Exhibition: The Shields of Melanesia at The Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival Sydney College of the Arts

Exhibition: The Shields of Melanesia at The Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival Sydney College of the Arts

This superb exhibition of Melanesian Shields was sponsored by The Oceanic Art Society Sydney & curated by Geoff Carey.

The exhibition showed New Guinea Shields in a way never seen before in Australia at the Sydney College of the Arts who gave use of its large exhibition spaces to allow this exhibition to be part of The Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival showcasing Pacific Islands Art & Culture.

The exhibition was supposed to be in conjunction with a publication of a book by the same name The Shields of Melanesia that was printed five years later in 2005.

The Shields of Melanesia Edited by Harry Beran and Dr Barry Craig

This is the first comprehensive compilation of the war shields of Melanesia. The volume illustrates more than one hundred types of shields from all cultural areas of Melanesia that used such objects. Approximately eighty percent of the shields illustrated in the book have never appeared in print.

The editors describe why the use of fighting shields in the South Pacific was confined to Melanesia. The typology of war shields used in the book is based on an exhaustive survey of the literature, on the field experience of the authors, and on a survey of the collections of the major Australian museums.

Twenty-Four of the shields shown in photos in this book belong to the Todd Barlin Collection of New Guinea Art 

Todd Barlin Wrote three sections of this book

3.1 Shields from the North Coast of Western New Guinea: Pages 28- 32

5.1 The Shields of the Highlands of Western New Guinea : Pages 112- 1117

6.1 Shields from the Southern Lowlands of Western New Guinea: Pages 155-165