CANBERRA – An exhibition of tribal artefacts from the remote Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea, including reminders of the long-dead customs of headhunting and cannibalism, has been launched at the National Gallery of Australia.

Myth and Magic: Art of the Sepik River includes 85 works drawn from collections in Australia and PNG and many have never been seen publicly before.

Included in the Canberra exhibition are tribal sculptures depicting ancestral beings and mythical animals, including a 6.5-metre-long spirit crocodile which guards the display.

The exhibition also includes an ancestral figure made with human bones and a structure to display the heads of vanquished tribal foes.

NGA director Gerard Vaughan said that while many Australian institutions had significant collections of PNG art, they were mostly stored out of public sight.

“We have hardly scratched the surface, I think, in showing the greatest works of art that we have in this country from PNG to the Australian public,” Dr Vaughan said.

“Very few museums have substantial spaces dedicated to those collections.

“We have a very particular interest in PNG and even a kind of responsibility because we are such close neighbours.”

But Australia’s attitude to Papua New Guinea was not always so neighbourly.

Early in the 20th century, some Christian missionaries encouraged villagers to burn old tribal objects which were seen as pagan reminders of a bygone culture.

Others though recognised the artworks as items of international interest and many were removed for private and institutional collections.

Today there are an estimated 85,000 examples of Sepik River art in Australia.

Director of the PNG National Museum and Art Gallery Dr Andrew Moutu said some of those were looted from villages and smuggled out of the country before the first cultural protection laws were introduced in 1913.

“Prior to 1913, you could imagine that the removal of cultural property from Papua New Guinea was already going on, including by Australians,” Dr Moutu said.

“A lot of them are found in European museums, in Paris, in Germany, in Switzerland and so on.”

Dr Moutu said that today the trade in artefacts was strictly controlled by customs regulations and monitored by his own institution.

“We regulate the traffic of cultural property so, as much as possible, we want to believe that most things that leave Papua New Guinea are verified and legitimised by appropriate permission from the museum.”

Curator Crispin Howarth said world attitudes to the tribal pieces had changed over the past century.

“Many museums built collections in the name of anthropology – not as amazing visual art,” Mr Howarth said.

“It all started here in Australia in World War I, when the Australian naval and military expeditionary force made an expedition up the Sepik River which was hitherto unknown to Australians.

“They went up there looking for a German warship – which never actually existed – and just coming into encounters with these completely different cultures and different ways of creating art.

“Headhunting within this particular region of Papua New Guinea was traditionally part of the accepted cultural norms, part of the fabric of the community. The region has always been enticing.”

Myth and Magic: Art of the Sepik River is open at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra until November 1.