Tribal Focus

An exotic collection of ‘Tribal’ has just been launched on Moorabool.com – from Australian Aboriginal, to our closest neighbour, Papua New Guinea, and far beyond to the Pacific nations and African cultures, there’s quite a number of interesting ‘tribal’ items to browse.

Tribal art is important, as while the West became more sophisticated, it remained the same – simple forms, compelling story-telling through highly stylised illustrations in carving and paint.
For this reason, the ‘Modernists’, those artists who dragged the Western World into the modern aesthetic, sought out primitive art for its honest truth and pure, basic forms.

Matisse, Gauguin, and Picasso all collected, and were influenced by art & objects from Africa, South America, and the Pacific. In the 19th century, it had been collected as ‘curios’: in the early 20th century, it was seen as an important aspect of the human art-scape, where tribal people had created pure forms unencumbered by the baggage of the Classical (Greek & Roman) world.

Today, this theme is still very much alive – but it has transformed to something new, with modern artists from the First Nations of a multitude of countries now exploring their own heritage, and merging it with the 21st century.

It certainly makes the world a much more graphically interesting – and colourful – place!

Moorabool’s Tribal

Australia is a terrific source for tribal art. When Europeans first came, they were eager to explore the culture that was already here. Collections were formed – many pieces were shipped overseas – even as the catastrophical encroachment of Western culture destroyed the peoples who had created them. The misfortune of colonisation cannot be overstated- but looking back, it was the Europeans who were fascinated by the Aboriginal People who preserved not only the languages in some areas, but also no end of artefacts which they gathered for their collections. Today, these items are often the only surviving link to long-lost Koori culture that goes back tens of thousands of years.

Elsewhere, the travelling Westerners collected also, and often settled in Australia. As the main British presence in the region, Sydney and Melbourne were the access point for the governing of areas such as Fiji and Papua New Guinea. During WWII, this became particularly important as troops moved into the islands north and east of Australia to deflect the planned Japanese take-over. The soldiers on these expeditions often became very involved in the local situations, and numerous examples of soldiers stationed in New Guinea staying on after the war for decades occur: one of the sources for our present collection was a photographer in WWII for the RAAF, and stayed on in a government role, marrying a PNG local and living there for the next 30 years.

Captain Cook

These prints are dramatic records of the British exploration of the Pacific in the 18th century – ‘CNN reporting live from the South Pacific’. They were published by numerous firms in London, and later in France, for many decades, in various sizes.

Australian

Australian Aboriginal culture, or as it is now popularly called ‘First Nation’, is the oldest continual culture on the planet. Early European contact was dismissive of their achievements, but we now see just how impressive it is for a culture to survive that period of time in an environment Europeans could not survive in for long.
We do see a large amount of Australian Aboriginal artifacts at Moorabool – the largest being the ‘woomera’ shown below. This is a prime example of their superior survival skills and technical innovation: a woomera is a spear-thrower, basically a long leaver-extension for a hunting spear. When used to launch a spear, it resulted in an incredible 60% extra force and massive increase in distance. This particular example, at 2.66 meters, is the longest we have seen, and is an original usable piece made without European tools or materials.

Papua New Guinea

Solomon Islands War Canoe & Nguzu Nguzu

This large model of a War Canoe from the Solomon Islands is quite dramatic.
When the Royals Kate & William visited in 2014, they were treated to a ride in one, as shown below.

Pacific Islands

Tapa Cloth

Gilbert Islands (Kiribati)