Ancient treasure

EUROPEANS discovered the American continent by accident; Australia was imagined, anticipated and even named before the first Europeans arrived.

EUROPEANS discovered the American continent by accident, when Christopher Columbus thought he was taking a westerly shortcut to the Far East; Australia, on the other hand, was imagined, anticipated and even named Terra Australis, the southern land, for millennia before the first Europeans landed here about four hundred years ago.

Already in antiquity, geographers hypothesised that the sphere of the earth must have a southern continent to balance those they knew; but many thought the torrid zone around the equator would prove impossible to traverse, and that we might never really know if there was intelligent life in the south.

When Europeans did discover the west coast of Australia, they had no idea how far the new land mass extended. In various early maps, we find the west and north accurately charted, but the east remains vacant, open to speculation; sometimes it is joined to New Guinea, sometimes to Antarctica or even to South America.

But there was something fundamentally disappointing about the new continent. Never, in fact, has there been less of a rush to colonise a significant new territory: it was almost two centuries before any kind of settlement was initiated, and even that was a penal colony.

Nothing was even contemplated until James Cook had mapped the east coast and revealed more promising territory than had previously been found. But this final definition of the shape of our continent did not entirely satisfy those who continued to believe in a great southern land, and Cook's second voyage in 1772-75 was expressly intended to determine whether or not the vast South Pacific held another and bigger land mass. His conclusion, of course, was in the negative; New Holland was, after all, the only Terra Australis we were going to find.

From the 16th century until Cook's time, rival European powers had been sporadically criss-crossing the ocean with the southern land as their ultimate goal. One of them, Alvaro de Mendana de Neira, a Spaniard sailing from the Spanish base in Peru, landed at the Solomon Islands in 1568; mistaking the iron pyrite used by the native inhabitants for gold, he named the islands for the legendary treasure mines of the biblical monarch -- later the subject of H. Rider Haggard's Victorian bestseller King Solomon's Mines (1885).

The fool's gold Mendana had found was bound as the head of a small mace-like instrument used for adornment. What he would not have understood is that these little clubs were worn as signs that a warrior had killed a man. Mendana did, however, soon realise how violent the local culture was when he was offered part of a boy's body to eat, and as conflict broke out over limited food supplies. He returned to Peru, and many years later made a second expedition to the Solomons with the intention of founding a colony there. But this time he could not find the islands in the boundless expanse of the ocean, and established an ill-fated settlement in Santa Cruz instead.

The art and culture of the Solomon Islands is the subject of an important exhibition at the NGA put together by Crispin Howarth, whose outstanding Gods, Ghosts and Men, a survey of the Pacific artefacts in the gallery's collection, was reviewed here in 2008. The exhibition is accompanied by an excellent catalogue, which deals with its subject sympathetically and yet realistically, unlike the sentimentality and moralising that are all too common in discussions of indigenous arts.

The culture of the Solomon Islands was based on the practice of headhunting. This wasn't a marginal or exceptional occurrence, but the core activity that defined the values of manhood and therefore determined the status of a man; killing another and collecting his head as a trophy was a rite of passage. Preparing for raids on other communities or defending oneself from enemy raiding parties were constant preoccupations.

Some of the objects in the exhibition refer explicitly to headhunting, while in others the relation is at first sight less apparent. The most grisly are three skulls in a small room that also contains a remarkable chalkstone sculpture of a head. Two of these skulls have been coated with a black, tarry gum which roughly reconstitutes a face, and features have been defined in shiny slivers of nautilus shell pressed into the coating. These are most likely trophy heads, in which the potency of the dead man is trapped and exploited in the service of the victorious warriors.

Another skull is bare bone, but wrapped around with numerous shell rings, some of which are set in the place of eyes and ears. This is probably the head of an ancestor rather than a headhunting trophy, but the difference in practice is not as great as it may seem, since the ancestors too were forced to serve and protect the community with magical powers.

Several of the most intriguing objects in the exhibition are small heads that once adorned the prows of ships. They were mounted low, not far above the surface of the water, because their wide open, apotropaic eyes -- intended to confront unblinkingly and outstare evil spirits -- are especially meant to conjure the perils of the sea. At the same time, the staring eyes are also searching for the village that is to be attacked, for these canoes were built for headhunting raids; some of the figures hold small human heads in their hands.

One of the feared spirits that inhabit the ocean, an adaro, is represented as a winged phallic god with dolphin feet in a sculpture that was, like some works here, included in the 2008 exhibition. As in many cultures, dolphins had a special status (in Greek myth they were originally pirates, transformed by the power of Dionysus) and it was extremely bad luck to catch one in a net. Another sea-spirit, called a kesoko, capable of sinking a canoe and eating its crew, is carved as a sternpost, presumably to cast an evil charm on any vessel giving pursuit.

Another ithyphallic carving is the life-size but strangely distorted urar figure, a spirit with dangerous powers particularly associated with male initiation rituals. A culture like this, largely based on warfare and much less on agriculture, is typically masculine in orientation, and it is largely the men who adorn themselves and make themselves beautiful with shaving and plucking, hair-bleaching and shaping, earlobe-stretching shell rings, necklaces and ornaments, and facial decorations painted on with white lime. The catalogue includes a striking photograph of three young warriors taken in 1891-92: dandies and killers, embodiments of vanity who lack the mirrors in which to admire themselves.

The exhibition includes a sculpture of a young man who is just like the ones in the photograph: smooth skin blackened with a soot paint, facial painting represented in shell inlay, enormous earrings, and even real hair, bleached golden, carefully attached to the skull in plugs like cosmetic hair restoration. This is the first of several remarkably realistic sculptures, which all seem to come from a particular centre, Roviana. The only thing here that recalls the highly schematic form of the prow-figure faces is the wide open, staring eyes, which give the young man an oddly possessed air.

Other unusually realistic sculptures include a young woman seated on the ground, carved from eight pieces of wood, and even more strikingly, a young woman with an apparently white child -- though whether an albino or a European child is meant remains unclear. There is also the fine effigy of a distinguished chief reproduced on the cover of the catalogue. This carving reproduces the chief's mutilated right hand, while the very finely articulated left hand, with the correct number of phalanges in the fingers and a very good sense of the structure of the thumb, makes it seem likely the sculptors in this centre had access to some pieces of European work, perhaps the kind of Spanish santos that proliferated in places such as The Philippines.

Europeans deplored the practice of headhunting, but their arrival inadvertently exacerbated the problem for some time. Merely acquiring iron axes by trade meant that native communities had a powerful new weapon that gave them an enormous advantage over those that lacked them. This provoked a sort of arms race as all the tribes sought to equip themselves in the same way. When they were able to obtain firearms, the effect was even worse.

At the same time the axes helped them build raiding canoes more quickly and efficiently, so that larger raiding parties could be organised. On the other hand it was realised that concerted firing on a canoe could sink it. Thus the level of violence and bloodshed, with raid and counter-raid, escalated until at last the Royal Navy sent a ship to put an end to the conflicts. After some bombardment and the burning of war canoes, the raids began to peter out, and the islanders were soon mostly converted to Christianity. The British government established a protectorate over the islands in 1893 which lasted until independence was granted in 1978.

All this raises important questions, however, which are part of a broader tension in the modern world, between the universal claims of justice and human rights and the local, particular demands of cultural traditions. Many cultures consider various kinds of bodily mutilation and other painful ordeals (circumcision, clitoridectomy, scarification, tattooing, piercing, tooth filing) as vital parts of ceremonies marking rites of passage, not to mention condoning rape or murder in certain circumstances (child marriage, widow burning, honour killing, witch hunting, vendetta killing). The more extreme practices are generally, and rightly, prohibited out of hand by modern civilised communities.

The effect on the culture in question probably varies according to the centrality of the tradition that has been outlawed. Sometimes they are marginal practices or ones that only prevail among the poorer and more ignorant strata of society. But what do you do when the unacceptable activity was central to the culture, as headhunting was to the lives of the Solomon Islanders? If you have to commit homicide and take a trophy head to be considered a man, what are you to do when these things are no longer permissible? You are presumably deeply disoriented in your very sense of identity and unsure of your place and value in the community.

Such disorientation will not last forever. Eventually a society such as this will adjust to the new reality, but it will mean, as for all tribal societies in the modern world, abandoning untenable traditions. In the meantime, the violence and tribal gang warfare that has engulfed the Solomon Islands in recent years shows the process of reconstruction is far from complete.

Varilaku: Pacific arts from the Solomon Islands
NGA until May 29