Pacific Manuscripts Bureau in 2002

Ewan Maidment, PMB executive officer

The Bureau continued its program of overseas fieldwork in 2002. Working with the Cook Islands National Archives in Rarotonga, the Bureau arranged, listed and microfilmed records of the Cook Islands Federal Government and the early New Zealand colonial administration of the Cook Islands, 1890-1910.

In Suva rare serials were microfilmed as part of a joint project with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community aimed at locating, copying and indexing Pacific scientific serials. The archives of the YWCA in Fiji were also microfilmed in Suva. Registers of Melanesian plantation workers indentured to Deutsche Handels und-Plantagen Gesellschaft in Samoa were microfilmed in Apia.

Projects in Australia in 2002 included microfilming the Samoan journal of Rev E. G. Neil in Adelaide, Sepik patrol reports and related papers of Kenneth Thomas in Victor Harbor and baptism registers of the Queensland Kanaka Mission in Sydney. Papers of Dorothy Crozier, the first Western Pacific Archivist, including Tongan archives collected by Beatrice Baker, have been arranged with the help of Mrs Sioana Faupula and are being microfilmed by the Bureau in Canberra.

Further archives microfilmed during 2002 in the Bureau's studio in Canberra include: ACTU reports on Pacific Islands trade unions; 10 000 cuttings from the Chilean press on Easter Island, 1972-2002, collected by Dr Grant McCall; correspondence files of the Australian Office of the Pacific Islands Company Limited and Pacific Phosphate Company Limited, 1897-1909; Graham Hamilton's Papuan patrol reports and related papers, including a copy of Rev. Norman Crutwell's report on UFOs in Papua which is the basis of Randolf Stow's novel, Visitants; and the unpublished autobiography of Rev Norman Cocks, Australasian Secretary of the London Missionary Society.

An annual distribution of 109 reels of microfilm and 35 audio CDs was made to each of the Bureau's members early in 2002. The Bureau presented a set of its Fiji Oral History Project CD recordings of Marsali Mackinnon's interviews with Europeans and part-Europeans in Fiji to the University of the South Pacific at an official ceremony in Suva in December. The Bureau continued its new audio archives program, producing digital masters of an oral history interview with Jai Ram Reddy, the Indo-Fijian politician.

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