Traditional Lifeways of the Southern Maori

University of Otago Press, 1994. Spine faded, foxing to pages. Previous owner name inside. Transparent adhesive covering book.

Journalist and researcher James Herries Beattie worked with New Zealand's southern Maori for almost 50 years and produced many books of research. With a strong sense that traditional knowledge needed to be recorded, in 1920 with Otago Museum support, he interviewed people from Foveaux Strait to North Canterbury and from Nelson and Westland. He then transcribed notebooks lent to him by his informants, recorded southern names for fauna and artifacts, travelled to traditional sites, and consulted the work of earlier researchers. Finally, he worked his findings into the systematic notes that eventually became MS 181 in the Hocken Library, a highly valued but increasingly fragile treasury of knowledge.