1993 APT1 Conference : Identity, tradition and change

3 or if we’ll be moved off the edge, because as you can see here the Pacific Islanders are in a very small minority here, however, I’m particularly grateful because Papua New Guinea is perhaps very fairly represented here. We have six representatives, two from the Arts Faculty, the Dean herself and the Head of the Textile, two students and one practical artist whose exhibitions you will see in the Art Gallery. Papua New Guinea is the largest inhabited island in the world and it is one of the islands that still has the greatest rainforests and the province that I come from in the east Sepik has one of the strongest living arts in the region of the Pacific and it’s river system is one of the greatest in the world. It has some of the best rainforests which are still untouched, so the arts, the women of my province have been involved in a very strong way through performing arts to give messages to the people about the art, about preservation of environment and the wildlife. Traditionally, and that takes me to the second part of my talk, traditionally, Papua New Guinean art was a part of the life of the people and that is the classical art. The early contact with the missionaries led to destruction of many sacred objects some of them were removed and thankfully are in New York or London or in Berlin or in Rome and I have seen many of these objects and they are intact and of course we can get them if we need to, but we have a living culture and our classical arts are expressed in many forms. They are expressed on the human bodies, people paint their faces, they express on canoe prows and paddles and the traditional art is very specific also in that some of it is exclusive to particular tribes and clans. They are actually owned, they’re copyrighted and they cannot be used by other tribes and other groups. They cannot even be either imitated or given different meaning, they are very very specific, they are owned and you cannot use them unless you obtain permission and that is still so today. These artforms derive from dreams, they come from spirits appearing to humans and instructing them about how to paint your body or how to design a canoe or an object and so CASUA1AARTGALL.TP1 24 May 1994