Author Description

This exhibition showcases the work of Ronald and Catherine Berndt while they travelled to Papua New Guinea in 1951. Ronald Berndt was the Foundation Professor of Anthropology, arriving at the University in 1957; he was appointed Professor on the establishment of the Department in 1963, the same year in which he and his wife Catherine founded the international journal of Anthropology and Comparative Sociology, Anthropological Forum. The Berndts were among the first white outsiders to enter the high mountain valleys of the Eastern Highlands region. The dense forest, which impeded their ten-day trek, was broken by broad swathes of two metre high kunai grass across the Highland valleys, where villages such as Kainantu were located. These portraits of local people were taken on a small Leica camera, using precious Kodachrome I film, unobtainable in Australia in the immediate post-War era, but supplied to the Berndts by Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History, New York.