The Coral Sea Cultural Interaction Sphere: Connections across the Coral Sea: A Story of Movement, Queensland Museum, 18 August 2022–9 July 2023

Abstract

The exhibition Connections across the Coral Sea is a partnership between Queens-land Museum and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage. On display is the story of cultural movement and interaction around and across the Coral Sea. It is an area with a human time-depth as old as the habitation of Sahul (Australia and New Guinea): 65,000 years. The archipelagos off New Guinea were settled 40,000 – 30,000 years ago, and a land bridge remained at Torres Strait until 8,000 years ago. More recent movements out of Asia and into the Western Paci fi c occurred between 3,500 and 2,500 years ago. These migrants spoke Austronesian languages and developed ‘ Lapita ’ pottery. The exhibition uses recent research and the Queensland Museum ’ s excellent collection to uncover ancient two-way cultural movements across the Coral Sea. It features the Torres Strait Islands and the Dingaal and Ngurrumungu nations from North Queensland. There are many unknowns in the settlement of the Paci fi c and Australia, not least the early, late and post-Lapita movements. Prehistorians have found few connections between the north and south of Sahul. Earlier research on the Lapita migrants suggested they avoided the underbelly of New Guinea, working their way along the north coast, loitering for a thousand years in the Bismarck Archipelago, then leapfrogging over most of the Solomon Islands, settling in the Santa Cruz group and Vanuatu, before continuing into Remote Oceania. The Queensland Museum exhibition deals with connections around the Coral Sea, raising implications for Australian and Paci fi c history, which have been known to prehistorians for a decade, but not by the public or even, I suspect, most modern historians. Canoes