SIR PETER BUCK MEMORIAL

Press, Volume XCII, Issue 27699, 1 July 1955, Page 3

SIR PETER BUCK MEMORIAL

APPEAL TO ENDOW PRIZES CANTERBURY ALLOCATION £l5O As a memorial to Sir Peter Buck, j the famous New Zealand anthropologist and Director of • the Bishop I Museum in Honolulu, an appeal has! been launched throughout New Zea-i land to raise a capital fund of £2OOOl to endow school prizes, a library collection, and a university scholarship. An allocation of £l5O will be raised in Canterbury. The Maori people subscribed £2200 (plus £5OO for permanent maintenance) to build the handsome memorial vault near the ancestral Okioki pa. North Taranaki, where Sir Peter Buck's ashes were interred a year ago. Museums throughout New Zealand are sponsoring the present appeal as a pakeha tribute. The Canterbury Museum is leading the district appeal and it is receiving assistance from the Association of Friends of the Museum, the Association of Friends of Te Wai Pounamu College, and the Canterbury branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand. The Friends of the Muse”m v I already made a grant of £lO before I seeking individual support from niem- | bers as the other bodies are doing. An interesting personal donation of ! £5 has been made by Mr r> v Ellison, of Taumutu, whose father was associated with Sir Peter Buck as a member of the Young Maori Party. The Canterbury Museum will receive contributions.

; The memorial fund will be used for I three purposes: (1) £25 10s will be i spent each year for the purchase of . books for the Sir Peter Buck Memorial library at Te Aute College and for a gold dux medal: (2) £33 a year will be set aside to provide a memorial bursarv to be awarded to a student taking anthropology stage three (including Maori studies) in the University of New Zealand: <3) Gold dux medals will also be provided for the Urenui primary school and the Waitara District High School.

PETER HENRY BUCK AN APPRECIATION (By Roger Duff) If many of us might regard Rutherford as our greatest pakeha of recent times, and Ngata as our greatest Maori. Peter Buck must surely be our greatest New Zealander. Man of two names, and two peoples, in his person Te Rangihiroa bridged the gap between Pakeha and Maori and. in his life, expressed the genius of both peoples. I see foreshadowed in his example the New Zealanders of the future, proudly blending the culture of both peoples, and if. like Peter Buck, blending the two bloods, regarding dual descent as an asset and honour.

Born in the despondent seventies, when the hope of the Maori people was at its lowest ebb. he lived to see them flourish in numbers and hope, largely inspired by the example of those few young men who saw in European education the key to progress—the Young Maori Party of Carroll, Pomare. Ngata, Bennett, Wirepa, Ellison, and Te Rangihiroa himself. Only superb natural gifts enabled Peter Buck to break through the then formidable barriers of mixed racial origin and depressingly humble home circumstances. to win the laurels of European scholarship and become a master in both cultures.

The purpose of this memorial appeal is to make it less difficult today, for children of either people or both, to follow his example.

His apprenticeship in Maori culture gained on the mud floor of his grandmother’s tree-fern hut at Urenui, he leaned out to grasp education as a key to unlock the gates of the pakeha world.

The road led him far: Te Aute College. graduated 1898: Bachelor of Medicine. Otago University, 1904: Medical Officer of Health. 1905-1909: Doctor of Medicine. 1910; Member of Parliament (Northern Maori), 1909-1914: war service, 1914-1919: Director of Maori Hygiene, 1919-1927: Ethnologist, Bishop Museum, Honolulu. 1927-1936: visiting Professor in Anthropology, Yale University. United States, 1932-1934; Director of Bishop Museum, 1936-1951. Then there were degrees and honours: M.A.. Yale. 1936: D.Sc.. University of New Zealand. 1937; D.Sc., University of Rochester. United States, 1939: D.Litt., University of Hawaii. 1948: D.Sc.. Yale, 1951: D.S.Q.. 1918; Royal Order of the North Star, Sweden, 1949; Hector Medal, New Zealand Institute, 1936: Rivers Memorial Medal. University of London, 1936: S. Percy Smith Medal, University of Otago, 1951; Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George. 1946. , These honours came to him who did not seek them, because his was a dedicated life, dedicated to interpreting to New Zealand and the larger world the heroic wanderings and achievements of Maoris and Polynesians. In that cause of his mother’s people he poured out the energy of a generous life, to bequeath to the scientific world his matchless series of Bishop Museum monographs, and to the public such books as “Vikings of the Sunrise” and “The Coming of the |Maori.” The latter was one of the last four books he wrote under a veritable sentence of death, after a seriotis operation for cancer in 1947. “That he Dulled through was a miracle,” wrote a Bishop Museum colleague, Katherine Luomala. “An even greater miracle was the fact that for three more years he lived a strenuous life, which a healthy man would have envied. Only his medical colleagues know what discipline was necessary, from what deep spring of vitality he must have drawn to force Death to walk at a respectful distance for so long. . . His mortal illness found him at his week-end cottage of Lanikai, working as usual on a manuscript He died on December 1. 1951. It was my privilege, speaking at the tangi for his ashes at Urenui in Aug-

ust last year, to bid him farewell in the very words of his lament for the pioneer pakeha scholar of Maori origins. S. Percy Smith, in 1922. The translation runs:—"Farewell, O Sir. farewell! Depart along the path trodden by the thousands, trodden by the myriads, the path which sends no messenger to the rear! Depart along the broad pathway of Tane! Sleep! Sleep on the bed which cannot be stirred!. Rest! Rest on the pillow which cannot be removed! Sleep on, O Sir, beneath the Western Wind. Await thou, the multitude of birds Singing in full-throated chorus at the Breaking of Dawn! That will be a sign to thee To enter IJikurangi, the World of Being (And the World of Light.”