About a week ago I rang the W.A. Museum to talk to the anthropologist about viewing an artefact I donated whilst on leave from a teaching post in Papua New Guinea. The year was 1963. The artefact was on display for a short period in 1965 but has been stored ever since.
In 1965 I was back in Western Australia and had been posted to a country High School in a nice town named Bridgetown. It was there I met my wife to-be Joan who was a French/English teacher at the same school. I told her about the artefact, a head-dress, and we went to the museum to view it. We were taken to some old houses in the centre of Perth which were owned by the museum and used for storage. I was amazed at a large collection of Papua New Guinea artefacts stored there and upon reflection, they were probably worth millions. The collection, apart from my donation, was from the 1870s, donated by a missionary.
Tomorrow we are going to view the head-dress and take photographs of it. We are also going to check out the large New Guinea collection…that is if it hasn’t been flogged!
My next posting will have some pics of the head-dress, details of its origins and a report on the museum collection
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