those of people like Beatrice Grimshaw, who in the early part of the 20th century, though not a visual artist, gives the most negative and vilifying depictions of women in the Western part of the Pacific.

Durack’s imagery for these portraits is grounded in the salvationist overtones from the missionaries. It was about presenting an impression of women who gave their hearts and souls to supporting their communities– working too hard in the gardens, carrying too much wood and water, quite a generalised picture of a gendered culture where the labour of women was essential, but not culturally valued.

It is important to read these works in the context of the earlier and co-present representations. In particular there is a contrast between the ways we see the educated, elite women, such as (Dame Ahioma) Alice Wedega, Mrs Veita Hau’ofa, and Ami Aisoli of New Ireland, and the representations of the women in village and rural situations. The pictures of “average” or “working” women reveal a more generic representation, the titles lack information on the individual, for example ‘girl of Sepic’. This is intriguing in terms of the history of debates regarding the visual representation by foreigners in the Pacific and the tension between individuating persons and representing collectivities. In the early voyage materials of Cook, individuals are represented in Polynesia with generic racialised depictions in the Western part of the Pacific, later named Melanesia.

The art in the collection has been categorised into broad subjects. Women are “sorted” by their identity in terms of their work, such as Nuns, Nurses, Teachers, Midwives. This mirrors the range of efforts by the Christian missions in Papua New Guinea. It emphasises the contribution of women to their society through productive work, within traditionally female professions. Those in non-traditional work are not documented. The concept of work as the prime characteristic of their identity reflects the Christian imported values “Hands to Work, Hearts to God” as the Shakers have interpreted these values.

In my earlier writing, particularly ‘Family and Gender in the Pacific’, Martha McIntyre, Pat Grimshaw, and others, reflected on the dramatic transformation of domesticity and gender relations across the Pacific. For the salvation of Papua New Guinea women, the Christian missions strongly advocated focusing women’s attention on their roles as wives and mothers. In our recent book ‘Divine Domesticity’ about Asia and the Pacific, Hyaeweol Choi and I contend it is important to recognise that these domestic roles were complimented by Church based education. This education made new public roles, such as teaching and nursing, available to women.

However, Anne Dickson-Waiko, a leading Papua New Guinea scholar, has proposed that women were excluded from the space of modernity. The colonial state’s labour laws insisted that it was men involved in migrant labour schemes, men engaging more in the commodity economy, and definitely men dominant in the realm of politics. The colonial state can be seen to be creating that ‘man’s territory’ many writes have reflected upon. So in some ways, Barnes’ ‘do something about the women’ provide the subtext that the colonial state had done very little in terms of the situation of women, at that time.

Finally I would like to speak about the future uses of the collection, and congratulations to the library for acquiring and making it available. I hope it will not just be of use to scholars here in Australia or those within the broader Oceanic region, but as has happened to other collections that have gone online, it will also be of great interest to the descendants of some of the people represented here, and in fact all of the contemporary citizens of the very diverse and large country of Papua New Guinea.

I am looking forward to future exhibitions at ANU, which are going to be showing us, not just the efflorescence of indigenous artists at the time of Papua New Guinea’s independence, but how these arts have flourished since that time in 1975.