Solomon Islands, 1908 – True Echoes

Collection overview

The WHR Rivers and Arthur M Hocart 1908, New Georgia group, British Solomon Islands Protectorate Cylinder Collection (C108) comprises thirteen recordings from fourteen wax cylinders recorded in 1908 by Dr WHR Rivers and Arthur M. Hocart on the islands of Simbo and Vella Lavella in the New Georgia Group of the Solomon Islands.

These cylinders are part of a group of eighteen; for four, only the cylinder box lids or cylinder box itself still exist. As one cylinder is badly cracked, there are only thirteen recordings. There are ten recordings from Simbo, with British Library shelfmarks C108/378, 381, 382, 773, 1406, 1407, 1409, 1410, 1412, 1413 and three lids from what seem to have been Simbo cylinders, with shelfmarks C108/1408, 1411, 1414. Another two cylinders were recorded on Simbo by men from the nearby island of Ranongga, although there is only one recording, C108/376, as the second Ranongga cylinder C108/377 is badly cracked and could not be digitised. There are two recordings, C108/771 and C108/772, and one cylinder box, C108/770, from Vella Lavella.

The cylinders and cylinder lids C108/1406-1414 came into the British Institute of Recorded Sound in or around 1959, as part of the Sir James Frazer collection at the University of Cambridge. For the others, C108/376-378, 381, 382, 770-773, the provenance is not known (Clayton 1996:87).

Research by Vicky Barnecutt, British Library. With thanks to Tim Thomas, University of Otago, for his help.

The Collection

These recordings were made during the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition to the Solomon Islands in 1908 by the expedition leader Cambridge anthropologist William Halse Rivers Rivers (1864–1922), and expedition member Arthur Maurice Hocart (1883–1939).¹ The third member of the expedition, Gerald Camden Wheeler (1872–1943), left to work by himself in the islands of the Bougainville Straits after two months, and does not seem to have been involved with making the recordings. Our research indicates that these cylinders were recorded on the islands of Simbo and Vella Lavella between May and December 1908.

Six of the cylinders and the three lids (C108/1406-1414) were originally part of the WHR Rivers cylinder collection. These are all brown wax. In 2019, the British Library’s cylinders from Oceania were examined as part of the True Echoes project. Tim Thomas of Otago University identified six more cylinders as being recorded in 1908 in the New Georgia group of the Solomon Islands, by the anthropologist Arthur Hocart (Tim Thomas email to Vicky Barnecutt 24 November 2020).² These cylinders, three from Simbo (C108/381, C108/382, C108/773), and three from Ndovele on Vella Lavella (C108/770, C108/771, C108/772), had previously formed part of the British Library’s unidentified cylinder collection (C680). Unfortunately, whilst the cylinder box for C108/770 indicates that the original recording was from Ndovele, the box now contains a cylinder recording of a British music-hall song, probably due to an accidental mix-up. Three of the cylinders are black wax, and three are brown wax. It was decided that these cylinders should be added to the WHR Rivers cylinder collection, which has been renamed to reflect the fact that both Rivers and Hocart contributed to the collection.

In November 2021, Thomas discovered some of Rivers’ fieldnotes from the Solomon Islands expedition of 1908. Using these, he identified three more cylinders from the British Library’s unidentified cylinder collection (C680) as recordings made in 1908 by Rivers and Hocart, C108/376-378. Two of these cylinders, C108/376 and 377, include recordings made by Ranongga men on Simbo; unfortunately the cylinder C108/377 is badly cracked and so could not be digitised. The fieldnotes indicate that these three cylinders were originally part of a group of eight recorded by Rivers; there is more information on this below.

The recording context

Rivers travelled to the Solomon Islands from Auckland on the Anglican Melanesian Mission’s ship Southern Cross via “the New Hebrides, Banks and Torres Islands, the Santa Cruz Islands and the Eastern Solomons” (letter from Rivers, 14 June 1908, in Bayliss-Smith 2014:284). Hocart and Wheeler came by steamer from Australia. They met up at Tulagi, the administrative centre of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, in early May, and on 11 May 1908, they sought advice from Charles Morris Woodford, the Resident Commissioner, on where they should undertake their research. They decided to focus on the New Georgia group of islands, in what is today Western Province, and arrived on the island of Simbo on 14 May 1908.

Simbo was also known locally as Mandegusu and Narovo, and it was noted on European maps as Eddystone Island. Hocart referred to it as Mandegusu in his fieldnotes.³ It consists of two islands separated by a saltwater lagoon. Simbo is mentioned in two of the recordings. Hocart noted that he and Rivers “worked together” for three months on Simbo, then he carried on alone for a while (1922:71).

Rivers’ fieldnotes indicate that he recorded eight cylinders, including C108/376-378, on or before 13 June 1908. He noted that the first five cylinders on his list, which include C108/376 and 377, were made on Simbo by “Ranongga men” on an unspecified date. The page numbering of the fieldnotes indicate that these must have been recorded before 13 June, noted as the date of the performances for the second three cylinders, which include C108/378. Ranonnga is an island 8 kilometres or 5 miles north-east of Simbo; it was marked on some older maps as Lunga. The ninth cylinder mentioned by Rivers was probably recorded fairly soon after 13 June as it is referred to around 50 pages later (see below). Wheeler left Simbo in early August to travel north to the islands of Mono and Alu in the Bougainville Straits.

The period when Rivers and Hocart worked apart must have been in the middle or end of August, and probably lasted about two weeks. They seem to have worked alone on different parts of Simbo. In the Rivers papers in Cambridge University Library, there is a sketch map that Rivers made of village names around the northern coast of the island (pg. 1299, 1499, 1500). In Hocart’s fieldnotes, the period prior to the trip to Vella Lavella covers a tour to Ove in the southern part of the island. In a note immediately prior to the Vella Lavella section, Hocart speculates about the direction “W.H.R.R.” must have taken around a hill (Thomas email to Barnecutt 16 September 2021).

In September 1908, Hocart and Rivers “joined forces in a tour around Vella-Lavella” on a vessel they chartered from a trader on Simbo (Hocart 1922:71). Hocart noted being “on Joe’s schooner” on 22 September 1908 (p. 881, Hocart fieldnotes); this suggests that the schooner was chartered from Joseph Binskin, a trader who had stations on the islands of Simbo, Ghizo, and Baga (Mbagha) by Vella Lavella.⁴ As this is the only time they visited Vella Lavella, the recordings from that area were probably made during this trip.

At the end of September, Rivers rejoined the Anglican Melanesian Mission’s ship Southern Cross on its voyage back across the Pacific. Hocart travelled to the Roviana Lagoon for about six weeks, then he spent two weeks back on Simbo, two weeks on Kolombangara (Kulambangra, Nduke), and then a final stint on Simbo. The date of Hocart’s departure from the area is not clear, but he left in early January 1909 to travel to Fiji via Sydney to work as a teacher. Hocart noted leaving on 1 January 1909 (Hocart 1922:71), but he also noted that “one of us” i.e. either Hocart or Rivers, witnessed a festival on 3 January 1909 in Kelekele, Ove, which he noted was on Simbo (Hocart 1931:302). As Rivers left the area in October 1908, this must have been Hocart (Hocart 1931:316). Fred Green noted that Hocart left Simbo on 5 January 1909 (letter from Green to Rivers, 5 January 1909, in Haddon papers bundle 12018 Cambridge University Library; Bayliss-Smith 2014:286).⁵

Hocart noted that he and Rivers used interpreters during their time in the Solomon Islands:

“Our work was done through interpreters. Their pidgin was of the most rudimentary description, but as our knowledge of the language improved, their scanty English was richly supplemented with native words. We were frequently able to understand what was said before it was interpreted. Prayers and some stories were taken down word for word and constitute an effective check on interpreted material. Working through interpreters is certainly not ideal, and it is to be hoped that field-workers will in the future undergo a linguistic training and seek to work in the vernacular; but this is not given to all, and it is a great mistake to imagine that because interpreted work is not the best, it therefore is not good.” (Hocart 1922:72).

The Recordists

There is little information to indicate exactly who made these recordings, but the information that we have indicates that Hocart definitely made some of them, and Rivers made others. We do not know if they helped each other. It is also possible that the trader Fred Green was responsible for some of the cylinders, and that Wheeler assisted with others. Wheeler and Green are discussed below.

Rivers’ fieldnotes from the Solomon Islands contain five sheets that refer to the making of recordings on page numbers 452, 453, 502, 503 and 551. Thomas kindly shared these with the True Echoes team, having found them in Rivers’ papers in the Haddon collection at Cambridge University Library. Thomas noted that it had been assumed that these fieldnotes were lost or missing, but in fact they had been filed incorrectly with the Torres Strait material. ⁶ We subsequently identified a fifth sheet that mentioned the phonograph and a recording on page 551.

The fieldnotes document the recording of nine cylinders. Pages 452-3 document the recordings of numbers 1-5. Numbers 1-3 were songs sung by “3 Ranongga men,” with number 1 presumably corresponding to C108/376. Confusingly, the recording does not sound like voices but some kinds of aerophone being played. Number 5, which corresponds with C108/377, features an individual, presumably a man, named Mblei singing a song called mila milo. Rivers noted that this was a “general song sung on any occasion; usually sung at night when together”, with the tune coming from Vella Lavella and the words from Ranongga (Rivers 1908, pg 452). Unfortunately, C108/377 is badly cracked so we do not have a recording for this cylinder.

Pages 502-3 of Rivers’ fieldnotes describe using the phonograph to record cylinder numbers 6-8, “3 records… playing the flute (Keivu)” on the evening of June 13. Rivers noted that all three recordings were of the same piece, a “tune called Meru-meru” by two performers whose names are difficult to decipher, but may be Pandanjiru and Banna. Number 7 is probably C108/378. For this cylinder, the performers held their flutes nearer to the horn, “placed better” for the recording than the previous cylinder, no 6, where “the reproduction could hardly be heard at all” (Rivers fieldnotes, page 502). On the following page, Rivers noted that the meru meru tune belonged to Narovo (Simbo) “old times,” and that it could “be played at any time” (Rivers fieldnotes, page 503).

On page 551 of Rivers’ fieldnotes from Simbo, he noted the use of the phonograph and a final ‘Cylinder No. 9.’. Information in the fieldnotes suggest that this cylinder had two recordings on it, firstly a song called “Jio tu” sung by Nasiwato, and secondly a song called “Nggoni” sung by Tiro. The Nggoni song was from Narovi, and was an “Ordinary song” not sung for a “special occasion” (Rivers fieldnotes, page 551). Tiro was from Tumbi on Simbo, and she was married to the English trader, Fred Green. Nasiwato was her daughter by a previous marriage to a man from Ontong Java. There is a photo of Tiro and Fred Green below.

We do not know what happened to the six cylinders that Rivers listed, cylinder numbers 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 9. Rivers’ fieldnotes from Simbo are on numbered pages, from 400-1100 and 2000-2100. The fact that the three mentions of the phonograph are all in the first 151 pages of the notes may indicate that he made them towards the beginning of his stay on Simbo, although it is not clear whether the fieldnotes were written in chronological order.

Hocart wrote an undated manuscript on “Music” that Thomas kindly shared with the True Echoes project. We were later able to access the manuscript directly from the Alexander Turnbull Library in New Zealand. In it, Hocart discussed music from Simbo, Vella Lavella, and Roviana, and noted that “the singing is generally so low that distinct records were very hard to get even when sung directly into the phonograph” (Hocart “Music” page 1). Most of the references in the “Music” manuscript use “we”, indicating that either Rivers or Wheeler, or both, were also involved in the study and recording of music. The fact that some of the music discussed and transcribed was recorded on Vella Lavella suggests that “we” referred to Hocart and Rivers, at least for those recordings. Hocart noted that “A number of songs were sung for us”, and listed the Mbanyata, the Kera ite, two styles of Gonigoni, the Kera Savo, and the Vuravura (Hocart “Music” page 1). Although Hocart did not specify, it seems that these particular songs were from Simbo. Further on in the manuscript, he noted the Mbaruku; this is written on the cylinder lids of C108/770 and 771 as well as the location of Vella Lavella (Hocart “Music” page 4). C108/772 is recorded as Sirumbai, which Hocart noted was a song from Vella Lavella.⁷

WHR Rivers and Arthur Hocart

Rivers had extensive experience of anthropological fieldwork (Crowe 1998:992), having taken part in the Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits in 1898. During this expedition, a large number of cylinder recordings were made by Charles S. Myers and Sidney Ray, and Rivers must have observed their use of the phonograph. However, there is no evidence of him using a phonograph before the 1908 trip, nor receiving any training in recording. It is clear from his fieldnotes that Rivers found using the phonograph to record on Simbo in 1908 to be very challenging. Of the eight cylinders that he noted recording, one (no. 4) was cracked, and three others (nos. 6-8) were either “awful” or “warped” (Rivers fieldnotes, pages 452 and 502). He had great difficulty recording the flutes being performed; Hocart discussed the same issues.

Hocart was an undergraduate at Oxford and went on to study psychology and phenomenology at the University of Berlin under Carl Stumpf, founder of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv (Thomas 2014:270).

The Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv was part of the Psychological Institute of Berlin. In November 1907, Rivers wrote to Erich von Hornbostel, who became Director of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv in 1905, asking Hornbostel to teach Hocart “methods of recording songs etc with the phonograph”.⁸ Rivers noted that Hocart was hoping to accompany him to the Solomon Islands in the following year, and wrote:

“I am taking a phonograph with me + I am hoping to obtain records not only in the Solomons but also in other places, Hawaii, Fiji etc which I propose to visit on the way”⁹

In a letter to Hornbostel in December 1907, Rivers asked Hornbostel to send the “Anleitung” to him in the Solomon Islands or to give them to Hocart; anleitung means instructions, and may have referred to general instructions on how to make recordings or perhaps the use of a specific model of phonograph.¹⁰

Hocart was 25 years old when he accompanied Rivers to the Solomon Islands. He recorded at least 19 cylinders in the Roviana Lagoon between 2 and 15 October 1908, and these were sent to the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv (Ziegler 2006:155). They are mostly recordings of songs from Munda, the village where Hocart was based on the lagoon, but one of the songs is a Baniata song sung on Munda and another is a Malaitan song sung by two people from Malaita, presumably whilst on Munda. There is also one English and one Fijian hymn sung by two Munda men (noted in Scales 1999).

Hocart wrote to Hornbostel in February 1909 expressing regret that the work he had done for the Berlin Psychological Institute had not been a success. He noted that “it was agreed with Dr Rivers that the Simbo records would be taken to England and the Roviana ones taken with your cylinders”. Hocart then lists a series of technical issues that compromised the Roviana recordings: half of the cylinders were broken in transit; the strap of the phonograph broke; and the recording diaphragm cracked. It is clear from his letter that he had borrowed a phonograph from the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, noting that as he couldn’t use “your phonograph” due to the broken strap, he had to use “a very inferior one of our own.” It is not clear whether the Simbo recordings were made with the superior phonograph from Berlin or the “very inferior” one.¹¹

Hocart lamented that it was not possible to record the “mournful & higher type of music” in Roviana as it was so faint, and that when they asked people to sing louder it altered the character of the music. He also noted that “flutes were quite inaudible in the phonograph however near they may be placed,” and so he wrote down the fingering.¹² The comments on the difficulties in recording singing were echoed in Hocart’s “Music” manuscript (Hocart “Music” page 1).

Hocart noted that he was sending the phonograph back to Hornbostel in Berlin as he could not get it out of customs, presumably in Australia, to get it repaired. Other correspondence in the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv indicates that the phonograph was returned to Hocart in Fiji; it is not clear where it ended up.¹³

In 1909, Hocart went to Fiji where he conducted research in western Polynesia whilst working as the headmaster of a school in the Lau archipelago. He served in the British Army during the First World War and subsequently worked in Sri Lanka and Egypt. He published extensively, but was not able to establish a permanent career in academia.

Rivers continued to correspond with Hornbostel after the expedition. In July 1910, he wrote to Hornbostel in what looks like a reply to Hornbostel’s request for copies of the other records that he and Hocart “took in the Solomons.” He said that he would be happy to let Hornbostel have copies, but asked to put it off for a while as there was “no definite department for such records here” in Cambridge. He noted that both the “new Ethnological Museum and new Psychological Laboratory are either being built or are about to be built,” suggesting that a new department would be started once the building works were completed, and this would avoid him having to have copies made at his own expense. Once this was done, they would be pleased “to arrange full exchanges.” He mentioned both Haddon and Myers in the letter.¹⁴

Fred Green

It is possible that some of these cylinders may have been recorded by Fred Green, an English trader living on Simbo. Green noted that he made and sent cylinders to Rivers in January 1909; in the accompanying documentation he wrote that “l am having a lot of trouble with the cylinders as they are very mouldy and make a lot of noise while recording. Out of 20, I have only been able to send you 4 good records”.¹⁵ We do not know if these four cylinders have survived, or whether they are part of this collection.

Green was married to Tiro, a woman from the hamlet of Tumbi on Simbo. He traded and owned a coconut plantation on the island.¹⁶ He evidently got on well with Rivers and Hocart; in another letter he thanked Rivers for visiting his father, presumably in England.¹⁷

History of the Cylinders

C108/1406-1414

These cylinders and cylinder lids C108/1406-1414 were part of the Sir James Frazer collection at the University of Cambridge that came to the British Institute of Recorded Sound in or around 1959. It is not clear when they were assigned the collection title WHR Rivers Cylinders (C108). The cylinders were first dubbed in January 1984 by British Library sound technician Lloyd Stickells, and writing on the storage box indicates that they may also have been dubbed again on 3 January 1989.

Ian Scales, a PhD student at the Australian National University (ANU), took cassette copies of the recordings to Western Province in 1999. He played the recordings to elders in Ghatere village on the island of Kolombangara.¹⁸ He wrote,

“There was no recognition of the style of music. The consensus, on this matter as with so many others, was that I should have come in the 1960s when the last pre-mission generation was still alive and active. I had extended my inquiries into the method of playing the local bamboo flute, using details taken from Hocart’s precise measurements of an example. I learned how to play that flute (in 1999), but again, it was seen as a curiosity from “time before” (olden days). Similarly with the mouth harp I made from Hocart’s notes and other sources. My main informant, Silas Bio of Ghatere village (c.1943-2003) said that when the white man music of the mission came, it was so sweet that nobody kept the old music. He mentioned an early mission book of choral music, “Choral Anthems”, which he said the missionaries brought. I did find a copy of the book, and indeed it has full SATB scores. This might have been in the 1920s or 1930s, because the Seventh-day Adventist mission came to Ghatere in 1920.”

The cylinders were digitised in May 2001 by Will Prentice, sound engineer at the British Library. He wrote that the cylinders “suffer from speed/pitch problems”; he did not attempt to correct these, but noted that SADiE software would be the only accurate way of rectifying the problem. He also noted that the cylinders “feature a spoken announcement and reference note, which I took to be in the region of a present-day G sharp, based on the music and spoken announcements.”¹⁹

Other cylinders

It is not clear how the cylinders C108/376-378, 381, 382 and 770-773, came into the British Institute of Recorded Sound, but none of them have red-ink labels (Clayton 1996:87). C108/770-773 are all black wax cylinders, and their boxes indicate that they may have been copied from the original brown wax cylinders by Pathé.²⁰ They were digitised in March 2001 by Will Prentice.

Related collections and information

Rivers and Hocart collected around 400 artefacts during their fieldwork in the Western Solomons, including a number of flutes from both Simbo and Ndovele, and bassoons from Simbo. They also took about 320 photographs in the region. The artefacts and photographs are all at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Thomas 2014:253).

Rivers’ fieldnotes are in Cambridge University Library; Hocart’s are in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand.

Wheeler also made a collection of about 198 artefacts that are in the British Museum.²¹ Many of these are from Alu, but around 56 were from the New Georgia group, having been collected on Simbo.

The Percy Sladen Expedition generated at least one other cylinder collection, the Roviana recordings that Hocart sent to Berlin. Some of the cylinders in the British Library’s Unidentified Cylinder Collection (C680) may have been recorded by Hocart or Rivers, but there is not enough information to confirm further individual cylinders. The British Library collection Thomas Edge-Partington 1909-1914 British Solomon Islands Protectorate Cylinder Collection (C83) includes recordings from Malaita, the Bougainville Straits, and New Georgia. The recordings from New Georgia include two from the Ulusagi dialect of the Marovo Lagoon and one example of speech in the Baniata language (C83/1520). However, there is no indication that this collection is linked in any way to the cylinders recorded by Hocart and Rivers, apart from the fact that it includes some recordings from New Georgia and was probably made at around the same time.

Bibliography

Anonymous. 1950. ‘The Hocart Papers in the Turnbull Library’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 59, 3: 268–272.
Bayliss-Smith, Tim. 2014. “Appendix 1.”In Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg (eds.) The Ethnographic Experiment. A. M. Hocart and W. H. R. Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 282–290.
Crowe, Peter Russell. 1998. “Melanesia.” In Adrienne L. Kaeppler, J. W. Love, Stephen A. Wild, Don Niles, Peter Russell Crowe, Barbara B. Smith, Amy Ku’uleialoha Stillman, and Philip Hayward (eds) The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Vol 9. Australia and the Pacific islands. New York: Garland Publishing. pp. 991–994.
Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.) 2021. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Twenty-fourth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International.
Hocart, Arthur Maurice. 1922. “The Cult of the Dead in Eddystone of the Solomons.”The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 52: 71–112, 259–305.
Hocart, Arthur Maurice. 1908. Fieldnotes, pp 1–1596. [Manuscript] Hocart, Arthur Maurice 1883-1939: Papers, MS-Papers-0060. Wellington, New Zealand: Alexander Turnbull Library. Microfilmed c. 1975 by the Alexander Turnbull Library. https://tiaki.natlib.govt.nz/#details=ecatalogue.9564
Hocart, Arthur Maurice. n.d. Music. Typescript about the music of Simbo Island. [Manuscript] Hocart, Arthur Maurice 1883-1939: Papers, MS-Papers-0060. Wellington, New Zealand: Alexander Turnbull Library. Microfilmed c. 1975 by the Alexander Turnbull Library. https://tiaki.natlib.govt.nz/#details=ecatalogue.9564
Hocart, Arthur Maurice. n.d. Handwritten note to Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, listing contents of the wax cylinders. Berlin: Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv.
Hocart, Arthur Maurice. 1922. “The Cult of the Dead in Eddystone of the Solomons”. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 52: 71–112, 259–305.
Hocart, Arthur Maurice. 1925. “Medicine and Witchcraft in Eddystone of the Solomons”. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 55:229–270.
Hocart, Arthur Maurice. 1930. “An Anthropologist in the Solomon Islands”. The Listener.
Hocart, Arthur Maurice. 1931. “Warfare in Eddystone of the Solomon Islands”. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 61:301–324.
Hviding, Edvard and Cato Berg (eds). 2014. The Ethnographic Experiment. A. M. Hocart and W. H. R. Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Rivers, William Halse Rivers. 1908. Field notes (12073). In: Haddon Papers 12000-12086. W.H.R. Rivers Collection. Box 130. Rare Manuscripts Collection, Cambridge University Library (AJCP ref: http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1146092941)
Rivers, William Halse Rivers. 1914a. Kinship and Social Organisation. London: Constable & Co. Available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/44728/44728-h/44728-h.htm
Rivers, William Halse Rivers. 1914b. The History of Melanesian Society. Two volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b31362692
Scales, Ian. 1999. Document on Hocart wax cylinders. London: British Library Sound Archive, World and Traditional Museum archives, May 1999.
Thomas, Tim. 2014. “Objects and Photographs from the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition”. In Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg (eds). The Ethnographic Experiment. A. M. Hocart and W. H. R. Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 252–281.
Waterhouse, J.H.L. 1949. A Roviana and English Dictionary. Sydney: Epworth Printing and Publishing House.
Ziegler, Susanne. 2006. Die Wachszylinder des Berliner Phonogramm-Archivs. Veröffentlichungen des Ethnographischen Museums Berlin, 73. Berlin: Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Collection overview

The Collection

The recording context

The Recordists

WHR Rivers and Arthur Hocart

Fred Green

History of the Cylinders

C108/1406-1414

Other cylinders

Related collections and information

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