The desk top sized (40 cm tall) wooden figure is not of the same age and therefore not anything like the same class as a similarly shaped figure in the Musee de l'Homme in Paris as punters had hoped at the time.
Lawson's, it has to be admitted, made no ambitious claims to the statue in its cataloguing of the figure as Caroline Islands in Micronesia in one of its regular tribal art sales held on May 21 2001. Otherwise it would hardly have put a $200 to $300 estimate upon it.
But the auction house's specialist at the time, Mr Guy Earl-Smith gave it an unusually full entry for such a low value figure leaving buyers to make up their own minds about it.
The lot was sold to a telephone bidder for $16,100 in the kind of flurry that was no stranger to the company's sales particularly in this category of sale at that period.
But the competing buyer's were not having an entirely full lunar moment for if the wooden carving was “authentic” they would have pushed it even more heavenwards.
The figure was at worst a fine anthropomorphic figure and a handsome piece of décor but they had hoped it was pre-Western contact and not made for sale to tourists.
The figure went to a bidder on the telephone reported to be Hawaiian and the counter bidders were the anthropologist Harry Behrens and Melbourne collector Mr Mel Davidson. The NSW politician Mr Richard Jones was reported to be the under-bidder.
Full life sized carvings of these strange figures associated with the remote Micronesian atoll have since been mooted to be worth $US500,000 to $US1 million.
Only six are known and one or two others have appeared which are reported to be in too fine a condition for comfort, crack-less, although this may be due to the care with which they might have been handed down rather than their youth.
The Financial Review later reported that the figure went to an Hawaii family discovered later to be the Blackburns.
The anonymous vendor declined to have the wood tested, which might have been slightly helpful, because of the cost. The buyer has had the tests done, and as expected they were of limited value, establishing little more than that the wood was probably from the part of the world where it was likely to have been carved.
The older figures suggest a magnificent pre-contact creativity that belies its current remoteness as the home of less than 1000 people.
The figures have more recently been recreated for what little tourist market there is, worryingly so, given the values that have been mooted for larger scale examples.
The status of the carving offered by Lawsons has become clearer, together with that of the known larger ones, as a result of an exhibition organised by Fondation Beyeler and the accompanying publication Nukuoro, Sculptures from Micronesia.
Most of the definitive and unquestionably provenanced figures were brought together for the exhibition and examined by a bevy of the world's top tribal art authorities whose findings have been published in this volume, which includes a catalogue raisonne of all the known figures.
Adrienne L.Kaeppler's essay New Observations on Nukuoro Wood Sculptures: Lost, Found, Dormant and Dubious may be the most illuminating. Kaeppler is Curator of Oceanic Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC.
Her observations are drawn from past extensive research focused on fieldwork and museum collections.
She has been particularly interested in the interrelations between social structure and the arts, especially dance, music, and the visual arts in Polynesia and Micronesia.
Kaeppler says in the essay that the figure was made known in 2001 when it was purchased by Mark and Carolyn Blackburn of Honolulu at Lawson 's.
It was sold on behalf of a private collector who was said to have purchased it in a curio shop in the mid-1960s.
The figure is similar to other small figures with their hands attached to the body at a 90 degree angle at the wrists – including the 19th century ones.
The Blackburns turned to wood analysis to see whether it was made for the museum/collector trade rather than for spiritual reasons.
The opinion emailed to the Blackburns by the auction house that the figure was “very early 1900s, possibly the late 1800s,” should be disregarded," she says.
