About the collection
In many respects, the internationally recognised Oceania Collection is the most significant the Museum of Ethnography has to offer. Three-fourths of its 14,500 pieces are associated with the four great names in Hungarian ethnographic collecting, all of whom were active at a time when Hungary's international connections, through its status as part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, were broadest in scope and the peoples inhabiting the islands of the Pacific were still highly isolated.
Of the four collectors mentioned above, the first was Sámuel Fenichel (1863-1893), who brought back some 2500 objects from his travels in German New Guinea in 1892 and 1893. Following his death in 1893, his work was continued by Lajos Biró (1856-1931), who between 1896 and 1901 assembled not only 200,000 zoological specimens, but also some 6,000 artefacts and more than 300 photographs. Between 1893 and 1898, at the time Fenichel and Bíró were in New Guinea, a third great collector, Rudolf Festetics (1865-1943) was also present in the region. Unlike his less privileged naturalist contemporaries, Count Festetics belonged to the nobility, and could therefore afford to take an 8-year honeymoon trip in the area of the Pacific islands. His collection of nearly 1,600 artefacts and more than 600 photographs was presented to the Hungarian National Museum on the occasion of its 100-year anniversary when the count returned from his travels. The fourth great contributor to the collection was an Italian merchant named Giovanni Bettanin, who sold the museum nearly 2000 objects of Pacific origin between 1897 and 1908.
Another means employed frequently by Western European museums in their quest for new material was to commission commercial and military ships with the gathering of ethnographic items from the regions they visited. The 200 pieces brought back to Europe by the Austro-Hungarian military ship the Panther in 1907, still found today in the Oceania Collection, stand as a testimony to the success of this technique. Oszkár Vojnics (1864-1914), another rich landowner and world traveller of the ilk of Rudolf Festetics, also collected ethnographic material during his several lengthy excursions to foreign lands. During his travels in the Pacific between 1906 and 1908, Vojnics acquired 100 objects and took 650 photographs, all of which have since found their way into the museum's collection. Another significant contributor of material of the period was the traveller Ferenc Hopp, from whose estate a number of pieces, particularly from New Zealand, were added to the collection.
After this initial period of extensive collection work had passed, the museum's holdings grew more slowly. One worthy contributor of the time was Károly Sándor Verebélyi, a pearl fisherman of Hungarian descent who donated his private collection of 180 pieces to the museum in 1928. Of all contributors to the Oceania Collection, the only professional ethnographer was the world renowned advocate of psychoanalytic ethnography, Géza Róheim (1891-1953), whose research sites included locations in Mid-Australia, the Massim Region of South-east New Guinea, and the Island of Normanby. The museum acquired 227 objects from Róheim's fieldwork in Australia in 1929 and a collection of 211 objects from his subsequent work on Normanby Island. The last significant contributor to the collection from the time between the wars was the geologist Horst von Bandat (1895-1982), who donated his collection of 135 artefacts from Western New Guinea to the museum in 1940. Minor contributors during this period included Simon Papp (1886-1970), a geologist and crude oil researcher, who presented the museum with 14 pieces collected in New Guinea between 1928 and 1929, and the archaeologist László Vértes, who in 1953 and 1954 donated two priceless wooden statues from the Easter Islands acquired on the international art market. Vértes later left the museum a third wooden statue from Maori in 1970.
Though the political reprieve of the 1970's theoretically gave the museum the opportunity to acquire material from locations outside Europe, work on the Oceania Collection had by that time virtually stagnated. The only pieces to be added in recent years have been those donated by Hungarians living in emigration in foreign countries, together with a handful of purchases and exchanges. Such additions include the gift by Sydney anthropologist László Vimláti in 1968 of several objects from Arnhemland in Northern Australia, among them two valuable bark paintings; a collection of recent Easter Island carvings donated by Montreal bacteriologist and M.D. György Nógrádi; and 360 pieces from the Tennant Creek area (Northern Territory, Australia), donated at the end of the 1970's by the gold digger László Pintér.
The curator of the collection is Dr. János Gyarmati and Anna Bíró
The scientific treatment of the most outstanding subsection of the Pacific Collection, namely, the ethnograpical materials collected by Lajos Bíró, has been most generously sponsored and supported by the de-Unger scholarship since September 2006. To view the objects processed enjoying the support of the abovementioned organization, please visit our online database.
To view the notes on the artefacts collected in New Guinea by Lajos Bíró, please click on one or more of the below:
Inventory and labels of ethnographical objects, Huon Bay, New-Guinea, Page 695, Drawing N.o. 478 (EA 4715)
Inventory and labels of ethnographical collection, 1900, Bismarck Islands, New Guinea?, Page 159., Drawing N.o. 69. (EA 4716)
Notes taken regarding photographies made during field work, 1896-1902, India, New Guinea, Ceylon, etc, Page 479, Photo N.o. 302., Map N.o. 14. (EA 4718)
Vilibáld Seemayer: Inventory of Museum für Völkerkunde Astrolabe Bay (New Guinea) objects, 1899, Berlin, Germany, Page 200., Drawing N.o. 412., Map N.o. 2. (EA 1028)