Design and Art Australia Online

Napolean Oui lives in Cairns where he works as a cultural presenter and educator at Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park. His father’s family is from the Torres Strait and New Caledonia. Oui is a dedicated advocate, researcher and educator of the rainforest art, culture and style. As information on rainforest culture held in public collections is scant and not published, he wrote to all Australian museum collections. (Cautious museums usually make access restrictions.) The collated black and white copies the registration records serve as a memory bank for his imaginative commentary on this anthropological material. His research has uncovered not only the enormous scope of what remains of the great art of the rainforest people, but a little known aspect of the production of bark cloth in this region. Nowhere else in Australia was bark cloth made. Reclaiming this medium is now one of Oui’s passions.

Writers:

Date written:

2015

Last updated:

2015