Alex Cameron: Hello and welcome to the Researching the Pacific Learning Webinar. My name is Alex.

Jame Cruz: And I'm James.

Alex Cameron: We're reference librarians here at the National Library.

James Cruz: Before we start, we would like to acknowledge Australia's First Nations peoples - The First Australians - as the traditional owners and custodians of this land, and give our respects to their elders, past and present and through them to all Australian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Alex Cameron: Additionally, the resources that we present in today's webinar may contain images or voices of deceased persons and may also reflect the bias, norms and perspectives of the period of time in which they were created. We accept that these may not be appropriate today.

James Cruz: Today, we'd like to guide you through the collections the National Library holds that will help you research the Pacific region, including resources on Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Tonga and more.

We'll show you the range of materials available from the National Library, including historical maps and photographs, newspapers in language magazines and oral histories.

Many of the items we'll show have also been digitized and are freely available to look at online through the National Library.

While it's not possible to talk about all of our Pacific holdings and resources today, we aim to show you some of the highlights from our collection.

Alex Cameron: We'll also talk about the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, known as PMB or PAMBU, which is based at the Australian National University. And hear from Kari James, PAMBU's executive officer.

James Cruz: The National Library has a number of large format collections, some of which contain lots of useful records about life in the Pacific.

One of the Library's most significant Pacific collections is the Rex Nan Kivell collection, which was acquired by the National Library in 1962.

The collection comprises of approximately 5000 books, pamphlets and journals, as well as over 800 maps, 300 plus manuscript items, and a large collection of photographs and paintings which are largely related to the lands in the Pacific from 1751 to 1900.

The collection contains a wealth of material about maritime exploration of the Pacific, such as letters from prominent figures like James Cook and Joseph Banks, journals from the 1700s detailing voyages, as well as maps and nautical charts detailing lands through the Pacific region.

There's also missionary records such as correspondence from missionaries belonging to the London Missionary Society and records belonging to reverends Posted in New Zealand and Tonga.

Alex Cameron: Arguably, one of the most exciting parts of the collection is the collection of prints, paintings and photographs. The collection is huge with over 3000 paintings and over 8000 prints.

While much of the collection depicts Australian scenes, there are many beautiful works showcasing scenery and day to day life within the Pacific region, with depictions of Tahiti by Sydney Parkinson, Tonga by John Weber, Hawaii by Jaques Arago and the Mariana Islands by Louis Choris.

James Cruz: Another formed collection of interest for Pacific Research is the Chinnery Collection, which contains manuscript papers, maps and photographs related to Papua New Guinea in the early 1900s.

There is a wide variety of cartographic material in the collection with patrol maps of Papua New Guinea, native crop distribution maps, geological maps and maps depicting language barriers in the region.

The photographic collection is also quite extensive, covering Ernest Chinnery’s work as a patrol officer with photographs of his patrols in Kumasi, Mumbare and Delta divisions in Papua. His Mount Yule expedition in 1917, visits to the Sepik district and more.  Chinnery’s wife, Sarah, was also a photographer who captured scenes of villages and homes in Papua.

Alex Cameron: The Spencer Collection, another of our formed collections, contains a wealth of photographs of Papua New Guinea. Dr Margaret Spencer, an entomologist, and Dr Terence Spencer, a malariologist, worked in epidemiological studies in Papua New Guinea from the 1950s to the 1970s. The collection includes photographs of Port Moresby, the Wahgi Valley in the Western Highlands, the D’Entrecasteaux Islands of Papua, New Guinea islands, including the Tasmans and Mortlocks, and Bougainville Island. The photographs mostly capture landscapes, village life ceremonies and patrol work over those years.

If you would like to know more about these collections, comprehensive overviews of the Nan Kivell and Chinnery collections are available online. Simply visit our website and navigate to the Guide to Selected Collections page.

James Cruz: The Nan Kivell, Chinnery and Spencer collections can be accessed via our National Library catalogue.

To find this material in the catalogue simply type in the name of the collection in the text box, then select the material format from the Add Limits” dropdown menu.

For example, you can type generate and select picture from the dropdown menu, and this will show you photographs from the Chinnery Collection.

If you're interested in digitised content that you can access from wherever you are, use the National Library's digital material filter on the right hand side to limit your results. For example, this beautiful engraving of a New Zealand chief, part of the Nan Kivell collection, is available to view online.

If you would like to access the original physical material, you can request items in the catalogue using your National Library card, and they will be delivered to one of our reading rooms in Canberra.

If you're interested in looking at other maps and photos that aren't part of these formed collections, the catalogue makes it quite easy to do. By limiting your search to maps or picture under the Add Limits” field, you find plenty more maps and images relating to the Pacific region. There will be a number of those already digitised and freely available on Trove, while others will need to be called up to a reading room to be looked at more closely.

Alex Cameron: Moving on from our formed collections, newspapers and magazines are another excellent source of information for researching the history of the Pacific.

As these give you insights into what was happening in specific communities at a given point in time. The National Library has a very large collection of current and historic newspapers from places such as Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand and the Marshall Islands, which can be searched using our online catalogue to search for newspapers.

Put the place name into the search box. Select newspaper from the “Add Limits” dropdown menu and click find.

Some of our newspapers are digitised and are available to read online. These will have a direct link to the newspaper in the catalogue record.

Others are available as microfilm and paper copies, which can be requested with your National Library card to use in our reading rooms.

James Cruz: You can also use Trove to find historical newspaper articles and magazines about Pacific Nations.

A great Pacific resource that is available through Trove is the Pacific Islands Monthly magazine. The magazine ran for 70 years from 1930 to 2000 and covers news items from Pacific countries. Although originally published in Australia, it does document current events and topics in Pacific countries. Every issue of the magazine has been digitised and is freely available on Trove.

Alex Cameron: If you are looking for current articles rather than historical ones, you can do so using the databases Press Reader and NewsBank Access Global. These databases contain online, newspaper and magazine articles from a wide range of countries, including many from the Pacific region.

To access these databases, visit the National Library website and click the button for the eresource portal. From there sign in using your National Library card. Click the Browse a resources tab and search for the name of the database such as Press Reader. To find Pacific content in Press Reader click the “All Countries” dropdown menu and select the countries you are interested in. For example, if we select Fiji and click done, we can see the full range of Fiji and content in both English and in local languages. In NewsBank, click the items add source list at the top of the page and type the place name into the search box.

James Cruz: Another valuable source of information for researching the Pacific, in particular Fiji, are Indian emigration passes to Fiji. While the National Archives of Fiji are the custodians of the original material the National Library of Australia has digitised the passes to make them more widely accessible. The records in this collection comprise approximately 60,000 passes issued to Indians who came to Fiji as indentured labourers

To find out more about Indian emigration passes and how to access them, our colleagues, Judith and Jack, presented a webinar on this topic. The recording of which is available to watch via the Library's YouTube channel.

Alex Cameron: Oral history recordings are an amazing resource for researchers as they allow you to hear people's experiences in their own words and voices. 

The National Library has been actively trying to preserve these stories with our most recent project to collect Fiji and Australian oral histories. Australia is home to more expatriate Fijians than any other country, and migrants from Fiji have made a considerable contribution to Australian society in music, academia, sports and many other areas. Recording these stories for future generations captures the unique experience and perspective that Fijian Australians have on events that shaped their community and Australia as a whole. Collecting and preserving Fijian, Australian experiences and materials is an ongoing priority for the National Library. More information about this can be found on the National Library website under the Collecting Priorities page.

James Cruz: To find oral histories in our catalogue, enter a person's name or a place name into the search bar and select audio from the “Add Limits” dropdown menu. 

Some of the recordings can be listened to online. For example, here's a clip of Sevuloni Waqatairewa interviewed by Thelma Thomas for the Fijian-Australian Oral History Project,talking about his childhood memories.

Thelma Thomas: So what was it like going to school in Nausori?

Sevuloni Waqatairewa: I was there for a very short time, so the memories I could remember were was the lining up for the classroom. I remember my teacher. I remember trying to adjust and trying to understand the relationship now at school, which is different from my relationship with friends and cousins and relatives in the village. So it was interesting.

Alex Cameron: It is important to note that there are many organisations outside of the National Librarywho hold valuable resources and information for researching the Pacific region.

These organisations include Digital Pasifik, a collaboration between the National Libraries of New Zealand and Australia, as well as the Department of Foreign Affairs, that aims to empower the people in and of the Pacific Islands, enabling them to see, discover and explore items of digitised cultural heritage that are held in collections around the world.

Another is the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, or PAMBU which leads us to a special guest, Kari James, the Executive Director of PAMBU.

Kari, thank you for joining us today and telling us about the work the PAMBU does. 

Kari James: Hi. Thanks for having me here today.

James Cruz: So how about we start off with could you tell us about the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau and how it came to be?

Kari James: The Pacific Manuscripts Bureau or PAMBU, as it's more commonly known, was established at the Australian National University here in Canberra, back in 1968. ANU Pacific scholar, Harry Maude, was finding it difficult to access the primary documentation that he wanted for his research because documents were often in remote parts of the Pacific, which were difficult to access. Or they'd been taken out of the Pacific and were sitting in the archives of colonial powers or church headquarters, or in private hands when business people and others had left the islands.

Maude used to talk to librarians at the Mitchell Library in Sydney and the University University of Hawaii about this problem. And the idea was formed to combine the resources and send someone into the Pacific with a portable microfilm camera to make copies of archival materials and to share the copies with those libraries who had contributed funds to enable these field trips.

Then the National Libraries of Australia and New Zealand also came on board, and so it started out as this consortium of these five institutions.

The initial idea was just to create a catalogue of Pacific Archives, but it was the Mitchell Librarian, Gordon Richardson, who first voiced concern about the damage the tropical climate can do to paper and advocated for making preservation copies of the archival materials themselves.

More than 50 years later, we still operate in much the same way, except that we now use a digital camera rather than a microfilm camera. And there are now 14 sponsoring libraries in the consortium, which has grown from the original five.

Alex Cameron: Okay, so how does PAMBU actually acquire your collection material, particularly from places that are quite remote?

Kari James: So PAMBU doesn't acquire collection material in the way that most libraries would use the term acquire. We don't acquire a physical collection. Instead, we're reformatting or copying archive. Our collection only consists of rolls of microfilm and digital files, and pambo itself doesn't hold the microfilm collection at all. These have all been distributed to the member libraries, including the National Library of Australia. And these libraries then facilitate access for researchers.

The executive officer, who is often the only full time member of PAMBU staff, will travel to an organisation in the region that is interested in having their collection copied and shared. We then work at their premises so those collections don't ever have to be removed from their custodians. 

We do also invite the collection custodians to access restrictions for any materials that might be culturally or politically sensitive. And we also supply the custodian or local library of the choice with a copy of the microfilm or digital. copy as well. 

If needed we also assist with arranging, listing and rehousing collections as part of this reformatting process, and we try to make about three or four of these trips each year.

I haven't made any trips to anywhere too remote, and the pandemic has obviously made travel impossible for the last few years. Most of my fieldwork has been in and around Suva, in Fiji, but I'm working towards a more remote trip next year.

My predecessors have certainly done some more remote work. I always think fondly about Ewan Maidment's beautiful description about visiting the Russell Islands chain in the Solomon Islands to copy records on a plantation. And he writes about traveling by boat and watching with great admiration at the drivers ability to navigate using the stars.

I've also read stories in past issues of our newsletter about flying in small planes and torrential rain and other sort of challenging travel situations.

We also work with collections that are held in private hands. There are a lot of people who have lived and worked in the Pacific as colonial administrators, academics, missionaries, volunteers or business people. And during that time they might have collected community newsletters or kept a journal or taken photographs. And those materials are often just sitting in people's homes and garages when they may actually be useful to researchers.

On a recent visit to a private collection, a Papua New Guinean colleague of mine found photos of his own family and village in this person's photo album, which was really wonderful to witness him seeing these photos of his own family for the first time.

James Cruz: Wow, that's incredible. What kind of materials are collected by PAMBU? What would you most be commonly collecting?

Kari James: Our collecting policy is very broad. We collect from anywhere in the Pacificon really any subject. We prioritise materials that may be at risk of loss or destruction due to the humid climate or extreme weather events or collections that might just be really difficult to access or even be highly sought after.

The materials should also have some research value as well, whether that is personal research for things like family or local history, or whether that scholarly research.

Most of our member libraries are university libraries,so the sorts of materials we copy are usually of interest to academic researchers across a whole range of disciplines.

But we have photos and newspapers and diaries and vernacular publications, things that will be of interest to all sorts of people with a range of interests, with materials on health, politics,economics, linguistics, agriculture, government records. So all sorts of subjects in, in a variety of record formats.

The two most common subjects in the collection are whaling and religious missions.

The religious mission materialsare very useful to all kinds of scholars because they are some of the earliest written documents about the Pacific. We have a lot of records made by the churches themselves, but also a lot of letters and diaries of missionaries which record their experiences and observations. The papers of churches and missionaries are useful for all sorts of research, for contextualising archeological research, giving eyewitness accounts of conflicts like World War One or Black Birding raids. They often document languages and cultural practices, some of which are now endangered. They document historic events, land transactions, whether observations and events which are now being used by climate researchers. And of course, they tell the storyof the spread of Christianity in the region, which is a huge area of scholarly and personal research.

Our current collecting priorities are gathering voices we don't always hear from in early written documents such as Pacific Islanders themselves, women and minority ethnicities. There's also growing interest in Pacific Archives from the environmental history community.

We've not worked in the Northern Pacific as much as we have in the South Pacific, and we'd certainly welcome any opportunities to work with organisations in that part of the region.

Alex Cameron: Would you be able to share some of the history of how items and materials were able to be preserved by PAMBU? It sounds like the precarity of some of these records and for a variety of reasons, that's why PAMBU's working so essential.

Kari James: Most of the projects we take on a fairly straightforward, mostly organisations or individuals will approach us, or we may approach them or offer an introduction that might be made by an ANU researcher who finds collections in the process of their research.

Sometimes, though, there are more urgent circumstances. For example, in 2004, after Cyclone Heta hit Niue and destroyed a lot of government records, PAMBU was invited by the government of Niue to go over and to make microfilm copies of important records that had survived the cyclone.

The Executive Officer at the time, Ewan Maidment, talks about setting up his microfilm camera in a in a shipping container where a lot of the wet records were drying. And he describes having to having black cloth over the entrance to the shipping container to keep out the light for his microfilming but needing to leave the door open because the smell of damp was just so overpowering.

I think that the change in climate means that there is much, if not more risk to archival collections in the Pacific than before. And thankfully there is much greater awareness of this now than when PAMBU started out in the 1960s, but there's still a lot of work to do.

We've also copied some collections where there was perceived or very real risk from civil conflict. In the 1990s, PAMBU copied records in Fiji that had survived an attack during one of the coups. We have also microfilm archives in Solomon Islands that reportedly have since been destroyed by fire during a period of civil unrest. 

And this year I've been working with the PNG National Fisheries College to supply copies of research papers that we microfilmed in their library years ago and library has since burnt down, so it's been great to be able to supply them with copies of some of the materials that they lost in this in this fire.

Now, these circumstance are not in our everyday business for PAMBU, but they do happen and they highlight just how easily documentary heritage can be lost.

James Cruz: That’s just incredible Kari. It's so exciting to hear the lengths that PAMBU must go to sometimes to be able to preserve these records for future generations. So how can the public access these records from PAMBU? 

Kari James: PAMBU materials can be accessed at our sponsoring libraries. The National National Library of Australia is one of three member libraries in Australia. Researchers can come into the Main Reading Room here at the National Library to view PAMBU microfilms. If you're a National Library card holder, I recommend ordering them online in advance so the microfilms are ready to view when you arrive. 

National Library card holders can also access our digitised collections remotely via the Library's eResources page.  You just need to log on to the National Library catalogue with your card details and search for the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau catalogue, under P. From there, you can search our full catalogue and view any of our digitised material.

Most of the collection is still on microfilm, but there are almost 300,000 pages of digitised content in the online database, and this is constantly growing.

James Cruz: Wow, that is a lot of online content. Thank you for coming in to chat with us, Kari.

Alex Cameron: This brings us to the end of our webinar today about researching the Pacific. We have talked about some of our significant Pacific collections and how to access them about our maps, oral histories, newspapers and the Pacific Island Monthly, Digital Pacifik, and of course, about the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau.

If you have any questions about our Pacific collections or anything to do with the National Library, please reach out to us using our Ask a Librarian service. Your question will be answered by one of our reference librarians, and we can spend up to one hour researching your question.

James Cruz: We hope you've enjoyed the webinar and have discovered something new and exciting about our Pacific collections.