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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 52| August 2001
Early Printing and Publishing in Pacific Languages
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Far left: [Interior of a
Melanesian Mission printing house on Norfolk Island]
Left: Susan Woodburn is Special Collections Librarian at the Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide. She is the first librarian to have been awarded a Harold White Fellowship at the National Library |
Why were Sydney printers producing books in Tahitian, Maori and Tongan as early as 1814, within just a few years of the foundation of the colony of New South Wales? And why was remote Norfolk Island a major centre of printing in the languages of Melanesia for more than 50 years? What were the imperatives that prompted missions to venture into the remotest islands of the Pacific and the interior of Australia and there to undertake the production of thousands of booksmillions of copies, hundreds of millions of printed sheetsin the languages of the indigenous peoples? How did they proceed, given that in their chosen mission fields there was not only an extraordinary multiplicity of languages and dialects but written languages were totally unknown, and that as a result an incredible effort had to be made, first to learn the languages, then to create a written form for them, teach people to read, undertake translations and new texts, and print and disseminate them? What were the technical problems in printing in remote places and unknown languages, and who did the printing? What was the cost to the missionaries, for whom success in terms of conversion was often a long time coming, and what was the impact on the people to whom they brought their conviction, and on the languages they sought to master and reduce to writing?
These were questions that first prompted my research into printing and publishing in the languages of Oceania and which I attempted to address further during my recent tenure as a Harold White Fellow at the National Library. My core project, however, was an essentially bibliographic one of identification and recording such works. The National Library has one of the best collections of these publications, particularly through the collecting of John Ferguson. In addition to his well-known Bibliography of Australia, he published a Bibliography of the New Hebrides and appears initially to have envisaged a complete bibliography of Pacific Islands language publications. His extensive papers include correspondence with many of those who were still contributing to the preparation and printing in the early twentieth century and are a further invaluable resource.
Part of the research undertaken will be incorporated in a paper to be contributed to the forthcoming first volume of the History of the Book in Australia. The end result will be a web-based listing of the Oceanic language material located, providing extensive introductory text and annotation to illuminate the body of materialwhy it was created, by whom, when and in what contextrather than the traditional physical bibliographers exact description of each discrete item. It is envisaged that this will provide links to sources and additional related material, enabling anyone to utilise the research for a range of purposes. A number of intriguing sidelines that emerged during my researcharrowroot as a publication subsidy, the influence of Christian hymns on traditional music, the impact of racial prejudice on perceptions of language, the forms of resistance of oral cultures to the introduction of the printed wordwill be highlighted for possible further investigation.
A Fellowship may not be for everyone (my best friends reaction to
my proposal to spend up to four months at the National Library engaged in
research was a blank Why? while my mother characterised it
pretty accurately as a sort of a busmans holiday then?).
The formal obligations of the Fellowship, particularly the public lecture,
can be daunting and unrewarding. For me, however, it was close to heaven,
providing an extended period of concentrated research, with access to
perfectly matched resources, in privileged and congenial surroundings,
with welcoming and helpful Library staff and companionable fellow
Fellows. I was fortunate in having the moral and material support of
the University of Adelaide and as a librarian took advantage of courteous
invitations to functions and talks of professional interest during my time
in Canberra. I am indebted to the Council and Director-General of the
National Library for the award of the Fellowship. I urge any librarians
who have scholarly research interests that could usefully draw upon the
rich and varied resources of our National Library to consider applying, to
their own benefit and that of their institution and the library profession
generally.
Susan Woodburn
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au