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COLLECTED SONGS AND LEGENDS

       FROM THE SOUTHERN COOK ISLANDS                          John JK Hutchin & Percy Hall (ed Bob O’Brien)

In early 2007 Va’aomanu Pasifika and the NZ Electronic Text Centre of Victoria University of Wellington updated its web resource “Tidal Pools: Digitalised Texts from Oceania for Samoan and Pacific Studies” with the addition of another Dorset Enterprises’ project – “Collected Songs and Legends from the Southern Cook Islands” (http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-HutColl.html )

 

This set of transcripts came into being as Bob O’Brien neared the end of his service at Wellington College of Education and on into his retirement after1997. Between other projects, mainly book publishing activities, he gave time to attempting to make reliable digital transcripts of most of these items, for he had immediately seen that  such a collection could well become an important resource for future academic study about language, society and the values of Polynesians who occupied the islands of the group during a time of European colonialism and rival Christian missionary expansion.

 

Among the last folders of the Hall Collection that he skimmed through in the Turnbull Library late in 1993 were some school copy/exercise books that contained dozens of pages of Maori, written in the main by John JK Hutchin (Atoni to his Cook Island converts) and which Percy Hall (Oro) must have found at Takamoa Mission in Avarua, Rarotonga. Some pencilled annotations in Hall’s script helped Bob to guess that the material was probably quite important. He decided that Hutchin and Hall must have both seen merit in recording the legends and songs of the era, and so made time to sit down with a person (or persons more likely) who must have patiently dictated, perhaps sang, a considerable number of items, while the missionaries continued to improve their command of Cook Island Maori by making the transcripts.

 

Bob had his eighty-something year-old Cook Island consultant, Kaitara Nicholas, of Lower Hutt, read some photocopies of a few samples, and he confirmed Bob’s guess. It must have been then that Bob decided that there was definitely a further project for his retirement in these three or four folders, so this was when he sought the permission of the Hutchin and Hall families to proceed with this task.

 

Bob’s thought was that if he transcribed the content of most of the copy books, then Kauraka Kauraka would perhaps be able to edit what Bob supplied him with. Kauraka was, until his untimely death a year later, the Chief Archivist for the Cook Island Government, a linguist, poet and song-writer. Bob hoped that between them they may be able to produce a parallel text in both Cook Island Maori and English that someone may see merit in publishing. Such a work could be of considerable value, because Bob hoped that it would supply insights into the language of the time, as well as the versions of legends and songs that were then in vogue.

 

The Turnbull Library officers gave approval to both of them to proceed with the project and Bob, by then, was clocking up a few hours each week gradually improving in his ability to read a language that he didn’t have command in, and from time to time that he had legibility problems with, as he slowly made a copy for his computer. In time, Bob started on an exercise book that had obviously been written by Hall, so that changed his understanding of how this collection had been assembled.

 

In February 1996 Bob made contact with Kauraka again, reporting another step forward in the project intended to bring to the world something of the culture of the Cook Islands from the second half of the Nineteenth Century. On the disk that Bob sent to Rarotonga was the first set of the material that he had found at the Turnbull Library and he had been able to transcribe since their meetings at Rarotonga in September 1995. Bob hoped that what he had written there would aid Kauraka in his attempts firstly, to correct whatever peculiarities in the Maori that Bob may have produced, and secondly, to facilitate a possible translation.

 

Bob was sure that Kauraka would be interested in the songs, for as he became more familiar with them, their language patterns and rhythms, the more he sensed that Kauraka and his contemporaries may get some pleasure from putting them to music if, as Bob suspected, at least some of them may have been “out of circulation” for some of the past century. Bob would be keen to learn of any current versions, if they have endured.

 

Kauraka’s death, Bob’s inability to make contact with another possible collaborator, and the growth of the Dorset Enterprises book publishing output, meant that the pace of further work on the “CI Songs and Legends “ digital transcription and attempts at translation, slackened.

 

During 2005 Bob tried to proof-read his original computer-held transcripts and made some attempt, in spite of his very limited ability in reading CI Maori, to categorise what was a random collection of items recorded by Hutchin and later edited by another LMS teacher and missionary, Percy Hall. Hall’s Papers were lodged with Alexander Turnbull Library (http://www.natlib.govt.nz ) in the 1980s after lying in a family home at Marton, New Zealand.

 

This was where Hutchin’s material had been stored for most of the twentieth century. Bob had made much use of Hall’s files in Below the Bluff at Nikao and obtained permission from his daughters to use the material, including the collection of school notebooks, in possible future publications. After 1995 he maintained an ambition to “do something” with the linguistic and cultural treasure trove, for in all probability he was the only person to know of its existence. The decision of ATL to create microfilm copies of the Hall papers in 2005 was another stimulus for Bob’s giving more time to the project. Proof-reading became easier.

 

In early 2006, Bob consulted with Teresia Teaiwa of VUW Pacific Studies department about the possible value of this collection of Cook Island Maori transcripts. She immediately saw that it had potential as a source to be included in the VUW Electronic Text Centre’s Tidal Pools Digitized Texts from Oceania for Samoan and Pacific Studies. Teresia applied for, and was awarded, a grant for the development of this project by VUW Senior Management Team in late 2006. Alison Stevenson and Samantha Callaghan then advanced the ETC part of the final presentation, that is now accessible through “Tidal Pools”. Bob is pleased to be able to identify them as further contributers to this taonga.