Vanuatu, 1924 – True Echoes

Collection overview

The Eric Raff 1924 Efate, New Hebrides Cylinder Collection (C83) is a set of twelve black wax cylinders recorded in 1924 at Port Vila on the island of Efate in Shefa Province, Vanuatu, formerly known as the New Hebrides Condominium. The collection was previously known as the RAI Vanuatu Cylinder Collection. Research conducted by the True Echoes team has ascertained that the recordist was Eric Maitland Kirk Raff (1892–1927), an Australian Presbyterian missionary who was based at Port Vila on Efate from 1917 to 1924.

The cylinders have British Library shelfmarks C83/1498 to C83/1509; they came from the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) in 1983. Three cylinders, C83/1504, C83/1506, and C83/1508, are broken and could not be dubbed.

Research by Vicky Barnecutt, British Library. With thanks to Christopher Ballard, Australian National University, Sarah Walpole, Royal Anthropological Institute, and Meto Nganga, Chief of Mele, for their help.

These black wax cylinders came into the British Institute of Recorded Sound (BIRS)¹ in 1983, along with two other cylinder collections.² The accompanying memo card from the RAI listed the three collections, but very little information was known about them, and there were no clues as to the recordists. The memo is dated 13 February 1980, and seems to have been an internal note from the RAI that was then included with the cylinders when they were passed to the BIRS. The card listed this collection as “12 phonograph cylinders. Compiler and date not indicated. Songs from Efate, Pango. Typed list. Also transcriptions and translations of each. 2 cylinders broken”. There are now three broken cylinders.

There is information on the lids and sides of the cylinder boxes; this is handwritten in two different writing styles. The writing in ink appears to be that of Eric Raff; it is very similar to his handwriting in a letter to Baldwin Spencer at the Melbourne Museum.³

Original documentation

This collection was accompanied by 28 sheets of transcriptions and translations. All the pages are neatly typed on a paper watermarked ‘Oceana Fine’ with handwritten corrections on a number of the pages. The notes start with a two-page ‘Records’ list. There are between one and three pages per song, with each song’s pages being held together with a small, rusty metal pin. This handwriting does not correspond to the handwriting in the corrections on the transcriptions and translations.

The Recordist: Eric Raff

Identifying the recordist

Chris Ballard of the Australian National University was able to suggest that Eric Raff was the recordist from the limited information that we had. With that name, we were able to corroborate his identity from records in the Royal Anthropological Institute archives. In 2015, Eve Haddow made the connection between the recordings made by Raff mentioned in correspondence with the RAI, and the collection in the British Library, but unfortunately the information provided by Eve was not integrated into the British Library’s documentation for this collection.

Eric Raff

Eric Raff was born in Victoria, Australia, on 29 March 1892, and studied for a BA at Melbourne University. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in Melbourne on 18 October 1916, and formally appointed as minister of the Margaret Whitecross Paton Memorial Church in Vila on the same day.⁴ He married Ruth Baird on 9 December 1916, and on 17 January 1917, they left Australia for Efate in what was then the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides. They stayed in Vila from 1917 to 1924 (Miller 1987:72, 444).⁵ They spent time in Melbourne on furlough in 1919.

Raff was evidently active and energetic in his mission activities. Correspondence from William Milne, a fellow Presbyterian missionary who lived on the island of Nguna off the north coast of Efate, Raff made use of the mission station’s launch to make pastoral visits to the villages on the north coast including Havannah Harbour every month or so (Milne 1918b, 1919a and b). Milne evidently liked Raff, noting that “[t]he more I see of Mr Raff the more I like him, he seems so sensible, and has a good way with natives” (Milne 1918b). On his departure from Efate in 1924, the Synod adopted a Minute of goodwill which noted that Raff was “an all-round good man,” and that he “displayed wonderful wisdom and tact in many difficult situations, and left Vila with the good will of all, natives and whites, British and French” (quoted in Miller 1987:73). His role as minister of the Paton Memorial Church as well as “missionary to the native labourers recruited for work in the Vila plantations” was “recognised as the most difficult post in the Mission”, according to fellow missionary Maurice Frater (Frater 1921).

Both Eric and Ruth Raff seem to have had good relations with local people during their time on Efate. For example, evidence indicates that they were friends with Nganga, the Chief of Mele in the 1920s. Nganga’s grandson, Meto Nganga, a clan chief of Mele, has provided the True Echoes team with a great deal of information about some of the people mentioned in the recordings. He shared this copy of a letter from Ruth Raff to his grandfather Nganga from 13 May 1920 in which she apologised for not being able to attend an event; Meto’s information indicates that this ceremony was the ordination of Nganga as Chief, as alluded to in the notes in the top left corner of the letter ⁶ (Meto Nganga email to Barnecutt 13 January 2022 and 02 February 2022).

It is also clear that Raff was competent with some of the modern technologies of the time, and proficient in the local language. The Synod’s Minute of goodwill also noted that he was “a handy worker”, and that whilst in Vila he learned “the art of printing” to publish a monthly newspaper “in the native language,” as well as the Mission almanacs (Miller 1987:73). The “native language” referred to was the language of Erakor (Meto Nganga email to Barnecutt 02 February 2022); Erakor is also known as South Efate or Nafsan [erk]; today there are around 6,000 speakers of the language (Eberhard et al 2021:15).

There is at least one photo that Raff took in 1920 in the Presbyterian Research Centre archives⁷, and Milne noted that Raff lent him some slides for a magic lantern show⁸ (Milne 1918a).

Chris Ballard (email to Barnecutt, 3 June 2021) noted that Eric “was evidently very humane (he’s fondly remembered in Havannah Harbour), and deeply interested in local kastom – he walked up to the abandoned interior village of Saone”. Eric collected a trumpet made from a conch shell at this village, at least one of which is now in National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh. He wrote some notes on the shell’s history and its ritual importance that are recorded in the National Museums Scotland catalogue.⁹ Similarly, Raff collected two shell axe blades and a sharpening stone, which he recorded as having been arranged in a pile in a site on Efate “near Fila [Ifira] Island where some Polynesians settled temporarily before moving off to Emai [Emae]”.¹⁰ This suggests his possible interests in the migration of people in the area in the past. Several items are also attributed to villages where Raff made audio recordings including Mele and Pango.

Raff corresponded with Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer (1860-1929), who was Honorary Director of the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne from 1899-1919. The institution, now known as Melbourne Museum and part of Museums Victoria, holds 28 artefacts and three photographs associated with Raff. In 1923, Raff gave the museum an overmodelled ancestral skull from Malakula and a coconut water carrier from Efate. The other items were donated in 1940 and 1963 by Janet and Edith Raff, understood to be Eric’s sisters. According to correspondence with Baldwin Spencer in 1918, Raff additionally arranged for a large collection of material culture items collected by missionary trader Ewan McAfee to be shipped to Melbourne.

Locations and Languages

The map below shows locations related to this cylinder collection. The red pins show Port Vila, where the recordings were made, and the villages of the performers. The blue pins show locations that are mentioned in the recordings.

Lelepa / Leleppa Island, Mele / Meli Island and Pango are mentioned in the recordings and there are performers who were also from these locations.

The Cylinders

According to correspondence between Ruth Raff and Sir Everard im Thurn, Eric made these recordings “in Vila … early in 1924” (Raff 1927b). She mentioned thirteen 4-minute Edison phonograph records; the collection only comprises twelve cylinders now. It is not known what happened to the thirteenth.

After leaving Efate at some point in 1924, due to Eric’s failing health (Miller 1987:72), the Raffs travelled to Scotland where Eric took up a position at St Mary’s Manse at Hawick, part of the Church of Scotland. On their arrival in Scotland, Eric wrote to both the Edison Bell Works and the Gramophone Company as he wanted permanent copies of his “phonograph records” made; neither company could help (Raff 1927b). Ruth noted that they also tried to enlist the help of Alfred Cort Haddon – “a friend at Cambridge (an ethnologist whom we had met in the Islands) tried to interest Dr Haddon, but apparently nothing came of it – I think they said their funds were low!” (Raff 1927b).

It is not clear who this friend at Cambridge was. Two anthropology students from Cambridge worked in the New Hebrides in the early 1920s, and they both probably passed through Vila on their way into and out of the country. Clarence Blake Humphreys visited the southern New Hebrides, probably in 1920, and his report formed the basis of his Masters dissertation at Cambridge which was examined by Haddon in 1923. It is not clear whether he stayed on in Cambridge after this. Thomas Theodore Barnard took part in an expedition to the northern New Hebrides in 1922-1923 with the biologist John Randal Baker. Barnard was a doctoral student at Cambridge and wrote his thesis on marriage regulation there, based mostly on the notes of WHR Rivers.¹¹ He moved to South Africa in 1926.

In July 1926, Eric received a reply from Thomas Joyce, Deputy Keeper of the Department of Ceramics and Ethnography at the British Museum, indicating that he would purchase Raff’s “New Hebrides Records” at 5 shillings a piece (Joyce 1926). On 30 August 1926, Eric loaned an artefact collection from Havannah Harbour and Pango (Efate), Southwest Bay (Malakula) and Nogugu (Northwest Santo) to the Royal Scottish Museum, now the National Museum of Scotland.¹² Research into related collections by Eve Haddow suggests Raff was an intermediary for fellow Presbyterian missionary artefact collectors located on other islands in the New Hebrides. He died on 22 March 1927 in Bournemouth; he was 34 years old.

After his death, Ruth contacted Everard im Thurn, former Governor of Fiji and also an ex-President of the RAI, to ask for his advice on what to do with the recordings. From the correspondence, it is clear that Thurn was interested and willing to help. Ruth noted that she did not want the “many legends, which my husband collected” or the “valuable phonographic records of old native songs (both legends & songs fast dying out)” to be lost to science “if they are of any use at all” (Raff 1927a). Thurn asked Ruth to send him “typewritten copies of all of the notes together with a concise statement by yourself as to your husband’s stations and work in the N. Hebrides and, especially, as to the places where he collected his material” (Thurn 1927).

The correspondence indicates that Ruth stayed in Edinburgh from 13 April until some point after 11 May 1927, during which time she typed up all of the legends to give to Thurn; she mentioned “more interesting notes on early Efate” that she could send to him later (Raff 1927d). It is not clear whether this material has survived. It is also not clear what happened to the cylinders, but it seems likely that Ruth took Joyce up on the offer of 5 shillings per cylinder, as she indicated to Thurn that she could drop them off at the British Museum when she visited London in early June before her departure for Australia on 16 June (Raff 1927c). Ruth’s handwriting matches the small samples of handwriting in the original documentation noted above, in particular her distinctive style of writing capital Ts.

The level of detail on the accompanying notes, including corrections on the covering list of Records as well as on the transcriptions and translations indicates that both Eric as recordist and Ruth as transcriber / typist knew the languages. The fact that the performers are named, with an individual named Nganga providing translations for the three songs on C83/1502, indicates that Raff worked closely with local people on these recordings and the accompanying notes.

The cylinders were dubbed onto tape in 1983, soon after they arrived in the British Institute of Recorded Sound, and digitised in May 2001 by Will Prentice, sound engineer at the British Library. They were transferred again in 2010 by Kevin Lemonnier, probably from DAT to digital file.

Related Collections

On 30 August 1926, Eric Raff loaned an artefact collection from Havannah Harbour and Pango (Efate), Southwest Bay (Malakula), and Nogugu (Northwest Santo) to the Royal Scottish Museum, now National Museums Scotland. The Efate artefacts match most of the locations at which he recorded.

In 1923, Eric Raff also made two donations to the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, now Melbourne Museum, with his sisters Edith and Janet giving a further 26 artefacts in 1940 and 1963. The material currently in Melbourne came largely from Efate, Santo and Malakula islands, with the addition of a piece of barkcloth identified by Eve Haddow as in the style of Erromango island. There are no artefacts that relate to the sound recordings.

There was no further information about the cylinders in Thurn’s papers in the archives at the RAI, beyond his correspondence with Ruth Raff. James Hamill, Curator at the British Museum, searched the British Museum archives but could not find any evidence of the cylinders being purchased or donated to the British Museum in 1927, and no additional information on the collection, for example no evidence of correspondence between Raff and Joyce in 1926. Alison Clark, Curator at National Museums Scotland, looked for but did not find any additional information from Eric Raff in the NMS archives.

Bibliography

Ballard, Chris and Nicholas Thieberger. 2006. ‘Language and Ethnography on the Mission Frontier: Daniel Macdonald at Havannah Harbour, 1872–1905.’ Paper presented at the 2nd Australian National University Missionary History Conference, ’Asia-Pacific missionaries: At home and abroad,’ August 2006.
Capell, Arthur. 1942. ‘Notes on the Fila language, New Hebrides.’ Journal of the Polynesian Society 51: 153–180.
Clark, Ross. 1998. A Dictionary of the Mele Language (Atara Imere), Vanuatu. Pacific Linguistics. Canberra: ANU Press.
Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2021. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 24th edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International.
Joyce, Thomas Atholl. 1926. ’T.A. Joyce, Dept. of Ceramics and Ethnography, British Museum to Rev. E.M. Raff.’ Ethnomusicology Committee. Wiley Digital Archives: The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. No Date. http://WDAgo.com/s/5bb00889. Accessed 8 June 2021.
Lacrampe, Sebastien. 2017. Description and Documentation of Lelepa, an Endangered Language of Central Vanuatu. Endangered Languages Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-000F-BAF7-9. Accessed on 4 May 2021.
Macdonald, Daniel. 1898. ‘The mythology of the Efatese’. Paper read at the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science 7:759-768
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Milne, William. 1918a. Letter from William Milne to Alexander Don, 8 January 1918. Presbyterian Research Centre archives GA0146 New Hebrides Mission – Staff Files – Rev WV Milne 1915 to 1919. 2/8 1984/0018 AA13/116. Emailed to Barnecutt 22 August 2021.
Milne, William. 1918b. Letter from William Milne to Alexander Don, 28 October 1918. Presbyterian Research Centre archives GA0146 New Hebrides Mission – Staff Files – Rev WV Milne 1915 to 1919. 2/8 1984/0018 AA13/116. Emailed to Barnecutt 22 August 2021.
Milne, William. 1919a. Letter from William Milne to Alexander Don, 8 February 1919. Presbyterian Research Centre archives GA0146 New Hebrides Mission – Staff Files – Rev WV Milne 1915 to 1919. 2/8 1984/0018 AA13/116. Emailed to Barnecutt 22 August 2021.
Milne, William. 1919b. Letter from William Milne to Alexander Don, 4 March 1919. Presbyterian Research Centre archives GA0146 New Hebrides Mission – Staff Files – Rev WV Milne 1915 to 1919. 2/8 1984/0018 AA13/116. Emailed to Barnecutt 22 August 2021.
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Raff, Ruth. 1927b. Letter from Mrs. Ruth Raff to Sir Everard im Thurn, 14 April 1927. Ethnomusicology Committee. Wiley Digital Archives: The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. http://WDAgo.com/s/3bf69adf. Accessed 8 June 2021.
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Raff, Ruth. 1927d. Letter from Mrs Ruth Raff to Sir Everard im Thurn, 10 May 1927. Ethnomusicology Committee. Wiley Digital Archives: The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. http://WDAgo.com/s/211a4c36. Accessed 8 June 2021.
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Thieberger, Nick. 2004. ‘Topics in the Grammar and Documentation of South Efate, an Oceanic Language of Central Vanuatu.’ PhD thesis, University of Melbourne.
Thieberger, Nick, and Chris Ballard. 2008. ‘Daniel Macdonald and the “Compromise Literary Dialect” in Efate, Central Vanuatu.’ Oceanic Linguistics 47(2): 365–382. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20542820?seq=1 Accessed 8 June 2021.
Thurn, Everard im. 1927. Letter from Sir Everard im Thurn to Mrs Raff, 29 March 1927. Ethnomusicology Committee. Wiley Digital Archives: The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. http://WDAgo.com/s/0ab2924b. Accessed 8 June 2021.