Research notes

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 18, Issue 1, 1 May 1984, Page 42

Research notes

Professor Jacob Gruber, Professor of Anthropology at Temple University, Philadelphia, has been awarded a Fulbright travel grant for research at the Alexander Turnbull Library in 1984. Professor Gruber will be examining the relationships between Richard Owen of the Natural History Museum in London and his various ‘agents’ in New Zealand, including von Haast and Mantell, for a study of colonialism and science in the nineteenth century.

The publication of the second volume of Early Eyewitness Accounts of Maori Life, which deals with the Marion du Fresne expedition of 1772, has been delayed by the discovery in Paris of a hitherto unknown account by Le Dez, second lieutenant on board the Marquis de Castries. Isabel Ollivier, who identified the account in the Bougainville family papers in the Archives Nationales, has prepared a full transcription and translation to be included in the second volume. The merchant bank Indosuez New Zealand Limited has agreed to make a substantial grant to the Library’s endowment funds over the next three years to help meet the publishing expenses for the series of five volumes. The Turnbull Research Endowment Fund made a grant towards the costs of an extended visit to Wellington in August by Mr Max Hailstone, a lecturer at the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury. Mr Hailstone worked on the Library’s fine printing collection, lectured to the Friends on avant garde typography in the twentieth century, and participated in the Library’s inaugural fine printing colloquium.

lan Milner’s biographical study, Milner of Waitaki: Portrait of The Man, was published by John Mclndoe and the Waitaki High School Old Boys’ Association late in 1983. Professor Milner received a grant from the Turnbull Research Fund to return to New Zealand to work on the Frank Milner papers in the Library during 1980. DrJ. E. Cookson has published in the New Zealand Journal of History for October 1983 the first results of his work on the pacifist and anti-war movements, under the title ‘llliberal New Zealand: the Formation of Government Policy on Conscientious Objection, 1940-4 T. Dr Cookson’s research has been supported by two grants from the Library’s Research Fund.

The Chief Librarian delivered a paper on the bibliographic resources for New Zealand studies at the British Library’s colloquium on resources for Australian and New Zealand studies in London early in February 1984.

Selected papers from the 1983 History of Science in New Zealand Conference, sponsored by the Turnbull and the Royal Society of New Zealand, are to be published by the Society early in 1984. A grant towards the cost of publication has been made by the Scientific Distribution Committee of the Lottery Board.

A Maori manuscript from the Library’s Polynesian Society collection has recently been published by the University of Canterbury Maori Department. Two Maori Stories from Marlborough, recorded by Tuiti Makitanara, edited and translated by Melodie Watson and Margaret Orbell, contains two traditional stories noted down by Tuiti Makitanara (later M.P. for Southern Maori) from his Rangitane elders and sent to Elsdon Best in 1894. They are presented in transcription and translation with editorial and textual notes and content analysis. The 41-page publication is the first in a series which will concentrate mainly on South Island texts.

Scottish Academic Press issued early in 1984 James Hogg’s Anecdotes of Sir W. Scott, edited by Douglas S. Mack from the original manuscript in the Turnbull collections. The Turnbull manuscript is identified by Mack as the first of Hogg’s biographical accounts of his friend Sir Walter Scott, prepared for publication in March 1833 and long believed lost. The Library received in January The Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue: the British Library Collections , a set of 88 microfiches of entries and 25 of indexes. Publication of this catalogue concludes the first phase of the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue Project (ESTC).