School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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End date: 2012 × Start date: 2010 × Type: Masters Research thesis × Subject: Australia × Subject: history ×

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    From idol to artform: missionaries and material culture in the Pacific
    MCGILL, ESTHER ( 2012)
    In Hawai’i the introduction of woven cloth and sewing circles led to the development of a distinctive form of quilting. In Arnhem Land in Australia the transition to a market economy through the promotion of local art and craft production led to the material transformation of bark painting from objects of temporary use to artefacts of permanent significance. In both of these cases missionaries played a key, though often unintentional, role in the development of these artforms. This thesis is an exploration of Indigenous creativity and purpose combining with missionary influence on Pacific material culture. Particular focus is made of the development of quilting in Hawai’i in the nineteenth-century and bark painting at Yirrkala in the twentieth-century, culminating in Lili’uokalani’s 1895 ‘Queen’s Quilt’ and the 1963 Painted Bark Petition. During periods of social change, transformations occur in material culture produced by a society. Exploring the relationships between missionaries and Indigenous peoples through artistic expressions of the time illuminates many aspects of these relationships otherwise restricted to European-dominated accounts. Material culture is used as an historical source material to explore cultural changes and corresponding notions of authenticity, as expressed through missionary and museum collections. This thesis is concerned with the two-way nature of cultural exchanges, with particular reference to the art produced through these relationships, art that is both aesthetically beautiful and socially powerful. Queen Lili’uokalani’s Crazy Quilt and the Yirkaala bark petitions both appropriated aspects of European culture in order to create new objects of significant cultural, political, and social importance, and were generated out of missionary-Indigenous relationships.