“I moved in here with my precious things, but that was before I was told I might die the next day …”
William is downsizing. And the treasures he is selling are extraordinary.
The New Zealand Herald views them first from inside a secure lock-up. Artvisory auctioneer and head of ethnographic art James Parkinson punches in the codes to the facility he describes as “Fort Knox”. Behind the roller door: The Dr AA Schiessel Collection of New Ireland and Oceanic Art.
Based on accompanying field notes and a handwritten label, this particular head is believed to be a “kovakieto” associated with crop fertility rituals.
Parkinson: “I mean, when you see these things, they’re not wallpaper right?”
The heads are fearsome. Five extremely rare kovabat – described in the auction catalogue as “rain heads, the sacred wooden figures of the marada malagan tradition of Tabar Island” – collected by William’s father between 1949-50.
Worldwide, just 15 examples of kovabat are recorded in private and public collections.
“Well, now there’s five more,” says Parkinson. “And they were lying in storage for almost 80 years.”
The heads are so rare, their market value is relatively untested. The only previously auctioned example, sold in 2015 at Sotheby’s New York, fetched US$1,054,000 – around $1.8m in New Zealand dollars.
“It’s hard to gauge what the collection’s worth on the basis of one sale,” Parkinson says. “The best ones, $100,000-plus, but we really don’t know … it’s so unusual and so provenanced. The market will decide.”
Artvisory’s James Parkinson with one of five rare Tabar Island “heads” that will be auctioned next month in Auckland. Photo / Corey Fleming
On July 27, Parkinson will auction 46 New Ireland pieces from the Schiessel collection. Two of the kovabat heads have been valued at between $25,000-$125,000. Signficantly, says Parkinson, the lots include journals the doctor kept as he undertook his remote patrols – a mix of medical notes, hand-drawn maps, and rough sketches of the complex New Ireland malagan and Tabar Island art that so fascinated him.
“Malagan” is a complicated term to describe.
New York’s The Met says: “In northern New Ireland, malagan is the collective name for a series of ceremonies, as well as the masks and carvings associated with them. Still practised today, these rituals are held primarily in memory of the dead and combined with initiation ceremonies in which young men symbolically replace those who have died”.
Malagan carvings have been described as “the most technically complex in all of Oceanic art … displayed in special enclosures, sometimes in considerable numbers, during feasts honouring both the dead and the donors of the carvings,” notes The Met.
The rare kovabat heads, meanwhile, are used in associated rain making and agricultural fertility rituals. They are not malagan works per se, explains Parkinson, but weather rituals and the mortuary ceremonies are interrelated. And while most malagan funerary carvings are destroyed or left to rot, kovabat are preserved and reused over many ritual cycles.
The complete Schiessel collection includes some Māori taonga obtained by the doctor in later years. Most of the pieces in the upcoming auction have been in storage for decades.
“I’d seen some photographs,” says Parkinson. “But I wasn’t quite prepared for what I was about to find … there have been tears, a couple of times.
“It really is a huge discovery. Alongside it, and this is the big thing for me, was to get all of his notes and documentation.”
A young Dr Augustin Schiessel and one of field journals he kept during his time as a medical officer in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. Photo / Corey Fleming
Dr Augustin Anton Schiessel’s backstory would fill a book.
In 1949, he was a medical officer in the Papua New Guinean province of New Ireland – but, as the auction catalogue says, his path to medicine was far from direct.
“A Viennese childhood in a working-class household, a watchmaker’s apprenticeship, a medical degree completed under the shadow of the Anschluss [the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into Nazi Germany], flight from Austria, exile in London, deportation as an enemy alien, two years in an Australian internment camp, and a slow, deferred return to the profession he had qualified for in 1938.”
A decade before he arrived in Papua New Guinea, Schiessel had formed a relationship with a young woman from New Zealand.
Elizabeth Aitken MacCormick’s family settled in Auckland in the 1850s. She grew up on Mountain Rd in Epsom, went to University and spent the first summer of her OE hitchhiking across Hitler’s Germany, sleeping in fields and youth hostels. In 1939, she was working for Unity Theatre, a left-wing workers’ theatre company – where she met Augustin.
He already had a wife and daughter in Vienna, but his political leanings dictated his future. He fled to England – and then it, in turn, shipped him to Australia, an “enemy alien” onboard the HMT Dunera.
That hellish and controversial journey was subsequently captured in a fellow passenger’s court testimony: “Hammocks almost touched, many men had to sleep on the floor or on tables. There was only one piece of soap for 20 men, and one towel for 10 men, water was rationed, and luggage was stowed away so there was no change of clothing … Blows with rifle butts and beatings from the soldiers were daily occurrences. One refugee tried to go to the latrines on deck during the night – which was out-of-bounds. He was bayoneted in the stomach …”
Still in the United Kingdom, Elizabeth had given birth to Augustin’s first son, Donald. In Brisbane, following Augustin’s eventual release from two years’ internment, middle son Bill would be born. The couple’s youngest son Richard would complete the family that, in 1949, went to Papua New Guinea.
Augustin had travelled ahead, securing employment in the Australian-administered Melanesian territory, after he gained a second medical qualification at the University of Melbourne.
Bill remembers arriving in Kavieng shortly before his sixth birthday.
“The house had a wooden floor, thatched walls, a thatched roof, mosquito nets, a kerosene fridge …
“My memory of people wearing the masks? Probably New Year’s, a big sing-sing adjacent the wharf and copra shed which was just below the house. Dancing, canoe racing, a greasy pole, coconut husking and a copra prep competition.”
William “Bill” Schiessel is selling the tribal art collection his father Augustin amassed in 1949-50 as a medical officer in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. Photo / Corey Fleming
They were not the only white people, but Bill says his Viennese father “wasn’t down to the club and drinking beer”.
“He was getting interested in other things. Brushing up his pidgin English, climbing volcanoes, all the good stuff. We arrived about six months after my father and then I hardly see my father at all because he’s off on patrol, looking at leprosy and yaws disease and going through the jungle …”
He imagines the doctor’s conversations with the locals: “‘Oh, that’s a nice little friction drum … oh yes, it’s nothing … you take the little friction drum’. And at this stage, with my mother’s help, he started corresponding with Auckland Museum.”
Some of that correspondence is reproduced in the catalogue for the upcoming auction. Dr Schiessel suggests it would not interfere with his work to collect and send off some objects that will otherwise be left to rot. In a postscript, he says “I do not have any monetary interest in this deal but I am sorry to see beautiful objects rot …”
Auckland Museum did, eventually, obtain two pieces – a friction drum and a single kovabat rain head, the latter credited online as “the most striking exhibit” in the Pacific Masterpieces gallery that closed last year following the detection of asbestos dust.
Dr Augustin Schiessel and Elizabeth Aitken MacCormick lived in New Ireland in 1949-1950, with their three children (from left) Richard, William and Donald. The family dog Lumpi often accompanied the doctor on his patrols.
Bill does not remember his father bringing tribal art into their thatched roof home.
“I have no memory of him at all in the house … I remember going on picnics with him. We would jump in our canoe with its sail of red Japanese parachute silk and sail across the bay … We would go with my father to visit a leper colony, motors roaring and catch kingfish and marlin and they’d be lying across the back of the boat …”
Eventually, his aunt arrived “to rescue her sister and take her back to the safety of her family”. Bill chuckles. “Yes, I was rescued as well.”
In Auckland, Elizabeth and the boys lived in the family bach in Takapuna. In Kavieng, Dr Schiessel prepared for a two-month patrol of the Tabar Islands, accompanied only by a small dog named Lumpi.
September, 1950: “… I had quite nice experiences with the natives who as a whole are very friendly people. I collected quite a number of things …”
His letter home to Elizabeth acknowledges her “adversity” to removing cultural items. He reassures her, “Malagans are thrown away after the feast into the bush where there is a special place for them. There they rot away”.
He records that a village councillor offers him a kovabat and, in the bush, he is shown two – badly rotted through exposure to the rain and sun.
“Whether I would like to have them? Why, yes very much so, and into the bag they went … Still out there, they would be completely buggered up in no time.”
One of two kovabat or “rain heads” believed to have been specifically described by Dr Augustin Schiessel in a letter he sent to Auckland in September 1950.
Those two heads are labelled Lots 14 and 15 in the auction catalogue. In his apartment meanwhile, Bill has reached for a conch shell trumpet.
His mother used to call her boys inside from Takapuna Beach with this. Did Bill ever try that with his own kids?
“It wouldn’t have worked in Algeria or Togo or Egypt or Tashkent …”
He has prostate cancer and it has “fully metastasised”.
“People with my diagnosis, you know some of them snuff it after months. But some of them live on to be 93 …”
He puts the conch to his mouth and blows.
“It carries a long way,” he says. “As it’s meant to.”
Many of the carvings his father collected in New Ireland and Tabar are linked to funerary rituals. Bill says he associates them with family, not death.
“Some people say these are very bad juju, you don’t play with these things … I have never had bad feelings about any of these things.”
He grew up with winged figures over the hearth and enormous masks stacked on top of a cupboard. His mother, he admits “did say she found them a bit oppressing”.
After his return from New Ireland, Dr Augustin Schiessel (far left) practised medicine in Kaikohe. Middle son Bill stands to the left of the day’s catch.
Post-Papua New Guinea, his father became Kaikohe’s second doctor. His parents’ relationship did not survive the Far North posting, but Bill remembers those years fondly.
“Fourteen acre farm, 40 sheep, two cows, two horses, pigs, chooks and three boys to run it as slave labour. It was great fun though …”
First prize at the A&P show for the family butter. Digging up dead sheep to collect real life knucklebones. Homemade Viennese-style blood sausage from slaughtered pigs. Elizabeth and Augustin separate – and his father’s tribal art collection goes into storage.
Dr Schiessel died in 1986. It would be another year before Bill began cataloguing papers and letters. He is the only surviving member of the family who lived in New Ireland and he is having his own international adventures and building his own family.
He expected to unpack and live with some of the pieces he’s sending to auction.
“I’m selling now, because I’m downsizing.”
Experts have told the Herald there would be little interest in having the New Ireland pieces repatriated. Bill wants them to be displayed and enjoyed. And, while there is expected to be some interest from public institutions, he’s comfortable with them going into private ownership.
“It’s better to have the collection broken up than to have it mouldering away and being eaten further by rats. All the small artefacts, the fish hooks and things like that, they’re beautiful things in themselves. I’m quite happy that someone, somewhere, gets enjoyment out of them.”
William Schiessel remembers this carved wooden frieze (which has a pre-auction estimate of $10,000-$30,000) being displayed in his parents’ homes.
Jean-Phillipe Beaulieu holds the Warren Chair of Astrophysics at the University of Tasmania, but the French scholar has also spent more than three decades studying the art and traditions of Papua New Guinea. He has a particular interest in Tabar Island culture and is acting as a consultant for the auctioneers organising this sale.
Via email, Beaulieu tells the Herald “repatriation is an important discussion”.
But: “I think the broader question is how to preserve, share, and transmit cultural knowledge. Many New Ireland ritual objects were intended for a single ceremonial use and would traditionally have been left to decay in the forest after the ceremony. Had these particular objects remained in the villages, none would have survived.
“The people who owned them chose to sell or give them to Dr Schiessel who was travelling from village to village as a medical doctor. Today, these objects serve as ambassadors for New Ireland culture around the world.”
He calls the collection “something of a time capsule” and says the level of accompanying documentation that comes with it is extremely rare.
“Many of my friends in the Tabar Islands are eager to learn more about their history. I regularly bring back photographs, archival documents, and information about old ceremonies and objects. For them, reconnecting with this knowledge is often more important than the physical location of the objects themselves.
“What is important here is that the collection is being documented and published. The objects are not disappearing anonymously into the market. Their history, provenance, and cultural significance are being recorded.”
Some of the treasures unearthed in preparation for the sale of The Dr AA Schiessel of New Ireland and Oceanic Art in Auckland on July 27. Photo / Corey Fleming
Beaulieu is planning to take copies of the auction catalogue to the Tabar Islands, so locals can compare the objects with photographs that exist from 1908 and traditions that still survive today.
“In that sense, the collection will continue to educate and connect people, both in Papua New Guinea and abroad.”
James Parkinson, who will wield the auctioneer’s gavel on July 27, says tribal art has drawn collectors since the early 19th century, because it represented such a radical break from the polite limits of European traditions.
“It was not decorative, not deferential, not ‘nice’ … you may not like it, but indifference is impossible.”
Collecting tribal art is life-affirming, Parkinson says.
“It connects us to something larger than ourselves. To an awareness of death, to ancestry, to culture, to the persistence of human creativity in the face of time, loss and our eventual – but certain – departure.”
The Tabar Island Rainmakers: The Dr AA Schiessel Collection of New Ireland and Oceanic Art will be on show at the SO/ Auckland Hotel, July 25-27.
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on its lifestyle desk.