Polynesian and Melanesian historical pamphlets
This week marks Ni
vosa Vaka-ITaukei ni vanua o Viti or Fiji Language Week for 2015. This is
timely as we can happily share the news about some nineteenth century Fijian
language items in Sir George Grey Special Collections that have recently been
individually catalogued.
These Fijian language items were part of a larger collection
of nineteenth century pamphlets in English, Polynesian and Melanesian languages
collected by Sir
George Grey. They include grammars, primers, vocabularies, and religious
texts. The pamphlet shown below is an arithmetic textbook published in Levuka
in 1865.
“While in New Zealand, Grey had naturally extended his
interest in languages to those numerous languages and dialects of the Pacific.
For access to such materials, he found it vital to develop contacts with the
missionaries in the Pacific (such as Walter Lawry and Thomas Buddle
in Fiji) and others who were less closely related, but who nevertheless printed
and supplied the kind of material he desired. (p.129)”
You can read a letter dated 8 October 1851 from Buddle to Grey with a post script saying Buddle had enclosed “a copy of a Fijian Grammar lately [received] from the Islands.”
Below is an example
of the type of materials missionaries were publishing at the time. This is the
1855 edition of ‘The teachers manual’ by the Rev.
R.B. Lyth which was published by the Wesleyan Mission Press in Fiji.
Grey’s interest in indigenous languages has resulted, more
than a century and a half later, in these pamphlets being available for the
public of Auckland. On the significance of Grey’s work, Kerr says that:
“The man
most suited to comment on Grey as a collector of indigenous language materials
was of course [Wilhelm]
Bleek. In a letter to his friend Haug in December 1857, Bleek describes fully
Grey’s position and his place in the future. To Bleek at least, it was secure:
You can
hardly imagine how enormous the library of Sir George Grey is in this field and
how much time and money he spends to make this library complete. Only a man in
his position, with his means and his ardent scientific desire for the subject
can gather such a collection. I am quite convinced that nobody else would be
able to collect even a third of this material. There are amongst them some
books of hardly half a dozen leaves or less, which cost thousands of pounds to
procure. But they are not just unique in themselves, but also are the only
evidence of an otherwise completely unknown language, philologically and
ethnologically of great importance… May he live to do still more important
work. (p.132)”
128 Pacific Island language works that Grey collected while he was the Governor of the Cape Colony were transferred from South Africa to Auckland Libraries in 1978. This geography textbook and could be of interest to contemporary
researchers of colonial pedagogy.
The pamphlets were bound together shortly after Grey gave
them to the library in 1887, as the 1888 catalogue describes them as, “The
pamphlets catalogued below are bound in volumes”. The Fijian ones were Volumes
76 and 75.
However following the change to subject departments when the
library moved into this building in 1971, the pamphlets were disbound. We
hunted around in the basement and found an empty binding saved from the
disbinding of most of the pamphlets to give an example of how researchers would
have used them for much of the first hundred years after Grey donated them.
Ref: Selected pamphlets next to binding.
An inventory of the pamphlets was completed by David Verran
in 1994 to help provide access to interested readers. Now each pamphlet has
been described in full and they have individual records in our library catalogue.
Try a search on ‘Polynesian and Melanesian historical
pamphlets’ and if you see anything that is of interest come up and request it
in the Sir George Grey Special Collections reading room on the second floor of
the Central Library.
Author: Andrew Henry
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