Magazines - Tribal Art Spring 2011

By Crispin Howarth, curator for Pacific Arts at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Introduction
The nation of the Solomon Islands consists of a chain of mountainous islands that stretch in a southeasterly direction from its northern tip near Papua New Guinea toward Vanuatu in the south. At first glance, the Solomon Islands have a long history of conflict. Over the past 200 years, these conflicts have ranged from the seafaring expeditions associated with headhunting practices, to encounters with external influences of the labor recruitment era, naval might, and conflict on a spiritual level due to the advent of Christianity.
In the past decade, with the assistance of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), the Solomon Islands have established peace after a civil war that affected parts of the nation. Some fifty years earlier, in the twentieth century, the islands endured modern warfare on a massive scale during World War II. Tens of thousands of foreign troops with ships and planes brought different goods, technologies, and customs that markedly affected the local communities. Aspects of traditional culture, known as kastom, were aban- doned or discouraged through foreign influence, both direct and indirect. Before World War II there was a period of peace in the Solomon Islands beginning with the 1893 establishment of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. Prior to this era, particularly in the Western Solomon Islands, the cultural practice of headhunting aggressively expanded through the introduction of firearms by traders beginning in the 1860s and 1870s. Within this period of expansive indigenous warfare and fledgling Western involvement, missionaries struggled to spread the word of Christianity and the Protectorate administration established its authority through the shock-and-awe tactics of punitive action.
It is this era of history for the Solomon Islands—distinguished by the great changes brought about by missionary influence on kastom practices in the 1890s to the coming of Japanese and American military powers in the 1940s—from which the works in this exhibition are drawn.