South Pacific Books and the Concept of Rarity

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 21, Issue 2, 1 October 1988, Page 81

South Pacific Books and the Concept of Rarity

SHARON DELL

In the Western European tradition of scholarly librarianship rare book collections generally comprise pre-1801 publications, first and special editions, association or other special copies and the products of fine printing presses. If this tradition was followed in the Pacific it would exclude most South Pacific books. Although documentation of the South Pacific began with Magellan’s exploration in 1521, it was not until the arrival of missionary presses in the early 1800 s that printing in the area commenced, especially in the languages of the South Pacific. Increasingly, rare book collections in Australia and New Zealand are being expanded to include parts of the early national and regional printing output.

Since the prototype South Sea Island, described by Wallis, Cook, Bougainville and others, took hold of the Western world’s imagination, documentation and interpretation of the region have flowed from the presses of the world. Generations now have studied in the natural laboratory which geographical and cultural fragmentation have created in the Pacific. In this they have been supported by the collections of the great research libraries and notably, by Pacific research libraries. These were established comparatively recendy, with the aim of creating comprehensive collections relating to Oceania as a basis for research work by the many universities and organisations engaged in Pacific studies. The University of Hawaii Library, B.P. Bishop Museum Library, Mitchell Library, National Library of Australia, and Alexander Turnbull Library share with an increasing number of local libraries and museums the task of preserving and promoting the documentary heritage of the South Pacific region. The conditions under which material is published in the Pacific have always conspired against the systematic collection, preservation, and documentation of the region’s publications, and contributed to their rarity. 1 It is an area renowned for its cultural diversity. Geographically, the Pacific Ocean comprises one third of the earth’s surface, yet, excluding Papua New Guinea, its total land mass is only that of Cuba. Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands share among 3.5 million

people one quarter of the world’s known languages. Historically, there are political, religious and commercial ties which link the Pacific peoples with Britain, USA, France, Japan, Germany, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. The focus of this paper is on publications in the languages of the South Pacific. The recent acquisition by the Alexander Turnbull Library of a collection of papers and publications from the Cook Islands has forced a re-evaluation of the Library’s Pacific Island languages collection, and led to consideration of practical ways by which its role can be extended beyond bibliophily into that of an active research library. Such libraries are, according to lan Willison, ‘involved in a grand collaborative enterprise whereby the techniques of writing, of publishing, of critical scholarship are brought to bear on the progressive ordering of the world’s experience of itself. 2 Willison supports the idea of a library’s collection as an archaeological stratum acting profoundly on the intellectual ordering of experience in its own right and with others.

The Cook Islands is a self-governing state in free association with New Zealand. Its fifteen islands lie scattered between Samoa and the Society Islands. In 1821 the Reverend John Williams of the London Missionary Society left two Tahitians there to begin the task of converting the people to Christianity. From 1827 permanent mission stations were established and villages formed as the people were encouraged to imitate a European way of life based on Christian legal codes.

As elsewhere in the Pacific, the chief means of missionary instruction was the distribution of vernacular literature. Vocabularies and grammars, catechisms and Biblical texts, hymnals and prayerbooks were followed by the full translation of the Bible and, almost invariably, Pilgrim’s Progress. Printing in Cook Islands Maori was carried out at the London Missionary Society press in Tahiti; then in 1834 Charles Barffs cast-off press and a few fonts of type were sent to the Reverend A. Buzacott in Rarotonga. With the arrival of the French in Tahiti the station declined and Rarotonga became the centre for their Eastern Pacific mission work. This included printing. As in most mission fields, a belief that literacy gave access to European material culture fuelled a period of intense interest in reading and writing.

In September 1987 Miss Dorothy Hall wrote to the Turnbull Library offering to donate some papers and books belonging to her father, the Reverend Percy Hall, who had been in charge of the LMS School in Rarotonga in the early 1900 s. Miss Hall expected that the Library would want to dispose of most of the collection. In fact the three cartons which arrived contained extraordinarily exciting material covering the early mission period, and the difficult time for the missions which followed the introduction of Consular administrations. The collection was also truly varied: manuscripts 3 , books, printed ephemera, sketches, maps, song-books and glass negatives have all fascinated Library staff.

One carton included printed items. Some of these were multiple copies still tied up in the printer’s paper bundles. Many items showed the typical effects of a tropical climate, being mouldy and worm eaten. Other items were signed, inscribed or annotated by people associated with their production; the 1846 Pilgrim’s Progress 4 was annotated and marked up in William Wyatt Gill’s handwriting in preparation for a later edition. In total, there were about sixty items in Cook Islands Maori and forty other related English language publications, official publications, and issues of serials.

The difficulties that were encountered in evaluating the Hall Collection are symptomatic of the poor level of bibliographic control and the paucity of research into Pacific Islands language publications in general. The printed material in the collection was first compared against the items listed in the standard text, H. Bond James’s A Bibliography of Publications in Cook Islands Maori. 5 This was supplemented by the Alexander Turnbull Library’s own catalogues. Of these, the most useful record was the shelf list, even though the bibliographic information it gave was often distressingly brief. James listed seventythree items in his bibliography, excluding serial articles. There were a further thirty items in the Turnbull’s shelf list which were not recorded by him. It was startling to find that the Hall Collection contained thirty items not recorded in either list. This discovery prompted a comparison of the Turnbull’s collection with those of other research libraries.

The James bibliography was used as the standard of comparison. His statements of each library’s holdings were supplemented with information from the published catalogues of the B.P. Bishop Museum Library, and the Grey Collection at Auckland Public Library. 6 The following table shows the number of items held by each library which were found to be listed by James.

Table 1: Library Holdings of Cook Islands Maori Imprints Recorded by James. National Library of Australia 11 Ferguson Collection (now in NLA) 37 LMS, Sydney 5 B.P. Bishop Museum 14 New York Public Library 6 American Bible Society 4 School of Oriental & African Studies, London 10 Alexander Turnbull Library 62 [shelf list of Cook Islands Collection 45] [Percy Hall Collection 17] H. Bond James Collection 36 Seventh Day Adventist, Rarotonga 6 Grey Collection, Auckland Public Library 2

Any conclusions reached from such a brief investigation must be offered cautiously. Two points were clear, however. First, over half the items in the James listing (forty-two of seventy-three) were represented in library collections by only one or two copies; most libraries had some unique holdings. Second, each collection was likely to hold unrecorded items (the Grey Collection for instance had ten not listed in James). It was also significant, both for institutions wanting to assess their own collections, and for researchers, that the holdings of several major collections could not be ascertained.

Some island groups, it is true, have excellent bibliographical coverage of their publications, but the example of the Cook Islands is not so atypical that it cannot lead to wider conclusions. The strongest collections of publications in the languages of the Pacific are held in research libraries located on the fringes of the region. Within these libraries the collections are so briefly identified and described that the published finding aids cannot be relied upon as a true indication of holdings. The existing bibliographic tools and supporting literature are likely to have been published in small print runs and are frequently expensive or scarce. Although they may meet the needs of people who have access to copies held in research libraries, they are difficult to acquire. Several large scale works have been in preparation or close to publication for years. 7 Of the ten or so mentioned by H. E. Maude in 1971 only three appear to have been published since then. 8 There is an obvious need to assist the publication of bibliographies of the region. In particular, even basic draft listings of the known publications in Pacific Island languages or the holdings of individual libraries would be of great value. Very little has been written about the printing history and spread of literacy in the Pacific, apart from Lingenfelter’s Presses of the Pacific Islands, 1817-1867 9 and the inclusion of press histories in some bibliographies. ABHB, the Annual Bibliography of the History of the Book, has had only one entry for the entire region in the past fifteen years.

Apart from the usual forms of historical and linguistic research which these collections sustain, the ‘laboratory’ of the Pacific is being used in the increasingly popular fields of the history of the book and literacy, and the changes from oral to book-based methods in the transmission of knowledge. Bernard Smith, among others, has shown how important the images of the Pacific were in shaping the Western mind’s perception of people and place. Conversely, missionaries are said to have found illustrations essential for conveying the concepts of the Bible. 10 There has been little examination of the rising impact of radio, pirated TV and video and their adoption as a means of communication. Neil Postman laments the decline of the age of typography in twentieth century Western life. He speaks of the clashes of resonances, such as the continuing importance of oral testimony in our courts of law, even

after 500 years of printing. 11 In the Pacific, where printing is only 150 years old and was engaged in for Pacific Islanders, rather than by them, audio-visual technology supports the tradition of oral communication. Current research examining changes in communication systems points to the possibility that print may be by-passed in some places.

Cultural revival and the desire for independence is also creating a market for information about the past. In New Zealand the 500 Kohanga Reo, or language nests, set up to teach Maori children their own language and culture have been the spur for the first genuine Maori book publishing since the introduction of printing over one hundred and fifty years ago. 12 In Hawaii the Punana Leo movement may have a similar effect, creating an upsurge in interest in the language and its publications.

These observations have a bearing on the role of the research library in the Pacific. A re-evaluation of the way in which Pacific collections are promoted and preserved may be necessary. These South Pacific publications may not form part of the research libraries’ own national imprints, but geographical, cultural, and political ties with the Pacific can be used to justify an increased allocation of resources for the care of Pacific collections. Even without such ties, sheer scarcity imposes a responsibility. In times when retrospective national bibliographies near completion, it would not be inappropriate to turn bibliographic talents to the South Pacific. With increased use of shared bibliographic databases, a co-ordinated programme does not seem too impractical to contemplate.

The best means of ensuring that copies of publications are available where they are needed is open to discussion. Micro-reproduction would seem an obvious answer, and the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau would be an ideal co-ordinator. However, Pacific libraries do not all have microfilm or fiche readers, so a paper by-product would be a necessary part of any project. In the ‘climate’ of the Pacific both cyclones and coups render any library collection vulnerable. It cannot be assumed that someone else will be doing the job. The nature of the collections, relationships with the people of the Pacific, the interests of researchers and the desire to be part of‘the intellectual ordering of experience’ demand a more active role. Additionally, in the current political and economic situation of Australia and New Zealand at least, a research library’s assumption of responsibility for the rare books of the wider Pacific region may provide justification (if further justification is necessary) for the maintenance of rare book collections.

This is the edited text of a talk given to the Rare and Precious Books and Documents Section at the IFLA/LAA Conference, Sydney 1988.

REFERENCES 1 Nevertheless, excellent surveys of literature about the Pacific exist. H. E. Maude’s essays ‘Pacific Documentation: An Introductory Survey’ and ‘Bibliographic Control of Pacific Manuscripts’ are classics, published as a result of the 1971 Australian Unesco Seminar in Source Materials Related to Research in the Pacific Area (Canberra, 1973). The work of bibliographers Petherick, Taylor and O’Reilly is augmented by popular overviews such as A. Grove Day’s Pacific Islands Literature: One Hundred Basic Books (Honolulu, 1971). lan Willison’s ‘Publishing in Oceania: A British Librarian’s Perspective’, in Publishing in the Pacific Islands: A Symposium, edited by Jim Richstad and Miles M. Jackson (Manoa, Hawaii, 1984), discussed the passing of control of the way in which Pacific islands are represented to the world through literature from Europe to the islands themselves. The challenges of being a Pacific publisher today have been outlined by Kevin Walcot in ‘Perspectives on Publishing, Literacy and Development’, in Publishing in the Pacific Islands .... The continuing difficulties librarians face in collecting contemporary material from the region were discussed in a post-IFLA 1988 seminar. 2 lan Willison, ‘Publishing in Oceania . . .’, p. 51. 3 The manuscript papers in the Reverend Percy Hall Collection are described in ‘Notable Acquisitions’, Turnbull Library Record, 21 (1988), pp. 54-55. 4 John Bunyan, Te Tere no te Tuitatere mei Teiane Ao kite Ao a Muri Ata (Rarotonga, 1846). 5 H. Bond James, A Bibliography of Publications in Cook Islands Maori (Sydney, 1953). This is a draft listing, issued by the South Pacific Commission; it does not appear to have been superseded. James was a London Missionary Society colleague of Reverend Hall.

6 Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Dictionary Catalogue of the Library (Boston, 1964); W. H. Bleek, The Library of his Excellency Sir George Grey (Capetown, 1858). Holdings for the Mitchell Library (whose published catalogue contains reference to a ‘Tentative list of books written in or written about Cook Islands’, but not cards for the items themselves) the British Library, the University of Hawaii Library and the Cook Islands National Library could not be ascertained. 7 In 1971 H. E. Maude announced that W. G. Coppell’s major bibliography on the Cook Islands was close to publication. See his ‘Bibliographic Control of Pacific Manuscripts’, Source Materials in the Pacific Area (Canberra, 1971), p. 76. However, earlier this year, a communication from another Pacific bibliographer, Philip Snow, indicated that publication of Coppell’s work is still several years off. 8 H. E. Maude, ‘Bibliographic Control . . .’, p. 77. 9 Richard Lingenfelter, Presses of the Pacific Islands, 1817-1867 (Los Angeles, 1967). 10 Niel Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas 1797-1860 (Melbourne, 1978), p. 247. 11 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York, 1985). 12 Sharon Dell, ‘The Maori Book or the Book in Maori’, New Zealand Libraries, 45 (1987), 98-101.