Herries Beattie Digital Collection Launch

On 6 June, a delegation from the Ngāi Tahu Archive travelled to Ōtepoti for the launch of the Hocken Collections' digital collection of ethnographer James Herries Beattie’s extensive papers. Fittingly the launch date would have been Beattie’s 143rd birthday.

Beattie was an avid collector of the stories and place names of Te Waipounamu. In the early decades of the twentieth century, he travelled the island by train and bike, interviewing local people.

His collection of published and unpublished work has been used, in combination with other traditional knowledge and sources, to inform the WAI 27 Waitangi Tribunal Claim, to identify place names for Kā Huru Manu, and for the preparation of biographies in the Tāngata Ngāi Tahu: People of Ngāi Tahu series. The significance of the Beattie papers was recognised in 2018 when the collection was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World New Zealand register.

The launch event bought together multiple generations of Beattie’s descendants, local Kāi Tahu, Hocken staff and the wider community to celebrate the work of Beattie and the massive project to digitise this collection as part of the Hocken’s Kāi Tahu Digitisation Programme. The Ngāi Tahu Archive and local Papatipu Rūnaka have worked together with the Hocken Collections on this important project.

The Ngāi Tahu Archive was presented with a collection of the digitised records at the launch, which will in time also be made available on Kareao. For now, the digitised records can be explored through the Hocken Digital Collections portal:
https://hocken.recollect.co.nz/pages/beattie