13 minute read
A suburban treasure house
Textiles, rugs, paintings, carvings, statues, masks, ceramics, chests, basketry: the variety is repeated in every corner of the Kok home. All images ANMM/Andrew Frolows unless otherwise stated
The Willem Kok Collection
Why do people collect? And what do those objects mean to them? This is a story about the overwhelming passion of one family to create a collection of their own. By Jeffrey Mellefont, Honorary Research Associate.
Regardless of their orphan status, these objects come from a time and place … They are carriers of their own histories, even without their human relatives to speak for them.
WHEN I READ THESE WORDS by Dr Christine Hansen of Tasmania’s Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, I couldn’t help thinking of a modest suburban bungalow that I had recently visited, in which the most astonishing private collection of ethnographic art and artefacts filled literally every living space. It was the home of a former fellow staff member of the Australian National Maritime Museum. But not once in the 15 years that we had been part of the same organisation did I realise that my courteous and quietly spoken colleague lived in his family’s own ‘museum’, surrounded by an assemblage of extraordinary diversity that his late father, his mother and he had spent much of their lifetimes putting together. Erwin Kok was one of the museum’s front-of-house staff. He worked in the foyer, welcoming visitors as they arrived, dispensing tickets and information, and stowing coats and bags in the cloakroom. It was a role at which Erwin excelled: unfailingly genial, welcoming and helpful to visitors and staff alike. But only after I had retired from the museum did I realise that we had some quite deeply shared interests, when Erwin invited me to attend a Sydney Oceanic Art Fair that he was helping to organise for the Oceanic Art Society. This association’s focus on the artworks of traditional societies distributed around several oceans overlapped with my own interests in the maritime traditions of our Asia–Pacific region. Erwin and his mother, Henriette Kok, were among the stall-holders exhibiting ethnographic material. I left the fair with an ornate canoe bailer from the Solomon Islands, and an invitation to visit their home and view their collection.
I had no idea what was in store until Erwin opened his front door to greet me, in their tidy suburban street of pleasant, century-old brick bungalows. It was jawdropping. Every space, every wall, every shelf, sill and drawer, every nook and cranny, was crowded with the artistry and artefacts of countless different cultures. The diversity was simply mesmerising as I navigated the rooms of this not overly large cottage. I was voyaging around the world once more – or, I should say, the developing or non-Western world.
Here were works of artisans and artists of the Pacific and Indian oceans, of eastern, southern and Southeast Asia, of Indigenous Australia, of Africa. A little, even, from the Mediterranean and the Americas. Everything was wrought by human hands: in wood and clay; iron and steel; stone, bone, tusk, tooth and horn; shells, fibres and textiles. I think it’s reasonable to say that most museum visitors and staff have an above-average susceptibility to the history and human experiences or stories that can permeate objects, and imbue them with a significance that transcends their material forms. Even so, it’s hard to convey the impact that this secret treasure-house of objects had on me. After all, we modern museum workers and visitors are used to a certain minimalism in carefully curated displays calculated to channel our attention.
Here in the Koks’ home, the cultural riches of the world were on display seemingly, at first glance, in no particular order and overwhelming in their demands for attention. Where to look first? Items that were rare or exceptional sat alongside curios or tourist souvenirs. But as I lingered longer, I began to see the considered choices that underlay the placement and groupings of objects. A window recess was turned into a showcase of striking, anthropomorphic terracotta sago pots from Papua New Guinea. A tiered corner table was devoted to dozens of polished stone adzes – the fundamental boatbuilding tool that enabled humans to spread through Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. There was much more to delight a maritime enthusiast: precious, sacred tabua sperm whale tooth pendants from Fiji; exquisitely decorated paddles of the Trobriand Islands, Sepik River and Bougainville; a drawer full of the wonderful, lustrous mairineer marine-shell necklaces of coastal palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) women. A canoe bailer was intricately carved from the famously suggestive female form of the coco der mer coconut that’s endemic to the Seychelles. Evident everywhere was a high degree of ingenuity and stylishness in housing or hanging such a multitude of artefacts in simple domestic settings – with no access to the sophisticated and often expensive museum display technologies we’ve become accustomed to. And with the additional major challenge that, in a rented home like this, tenants aren’t allowed to drill holes in the walls for hooks and hangers. But this was no museum, nor even a house museum. It was a home that, behind its closed doors, had been dedicated to all that was beautiful, marvellous and exotic. To me it had another dimension, though. It was a kind of monument enshrining the collecting impulse. As I lingered longer, I began to see the considered choices that underlay the placements and groupings of objects
Erwin and Henriette Kok (with a photo of Willem Kok between them) surrounded by some of their collection.
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To Erwin and his mother, Henriette, it was the Willem Kok Collection, in memory of its founder, the husband and father who had passed away in 2016. The collection’s origins preceded this Dutch family’s arrival as migrants, and in some respects could be traced back to Willem Kok’s childhood under German occupation during World War II.
‘My father was seven years old when the Germans invaded,’ Erwin explained. ‘During those difficult years when there were shortages of food and necessities like firewood, Willem gained the skills of foraging for survival. My grandfather had a bicycle and general trade store; Willem rode out on a rickety bicycle that his dad had made to look too old and dilapidated for the Germans to commandeer. Grandfather suspected from the previous war that many goods would become scarce, so he managed to accumulate some supplies for trading with people who’d bring in items to exchange. My father could take such things to trade for vegetables and sometimes even a little meat if the farmers had any surplus.’ Another task, far more dangerous, was taking things to help a group of Jewish refugees hiding out nearby. The consequences for everybody, if caught, were dire. ‘As the war was ending my father, now about 12, would venture into abandoned bunkers and collect all sorts of things the Germans left behind,’ continued Erwin. ‘Helmets, badges, webbing, shoes, tins of food. Even weapons, like a German officer’s Luger pistol. He traded them with the liberating troops – English, Canadian, Americans – for food and basic needs. They prized things like a German badge or jacket as souvenirs, and a bar of their chocolate could keep you alive for a couple of days.’ Henriette was the daughter of a teacher. She remembers the school being occupied by German troops, and her parents forced to billet two officers in their home. Henriette met her future husband Willem in The Hague where he was working as a salesman in a department store. In the 1960s the couple migrated to Australia with their infant son, Erwin. Henriette describes the Italian migrant transport Aurelia as a ‘horrible little ship’. The men were segregated from the women and they hardly saw each other for the whole six-week voyage. ‘My husband went ashore in Egypt, really excited to see the pyramids and a museum,’ recalled Henriette. ‘I stayed on board with our toddler … they said it was dangerous ashore! Willem bought some little statues and scarab beetles in the market. Besides that, in our luggage were a few small things that Willem had from
01 Papua New Guinea Chambri Lakes damarau sago flour pot of narrow necked bulbous form. Single face decoration. 02 Papua New Guinea Sepik figure. Woven grass male with clay scalp inset with human hair remnants, with shell-decorated hat.
03 Kalimantan Dayak baby carrier. Woven rattan with wooden base and beadwork exterior, decorated with demon head, bells and teeth.
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the Netherlands, a traditional Indonesian knife and a West African figure.’ It was the beginning of their collection. It would grow, spurred perhaps by Willem’s war-born instincts to gather objects of intrinsic interest. The family settled in Sydney, living in a small section of a large house in Double Bay, where Henriette worked as housekeeper while Willem was employed in the maintenance departments of Sydney hospitals. As they managed to put some money by, they collected. They liked to visit Paddy’s Markets, where some of the stalls sold exotic things. One day Willem, walking across the city from work, happened on someone dressed in New Guinea tribal regalia handing out leaflets advertising a small nearby gallery selling carvings. The couple began patronising the very small number of galleries that sold ethnographic material at that time. One was on Elizabeth Street, selling tribal art collected by missionaries of the Paulian Association. ‘On holidays, when I was a child, an aunt always took me to the Tropen Museum,’ recalled Henriette, referring to Amsterdam’s famous ethnological museum. ‘When I married Willem we visited other museums in Europe. I loved it but I never had an inkling you could buy anything like that for yourself.’ The collection grew slowly if they had a bit of money to spare. Sometimes they would put down a deposit and pay it off on lay-by. Sometimes something they liked better would arrive before they had finished paying the instalments, and they might switch their lay-by to the new object. Then the family discovered auctions, which were advertised in the Saturday paper. ‘My parents would always strive to learn more about these things and where they originated,’ Erwin told me. ‘They sought out art books, first from libraries and then occasionally they might see something in a book shop. Bit by bit we accumulated a lot of books. My father was a voracious reader. When he went through a period of being interested in Japanese swords he sourced books about that extremely specialised topic and became very knowledgeable.’ As time went on and their interest and knowledge grew, the family participated in collectible fairs in Sydney. One was a periodic antique arms fair, since their own collection included many different cultures’ bladed tools and weapons, spears and arrows. ‘But profit was not the main motive,’ Erwin added. ‘We never collected as investment. We sold items to make room or to get a bit of cash for something else.’
01 Tasmanian Aboriginal women’s necklaces of iridised mairineer shells collected from rocky east-coast and Bass Strait island shorelines; mid-20th century. Image Jeffrey Mellefont 02 A sitting room with scarcely room to sit amid art works and artefacts from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe and the Mediterranean.
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Every space, every wall, every shelf, sill and drawer, every nook and cranny, was crowded with the artistry and artefacts of countless different cultures
I have always admired passion in people. I don’t mean the romantic kind of passion – that’s relatively easy to understand compared to the mysterious urge to immerse and surrender oneself to an activity, a pursuit, a theme, a subject. And if passion tips over into obsession … well, that can be quite useful as a tool for heightened engagement. It was easy to admire the Kok family’s passion as we sat surrounded by it in a living room where armchairs were squeezed into the few spaces that remained between artefacts. It seemed to me there was a certain uncomplicated honesty about their love of these pieces. They had never been office-holders of the Oceanic Art Society, to which they had belonged for decades, nor did they style themselves as eminent collectors. They had been members for a while of the Australian Museum, Sydney’s greatest collection of their sort of ethnographic material, but they had no specialist relationships with its curators. Indeed, it seems their extensive collection remained under the radar to most of the professionals in the field.
Passion often extracts a price. Erwin described the disruption when their previous home of many years was sold by the landlord. Dismantling, packaging and moving their immense collection, and reinstalling it in their next rented home, was a drama from which they were still recovering. I greatly valued my invitation to view it since access was rarely granted. Asked why his family collected, Erwin explained it to me this way, while Henriette nodded in agreement: ‘The main reason that my parents bought something was because they liked the look of it, because it was decorative. Or because it was an interesting item, historically or ethnically, something exotic from another country, another culture. Or because of what people used the implement for, whether it was a bridal veil or an item that people would swap for a pig, because that’s the way their culture operated. Or if it was just nicely carved or decorated or painted or woven.’ Of course many of us acquire items of cultural and aesthetic appeal during our travels, and keep them as mementos. For this unassuming family of modest means who, it seems, put most of their resources into collecting, that collection was their portal into worlds they weren’t able to visit themselves. ‘Collecting is both an act of reverence and of its opposite, possession,’ wrote Sydney architect Elizabeth Farrell in a recent article about the renaissance of public libraries – before concluding that ‘some things are beyond price’. That’s true of all kinds of collections, including books, which for some of us are also hugely collectible. But not uncommonly they are a source of angst as our books threaten to take over whole rooms, or even entire houses. That inevitably leads to dilemmas as we contemplate the need to declutter. So it was for Erwin and Henriette Kok. They could see a time arriving when changing circumstances might require a move into a different type of accommodation. It demanded that they reassess their custodianship of the extraordinary Willem Kok Collection. In what struck me as an almost unimaginable act of courage combined with anguish, Erwin and Henriette made the decision to dispose of the collection as the pandemic was unfolding. Not long after my visit, in one single, intense, day-long session, they saw the vast majority of their beloved collection sold. Item by item, or in small groupings of related objects, 564 lots went under the auctioneer’s gavel to eager collectors either bidding in person at the auction house or on the internet.
Looking for positives in this, I like to think that among the many traders, investors and probably some museum and gallery curators who acquired items from the Willem Kok Collection, significant parts of it went into smaller private collections. Into the hands of people who, like Erwin, Henriette and Willem before them, will simply derive immense pleasure from their beauty, craftsmanship and the human purposes and meanings they embody.
Jeffrey Mellefont was the founding editor of Signals 1989–2013. In retirement he continues to research, write and lecture on the history and seafaring traditions of Australia’s Asian neighbours.
