Recent readings have begun, more often than not, with in memoriam. For Dad, Brother, Grayling. For Michael and for all the lost loves. If we turn towards death and look at its folds the lists will abound.
To step into the National Museum and Art Gallery of Papua New Guinea (NMAG) is to pass again through a threshold of intimacies held in colonial makings. Its conception transects a geographical line of land; Kaiser-Wilhelmsland a Schutzgebiet to the north, and the Territory of Papua and New Guinea a protectorate to the south. Within this frame, the museum’s beginnings can be traced to the 1880s, held in relation to the minds of two heads of a colonial administration under British Papua: Lieutenant Governor Sir William MacGregor and his Government Secretary Anthony Musgrave. While NMAG was built in 1975, its beginnings (through MacGregor’s early collections) enfold a web that binds one to the other, and it's history is one that echoes a practice that took its hold on the epidermis.1
Printed and stylised on the surface of infographic panels inside the NMAG, the narrative of the museum’s timeline is made to be read as linear, and so too it suggests is ours.2 Its line is focused on a structure of post-war and post-independent contingencies reliant on a need for nation-building.3 Introduced as summarised chapters, the panels introduce the history of the museum named after events and the varying heads of the British and Australian colonial administration that shaped the country up until it's independence in 1975. The MacGregor years, The Murray years, The World Wars, The Cleland years and The Mann years. Beyond the panels, the main Galleries within the museum have been named after figures remembered for their roles in a post-independent making. The five galleries within the museum are The Bernard Mullu Narokobi Gallery, The Be Jijimo Gallery, The Ian Saem Majnep Gallery, The Tumbuna Gallery and The Susan Karike Gallery. In their naming a proposition for a post-colonial and post independent relation to self is made and it is within a newly built sixth gallery where a remembering of another event, one enacted in wounding, is retold.
The Kokoda Gallery opened on November 3rd, 2023, with a purpose to commemorate Papua New Guinea’s role and relationship to World War II. The Kokoda Gallery’s conception mirrors that of the NMAG in that it is tied to colonial beginnings, and its echoes reverberate within the contemporary landscape where a paternalistic practice is repeated and finds its place again within a cultural telling. Its narrative is a reminder of service for a collective memory made for another. No longer Gallipoli, the campaign is Kokoda and within this room death is used as a levelling field. Although the making of the gallery suggests a turn towards a remembering of Papuan enslaved and laboured life, this history recedes from its overarching schema. Its relation to the past is one told in brevity, and it is within this absence that the caveat is felt, made clear through the gesture of its polite cut.
One enters this Kokoda Gallery by ascending concrete steps that flank both sides of a circular artery within the interior of the museum, and my attention takes its hold on two paintings.4 The first takes up almost a third of the space of the wall on which it is hung. Its contextual makings as an artwork produced as part of the wartime effort has given it a desired social life. Seven figures, rendered in oil, nearly engulf the canvassed surface, and from here a figure of a man appears — his body is made bare, save for two pieces of fabric. One piece of fabric is rendered in muted tones of blue and is drawn atop his waist in the figure of a knee-length wraparound. His face has no overt expression, yet enlaced around his forehead is the second sliver of cloth. Its white surgical fabric acts as a bandage to an alluded head wound.
Arms belonging to four figures extend. These have been shaped in altering positions, fashioned in gestural pulls to level a weight of another whom they carry. The footing of one of the carriers is steadied by their placement on the earth’s surface. Knees bent and with rounded backs, their posture is made in effort to hold the presence of this other whose weight is borne alongside the labour of three. Immobile, the carried figure lies outstretched, his face in quiet repose. In the scene’s background, two figures clothed in conscripted military uniform move in opposite directions. One proceeds towards the interior of the scene’s edge. His body is turned away and with a growing distance, he moves toward the suggested battle beyond the frame. The remaining soldier walks alongside the figures of the carriers. His body appears half crouched in painful grimace, protected in the corner of the frame behind the bodies of the laboured four. Their direction of movement suggests a slow return from an opposing gun’s range. The painted gesture is cyclical, and the figures reflect a bounded wounding whose presence continues to take its hold within everyday life. The painting by William Dargie titled Native bearers carrying wounded in New Guinea (1943) has a dizygotic twin in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Their subtle differences are strange, and the mirrored other carries in its title the geographic point bearing the name of Owen Stanley.5
The second painting, Nora Heysan’s Sister M. Russel nursing at the 106th Australian Casualty Clearing Station (1944), is placed near the first. Smaller in scale, this work simply depicts two figures. The scene reflects the interior of a structure built with an availability of time, and not one intended for a short-lived temporality. One of the subjects is drawn standing alongside a hospital bed and is shown tending to the bandaged arms of a dismembered other. His wounding is one of a peculiar infliction: the area where his wrists would meet with palms is dressed in thick bandages of surgical gauze. His pain too will be felt in an absence. He lies atop the bed’s mattress, slightly upright. His gaze rests on the hands of the attentive nurse whose touch enfolds a limb with cloth. The colours of the fabric on which both figures are set against make for studied contrasts to the colours of their skin. A cream of white for the wounded, and a fabric of dark green for the nurse. Both faces are made in profile and are turned toward each other.
In its ritual celebration, the scenes within the room make for a feeling of frustrated unease. On exiting, an aged banner which holds a reproduced photograph of George Silk’s Blinded soldier, New Guinea (George Whittington being led to an aid station by Raphael Oimbari) (1942) stands unanimated by lack of a necessary breeze.6 The support structure for the banner is broken, and the image faded from the sun’s exposure. On the banner a subheading reads out the colloquial name used for the Papuan labourers and infantry. Coined from the British naming for the Hadendoa of the Beja people who fought against their colonial rule during the Mahdist Wars, the name would find itself within the lyricism of Rudyard Kipling — voiced out in poetic song. This name would later be appropriated within the Pacific Theatre, and its damaging trope would be repeated again in the shape of new lyrics used in speaking to, used in speaking of, used in the recognition of Papuan life beyond WWII.7
Wounds are made tenet within this sixth room and within the museum a reading of the past is left closed, its silence in turn tacit. Beyond the painted canvas, outside its room as a holder, death’s signal is no longer marked by the sonorous echo of a gun but sounded by the lack of access to care. The scenes within the Kokoda Gallery leave us in a repeating deadlock where a violence continues to re-enter the fold. Bodies are kept at the edge, and care struggles to find its reach. It is felt in the absence of things built to make one feel that life is precious.8 The question burns heavy and pervades in thought — how then to break free? Perhaps better not to enter through lacrimal puncta or ceremonial ritual. Better perhaps to dive into the wreck. To begin with clarification as practice; to say the next thing and never the last.9 To allow the wound to have the needed recursivity to bear them opened in full.
[1] Andrew Moutu, ON THE TWO SIDES OF HISTORY, 2011, p. 3.
[2] David Scott, The Tragic Vision in Postcolonial Time, PMLA Vol. 129, No. 4, Modern Language Association, 2014, pp. 799-808.
[3] Anna Edmundson, FROM ECONOMIC LABORATORY TO HAUS TAMBUNA Re-inventing the Papua New Guinea Museum, Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde, Frobenius Institute, 2018, pp. 125-148.
[4] The paintings discussed within this text are Nora Heysan’s Sister M. Russel nursing at the 106th Australian Casualty Clearing Station (1944) and William Dargie’s Native bearers carrying wounded in New Guinea (1943). I have refrained from reproducing both artworks alongside this writing either on a physical page or its otherwise digital sister. Its deduction is not a disavowal but an exercise in speaking together about the falsehood of the absence of violence by the absence of its visual signal expressed by Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman. It is an exercise to speak to an abstraction of context and does not allude itself from this writing. Its presence is voiced in a need to speak. I am grateful to Jessyca Hutchens whose guidance helped me find the reading and language to express this point. Fred Moten, In the break: the aesthetics of the Black radical tradition, University of Minnesota Press, 2003; Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Oxford University Press, 1997.
[5] William Dargie, Stretcher bearers in the Owen Stanleys (1943). This painting is available to view online here: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/ART26653?image=1.
[6] George Silk’s Blinded soldier, New Guinea (George Whittington being led to an aid station by Raphael Oimbari) (1942) is available to view online here: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C33402.
[7] Victoria Stead, Violent histories and ambivalences of recognition in postcolonial Papua New Guinea, Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 20, No.1, 2017, pp. 68-85.
[8] Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, English translation by Steve Corcoran, Duke University Press, 2019, p. 38.
[9] David Scott, Stuart Hall’s voice: intimations of an ethics of receptive generosity, Duke University Press, 2017, p. 16
