Traditional Lifeways of the Southern Maori: The Otago University Museum Ethnological Project, 1920 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. Editor Atholl Anderson introduces Traditional Lifeways of the Southern Maori - first published in 1994 and now reprinted with a new ISBN - with a biography of James Herries Beattie, a description of his work, as well as details about his informants. This classic book of research is a wonderful source of knowledge, unique in New Zealand literature. As Tipene O'Regan writes in his foreword, "Ngai Tahu will be the richer for the emergence of this remarkable text. Maori studies, in general, will be the richer. The texture of southern knowledge will be better etched in our landscape."