Ko nga moteatea, me nga hakirara o nga Maori : he mea kohikohi mai [electronic resource]

Ko nga moteatea (1851/1853)

Governor George Grey was a confirmed bibliophile and amateur ethnographer. One of his contributions towards preserving Maori oral traditions was this collection of songs (waiata), genealogies (whakapapa), and mythological stories. In 1851, Grey commissioned Stokes to print off a number of specimen sheets to circulate amongst his Maori friends and informants for corrections and annotations. This example of the first section has a number of annotations in Grey's handwriting which were incorporated into the final printed version of 1853. Although Grey thought of his collection as documenting an homogenous single culture, and indeed regularised the oral traditions for the print medium, these specimen sheets indicate the lengths he went to in order to obtain accurate versions of his material.