Rowan Henderson:

Afternoon everybody and welcome to the National Library of Australia. My name is Rowan Henderson and I'm the Acting Director of Curatorial and Collection Research here at the Library. I'd like to begin by acknowledging Australia's First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of the land, and give my respect to the elders past and present and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. I'd also like to welcome anyone who hails from Vanuatu who's visiting us today, either in person or online.

Thank you for attending this event, coming to you from Ngunnawal and Ngambri country. I'd also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that now might be a really good time to turn off your mobile phones or any other devices, so that they don't interrupt the presentation. This afternoon's presentation is titled 'Recovering Vanuatu's indigenous literature', and it's by Professor Matthew Spriggs, an honorary 2025 National Library of Australia Fellow.

Our distinguished Fellowships programme supports researchers to make intensive use of the National Library's rich collections through residencies of three months. Professor Matthew Spriggs is the Honorary Librarian of the Vanuatu and Pacific Collections at the National Library of Vanuatu, part of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, and is also an Honorary Curator of Archaeology in the Vanuatu National Museum.

He's a dual Vanuatu and Australian citizen resident in Port Vila, Vanuatu. He's an Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University since 2021, having researched and taught there between 1987 and 2021, in the fields of Pacific and Islands Southeast Asian Archaeology. In his presentation today, Matthew will discuss the project to locate all known publications in the 135 indigenous languages of Vanuatu, formerly known as the New Hebrides, with a view to documenting the resource, and providing copies for the National Library of Vanuatu collections.

In his time at the NLA, Matthew has taken a deep dive into the significant collections held of New Hebrides missionary publications from the former personal library of the late Sir John Alexander Ferguson, a noted judge and bibliophile. So please join me in welcoming Professor Matthews Spriggs.

Matthew Spriggs:

All right, thank you very much. See, I'll take this off because it'll bang into things. Alright. Yes, that's what I'm going to talk about and Rowan has told you who I am. I noticed in the next Census that we'll be allowed to put down four different ethnic identities. So I suppose my best description would be a Cornish-Australian ni Vanuatu. So that's only three.

I'll have to come up with another one. Okay, the background to the project and then the question of who's interested in this stuff. As Rowan mentioned, Vanuatu was formerly the New Hebrides from 1774 to 1980, named by Captain Cook rather mysteriously given that the landscape, there's no relation to the old Hebrides that I can see at all. But anyway, he did, and that's when the literature that I'll be talking about was written during that period after Captain Cook.

How I got into this project, I don't really understand why I'm standing up here doing this or why I applied for a National Library of Australia Fellowship because I'm not a linguist, nor am I a theologian. And 99.9% of the literature that exists in Vanuatu indigenous languages is religious literature, bible translations, hymns and catechisms and such.

And I suppose I was inspired though by a Vanuatu Linguistics conference. It was held a couple of years ago, I think 2023. When having started my volunteer work at the National Library and having realised that we had a very good collection, National Library of Vanuatu, that is. We had a very good collection of materials in Vanuatu indigenous languages. It was quite clear that a lot of the linguists who were attending had no idea of the existence of this literature. And various linguists would say things like, until I produced this little book for the school last year, there was nothing written in this language at all.

And quite often this was clearly not the case. And the literature of Vanuatu goes back to 1843. In fact, and when I mentioned this to the assembled linguists, they were all stunned and amazed and started pouring into the Library to have a look at some of this material. Also, in my role in the National Library of Vanuatu, people often come in and ask Vanuatu, local Vanuatu people turn up and ask for materials in their own languages.

Do we have anything in my language? Or they say things like, 'My grandfather used to have a hymn book in our language, but a cyclone came and destroyed his house and it's gone. Do you have a copy?' And for quite a long time, if we didn't have a copy of the National Library of Vanuatu, I knew exactly where there was likely to be a copy. And that was indeed in the National Library of Australia.

And as Rowan mentioned, the incredible collection of Sir John Ferguson whose hobby, instead of collecting exotic bird stamps or coins, was collecting the products of the mission presses of the New Hebrides as you do. And amassed an amazing collection of many hundreds and hundreds of extremely rare publications in the Vanuatu languages, why they're all really very rare is because of course these were produced for the use of communities in Vanuatu who spoke these particular languages.

And so the vast majority of the copies were not on sale in bookshops or anything. They were sent to Vanuatu for people to use during their daily lives. And up to 180 something years of termites, cyclones, earthquakes and everything else has meant that there are virtually no copies of anything very early in people's houses in Vanuatu today. So many of these books are extremely rare.

What I'll go on to do, oh, I should have mentioned the most important fact is that Vanuatu has 135 indigenous languages. Although I must admit, I saw something yesterday that suggested 138. So the numbers, they keep discovering new ones, which is the greatest number of languages per head of population of any country in the world.

So it's one of Vanuatu's many claims to fame as well as the invention of bungee jumping, which of course is based on land diving on the island of Pentecost. And I'm sure Vanuatu has many other claims to fame as well. Now what I'm going to discuss here, a few results of the fellowship. I should briefly describe a very serendipitous meeting, which is add added to it. I'll talk about two mysteries, two sort of gems of discovery that I've made during the research and a mystery that's been solved.

So that will be the content of the talk. In terms of future research, there's much more to do. Of course, these projects are pretty much open-ended. So I tracked down the last remaining extremely rare texts that we know of, but we haven't seen copies of yet. So I'll be doing work as I note on the slide there in the Mitchell Library, perhaps some more work, the Auckland Public Library, the Turnbull Library in Wellington, Cambridge University Library, which holds the Bible Society, British and Foreign Bible Society collections.

And they also have the 'Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge' collections, which are on catalogued at present, and represent other publications. And the aim in the end is to produce a bibliography of the materials in Vanuatu indigenous languages, excluding Bislama the pidgin now becoming a creole because there is now a very large literature in that recent literature.

And also to make copies available to people in Vanuatu, become interested in materials, in their own languages. And working with the National Library, I hope to get a large number of works in Vanuatu languages available on Trove and also the Pacific website whose name I've forgotten, Digital Pacific as well. Yes, so that people will have greater access to them.

Right. Now, as I said, the kind of audience really for this material are linguists that I mentioned and also ni Vanuatu readers seeking copies of texts or anything in their own language. Also, as I've come to find out, local Bible translators who want to compare previous translation efforts that they can work with are also an important audience.

And also I think this material is important for historians of Christian missions of education in Pacific countries such as Vanuatu, who are studying the history of literacy and also related topics such as the contribution of Polynesian teachers who were really the first missionaries based in Vanuatu and other as they're called.

This must come from some Indian language, Pandits who are the local people who worked with the missionary on the translation of texts. The missionaries very rarely would've just written the thing out based on their own knowledge of a language. They would have committees of people, and these are very rarely mentioned in the history, but they are there in the missionary magazines being mentioned and in letters and other materials.

So that's a piece of research that would be very important to do. And as I note, even the occasional archaeologist is interested in this kind of material. Okay, the major sources are Ferguson who did a, he wrote three out of a projected five volumes called 'A bibliography of the New Hebrides and the history of the Mission Press.' So he got up from the southernmost, inhabited island in Aneityum to Epi and Ambrym, towards the north.

And this is a really invaluable source. And it was privately printed, only 20 copies made. And of course there's multiple copies actually in the National Library of Australia. Father O'Reilly, he's apparently correctly called. Obviously the grandson of some Irish migrant to France wrote the 'Bibliographie des Nouvelles-Hebrides'. And there it's interesting because there are many works in Vanuatu indigenous languages.

Which he notes down as jamais rencontré, like he'd never seen a copy, he'd only heard about it. And not surprisingly, many of these works are actually in the National Library of Australia. So they do exist. And the third source very useful, although it never claimed that its bibliography was at all comprehensive.

The work by the late great John Lynch and the late great Terry Crowley, two linguists who worked extensively in Vanuatu, their book, 'Languages of Vanuatu, a survey in bibliography.' So these are major sources that I've been able to use.

There's other known sources of materials in Vanuatu languages and the holdings at the National Library of Vanuatu, which came very largely from the Presbyterian Church of Vanuatu archives. I've produced a shelf list of that. And the material we have is Presbyterian church or Summer Institute of Linguistics who do Wycliffe Bible Translators, who do a lot of Bible translating. We are missing in our Library, many Anglican and the very few Catholic works in Vanuatu languages.

And then the usual other sources that I've been able to investigate during the fellowship. There are some lists, for instance, published of publications by the British and Foreign Bible Society. And also there are bibliographies of publications of the Anglican Church, many of which were published in the Solomon Islands during the G. But the major collections that exist, and these are quite, they're very well kind of organised in a way because they are the collections of Sir George Grey, who was the earliest collector of these materials.

A lot of the first generation of missionaries in Vanuatu sent copies of their works to Grey. And in many cases, these copies are the only copies that exist of these early publications. These are the ones from the 1840s, 1850s. And Grey's collection, according to Father O'Reilly in his 'Bibliographie des Nouvelles-Hebrides' are considéré comme perdu. They were considered to be lost and he was basing his listing on a bibliography of Grey's collection that was done, I think in the 1860s.

But it turns out, and for this information, I thank my colleague in Vanuatu, Stuart Bedford. Grey's collection has in fact survived in its entirety and for reasons unknown to me, sits in the Auckland Public Library system. So not in the National Library of New Zealand, the Turnbull, but in the Auckland Public Library. And I presume this is during COVID when they had not many visitors. A large amount of this material is fully digitised and available to anyone in the world, including somebody sitting in the National Library of Australia like myself.

So I've downloaded all of the Vanuatu material that they have digitised and it is an incredible collection. Secondly, of course, there's David Mitchell's collection after whom the Mitchell Library was of course named because based on his collection in the State Library of New South Wales. And he's like the next generation. So he was in touch and collecting, really in sort of the 1880s, around that time. And he's the generation before our very own speaking from the National Library of Australia perspective.

So John Ferguson, who really started collecting around 1912, 1913. As you can see, he passed away in 1969 and he was certainly actively collecting material well into the 1950s. So his collection, he built up over a very long period of time. Now, when I talk about literature in Vanuatu languages, I'm not including things like dictionaries, grammars, word lists and such, or texts collected by linguists and published more recently.

I am talking about actual literature that was produced mainly before 1980. And as I said, over 99% of this work are Christian religious texts. Okay, the fellowship itself. So John Ferguson, who he was, so John, he was 1961, New Zealand born, but we'll forgive him for that. Australian lawyer, judge, book collector and author of the famous infamous even seven volume bibliography of Australia, which includes books published prior to 1901 and I believe is still the standard reference used by librarians today.

And I've seen copies in the staff areas of the National Library and actually all over the building. So it's obviously still a very important work. And as I mentioned, he did the 'Bibliography of the New Hebrides' as well. The fellowship here as well as looking at the Ferguson collection has also given me the time to follow up other leads. So far I've only managed to spend one day in the Mitchell Library, but next week I shall spend two more days there immediately after the fellowship is finished. Actually checking up on materials which we don't hold here at the National Library.

And also I have spent some of my time downloading material from the Auckland Public Library system. Now during the course of the fellowship, because I did the fellowship in two parts. Six weeks in sort of February, March, April and then six weeks just coming to an end. Now in the middle of that I had a visit to Europe and I ended up one night at St John's College dining in College at High table in Cambridge. And afterwards I went up to have some coffee and there was a guy standing on his own looking a bit lonely.

So I went up and said, 'Hello, you know, kind of who are you?' And he said, 'I'm the Digital Officer of the British and Foreign Bible Society. And he said, 'And over here's my mate, who's the CEO. I was like, 'Do I want to talk to you guys?' Because I know that of course many of these publications were published by the British and Foreign Bible Society that was very active during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

And I didn't know at the time that their entire collection, which used to reside in Bible House in London, which they doubtless sold for many billions of dollars and moved to Swindon. I didn't realise that they didn't take their library there. They instead donated it to the Cambridge University Library, which was a few hundred metres from where I was standing when I learned this.

So I was able to establish contacts there and I went to visit them and the collection is overseen by the Redoubtable, Reverend Onesimus Ndungu and Neil Studge, as he's known Rees of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Digital Officer.

He took me in there to meet Onesimus and they have fantastic collection and they also are quite willing to get stuff digitised and turned into machine readable form. Which would be very useful for people who are doing Bible translations and hymns and translating hymns and things like this.

Now, I said at the start that I don't really know why I'm doing this project, given that I'm not a linguist or a theologian. But Reverend Onesimus, he assured me, he said, 'Matthew, it's God's will that you're doing it.' So I thought, 'Oh, it's as good as an explanation cause I can't come up with any other explanation actually of why I started this project or why I'm doing it.' But anyway, it was great. And I will be doing obviously stuff that I can't, materials that I can't find here or in the Mitchell Library.

I will be heading at some stage in the next two years, hopefully to Cambridge to have a look in their collections there. Okay, the current collections in the Vanuatu National Library, I said, as I said there from the SIL Summary Linguistics Presbyterian Church, we've got quite a good collection. For instance, in the northernmost province of Torba, the Banks and Torres, there are 11 languages we hold, eight works in three of them, Sanma, Santo and Malo.

There are 15 languages known. We hold 42 works in six of these languages, Penama, Pentecost, [unclear], Maewo. There are 10 languages we hold, 15 works in five of them. And in Malampa, which is Malakula and Ambrym, Malakula which has an enormous number or did have an enormous number of languages, 24 current languages and 15 which are moribund or extinct. We have 53 works in 10 of these languages.

On the island of Ambrym, there are seven languages and we hold in the National Library of Vanuatu 12 works and six of them. And in Paama and Lopevi, there's one language we hold eight works. So we hold just from Malampa province alone, we hold 73 works, many of which are extremely old. Now what I've been able to add just basically by going through the Ferguson collection is an enormous amount of material. This is just for the islands of Epi, Paama and Ambrym as recorded in Ferguson's last volume, he published in 1943, and I won't read this out, but I'd note that the Bieria language of Epi, there were seven works listed in Ferguson, the National Library of Vanuatu held one.

And I've been able to add from the National Library of Australia collection six more. So we have a complete record of everything written in the Bieria language, at least until 1914, which is the last one that Ferguson recorded. And that language is moribund. There are a few old people who can speak it, but it's not been passed on. Another interesting language that Tasiko dialect of Lewo on Epi. Which would probably now under the new way they're calculating the number of languages of Vanuatu would be considered a separate language.

Ferguson listed seven works in that dialect or language. The National Library of Vanuatu only had one. I've added six so that again, we have a complete record of everything I believe ever published in the Tasiko dialect or language. And Tasiko is completely extinct. Now this material will be available so that if people decided to revive it, there are several hundred pages of text in this material. Which again, I would suggest is almost completely unknown to linguists or other interested people.

Now, of all of these languages, National Library of Vanuatu has 12. The fellowship here has allowed me to add 41, and there are only three more to locate of the ones listed by Ferguson, 1943. That's an increase of 71% in the amount of works in languages just of those three islands. So the fellowship has been extremely valuable to us at the National Library of Australia.

If we go south to Shefa province, so the Shepherds' Efate and Tafea, Tanna, [unclear], Futuna and Erromango, and Aniwa. For Shefa, I mentioned Epi already, apart from Epi, Efate and other parts, the National Library of Vanuatu had 46 works in four out of the five languages, which are known from that area, 54 works. And for Tafea, where there are eight languages and two moribund and extinct languages on Erromango. National Library of Vanuatu held 56 works in eight languages. So the Vanuatu total that we have in the National Library of Vanuatu is 248 works in 45 languages out of 135 known Vanuatu languages.

Many of them have never been written down and some have never been studied by linguists either. Just adding to that from the fellowship here, the total added to the 56 works that we held in the National Library of Vanuatu is 113. So a grand total of now 169 works from Tafea, which again is an increase of, in this case, 67% over what we held before. And there are more to be found, particularly I think in the Mitchell Library.

Okay, the earliest three publications in Vanuatu languages all came out in 1843. I dunno how well you can see the first one there. That's particularly interesting. This was being worked on the island of Tanna at the point when the missionaries were expelled by the Tannese in January, 1843 after disease outbreaks for which they were blamed. And they were on page 11 of the text in their own printing press when they had to quickly jump on a boat and get out of there to avoid being killed. And I'll talk a bit more about that one in a minute.

The copy that we have here is just a photographic copy of an original held elsewhere. Secondly, and this, I've been working on Aneityum, the southern most inhabited island since 1978, and I think no one else on the island of Aneityum, ever knew that there was a publication from 1843 in the Aneiteumese language. So that was a pretty major discovery to be found here. Ferguson had reported in his 1943 book that he had located a publication in the language of Futuna, also in Southern Vanuatu from 1843.

And that was believed to be the earliest known book in a Vanuatu language. But we actually have three from 1843. And it's worth noting that the volume from Futuna, the [unclear] Futuna, which was put together by two Samoan teachers who were sent over there by the London Missionary Society. They were landed in 1841, and they would've sent the text that was published in 1843 in Samoa over on the missionary ship Camden in June, 1842.

But while this was being printed, they were all murdered, killed and eaten. Cooked, and eatened, murdered, cooked and eatened on the island. And this was unknown to the London Missionary Society until their next visit in 1845 when they discovered that this was the case produced. So this was being printed at a time when the people who had actually written it, who were Apela and Samuela of their names as recorded.

Which of course are Europeanized names, they had already been murdered. For Aneityum, the volume would've been produced by Tavita and [unclear] who were both, again Samoan teachers dropped off by the London Missionary Society land in 1841, and they sent the text to the book back in June, 1842 to Samoa, where it was printed. For Tanna, the publication, there had been Polynesian teachers sent to Tanna in 1839, [unclear], and in 1840 another one they were joined by [unclear].

There were two other teachers who died of diseases and they were there on hand to help George Turner and Henry Nisbet, who were the first resident missionaries in Vanuatu and were landed in June, 1842. And Turner and Nisbet would've learned some of their Tannese, or learn the Tannese language that they were able to pick up in very large part from these Polynesian teachers who some of whom had been there for three years already.

But as I said, they had to flee while printing the first volume of [unclear] and as well as Turner and Nisbet, the Polynesian teachers were also withdrawn to Samoa at that time. And I think it's important to mention, as I said, the people who actually did much of the work apart from the European missionary, the European missionary would've had the theological knowledge for the Bible translation. But much of the actual wording would of course inevitably have come from their interaction with in this early case Polynesian teachers and later the Pandits.

I love that. It's a great word, Pandits I think. Okay, the first mystery is the [unclear], the Tannese volume where the National Library of Australia only holds a photographic copy. Where is the original? And tipped in by Ferguson into the volume, he talks about the original being in possession of H. M. Ballou of Honolulu, Hawaii. And so I was able to find out a bit about Mr Ballou, and there's a photograph of him there from the 'Mid-Pacific Magazine' of April, 1913.

And he was an important character. He was a professor at, I guess what became later, it wasn't called then the University of Hawaii. And he was very largely responsible for putting together for a local rich guy, George Carter, an amazing library particularly of Hawaiian imprints. So I guess Carter and Ballou were the equivalent of a sort of John Ferguson in collecting the products in this case of the mission presses of the Hawaiian Islands.

Now, I mentioned that the other early works were printed at the London Missionary Society press in Malua, Upolu in Samoa, not in the building illustrated there, because that wasn't completed till October 1844. But that was a very long standing press that was established in 1839 in Samoa. And the 'Samoan New Testament' was printed here in 1848. They also printed the 'Old Testament' later, but that was printed in England by the British and Foreign Bible Society and they published all sorts of publications.

Now this is the second mystery because the first known publication in the language of South Efate called Nafsan, or the Erakor language is from 1864. But in an article in the 'Samoan Reporter', which you can get on Papers Past, which is the New Zealand equivalent of Trove. There's a report from the printer dated March the 2nd 1846, JP Sunderland and he mentions 500 catechisms for Tanna, the island of Tanna, which are printed in 1845, which I'll show you in the next slide.

Oh, there's a picture of it there too. But also spelling books for Lifu and Negone, which are in the loyalty arms of New Caledonia and also Vate, which means Efate in Vanuatu and apart from this account, which Stuart Bedford again put me onto just a couple of weeks ago. I don't know of any other reference at all, to the existence of a spelling book from 1845 to 6 at all. So whether it exists, I don't know, but we'll keep looking.

Maybe there's a copy in Samoa, I don't know. But also I was amazed to see that in this short period of months, he claimed to have printed a copy of 1,033,200 pages at the printing press. So this was an industrial scale printing press they had going there in Samoa, but we'll keep looking for that. Now the next three books published in Vanuatu languages, two in the Nafe language of Port Resolution and one in Aneityum, the two from I downloaded these, all of them from the Auckland Public Library website.

These were all part of Sir George Grey's collection and the two published in the Port Resolution or Nafe language of Tanna. These, it's recorded in various missionary writings that these were in fact composed by the Polynesian teachers who had fled Tanna, [unclear] and under the direction of George Turner. So again, these are very much produced by the Polynesians. You'll notice that the second one is the [unclear], which is the successful version of the 1843 publication produced obviously in karma conditions in Samoa.

So we have the 1845 version does exist. The Aneityumese 1, 1849. The [unclear] I think means like first book or something like that, that was produced by Reverend John Getty who had trained in printing before he began his missionary career on an Aneityum in Vanuatu in 1848. But he had the benefit of the presence of two Samoan missionaries who were present when he turned up Peter and [unclear] is the only names that we have for them.

And they helped Getty learn Aneityumese and also be able to produce this work. So again, it's not just the white missionaries whose names should be associated with these texts. The earliest texts from the island of Erromango 1853 and 1859. The first was printed again on an item in 1853 and the second work was printed by George Gordon, another missionary martyred on the island of Erromango in 1859, using the same printing press which had been transferred from Aneityum to Erromango.

And the interesting thing, and this is where linguists kind of wake up do your job, is that today Erromangan, standard Erromangan that people use as their indigenous language is really a melding of two different languages called Enyau/Yocu is one of them, and Sorug/Sye. And so it's really a mixture of two languages that were originally separate. And these texts must be in Enyau/Yocu before this merger occurred. The merger occurred because of a massive as happened on every island in Vanuatu, a massive depopulation.

So these would be linguistically very valuable because they date from a time before that occurred. Okay, the first of the two gems is the earliest hit parade in Vanuatu because the Reverend D. L. Patterson, who was on the island of Malo just off Santo from 1902 to 1925 in a volume which we have here in the Library of the 'Maloese: Primer and Hymn' book. He had annotated, I think you can see there with the dates of the services at which these hymns were sung.

And some of them there's one or two where they were never sung, presumably people couldn't get the tune or he didn't know the tune. And others, which are extremely popular and one of them is one of my favourite hymns. 'We Plough the Fields.' So here we go.

Matthew Spriggs (singing):

Ka celecele tano, ka lauo cinia, moiso alo man' kiri, cod a bo sile ra, cinau tari mo viti a etc, etc. Anyway, I never sung in Maloese before, so it's a first for the National Library of Australia. Oh, thank you.

Matthew Spriggs:

Okay. The second gem comes from the island of Aneityum, and this is a version of, again, the same work they did various editions. This is the 1856 edition of Nitasvitai Uhup', the first book, and this was the first book printed on the newly delivered printing press. And the old printing press went to Erromango where Gordon, the Gordons used it.

The Auckland copy is annotated, it has, I think about the pronunciation of the different letters in the Aneityumese alphabet. And this is interesting because under G, so when you see the word, the letter G, it's pronounced 'nga', like that. Linguists call it something, but I can't remember what it is, but that sound the 'nga' sound.

Now later on, this was not recorded in Aneityumese and G has the value of 'ing'. So it went from being 'nga' to 'ing'. It may have been somewhere in between, I don't know. But there is a 'nga' sound in Aneityumese. And the Aneityumese for many years complained that the missionaries couldn't quite get it.

So it leads to the mispronunciation of words or the misspelling of words I suppose in the missionary text. And it would be interesting to know more about this because when missionary Inglis, who sent this copy to George Grey, when he did a grammar of an Aneityumese in 1882, he doesn't have this 'nga' sound at all. But it was there at the start. So again, linguists, linguists, come on.

The other thing that I find particularly interesting, this is as an archaeologist, is that the parts of that printing press that turned up in 1856 of which this was the first publication are still on the site of the printing house on Aneityum, which I dug up in 2014, 2015. And you can see there the, can you say, oh, I think you have to bring it over here. Oh yeah, there we go.

Okay, this is a Colombian printing press. That's the kind of printing press it was. Now, oh, hang on, let's go. Sorry about that. Yeah, the Colombian, can I get it? Yes, I can. This bit there that goes, there is that bit, so it's upside down and that bit there is that part of the press. So the press has never left the site since 1850, 1856. And I excavated the printing house and it's absolutely covered in lead type.

I have boxes and boxes of lead type because what it seems that the printing house, when it went out of use because it became cheaper to print in Australia or New Zealand. It appears that it one day just collapsed sideways and all of the type would've been in racks and went everywhere. And for generations Aneityumese kids have been foraging these lead type and boiling them up, using them for fishing weights.

So the fishing weights of Aneityum for many generations been using the lead type, but the number of lead types lying around is in the tens of thousands. So anyway, but that was, I thought it was nice to see a book printed, the first printed book printed on a press, which is still on the site today on that island a hundred and whatever it is, years later, 150 years later or plus. Okay, now finally have I got time?

Yep. Finally, just one of the most wonderful results actually of the fellowship was being able to solve a mystery which had been exercising the linguists, the late great John Lynch and myself. Since the 1990s, both of us independently had been asked by the Aneityumese, 'Can you find out what our traditional numbering system was because we don't use it anymore.' And the current numerals that people use, are ithii, erou, esej, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10? See? So only the first three obviously are indigenous words.

And you can see this in the missionary publications. There we see Eksotus, nitaasviitai sekunt. Second is aged a Moses, the second book of Moses Deuteronomy is the fifth book. And then also a wonderful quotation about faiv ache nareto igcaki, um ero ache numu or five loaves and two fishes. And the five is faiv and the two is ero. So it's something which people feel they've lost. There are early accounts, but they're not particularly helpful in large part because George Turner, who was the missionary, you had to flee Tanna.

He did write down the numbers up to 10, but the printers couldn't read his handwriting. And so they thought what was an E was really a C. And so we get nijman celed et ethi. Well, cled isn't a word anybody's ever heard of in Aneityum. It's not in any of the text. The linguist Capell who lived in Sydney in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, he kind of thought, 'Oh, well gosh, it's not celed, there isn't such a word, so it must be [unclear]. So he came up with his version of it.

As you can see, some of these were recorded by people early on, but not the full set one to 10. And the reason is that the missionaries tried to suppress the numbering system because they found it not suitable for the teaching of arithmetic. And you can see how well they did in suppressing the language in that table there, which gives variation in Aneityum numerals by various Aneityumese people who were born at these particular dates, 1917, 1920, 1925 through to 55.

And you can see that some of them were confusing, four and five, some were confusing, five and something else, and people just really didn't have any idea. Well, as part of the fellowship, when I got onto the Auckland Public Library site, I found, and it wasn't digitised, so I had to send a friend of mine to go and have a look at it.

I found that Inglis, the Reverend John Inglis arrived on 1852 and 1859 had sent a handwritten grammar of an Aneityumese to George Grey, George Grey in New Zealand. And in 1882 he published a grammar of Aneityumese, but it had no section on numerals, but the 1859 handwritten version did, and here they all are.

So this is sort of almost from the horse's mouth, they lost numerals in all their glory. And I was able to get a copy, a courtesy of Guy Lavender Forsyth who managed to get a digital copy from the Auckland Public Library. And so we can now restore the full collection. That's just a closeup. It says 'All beyond this [i.e. 20] is et a hinag many, many, or many. One thing we did miss in 1995 was a note in the linguist Sidney Ray's book, 'The Language of the New Hebrides' on page 163, quotes R. Fraser, are saying 'The Aneityumese for six is (n)ikman um elid et ethi.'

And that in fact is very close to the truth because when you look at the version that we came up with, the best we could do, we hadn't quite got it right. So we had say for eight we had meled esej, whereas eight is actually nikman um eled et eseik or [unclear] as it would be today. So we have been able to solve finally, after our first attempt in 1995. In 2025, we've solved the mystery courtesy of the fellowship here and being able to have the time to access the wonderful collections of the Auckland Public Library from Sir George Grey.

And in conclusion, there's much left to do. There are many further sources to check beyond the National Library of Australia. We've increased the number of works already, the language of Tafea by 67% and for Epi, Paama and Ambrym by 71% of those listed in Ferguson. And it is similar for other areas. I just haven't had time to because I'm still frantically happy snapping away at things I haven't had time to calculate.

We really should, I know that dead white men are never very popular these days, but I think we really should be very glad that give a major thank you to Sir George Grey, David Scott Mitchell and John Ferguson for having the strange desire to collect the missionary products of the missionary presses of the New Hebrides. And we now have material in Vanuatu languages beyond early wordless back to 1843. So we can document 182 years of linguistic change in including materials in moribund or extinct languages and from before the major demographic collapse.

And this is important because on a Aneityum, for instance, as part of my PhD, I was able to document that the population declined through, introduced European disease was 94% and the language has changed. It's simplified. So it used to have a whole bunch of noun classes, things you can eat, things you can kill, things you can drink, and they have gone. But they are preserved in these early texts.

So in terms of being able to study linguistic change, these collections are absolutely critical. Also, the aim of the project, we will make available a large body of material for ni Vanuatu communities that they're interested in seeing of interest too to Bible translators, linguists and historians. And many new projects are suggested by the work.

And one of the important ones, I don't have time to do it, I'm getting too old, but it would be a great PhD or something to really look at who were the Pandits? The people who assisted with the translations of all these Bible stories for which and Bible translations for which usually we only have the name of the resident missionary.

And just to acknowledge that, first of all, of course the National Library for the fellowship, the National Library of Vanuatu staff and the cultural centre staff and various people have helped with the project. And with that picture there of King Charles III, a pig belonging to my brother-in-law, it's good night from him. Thank you very much.

Rowan Henderson:

Thank you, Matthew. That was fascinating. So we have some time for some questions now. But as we're recording, please put your hand up and someone will come around with a microphone before you ask your question. I've got one for you, Matthew. I was just wondering, you're an Honorary Librarian at the National Library of Vanuatu. Could you tell us a little bit more about the Library and the good work that they're doing and any challenges that they're facing there?

Matthew Spriggs:

Right, well thank you. They made me the national librarian because I donated my own library, which was quite extensive to them. And I think they thought I was going to catalogue it all, but that's not really what I do. I'm a bit of a fake librarian in that sense.

The challenges that we have at the National Library has an incredible collection of Vanuatu material and with my own library. And then another, several libraries have retired or passed away academics that I've been able to persuade their families to let me fossick through and pull out things. We now or will now have when the material gets there, a library of regional significance in various areas, particularly in anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology. And just one example, we were able to obtain the library of Jeff Siegel, who was probably the world's top expert on pigeon and creole linguistics.

And so we now have a library, probably the best in the Southern Hemisphere on anything to do with pigeon and creole linguistics. So if you want to know about North American Black English, then I don't know how many works the National Library of Australia holds, but we hold many in the National Library of Vanuatu.

So the aim is to build up a major regional collection covering really the whole of the South Pacific. Our biggest challenges are, well in the earthquake of December 17th last year, all the books fell off the shelves and it took us three months to put the ball back. As you don't in a library, you can't just put the books back on any shelf, you've got to put it back on the right shelf, the right order. So we have the problems like that which are sort of specific to our part of the world.

And also we don't at present have any environmental control. The building was built to take advantage of trade winds and things like this, which is obviously it wasn't designed by librarians. But we are working on plans to have our storage area properly kept to the right humidity and temperature.

And I know the German government has already made a tentative promise to give us a considerable sum of money to help with that. And we'll also be hitting up the Australian government who built the building, which opened in 2014. So it is a very nice building, it's just that it doesn't have the proper environmental controls for storage in a tropical climate. So they're really our major challenges that we have.

Audience member 1:

Yeah, thanks Matthew. It's such a fabulous collection and as you say, it has so many implications for so many people. I wonder if it now forms part of these discussions around a serial nomination for a memory of the world inscription with UNESCO that's happening for a bunch of South Pacific libraries.

Matthew Spriggs:

Yeah, I haven't even discussed or thought about that, but yeah, certainly that material, especially because of the 182 or whatever it is, I'm not very good at maths years of linguistic change. It is an incredible resource and would be the kind of thing that would be well worth nominating for the memory of the world.

And hopefully, I know I've been discussion with people here, including Rowan at the National Library. If we can get a project together and get this material digitised, then it becomes accessible not only to people who wander into the Vanuatu National Library, but to anyone in Vanuatu with a mobile phone.

As everybody, the mobile phones in Vanuatu will have Facebook built into them. So everybody has some degree of internet access in the country and mobile phone ownership I think is above 90% of the population. So that's the way to do things. It's through mobile phones, digital copies.

Audience member 2:

Matthew, thank you so much. It's great. I realised I know nothing about Vanuatu and its languages, so it's been a complete revelation. I did know they had quite a few languages, but 135 and counting is remarkable and occurred to me as you were speaking, who were the boundary setters?

Who decided where one language stopped and another one started? Or to put it another way, are they entirely discreet languages or can they be grouped? Could there be movement between them? Were the degrees of bilingualism, multilingualism so people could move seamlessly from one language to another? And are there major differences or are they really bones of areas of contention? Like between Scots and English, for example?

Matthew Spriggs:

No, well that's about 15 questions. I'm sure. I won't remember all of them. The Vanuatu languages form into two subgroups and north central Vanuatu languages. So all the languages of the north down to Efate are fairly closely related. And then the languages of Tafea, the southernmost province, where the languages have often been described, it sounds a bit derogatory, but it's not meant like that as barren languages. They're very different from each other. So that's the first point.

The boundaries were really established by, I guess by, and perhaps Sebastian who is a real linguist, might correct me there by Daryl [unclear], an academic at a ANU like Daryl [unclear], who did a linguistic survey and basically walked over the whole of Vanuatu to almost every village recorded word lists and then compared the word list between them and had a cutoff at I think 80%. If the shared basic vocabulary was shared over 80%, then it was one language and if it was less, it was two languages.

So that's how the boundaries were originally established. More recently, I think ni Vanuatu have become involved and it's really the number of languages they used to say there were 104 languages until a few years ago. But with a new way of calculating what's a language which is based much more on if people think that they are speaking a different language than somebody else.

It might be something where using the kind of somewhat arbitrary figures of if shared vocabulary, more than 80%, their dialects of each other and below that their languages. But if you, if people think that they're speaking a different language than people in the next village, that's what's up the numbers now to 135, perhaps 138 now. So it is much more now a self description as to whether people think they're speaking a different language.

Despite the north central Vanuatu languages being in a single subgroup, they are quite different. There is a language, for instance in South Pentecost called Sa, which has 15 dialects. So almost every village that speaks it somewhat differently than the one next door. And part of the reason, it's an interesting case, why there are so many languages in Vanuatu because in Fiji, which was probably settled two weeks after Vanuatu some 3000 years ago, there are arguably somewhere between two and six languages depending on how you define them.

And Vanuatu, which is like I said, settled presumably two weeks earlier, there's 135 or 138 languages. And the reason is that people in Vanuatu are playing a particular game with languages, which is to separate themselves from the next group. In some areas there's one language per archipelago, but in Vanuatu they're using language very much in an emblematic kind of way to sort of say, this is us and they're somebody else.

That said on the question of multilingualism, I think before European influence, it was quite normal for people to be able to speak up to five languages depending on if they had particular trading connections. A lot of groups married outside of the group, so particularly women would come into a group who would speak a different language. So that's quite common.

And so yeah, people were multilingual in many cases. I remember my late father-in-law who was a great creator of songs in the language of North Pentecost language called Raga. That he would always say it's not a good song unless it's got at least three languages in it. And this is very common in Vanuatu that people are singing songs with several languages in them or they're singing songs in languages they can't understand, but which they have learned.

And there's a particular very long song that's to do with a women's ceremony to take high rank, and they sing a song and no one can understand a single word of it. And when you ask them, well, what language is this? They say, oh, it's old Raga, but it's actually not. It's a totally, totally different language, which is now extinct called [unclear]. And it only exists in songs that nobody can understand. So people love playing with languages, playing with their own language to make it different and incorporating in various contexts, other languages to make it a good tune. Oh, one last one.

Audience member 3:

Did any of the people who translated the Bible and those things into the local language, do the reverse and translate into English what they heard of the songs of the people they were translating? Sort of relates to your previous point, actually.

Matthew Spriggs:

Yes, sadly, many of the missionaries had a very negative view of local culture and customs, and many of them were not interested in recording, for instance, stories in languages or giving translations of stories. There are some exceptions, but often they were more interested in suppressing the local culture and their use of the language was just so that they could proselytise the population more effectively.

Audience member 3:

Not like [unclear], for example.

Matthew Spriggs:

No, no. There are some examples of people who were particularly some of the Anglicans, Codrington who was the second bishop of Melanesia. He wrote several major studies of the culture and customs of people, some other missionary types. I think Capel was actually an Anglican priest in Sydney, and he certainly produced texts of traditional stories in languages and with translations to English, yeah. Okay.

Rowan Henderson:

Thank you very much Matthew. And thank you everybody. I'd also, anyone who's interested in learning more, we have a wonderful guide to our Pacific collections on our website, so please check that out. And also there is a kind of a true for Pacific collections, which is called Digital Pacific that Matthew mentioned earlier.

So that's all digitised material relating to the Pacific from a number of institutions. So please go online and check those out. Also, I've got a couple of quick plugs that I've been asked to give. We hope that you can join us for our next Fellowship lecture, International students and the Australian community, which will be delivered by the 2025 National Library Fellow Dr Anna Kent at 12:30pm on Tuesday 2nd of December.

Our website is also the place where you'll be able to find recordings of recent talks and performances from our Fellows. These are also available on the Library's YouTube channel. So thank you very much for attending today, and please join me once again and congratulating Matthew Spriggs for today's presentation.