Textiles made from the leaves of local plants and dyed with extracts of their roots and seeds are often created by groups of women in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville and nearby Choiseul Province and are infused with stories. The designs marked on the surface of or woven into the textiles are inspired by patterns observed in the natural world. The clan stories connected with these designs are recounted by the women who strip the leaves, grate the roots and weave or stitch the textiles. These artists also tell stories about the pathways the objects take into the lives of others, and recall textiles that were made and gifted to them personally.

Tuhu are elegant hoods constructed by women on Buka Island and the North of Bougainville from broad pandanus leaves, and in some instances are marked with bold red and black embroidered designs designating their owner’s elevated status. These unique sculptural forms are given names corresponding to the status of their wearer, represent some of the most important visual expressions in this region and are worn as ornamentation as well as a protective covering in public ceremonies related to coming of age, matrimony, death and the investiture of clan chiefs.

While the most ornately decorated hoods, known as A’Poa, can only be worn by the clan’s queen during Palmatana ceremonies, or used as a coffin at death, unmarked Tulbus are worn by clanswomen and fulfil multiple functions within and outside of ceremony — as mats, food covers and as shelter from the rain and sun.

The majority of works created for Women’s Wealth were made by groups of women from the Nakas and Nakaripa clans of Buka Island. Led by Kiria Asike, these women spent weeks sourcing and preparing materials before meeting at Marilyn Havini’s home, where they stitched designs onto strips of pandanus, then sewed these into capes. During this time, other family members stepped in to tend to gardens and feed family.

The patterns used to decorate the Tuhu capes (or Sinsu) worn by clan chiefs differ according to which of the four Buka and North Bougainville clans the chief belongs: Nakaripa, Naboin, Nakas or Natasi. For example, capes known as Kakoto feature small rectangles of colour woven into a number of the strips of white pandanus used to construct the cape. Alternatively, chiefs from the Naboin and Nakas clans wear capes decorated with red squares, while those marked with red and black are reserved for chiefs of the Nakaripa clan.

Geometric designs in red and black embroidered onto the Sinsu likewise identify the clan to which the wearer belongs. The most ornately decorated capes, known as A’Poa and worn by the three highest ranking chiefs, are decorated with the designs from all four clans. Triangular designs in red and black found along the top of a chief’s cape (from Tulbus to A’Poa) are known as Kaliana. Decorated Sinsu without the Kaliana can be worn by A Hatutu (second in line).

Delicate biruko fans are carried by women and used in choreographed ceremonial dances in Central Bougainville. Geometric designs embroidered in natural fibre, and more recently in bright wool, along the biruko’s upper lip enhance its visual impact as it moves through the air. Constructed from the leaves of the black palm, these fine textiles are a symbol of womanhood and can be carried only after a young woman has completed the seclusion that accompanies her first menstruation. Then the biruko is carried and used extensively as not only a fan but also a knapsack, sleeping mat, lap-lap, container or serving dish for food, baby carrier and shelter from the rain and sun.

Today, perhaps the most popular use of the biruko is as part of singsing (dance ceremonies), where their unique fan shape and bright patterning enhance the women dancers’ sinuous movements. These dances are performed at festivals and cultural days as expressions of identity and cultural connection.

Like many of the textiles created by women for the Women’s Wealth project, stitched and woven pandanus mats are kept close to the body, used for sitting on, as shelters and for presenting or covering food. These objects are frequently exchanged between kin and clan members as an expression of love and attachment. While firmly located in the domestic realm of women’s lives, pandanus mats can also be transformed into ritual valuables used in inter-clan exchanges and ceremonial occasions marking rites of passage, such as coming of age and marriage. Women work in groups to create large quantities of textiles, and combine them with handwoven baskets filled with food from their gardens and store-bought goods to create a generous gift.

Elisa Jane Carmichael’s A place to share 2018 responds to the gathering of women in a weaving circle at the Women’s Wealth workshop in Bougainville in September 2017. Using a coil-bundle weaving technique traditional to Indigenous women in south-eastern Australia, Carmichael created a mat in a form used throughout the region to designate a space for coming together. A place to share is circular in shape and incorporates yunggaire, a reed of subtly changing pink and green hue that grows in swampy areas of her island homeland Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island). In addition to this special reed which Carmichael carried to Bougainville from her own country, in this work she has used a deep red pandanus leaf, dyed by Hakö artist Kiria Asike at the workshop, and a range of discarded sea ropes and fish scales gathered with family members from the beaches of Minjerribah. A place to share asserts strong ties to country and traditions.

Baskets created through the Autonomous Region of Bougainville are not only containers for carrying or storing everyday goods, but also repositories of time, labour, knowledge and relationships. Baskets link people to specific geographies, family members, histories and cultures. Created from fibres and vines gathered in local forests and gardens, these forms communicate information about a particular environment and ways of living in harmony with it. A basket retains the shape of its raw materials and the traces of bodily movements involved in its construction, and is created using techniques and knowledge passed from one generation to the next. These objects are treasured heirlooms and often play a fundamental role in the expression of cultural identity or as carriers of sacred meanings.

Traditionally only created by men in South Bougainville, Kokan — elegant baskets woven from cane using a stitched coiling technique — are used to carry and store important or personal belongings, food and even infants. Commonly known as ‘Buka baskets’, these objects are at times decorated with geometric patterns worked in a lighter colour achieved by using the underside of the split cane. In more recent years, the weaving of baskets in South Bougainville has declined significantly with the introduction of plastic and other storage containers and the influx of woven cane baskets made by Highlanders into craft markets. There are, however, a number of individuals who continue to make baskets to express their cultural identity or generate income. The technique for weaving Kokan in Women’s Wealth has survived through practitioners such as Jacob Mikai and Peter Pemou, who are training young women and men to keep this unique art form alive.

Tohene, or chief food baskets, are large coconut-leaf baskets used for carrying and storing food in the Nukumanu Islands. These seemingly humble objects provide a material link to the natural environment and to the coconut trees lining the island’s shores. Every part of the coconut tree is used to sustain and aid life on this remote atoll populated as part of Polynesian wayfarers’ western migrations. Nukumanu Island artists such as Aida Pais continue to honour the creative actions of their Polynesian ancestors by gathering materials associated with place and making works expressive of this heritage.

The importance of pattern is evident in the contemporary basket-making practice of Emma Hopuhopu Makusu, in which age-old techniques are creatively reimagined. In her works, geometric patterns interwoven with texts and brightly dyed fibres ripple and shimmer before your eyes, creating optical illusions. The rectangular handbag-shaped form of Makusu’s baskets is inspired by bags traded with Solomon Islanders travelling to Bougainville to trade or connect with family members.

The inherent strength of the natural cane and rattan fibres used by Banoni artists Sister Theresita Alona, Milceller Gabu, Prisca Suana and Maria Wotsugogha enables them to create durable basketry forms perfectly suited to everyday tasks, from collecting garden produce and laundry to carrying personal belongings. Perfected over centuries, these forms include ingenious decorations, such as the elegant open diamond–shaped weave of the Pai that allows dirt from freshly dug root vegetables or water — in the case of the Sister Alona’s Reragowowana (fishing basket) — to pass through the basket. More complex woven patterns in the Katebo baskets women use as personal carryalls incorporate a combination of green Pai and black cane known as miyo. Continuing to build on traditional forms, these baskets are now also fashioned with long handles and in shapes and sizes that enable them to be used handbags.

The elegantly constructed, crescent-shaped baskets found in local markets are a contemporary Bougainville innovation. Inspired by the unique bicornal shape of coconut-leaf baskets used by Gunantuna men in nearby East New Britain, these Bougainville adaptations are created from lengths of cane found in local forests and woven using traditional basketry techniques. Master of these techniques Elizabeth Marata experiments not only with form but also with the beautiful dual colours of the cane she uses, twisting its darker outside skin to create surface designs ranging from the acronymn AROB to the iconic Upe headdress worn by men in areas of Bougainville as part of their initiation practice.

Weavers of Choiseul Province in the northern islands of the Solomon Islands archipelago continue to make elegant string bags distinctively patterned with diamonds, and with handles just long enough to fit over the shoulder. Known locally as kuza, these all-purpose bags are made in beautiful pale, undyed natural fibres and are a symbol of Choiseul womanhood. Sometimes the warm tonal shifts of the natural fibres used in these bags are mimicked with brightly coloured nylon threads. Women working with nylon also experiment with pattern, moving the string bag into the realm of fashion and the contemporary marketplace.

Spherical hand-built pots were once created in many parts of the Solomon Islands and nearby Bougainville for storing and cooking food. Created from local clays, and at times mixed with sand and glazed with the juice of local fruit, these pots served many purposes, from storing family valuables, such as traditional shell money, to functioning as ceremonial gifts. Today, with the introduction of imported metal cooking utensils and plastic storage containers, the women of Sirovange on Choiseul Island are some of the only the potters in the region still using local clays to create customary earthenware vessels. Blackened with the sap of local fruit prior to be fired in a pit, Sirovange pots such as those created by Imelda Teqae are created in a variety of shapes and sizes suited to the tasks of cooking and storing food. Teqae has also begun to develop forms, such as the goblet and jug, which can be sold as gifts and expand these pots’ role within her community.

Pipes fashioned from clay and other plant materials were created and used extensively throughout Bougainville. Like the small, intricately decorated lime pots that held lime, consumed with buai (betel nut) and dakah (mustard), these pipes were both functional items and personal adornments or keepsakes. With their quite short pipe and large bowl, they fitted very comfortably in the hand — one can imagine makers holding the unfired work, testing the length and weight until the perfect balance was achieved.

Intrigued by these items of her culture discovered in museum collections around the globe, Women’s Wealth artist Taloi Havini instigated the creation of a series of these pipes at the workshop. One very special example was modelled with the figure of a dog, signifying Havini’s Nakas clan. Local spectators were able to handle the forms before they were fired, and unfortunately a large number of them were broken as a result.

Confluence 10 2017, made by Janet Fieldhouse, is in part a portrait of Taloi Havini and her late father Moses. The work comprises two pipes with the head of the Nakas dog modelled on the lip of the bowls. The smaller Nakas is carried by the larger, in a moving tribute to the strength of the Havinis’ father–daughter relationship and the importance of kinship in this region.

Janet Fieldhouse has created a pair of larger-than-life hair combs from elegant woven baskets and ceramic rings that reference not only the importance of this form of body adornment in Bougainville and the Solomon Islands but also her ancestral lands in the Torres Strait.

Hair combs embellished with woven decorations or carved with intricate patterns were created and used extensively throughout the Pacific. The adornments, fashioned with highly valued materials, were status symbols worn more often by men than women.

Fieldhouse constructs the body of her combs from baskets as a type of cut-out, focusing attention on the mount that connects them to the wall comprising rings hand-moulded from a variety of clays. Reminiscent of shell adornments, the delicacy, hue, tactility and durability of these rings emphasise the sophisticated ways in which islanders work with available materials to great aesthetic and symbolic affect.

String and its heftier cousin, rope, are central to life on most islands throughout the North Solomon Islands region. Using a seamless backward plying motion, women roll bark fibres on their thighs into string with which they make beautiful knotted and looped bags. Bark fibres are also plaited or plied together into tough usia (ropes) used as lashing for building homes and boats, for fishing, in the garden or to carry heavy bundles of wood needed for cooking fires. In Choiseul, women create these usia as an essential part of their dowry to take to their marital home alongside their traditional kuza (string bag).

The Autonomous Region of Bougainville and nearby societies in the Solomon Islands have many indigenous forms of currency, including shells, dog and porpoise teeth, stone and more recently commercial beads. These often visually impressive currencies are used for mortuary and bride exchanges, compensation payments and sometimes commodity exchanges. Unlike European currencies, whose value is fixed by government, this wealth circulates and attains value through relational ties. Each island, and sometimes individual language groups on the same island, has its own valuables. Shell money in the Hakö-speaking region of Buka Island, for example, is named Beroana, while in Siwai in the south it is known as Mimis.

In the Nukumanu Islands, patterned belts beaded with shells, and more recently brightly coloured commercial beads, are created to be worn in marriage ceremonies and when a woman is first pregnant. During the latter stages of pregnancy, the belt continues to be worn as a support to keep the baby in position and to stop the mother’s body getting out of shape. Siwai women in South Bougainville create and wear a range of adornments created from shell valuables or brightly coloured beads, the most ornate being a chest harness known as Hanai aakono (‘wear back and front’).

Music and dance are some of the most vibrant and visible forms of expression in Bougainville and the Solomon Islands. Traditional and new songs and dances are performed by community groups throughout the region to mark important ceremonial occasions and celebrate local culture during festivals and on special days, such as AROB Day.

Some of the most iconic sounds are produced by bamboo ensembles. Across Bougainville, groups of men come together to strike the ends of a stack of bamboo pipes with rubber flip-flops, creating rhythmic, resonant sounds often accompanied by higher notes played on bamboo panpipes, the deeper bass sounds of slit-gong drums, and women’s melodic singing. While in the past, coconut husks were traditionally used to beat the bamboo, today flip-flops are used either with bamboo or PVC pipes.

Traditional dances and songs are as diverse as the mix of more than 20 different language groups found across the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. In performance, men and women wear special ornamentation as a specific marker of both cultural and gender identity. Dances are customarily performed against live drumming to mark important rites of passage, including initiation, coming of age, marriage and death. Music in general imbues life throughout the region — guitars are found in every household, and local forms of lotu (church), reggae, string band and heavy metal music have all flourished.

Australia b.1947
Here we are sisters 2018 Wool and cotton weft, cotton wrap on aluminium / 3 parts:
7.5 x 347cm (each)
Courtesy: The artist

Kay Lawrence’s elegant woven tapestry responds to Central Bougainville artist Adelaide Mekea Aniona’s comment at the Women’s Wealth workshop: ‘Here we are not wives, we are not mothers or grandmothers, we are just women doing what we love to do. Here we are sisters.’ Woven as three long strips, the work draws on Lawrence’s own European cultural heritage, in which intricate tapestries record important collective histories and mythologies. Here we are sisters references this role of textiles as historical ‘texts’ by featuring the names of artists who participated in the workshop. Yarns chosen carefully to match the colours of clothes and fabrics worn by the participants have been woven into the names to capture a sense of women’s personalities.

‘Habitat’ is a series of video installations launched by Taloi Havini in 2016 to address the representation of landscape and conflicting interests in Bougainville. The earliest iterations of this series, Habitat: Konawiru 2016 and Habitat 2017, used large projections, dramatic image sequencing and immersive surround sound to evoke the sense of loss and displacement experienced by Bougainville landowners as a result of the mining operations undertaken by Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) at Panguna mine in Central Bougainville from 1972 to 1989.

Commissioned for the Women’s Wealth project, the latest iteration of ‘Habitat’ explores identity and environmentalism in the context of history and nation-building. Central to this work is the redeployment of archival footage detailing the complex colonial relationship between Australia and Bougainville. Archives provide an important tool for audiences to comprehend national history, but have been constructed and disseminated according to the agendas of their colonial authors. In this work, archival footage originally collected by news agencies and colonial powers is re-presented alongside Havini’s own recordings and family archives to retell the story of Australia and Bougainville’s shared history. According to Havini:

‘The work will investigate and interrogate the colonial relationship between Australia and Bougainville from a matrilineal point of view, providing international audiences with context and understanding of the vibrancy of indigenous women’s cultural practice and connection to the land in these locales’.

In this documentary filmed by Jesmaine Sakoi Gano (Bougainville) and Georgianna Maetale Lepping (Solomon Islands) on location in Chabai during the Women’s Wealth in 2017, a number of participating artists provide interpretations of their work. The footage includes group demonstrations of how to hand-build pots, video of a pit firing and the process of dyeing pandanus with noni root. The film was edited in Brisbane by Gano and Lepping as part of a week-long internship undertaken with QAGOMA’s Australian Cinémathèque team. During this week the artists reconnected with Quandamooka artist Elisa Jane Carmichael by visiting and engaging with her country and family on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), just off the coast of Brisbane.

Solos language group
Autonomous Region of Bougainville c.1901–65
Guérian, le fondateur de Gagan, s’en va á Siné après sa mort (Guérian, the founder of Gagan went to Sine after his death) c.1930 Crayon on paper
35 x 20cm
Collection: Musée d’Océanie, La Neylière, France

A lyrical composition documents the death and passage to the afterlife of a personage known in Gagan as Guérian. While there is some disagreement today about whether Guérian is a mythical or actual ancestor figure, the work is accepted as an accurate description of the possessions an eminent man from this locale would have taken with him to Sine. Guérian’s status is revealed via the adornments he wears, including the Upe (headdress), kapkap (shell breast ornament) and three strings of shell money. His status is further articulated through the possession of Kepa (clay pots), spears, a mortar and pestle and quantities of animals and garden plants.

Solos language group
Autonomous Region of Bougainville c.1901–65
Tavaux forcés (imposed labour) c.1942–43 Crayon on paper
20.5 x 26.5cm
Collection Musée d’Océanie, La Neylière, France

This drawing features Indigenous workers dressed in the red lap-lap worn during the colonial period and carrying picks and shovels. Artist Herman Somuk was strongly attached to his birthplace and critical of the creation, from the early 1900s onwards, of an itinerant Indigenous labour force for German and later Australian plantations in the Shortland Islands and Bougainville. While this drawing could reference these plantations, its date during World War Two and the inclusion of individuals wearing Asian hats strongly suggests it documents the period of Japanese occupation of Buka and Bougainville (1942–43). During this time, the Japanese constructed a number of airfields using local labour, and in Somuk’s drawing the structure with an individual at its top waving flags may be an air traffic control tower. The work is one of the only historical depictions by a local artist of this locale.

Solos language group
Autonomous Region of Bougainville c.1901–65
Homme avec Upe (Man with Upe) c.1930 Crayon on paper
16.5 x 22cm
Collection Musée d’Océanie, La Neylière, France

In his preface to the book he published of Herman Somuk’s drawings in 1951, Father Patrick O’Reilly noted that Somuk was faithful to the rich traditions and ceremonial practices his father Parebuin taught to him, despite Somuk’s ‘passage through the schools of the mission and a baptism that had made him a Christian’. In this image, Somuk documents a young man wearing the headdress known as an Upe, once used in many areas of North and Central Bougainville as part of special rituals associated with initiation into manhood. The strong influence of the Church led to a rapid decline in this practice in North Bougainville, however, and the Upe is now primarily worn and practised only in the Wakunai area of Central Bougainville. Somuk’s art could be interpreted as an attempt to preserve the Solos peoples’ ceremonies that were being interrupted and overtaken.

Solos language group
Autonomous Region of Bougainville c.1901–65
Tir des alliés (shooting allies) c.1942–43 Crayon on paper
20.5 x 26.5cm
Collection Musée d’Océanie, La Neylière, France

In Shooting allies, Somuk captures the loss of human life on Buka Island during World War Two. The Allied aerial bombardment of Japanese forces occupying Buka Island and Bougainville had a devastating impact on local populations, and in this work we see a low-flying plane razing the landscape of people with a spray of bullets. In addition to the direct loss of life via aerial artillery, dwellings and gardens were also destroyed, and because it was too risky to make gardens using traditional clearing methods — utilising fire that would attract American bombers — there was no steady supply of food on Buka. As a result of camping in damp conditions in local caves and forests, hundreds also died from preventable diseases.

Solos language group
Autonomous Region of Bougainville 1911–88
(Man with Upe) 1972 Pen and fibre tipped pen on paper
57.5 x 30.4cm
Collection: Marilyn Frances Havini, Buka Island, Autonomous Region of Bougainville

During the 1970s, Australian-born artist and teacher Marilyn Havini worked closely with Gregory Dausi Moah in a program aimed at introducing students at Hutjena High School on Buka Island to traditional cultural practices. Havini describes Moah as a strong cultural man, recognised as one of the region’s most significant artists. These two drawings were completed while Moah lived with Havini and her Buka-born husband Moses on Sohano Island. Emerging from passionate conversations about culture and identity, the works record traditional practices that were in rapid decline or had been lost. Like Somuk, Moah was concerned by this and chose to document the North Bougainville practice of wearing the iconic Upe headdress as part of a boy’s initiation into manhood.

Solos language group
Autonomous Region of Bougainville 1911–88
(Tsuhana and feast) 1972 Pen and fibre tipped pen on paper
30.5 x 75cm
Collection: Marilyn Frances Havini, Buka Island, Autonomous Region of Bougainville

This drawing records the low dome-shaped structures made by men throughout Buka Island and North Bougainville as clan houses. Known as Tsuhana, these dwellings are the central authority and collective power base of a clan. The architecture is held up by three main posts often carved with tribal totems and other significant historical figures. Slit drums are placed on the front corner of the Tsuhana, and all tribal ceremonies, from bride price rituals and funerals to meetings called by chiefs, are performed here, accompanied by the resonant beat of drums. In Moah’s drawing, the drums are sounding and men are carrying in food and buai (betel nut) required for ceremony.

Australia b.1953
Tsuhana (Chiefs meeting house) 1977 Silver gelatin print
Installed dimensions variable
Courtesy of Bob Miller

During the early 1970s, Chief Moah created a Naboin tribe Tsuhana (clan house) on the sacred site of Peit, in the Gagan area of Solos on Buka Island, where all of the region’s tribes are believed to have migrated from. The Tsuhana was built between 1974 and 1976 as an exercise in cultural revival organised by the first provincial government in Bougainville — the North Solomons Provincial Government. Storyboards and carvings lined the interior, depicting legends of not only the Solos area but also of the whole of Buka Island. The Tsuhana was the frontage of the Peit Community Government Village Assembly, opened on 1 September 1976.

Australia b.1953
Storyboard depicting Roko wearing kapkap 1977 Colour print
Courtesy of Bob Miller

This brightly coloured storyboard from Chief Moah’s Tsuhana (clan house) in Solos depicts the traditional spirit figure Roko with a kapkap (shell ornament). The omnipresent Roko is common across all of Buka Island and North Bougainville, and each of the region’s four clans — Naboin, Nakaripa, Nakas and Natasi — have their own Roko spirits. Moah’s Roko figure wears a kapkap traditionally worn by chiefs on their chests and foreheads as symbol of authority. The kapkap is an intricately carved turtle-shell disc mounted on nacre (white mother-of-pearl shell). The central motif of the kapkap identifies its bearer and clan.

Australia b.1953
Storyboard depicting the first son of Buka – Guérian 1977 Colour print
Courtesy of Bob Miller

A prominent feature of Chief Moah’s Tsuhana were two large storyboards carved in bas-relief. The first man and first woman in the oral history of Buka and North Bougainville appear in the right of this storyboard. On the left is the firstborn Naboin son Guérian riding a shark — symbol of his power and of nature. The relative sizes of the figures indicate their importance in the story.