14th Oceanic Art Society Forum 2026

Presented in association with Aboriginal Art Association of Australia

We are pleased to announce that Art and Material Culture of the Torres Strait Islands is the theme of the Oceanic Art Society’s Fourteenth Forum to be held at the Burrinja Cultural Centre Saturday 14 November in conjunction with the opening of Billy Missi’n Wakain Thamai.

Join us to hear Dr Leah Lui-Chivizhe, a cultural historian of the Torres Strait Islands and Scientia Senior Lecturer and researcher at the University of NSW, reflect on her collaborative work with Aunty Elsa Day on ‘Meriam koskir: turdi a pe uridli’ for the exhibition, Fault Lines: Imagining Indigenous futures for colonial collections held in 2024-2025 at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

Come and hear Professor Ian McNiven, professor of Indigenous archaeology at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, explore how museum ethnographic objects and archaeological evidence can be used to help understand the long-term historical development of Torres Strait artistic traditions over the past 1000 years.

Dr Jude Philp, Senior Curator, Macleay Collections at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney. Her education from people in Zenadth Kes was part of her PhD in social anthropology. With Anita Herle, Philp edited Recording Kastom (SUP, 2020) a publication of Haddon’s field diaries Art/History/Life: the collections of A.C. Haddon in Torres Strait. Haddon famously worked with the peoples of Zenadth Kes between 1888 and the 1930s, and during his major fieldwork in 1888 and 1898 collected thousands of Islanders belongings, commissioned those he could not purchase, and took hundreds of photographs. Stored mainly within the British Museum and Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, these belongings hold stories old and new, some personal and some public. This talk focuses is on the public side of the collection and those Islanders who worked closely with Haddon.

Hear Daniel Dow, Project Officer, Repatriation Project at the Museum of Queensland present What’s so Secret about the Sacred? In story and song, as Daniel Dow sheds some light on some of the more mysterious aspects of working with First Nations cultural material. Gain an understanding of the spiritual challenges our First Nations Team face in their work, and how you can support it.

Listen to master printmaker Theo Tremblay from Cairns talk about his work with the leading artists of the Torres Strait Islands. He is a pioneer of collaborative printmaking and publishing, mentoring Aboriginal and Zenadh Kes (Torres Strait) artists in a range of print over many years. From 1981 – 91 he taught drawing and lithography at the Institute of the Arts, Canberra and established No Fixed Press, printing collaboratively with artists since that time.

Main Image - Installation view Billy Missi’n Wakain Thamai, NorthSite Contemporary Arts, Bulmba-Ja Cairns, QLD, 2020. Photographer Michael Marzik. Courtesy of NorthSite Contemporary Arts.