A PACIFIC BIBLIOGRAPHY

Turnbull Library Record, Volume IX, 1 September 1952, Page 3

A PACIFIC BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.G.B.

It is considered appropriate that the first article in this number of the Record should be a notice of a recentlycompleted work by the Librarian; and it is a tribute to the richness of the Library that the bulk of the material recorded is to be found there. Indeed , there are few other places where such a work could have been undertaken.

Taylor, C. R. H. A Pacific Bibliography; printed matter relating to the native peoples of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia. Wellington: The Polynesian Society, 1951. 592 pp. 425.

THE CONCERN which has SOMETIMES BEEN EXPRESSED about the number of published works dealing with New Zealand could just as appropriately be felt for the output on Oceania as a whole. From the first accounts of the voyages of Cook and Bougainville to the latest Bernice P. Bishop Museum bulletin publishers have added an impressive total to the scattered references in earlier literature. Elmer D. Merrill’s Polynesian Botanical Bibliography is an impressive example of what can be done in one field. The need, however, for some comprehensive attack on the literature as a whole has long been apparent, and this bibliographical milestone now before us, as well as being exhaustive in its subject, in large measure fills this omission. It is almost impossible to write a book about the islands without touching upon either the original way of life of the inhabitants or the problems arising from their contact with the west. A comprehensive bibliography of Oceanic ethnology is therefore basically a list of the more important works on the islands as a whole.

Though the four pages of entries under the heading Bibliography Oceania show that Mr. Taylor is not a pioneer, there is no other compilation which challenges comparison, .lore’s Essai de bibliographic, du Pacifique , published twenty years ago, is less comprehensive, while

the geographically-restricted wartime bibliography of the Southwest Pacific is virtually an Australian union catalogue of the better-known books.

A Pacific Bibliography is classified first by the main island regions and then by the appropriate island groups and cultural areas. The major divisions, Oceania as a whole, Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, and the particular island groups within them, arc arranged under the headings “Bibliography”, “General Works”, and “Ethnology, General”, followed by entries in a more or less uniform sequence of specific headings, such as “Physical and Mental Characteristics”, “Religion and Magic”, “Folklore”, “Culture Contact”, and so on. The general section for each of the four major divisions and for each of the twenty-one island groups or areas lists the more important works of history, discovery, and description. It is the entries in these general sections which make the bibliography of interest and value to a wider range of users than its main subject-matter might indicate.

It is this classification, again, which lifts the work above a mere chronological or alphabetical compilation. The most cursory perusal shows the command of material necessary for such a task. There must he confident familiarity with not merely books but also serial articles in a wide range of European publications. Consistently with the fundamental purpose of the bibliography the works of the early navigators, as well as books by important nineteenth century visitors such as Moerenhout, Ellis, Erskine, and Brenchley, appear under all the major groups described in their texts. Individual entries in the case of books give author, title, pagination, publisher, and date. Serial entries, which naturally, form the bulk of the work, give the title of the article following the author’s name, the periodical, the volume number, the paging and year of publication.

The index includes authors selectively, listing only those entries which in the bibliographer’s judgement would not otherwise be readily found. This means, for example, that of perhaps twenty entries scattered through the work under “Malinowski” eight only will be found in the index. Some knowledge of the subject-matter of the entry being searched for is therefore necessary to

locate it if not indexed, and the process may not be rapid where there is a legitimate difference of opinion about the most appropriate section for a particular item. The publication of a complete index in a work of this size would clearly have made the book more bulky and costly, but would have speeded up the process of consultation. The author’s reasons for omitting Pitcairn and Norfolk should perhaps have been given. Pitcairn, for example, although its former Polynesian inhabitants are known only from their archaeological relics, gets a page of treatment and ten bibliographical entries in Buck’s Introduction to Polynesian Anthropology. Inevitably in a bibliography on such a scale there are small slips. Ivens’s Island Builders of the Pacific , a study of North Mala, Solomon Islands, appears under Easter Island. It is also entered correctly under Solomon Islands but not with the virtually companion work Melanesians of the South-east Solomon Islands. Rowe’s Samoa under the Sailing Gods should be under Samoa General rather than Samoa Origins. But these are minor faults in a work of some 20,000 entries, some 1,600 of which it should be noted relate to the —more than three times the number of entries which were included in Hamilton’s Hand-list of 1911.

The work is an outstanding achievement of New Zealand bibliography completed during the uncertain leisure of some ten years. That it should be necessary to go back forty years to the publication of Dr. Hocken’s Bibliography of New Zealand Literature to find a comparable work is one measure of the bibliographer’s achievement. There is every indication from the merits of the bibliography itself that, with the inevitable addition of new publications to the interleaved pages, it may be as long before it is superseded.