The Swiss ethnologist Felix Speiser (1880-1949) was one of the earliest researchers to explore the islands of what was then called the New Hebrides, the present day Vanuatu. His extensive travels in 1910-12 brought him to various islands of the archipelago, including Malakula, one of the north-central islands. Malakula was at that period an island shunned by early travellers because of the harsh conditions and the severe practice of cannibalism. Speiser was able, though, to visit several villages, took photographs and acquired several items which he published in his ‘Ethnographische Materialien aus den neuen Hebriden und den Banks-Inseln’ in 1923. In this book there is no mention of the existence of ponarat, a tree fern gable ornament, adorning the men’s house. We may assume from this omission that these gable ornaments were far from general practice in each village. This may well be the result of the practice that the sculptor commissioned belonged to a special lineage inheriting this function in combination with the hierarchal structure within this culture where ultimately the chief of the district and not the elder of a patriline, had to give his approval for this occasion, which amounted to the payment of a certain amount of pigs. These gable ornaments depict the founding ancestor of the me’n house. Most ponarat we know from publications and public collections hail from the Northwest Malakula, inhabited by the Big Nambas. They all share more-or-less the same features of an abstracted face with deep-cut lines and a three-dimensional quadruped, a lizard or dog, at the back. Usually they are confined in measure between 75 and 110 cm. The present item, though, is different in execution and it is much larger in size. It shares the abstracted face and a quadruped at the back, the latter in deep-relief. Thanks to the 1961 catalogue ‘Sculpture monumentale de Nouvelle Guinée et des Nouvelles Hébrides’ in which several ponarats of various sizes were published, we know of the existence of larger and differently executed gable ornaments. They all hail from the Small Nambas, living to the south of the Big Nambas area and who share the same cultural institutions. These examples are much taller, up to 190 cm. in size and exhibit some same features as the present example, i.e. a deep-cut quadruped at the back and spirals denoting fangs of pigs, a prestige attribute. The Small Nambas area is less covered by ethnologists until quite recently. The present item may be added to a small corpus of gable ornaments hailing from a lesser known neighbouring culture. Provenance M.L.J. Lemaire, Amsterdam, 1969 and Gallery D'Eendt, Will Hoogstraate, Amsterdam.

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