OCEANIA N°11. THE FUNERARY TAPA CLOTHS OF THE NAKANAI FROM NEW BRITAIN. 1992. French/English text by Anthony JP Meyer. This is the exhibition catalogue for a discovery that I made in an Australian collection of a group of funerary tapa cloth that was completely lost. The Funeral procession had been photographed by Eddie Tull in the 1950’s. Tull bought up all the tapa shrouds and other processionary equipment and subdivided it all into several groups which were subsequently sold to museums in France and the USA. One section was somehow sold to Ian Still an Australian antique dealer who rolled them up in a cardboard drum and forgot about them in his garage where they remained hidden until I discovered them. The catalogue offers 14 of the TAPA masks, capes and shrouds as well as a detailed ethnographic analysis of the whole procedure.
