Last night, I had my first tour round our Oceania exhibition with the two curators, Nicholas Thomas and Peter Brunt, beginning with the map of the Pacific Islands, so widely distributed west of Papua New Guinea and including New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga, the Cook Islands and the Pitcairn Islands.

The first room on Voyaging includes a Tangonge discovered in 1920:-

In Room VII, Gods and Ancestors, there is a fine female figure from the Admiralty Islands:-

And a piece from Samoa:-

In Room 5, the theme is Performance and Ceremony, including more masks, as well as clubs and shields:-

Later on in the exhibition, one sees the interaction with European culture, including works which were acquired by anthropologists and deposited in European collections, like those acquired by J.C. Erde:-

The exhibition ends with a mask from New Caledonia, borrowed from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropolgy in Cambridge:-