BY PHILIP FITZPATRICK

PAPUA NEW GUINEA is the resting place of many dreams.

During the halcyon days of the Australian administration, in the 1950s and 60s, one of those dreams involved the existence of a remote highland valley that was a veritable Shangri-la, where a benign sun shone all year, food was plentiful and a laughing, happy people wore flowers in their hair.

This particular dream caught the imagination of many men and women.  One of those was Norman Tindale, the ethnologist at the South Australian Museum. 

Tindale laboured long and hard to convince the Museum Board to fund a collecting expedition to the highlands.  Now was the time to get in there and record it all before it disappeared forever he argued.  Alas, he was unsuccessful; in those penny-pinching years of austerity the gentlemen of the board remained unmoved.

Tindale reluctantly let the idea slip by and went back to his study of the Aborigines that would eventually make him famous.  When he retired from the Museum and went off to America to write his magnum opus, a young and zealous Museum archaeologist called Graeme Pretty took over his job.  Graeme knew about Tindale’s fruitless quest and decided to take up the cudgel again.

The particular Shangri-la Graeme had in mind lay at the head of two beautiful valleys in the Southern Highlands ruled over by a benign dictator called Des Clancy, who had his headquarters in the small township of Mendi. 

Des had originally suggested the idea of a museum expedition to the collector, Tony Crawford [left, with friends], and he, in turn, sowed the idea in Graeme’s head.

Graeme and Tony mustered some big guns for their assault on the Museum Board, not the least being TPNG Chief Justice Alan Mann, who was a sometime collector and was president of the trustees of the fledgling museum that had been set up by legislation in Port Moresby in 1954.

With Mann's help, Graeme secured a generous grant from the prestigious Wenner-Gren Foundation of New York and again took the proposition to the misers on the Museum Board. 

Where Tindale had failed, Graeme Pretty [right, buying artefacts], with a bag of American money, had success.  It was thus that the South Australian Museum Expedition to the Southern Highlands District was born in late 1968.

In many ways the expedition was timely.  The astute Southern Highlanders had been quick to grasp the new economy brought by the colonialists and were abandoning their own material culture hand-over-fist. 

With the help of Des Clancy and his kiaps, Graeme and Tony set up shop in several settlements from December 1968 through to the end of January 1969.  In those two months they haggled and bought an impressive collection of over 900 items, ranging from the commonplace to the unusual.

At the end of their stay Graeme assiduously divided the collection between the two museums, with the greater part going to Port Moresby.  From what both men had seen and bought they were agreed upon one thing, they had to come back again. For this purpose they turned to the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, but unfortunately events greater than either of them were in train.

Tony managed to get back to the Western District and begin his research into the Gogodala carvers, which culminated in the revival of a dying tradition and the production of his monumental book Aida.  Although Graeme managed to get up to visit Tony he was fighting a rear guard action in Australia. 

In 1971 Gough Whitlam and Nugget Coombs conspired and ordered the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board to re-direct research funding away from Papua New Guinea and the Pacific towards Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.  Graeme protested but eventually succumbed to the inevitable.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then.  Alan Mann died in 1969; Tony has become a successful publisher and Graeme, worn down by constant battles against the bureaucracy, much of it of his own making, passed away a few years ago.  In the meantime the divided collection has languished.

When Barry Craig, the Curator of Foreign Ethnology at the South Australian Museum and former Curator of Anthropology at the National Museum in Port Moresby suggested I might like to work on the collections, I discovered a literal treasure trove of Southern Highland’s material culture.

In Adelaide the collection had been well stored, although I did encounter a few smelly cassowary claw necklaces and other deteriorating pieces.  I haven’t yet seen the rest of the collection in Port Moresby; we’re still trying to figure out how to tackle that one.

My hopes are not high, what with the game of musical directors that has gone on over the years (the current director can’t get into the building because his chagrined predecessor has barricaded himself inside and won’t give up the keys), and the constant power failures, cut off phones and broken down air conditioners; it could be in any state.

Michael Somare was an early and enthusiastic patron of the National Museum but he seems to have forgotten all about it.  These days only the odd and intrepid tourist hikes out past the Parliament's haus tambaran, itself falling into disrepair, to stare at the remnants of a glorious cultural past in exhibits slowly being consumed by dust and mould and a floor littered with old handwritten labels.

One wonders what the old men and women of Bela, near Mendi, and Wabia, near Tari, long passed on but who embraced Graeme and Tony’s vision and generously sold or presented them with this valuable collection would think.