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Museum Victoria Acquires Indigenous Objects At Auction
Museum Victoria Acquires Indigenous Objects At Auction
Museum Victoria has acquired two Indigenous objects of international significance from recent auctions - Rain Ceremony Dreaming, a painting by Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, and a 19th century shield from Victoria.
The items, purchased for $36,000 and $73,000 respectively, will join Museum Victoria’s Indigenous Cultures collection which comprises more than 65,000 objects.
“Museum Victoria has the most extensive and culturally important collection of Australian Aboriginal materials in the world,” said Lindy Allen, Senior Curator, Anthropology (Northern Australia), Museum Victoria.
Museum Victoria’s Indigenous Cultures Collection from Central Australia encompasses diverse examples of material cultural items collected over a 100-year period from Arrente, Warlpiri, Warumungu, Kaytej, Pitjantjatjara and other groups.
“Early painted boards such as Rain Ceremony Dreaming represent an integral shift away from the traditional representation of ritual iconography towards the production of these same images by the old Pintupi men at Pupunya using modern materials. These men, including Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, had only recently walked out of the desert and at this time were being encouraged to express themselves in an entirely novel way by the art teacher Geoffrey Bardon,” explained Allen.
Created in 1972, the work represents the Rain Dreaming ceremony and features clear depictions of artefacts, sand paintings and decorated ritual objects. Within a few years these realistic representations of ritual work disappeared, and the designs became more abstracted to disguise the sacred meanings associated with them. In doing so, this became the foundation of what is considered the most important artistic movement to emerge from Australia, the Western Desert Art Movement.
“Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri played an instrumental role in the development of the Western Desert Art movement and his work has been recognised internationally, so the Museum feels extremely fortunate to be able to have purchased this significant piece,” she added.
Also purchased at auction was a rare and distinctively decorated broad shield from Victoria, dating from the 19th Century. In an 1878 work by R. Brough Smyth (The Natives of Victoria), this type of shield is referred to as a Gee-am, used for protection in general fights involving spears.
The shield was acquired under the Victorian Artefact Acquisition Fund, auspiced by Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, which allows Museum Victoria to actively seek out and acquire historical Victorian Aboriginal wooden artefacts so that they are in public ownership and therefore available to the Victorian Aboriginal community.
