This article was downloaded by: [Michael Webb]On: 14 August 2015, At: 14:51Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG

Click for updates

The Journal of Pacific HistoryPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjph20

Heart, Spirit and Understanding:Protestant Hymnody as an Agentof Transformation in Melanesia,1840s–1940sMichael WebbPublished online: 14 Aug 2015.

To cite this article: Michael Webb (2015): Heart, Spirit and Understanding: Protestant Hymnodyas an Agent of Transformation in Melanesia, 1840s–1940s, The Journal of Pacific History, DOI:10.1080/00223344.2015.1071756

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2015.1071756

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &

Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

Heart, Spirit and Understanding: Protestant Hymnody as an

Agent of Transformation in Melanesia, 1840s–1940s

MICHAEL WEBB

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the ways Protestant hymnody, a tool of evangelisation andcolonisation, served as an agent in establishing, mediating and transforming relationshipsbetween Melanesians and outsiders, and among Islanders themselves. It concentrates onearly transmission strategies and the initial reception of hymnody, the role of womenmissionaries in the establishment of hymn culture, the subsequent increase in participationin hymnody among the second generation of evangelised Islanders, and the nascence of alocal, Melanesian form of hymnodic expression. A tension is identified whereby as Islandercongregations became ever more proficient hymnodists and thus increasingly more capableof producing a sound acceptable to Europeans, they came to assume a broader-based‘Melanesian’ identity – a new, wider collective self-understanding based on emergenthybrid expressive practices. The paper argues that Islanders drew on hymn culture as theyremade their societies in the light of the new ideas and experiences to which they werebeing exposed, to the extent that to them it became a key symbol and register of theirsocial and cultural transformation and regeneration.

Key words: Melanesia, Christianity, 19th century, Protestant missions, Victorian era,music, hymnody, hymn culture

In an1869 essay entitled ‘The service of song inAneityum’, theRevd John Inglis (1808–91)reflected on his experiences with hymn-making since arriving on the island (in NewHeb-rides, now Vanuatu) in 1852.1 The essay records a shift in the missionary’s thinking

© 2015 The Journal of Pacific History, Inc.

Michael Webb – Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. michael.webb@sydney.edu.au

Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Donald Cochrane of the Presbyterian Archives Research Centre inDunedin and Camellia Webb-Gannon, as well as the anonymous reviewers and editorial team fromthe Journal of Pacific History for their valuable assistance towards the completion of this paper.

1 Inglis’s essay, which is signed ‘Aneityum, New Hebrides, Dec. 10, 1869’, was originally serialised intwo parts, the first of which appeared in the Reformed Presbyterian Magazine, 1 July 1870, 271–76, andthe second in the issue dated 1 Aug. 1870, 302–06. That version was slightly revised for the Evange-list, 1 Mar. 1876, 6–8, and further for his memoir: John Inglis, In the New Hebrides: reminiscences of

The Journal of Pacific History, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2015.1071756

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

regardingMelanesian culture that resulted, at least in part, from the challenges he encoun-tered in creating a hybrid musical form, the local hymn – the coupling of Aneityumlanguage texts and English hymn tunes. Inglis conveyed his desire to Indigenise thenovel genre by referring to such hymns as ‘Ohranitai’, a term he translated as ‘things ofthe voice’, which, he explained, was what ‘the natives call all compositions that are tobe sung’.2 Influenced by the thinking of late 18th-century comparative anthropology, inwhich ‘modern primitives are used to explain historical development in man’,3 as wellas the missionary notion of ‘indigenous Gentiles’ that proposed ‘close analogies betweenJewish, Christian and [aboriginal] rituals’,4 Inglis compared the Aneityum Islanders’singing of their ‘native songs’ with Biblical prescriptions for praising God, reflecting:

I never, till I came here, saw the full force of those expressions in thePsalms, where men are exhorted to sing and play with a loud noise.We are disposed, with our ideas of music, to look upon theseexpressions as figurative; but if Jewish music and the Jewish mind,were in any way akin to the Aneityumese, such expressions must beunderstood quite literally; for a prominent characteristic of theirsinging, as regards their own native songs, is the ‘loud noise joyfully’.5

Inglis’s experience had taught him that ‘music and language must go together– the one must affect the other’. He had come to see that hymnody would have greaterimpact if both the tune and the text were Indigenous. Inglis recognised that thecultural prejudices of missionaries posed a challenge. ‘We all go out to those islandswith strong prepossessions in favour of home excellences’, he reflected, ‘and it is along time before we can tolerate, far less appreciate, much that is good in thethings purely native’.6 Inglis concluded his essay by outlining a method for futurehymn-making based on (proto-) ethnomusicological research, which would result inthe composition of hymns ‘so nearly akin in principle to their own songs and theirown music,7 that the natives will learn them with ease, and sing them with theheart, the spirit, and the understanding’.8

missionary life and work, especially on the island of Aneityum, from 1850 till 1877 (London 1887), 136–53.This essay is the most comprehensive statement on music and Christian missionisation producedby a missionary operating in Melanesia in the 19th century.2 Inglis, In the New Hebrides, 136. In earlier published versions of this essay, Inglis had spelled thisIndigenous language word ‘nohranitai’. See for example John Inglis, ‘The service of song in Anei-tyum. Part 1’, Evangelist, 1 Mar. 1876, 6.3 Bennett Zon, Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Rochester 2007), 18.4 Helen Gardner, ‘The “faculty of faith”: Evangelical missionaries, social anthropologists, and theclaim for human unity in the 19th century’, in Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard (eds), ForeignBodies: Oceania and the science of race 1750–1940 (Canberra 2008), 264.5 Inglis, In the New Hebrides, 152.6 Ibid., 153.7 In distinguishing between songs and music, Inglis was referring to text or poetry (the former) andtune (the latter).8 Inglis, In the New Hebrides, 153.

2 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

These ideas were never implemented in Vanuatu during his lifetime – fordecades to come, Islanders approached and entered the new, Christian world musi-cally through this hybrid form of hymn.9 By the time Christianity was well establishedin the Islands, the generation of Melanesians who had been exposed to its culture fromchildhood began to actively pursue the learning of English (and later American)hymns with, as will be seen, heart, spirit and understanding. Yet for local epistemo-logical and cosmological reasons that will be explored, Islanders’ attraction to andengagement with hymnody did not always conform precisely to the Revd Inglis’svision.

In Melanesia, Protestant hymnody brought new orientations to and under-standing of the world. This paper investigates the ways hymnody, a tool of evangelisa-tion and colonisation, served as an agent in establishing, mediating and transformingrelationships between Islanders and outsiders, and among Islanders themselves.Vanessa Agnew has examined the nature and meanings of Pacific Islanders’ initialmusical encounters with Europeans in the 18th century,10 and Amy Stillman hasstudied the reception of Protestant hymnody in the Polynesian islands during thecentury that followed these meetings.11 To date, however, scholars have for themost part been tone deaf to hymnody’s impact12 during the first months and yearsof European settlement and beyond, along the coastlines and across the smallerMelanesian islands in the southwest Pacific.13 This is surprising, given the extent to

9 Crowl has noted that in Fiji, ‘William A. Heighway translated hymns into Fijian and collected pre-Christian meke chants, which were turned to chants with scriptural themes for school children’.Linda S. Crowl, ‘Politics and book publishing in the Pacific Islands’, PhD thesis, University of Wol-longong (Wollongong 2008), 149. On the Huon Peninsula in PNG, early in the 20th century, theLutherans Christian Keysser and Heinrich Zahn oversaw hymn production that combined Indigen-ous-language texts and Indigenous tunes. See Don Niles and Heinrich Zahn, Mission and Music:

Jabêm traditional music and the development of Lutheran hymnody (Boroko 1996), xxxi–xxxiv.10 See Vanessa Agnew ‘A Scots Orpheus in the South Seas: encounter music on Cook’s secondvoyage’, Journal for Maritime Research, 3:1 (2001), 1–27; Vanessa Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus: thepower of music in other worlds (New York 2008); Vanessa Agnew, ‘Encounter music in Oceania:cross-cultural musical exchange in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyage accounts’, inPhilip Bohlman, The Cambridge History of World Music (New York 2013), 183–201.11 Amy Kuʻuleialoha Stillman, ‘Prelude to a comparative investigation of Protestant hymnody inPolynesia’, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 25 (1993), 89–99; see also David Irving, ‘The Pacific inthe minds and music of Enlightenment Europe’, Eighteenth Century Music, 2:2 (2005), 205–29.12 Hurley has related how Australian Aboriginal hymnody has been similarly ignored, undervalued,considered inauthentic, criticised and so on, including by scholars. Andrew Hurley, ‘German–Indigenous musical flows at Ntaria in the 1960s: Tiger Tjalkalyeri’s rendition of “Silent Night”,or what is tradition anyway?’, Perfect Beat, 15:1 (2014), 7–21.13 The work of Don Niles of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies is a notable exception, as isthe research by Black: Helen Black, ‘Sere dina ni Lotu Wesele e Viti: “True songs” the history,culture and music of Fijian Methodist Indigenous liturgy’, PhD thesis, Australian National Univer-sity (Canberra 2010). The modest scholarly literature pertaining to historical aspects of Melanesianhymnody includes the following: Marcus Felde, Faith Aloud: doing theology from hymns in Papua New

Guinea (Goroka 1999); Jennifer J. Jones, The Theory and Practice of the Music in the Seventh-Day Adventist

HEART, SPIRIT AND UNDERSTANDING 3

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

which missionaries relied on hymns and hymnody in their efforts to accomplish spiri-tual change and cultural improvement, and the enduring place such hymns have cometo assume in Melanesian cultural repertoires.

The following aspects of hymnody in Melanesia are examined in whatfollows: early transmission strategies and the initial reception of hymnody, the roleof women missionaries in the establishment of hymn culture, the increase in partici-pation in hymnody among the second generation of evangelised Islanders, and thenascence of an identifiably Melanesian coastal and islands form of hymnodicexpression. In pre- and early contact times, spectacularly costumed and decorated,physically exuberant in dance and audibly ecstatic in full-voiced singing, the humanbody in Melanesia served as ‘a performative that [bound] people together in intricatewebs of meaning and experience’, wrote Bruce Knauft.14 Across Melanesia, suchexpressivity typically symbolised ‘the vitality, power and beauty of the larger groupor society’.15 As Paul Wolffram has explained, ‘vocal music… occupied a privilegedposition in many Pacific societies, and singing was and continues to be perceived as apowerful form of communication’.16 Wolffram found that, in pre-modern times insouthern New Ireland, group singing and dancing served as ‘a social and spiritualexpression of being, a statement of raw energy and life itself’.17 Given the centralityof performance in Melanesian societies, as well as the extent to which, across culturalboundaries, people traded in rituals,18 it is understandable that Islanders would drawon hymnody as they began to remake their societies in the light of the new ideas towhich they were being introduced. Indeed, as is argued here, hymnody became akey agent, as well as a symbol and register, of Islanders’ social and cultural transform-ation and regeneration.

Official and private missionary correspondence as well as annual reports andmemoirs comprise the key sources consulted, although travellers’ reflections and other

Church in Papua New Guinea (Boroko 2004); Spencer Kombega, ‘The Anglican liturgical music andthe movement towards Indigenisation’, DipTh thesis, Newton Theological College (Popondetta1987); Andrew Midian, The Value of Indigenous Music in the Life and Ministry of the Church: the United

Church in the Duke of York Islands (Boroko 1999); Don Niles, ‘An overview of hymnody in PapuaNew Guinea’, Melanesian Journal of Theology, 12:1 (1996), 7–35; Don Niles, ‘Polynesian hymns inPapua: the synthesis of a Christian educational tool and local creative expression’, Journal of Inter-national Development and Cooperation, 6:1 (2000) 145–58; Wendy Ratawa, ‘Fijian Methodist music’,South Pacific Journal of Mission Studies, 13 (1995), 11–20; Ellison Suri, ‘Music in Pacific Islandsworship with special reference to the Anglican Church in Lau, Malaita, Solomon Islands’, BDivthesis, Pacific Theological College (Suva 1976).14 Bruce M. Knauft, From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology (Ann Arbor 1999), 84.15 Ibid., 77.16 Paul Wolffram, ‘Music and dance performance’, in Moshe Rapaport (ed.), The Pacific Islands:environment and society (Honolulu 2013), 256.17 Paul Wolffram, ‘Langoron: music and dance performance realities among the Lak of southernNew Ireland, Papua New Guinea’, PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington (Wellington2007), 221.18 See Simon Harrison, ‘The commerce of cultures in Melanesia’, Man, 28:1 (1993), 139–58. Thisnotion is taken up further below.

4 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

non-missionary accounts are also drawn upon. Owing to the way congregational par-ticipation in hymnody developed historically in Europe and the USA, the paperfocuses on the initiatives of the Protestant denominations,19 which had the greatestmusical impact in Melanesia over the period under study here. By concentrating onthe efforts of the Presbyterians in Vanuatu, a relatively detailed picture of a givenarea is developed in order to provide the basis for some comparison with approachesundertaken elsewhere in the region, by the Methodist Mission, the LondonMissionarySociety (LMS) and the Anglican Melanesian Mission.20

As used in this study, the term ‘hymn’ encompasses the various kinds of songssung by Protestant congregations in Britain and the USA in the 19th century, whichincludes those from the published collections of hymns by Isaac Watts and CharlesWesley, Newton’s and Cowper’s Olney Hymns, the Presbyterian Psalm chants andthe chanted liturgical hymns of the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, selec-tions from the Church of England’s Hymns Ancient and Modern, as well as the Romanticgospel songs and choruses associated with Ira D. Sankey, Charles M. Alexander andothers. In the early Victorian era, hymn repertoires were more clearly defined alongdenominational lines, yet cross-denominational borrowing began to occur from the1880s, following, in particular, the emergence of the American gospel song-hymn.These gospel hymns are first mentioned in the Melanesian missionary literature inthe mid-1870s.21

In the 19th and early 20th centuries in missionaries’ home countries, hymnsand related religious music were highly significant culturally and featured prominentlyin private and public life. A ‘hymn culture’ of the time encouraged the flourishing of‘the tradition of writing, editing and compiling hymns and also the practical experi-ence of hymns; singing, sharing and using them as points of reference in everydaylife’.22 Hymns ‘evoked memories, touched emotions, carried theology, elaboratedon religious experiences, and effectively popularized Christian faith and patriotic con-victions’.23 They figured in social reform movements and, in Britain, contributed tothe foundation of an emerging national musical culture.

In his biography of the missionary George Lawes (1839–1907), who afterspending several years on the Polynesian island of Niue, was sent in 1874 by theLMS to Papua (in present-day Papua New Guinea), Joseph King distilled what

19 See T.E. Muir, Roman Catholic Church Music in England, 1791–1914: a handmaid of the liturgy?

(Aldershot 2008), 12.20 The activities of other groups – such as, for example, the South Sea Evangelical Mission (SSEM)in the Solomon Islands and the Seventh-day Adventists in various areas – are also important inconsideration of the impact of Protestant hymnody in Melanesia, yet their inclusion will have toawait a larger study.21 See Mel R. Wilhoit, ‘“Sing a Sankey”: the rise of gospel hymnody in Great Britain’, in MartinClarke (ed.), Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Burlington 2011), 114–16.22 Victoria N. Morgan, Emily Dickinson and Hymn Culture: tradition and experience (Surrey 2010), 23.23 Edith L. Blumhofer and Mark A. Noll (eds), Singing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: hymnody in thehistory of North American Protestantism (Tuscaloosa 2004), vii.

HEART, SPIRIT AND UNDERSTANDING 5

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

missionaries hoped and believed hymns could achieve on foreign mission fields,explaining:

No clear ideas can at first be conveyed in halting translations ofEnglish hymns, but the joyous singing arrests thought and provokesinquiry, and with a quicker perception than we sometimes recognizeas possible, a new truth enters the mind. Many a so-called ignorantnative lays hold of a great truth through its repetition in song, andit is not always mere parrot knowledge.24

It was impossible to predetermine how Islanders would receive such music, and naïveor optimistic in the extreme to expect it to have the same impact in the Islands as inurban settings in Victorian England. As will be seen, over time villagers became adeptperformers of harmonised hymnody and invested the new music with their owncomplex range of meanings while using it to further their own ends. In the process,missionaries’ perceptions of Melanesian hymnody also changed as it was locally trans-formed into a distinct and identifiable musical phenomenon.

HYMNODY IN MELANESIA

Before the arrival of English missionaries, Christian hymns were orally transmitted toMelanesia, beginning around 1830, from already established missions in Tonga toFiji. The Methodist John Hunt (1812–48) and his wife Hannah (née Summers,1812–91) arrived in Fiji at the end of 1838. Hunt, together with his colleagueRichard Lyth (1810–87) and later John Watsford (1820–1907), composed some ofthe first hymns in Fijian for congregational use.25 Hunt adapted from the Book of

Common Prayer the Te Deum, the Magnificat and Psalms, as well as Wesleyanhymns such as ‘Jesus, lover of my soul’, which according to fellow missionaryJoseph Nettleton (1835–1914), became in Fijian ‘an exquisite native poem, moretender, if possible than the original’.26 Nettleton described Hunt’s hymns as‘mellow and sweet in the Fijian churches of the late 19th century’, adjectives hewas presumably applying to the sound of the poetic Fijian in combination with thevoices blending in sung chorus.27

24 Joseph King and R. Wardlaw Thompson, W.G. Lawes of Savage Island and New Guinea (London1909), 194.25 While mission reports refer to the hymn-writing activities of all three men, Lyth actually creditedHunt with writing ‘most of the hymns’. See Thomas Williams, The Journal of Thomas Williams:

missionary in Fiji, 1840–1853, ed. G.C. Henderson, 2 vols (Sydney 1931), I, 209 n. 93. Lyth, amedical doctor by training, described the mission’s approach to hymnal compilation and hymnwriting as follows: ‘The principle…was to prepare a small collection of hymns on the moreleading topics contained in Wesley’s collection, and to make the hymns themselves, as far as wewere able, imitations of their prototypes or portions of them’. Ibid.26 Joseph Nettleton, John Hunt: pioneer missionary and saint (London 1906), 84.27 Ibid.

6 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

Under the supervision of the LMS, Samoan missionaries took up residence onTanna, Vanuatu, at the end of 1839. Samoan and Rarotongan evangelists were alsobased on Aniwa and Erromango from 1840, Futuna and Aneityum from 1841, andEfate from 1845.28 The LMS supervised the landing of four Samoan evangelists onthe Isle of Pines and on Maré in the Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia, in 1840; in1841 and 1842 additional Samoan and several Rarotongan evangelists were stationedin New Caledonia. William Gill’s Gems from the Coral Islands makes it clear that 18th-century English hymns (at least) were brought in Polynesian-language form andthat they were taught orally:29 at the opening of a church on Maré in 1851, ‘ahymn of praise was sung, translated into the language of Maré from the Rarotongahymn book. Only having a manuscript copy, the teacher read line by line’.30

With the arrival on Tanna in June 1842 of the LMS missionaries GeorgeTurner (1818–92) and Henry Nisbet (1818–76) and their wives, it would havebecome clear to these Islanders that such songs were English in origin. After amere three months on Tanna, Turner confidently reported:

We soon picked up the language, so as to conduct religious serviceswithout an interpreter, arranged the orthography of the dialect,and got our little printing-press set up. We composed some hymns,and commenced to sing the praises of God at our Sabbath services.Schools, too, for the daily instruction of the people, were set onfoot; few, however, would attend. We found that we had a difficultpeople to deal with.31

This became the model for establishing a mission in Vanuatu – language learning,holding services, setting up a printing press, composing hymns and starting aschool. The residence of Turner and his party was short-term, however; after seven

28 On Pacific Islander missionaries to the southern islands of Vanuatu, see Featunaʻi Liuaʻana,‘Errand of mercy: Samoan missionaries to southern Vanuatu, 1839–60’, in Doug Munro andAndrew Thornley (eds), The Covenant Makers: Islander missionaries in the Pacific (Suva 1996), 41–79.See also Raeburn Lange, Island Ministers: Indigenous leadership in nineteenth century Pacific Islands Christian-

ity (Canberra 2005), 248. An assessment of the musical impact of the early Polynesian pastors inMelanesia is overdue. Observations such as those by the Revd Thomas Neilson from Aneityumseveral decades later indicate that it was significant. Neilson described Toma, a Rarotongan evan-gelist, as ‘a capital singer, with one of those deep rich bass voices that have so much melody in them’

and declared that Toma ‘taught the people music; and the natives of his village are the best singersin the New Hebrides’. Thomas Neilson, ‘Letter from Rev. Thomas Neilson, Jun’, Reformed Presby-terian Magazine, 1 Oct. 1868, 369.29 See William Gill, Gems from the Coral Islands: Western Polynesia, comprising the New Hebrides group, the

Loyalty group, New Caledonia group (London 1855), 48. Gill included the text, in what is probably theMaré language, of the early English hymn writer Isaac Watts’s ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’and alluded to its source in Watts’s classic 1707 collection, Hymns and Spiritual Songs.30 Ibid., 40–41, emphasis original.31 George Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia: missionary life, travels, and researches in the islands of the Pacific(London 1861), 11.

HEART, SPIRIT AND UNDERSTANDING 7

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

months on Tanna they were forced to withdraw. Turner’s hymn-making approach,which became standard,32 involved composing a text in the local Tanna languageto fit an English hymn tune.33

In 1848 the Nova Scotian minister John Geddie (1815–72) and his wife Char-lotte (1821–1916) arrived with their two children and began mission work on Anei-tyum, an island 90 kilometres to the south of Tanna. Their first mention of musicappears in a letter Charlotte sent home three months after their arrival:

We have three hymns printed too. Mr. Powell is our poet.34 Thepeople are very much pleased to hear us sing in their own language…We now have a nice little chapel, and have again commencedschool…Our scholars are very irregular…They appear highlydelighted. We sing the alphabet with them, try to explain to themthe way in which words are formed by the letters, etc., and commenceand end with a hymn.35

The early printing of material in the local language was important to missionaries.Historically, printing and literacy were key means by which European society andculture had been transformed during the Protestant Reformation. Amidst the chal-lenges of early settlement in an Island society, printing provided the evangeliserswith a clear and achievable goal, and to mission supporters at home it served as asign that advances were being made. Importantly, literature was a potent symbol ofthe new kind of knowledge that had arrived in the Islands.36

As Patricia Grimshaw and other scholars have shown, ‘Protestant mission-aries had a clear path marked out for the gender and familial arrangements of the

32 It can be inferred from John Inglis’s essay discussed at the outset that hymn-making in Polynesiafollowed this practice. In Presbyterian circles in the 19th century, hymn singing in church services,and hence hymnal compilation, was a subject of considerable conflict and dissension. See forexample Barbara Murison, ‘Old favourites or new style: creating the hymnal of the PresbyterianChurch in Canada’, in Blumhofer and Noll, Singing the Lord’s Song, 64–91.33 This is clear from a letter written by Mary Matheson (1837–61) to her mother shortly after sheand her husband arrived on Tanna from Nova Scotia in 1860: ‘We sang the “Old Hundredth” tosome verses composed by Mr. Turner while upon this island many years ago’. George Patterson,Memoirs of the Rev. S.F. Johnston, the Rev. J.W. Matheson and Mrs. Mary Johnston Matheson, Missionaries

on Tanna… (Philadelphia 1864), 389.34 The Revd Thomas Powell (d. 1887) and his wife (d. 1890) arrived on Aneityum with the Geddiesand remained there for about one year.35 Charlote Geddie, Letters of Charlotte Geddie and Charlotte Geddie Harrington, 1851–67 (Truro 1908), 17,emphasis original.36 See Crowl, ‘Politics and book publishing in the Pacific Islands’. In 1851, when the demand forbooks and other printed matter such as hymn sheets was high, John Geddie reflected: ‘I saw the daywhen the natives feared the sight of a book, as something that generated disease and death; but nowI fear that a few go to the opposite extreme, and value a book as a charm to keep away these evils’.George Patterson, Missionary Life among the Cannibals: being the life of the Rev. John Geddie… (Toronto1882), 312.

8 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

Indigenous Christian men and women who were their converts’.37 To this end, mis-sionary wives offered sewing classes to girls and women, and singing was often under-taken at the same time. Mary Paton (who died within months of arriving on Tanna in1859) taught sewing and singing together,38 and John Paton’s second wife, Maggie(1841–1905), wrote from Aniwa in 1872, ‘I have my Sewing and Singing Classeson our front verandah’.39 The teaching of hymns appears to have been unsystematicat first, and as Inglis explained, ‘every new [missionary] arrival, possessed of musicalpowers, has been pressed in to help us forward in this department of instruction’.40

Given that singing was bound together with reading lessons, initially Islanderswould have been unable to distinguish between sacred and secular music genres.Beyond being intrigued to hear the foreigners’ attempts at singing in Aneityumese,it is difficult to know what they thought of the new music form. These first instancesof the mixing of cultural components – English tunes, Aneityumese texts –must surelyhave piqued the curiosity of Islanders, however. In some villages, the reaction was oneof caution, for reasons now discussed.

EARLY RECEPTION

Islanders considered the missionaries’ hymns an intrusion into local sound spaces. InMelanesia the physical environment is not a neutral entity but rather an active agent;inhabited by spirits, it is a realm of knowledge and power.41 All valid knowledge,including songs and dances, originates beyond the individual and the immediate com-munity; hence Islanders were wary of outsiders and their various practices.42 As themissionary John Inglis learned, ‘The Aneityumese recognize… a natmas, a personalspirit, distinct from the man’s own soul, speaking through the lips of the poet’.43

New talk, both language and message-content, as well as new songs, requiredcareful evaluation, since, as Lamont Lindstrom has explained for Tanna, ‘All islandmeans of inspiration are politically regulated to protect existing knowledge and

37 Patricia Grimshaw, ‘Missions, colonialism and the politics of gender’, in Amanda Barry, JoannaCruickshank, Andrew Brown-May and Patricia Grimshaw (eds), Evangelists of Empire? Missionaries in

colonial history (Melbourne 2008), 3–4. See also Hyaeweol Choi and Margaret Jolly, Divine Domesti-cities: Christian paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific (Canberra 2014).38 Inglis, In the New Hebrides, 262.39 Maggie Whitecross Paton, Letters and Sketches from the New Hebrides, ed. James Paton (London 1894),133; see also 56, 77 and 256.40 Inglis, In the New Hebrides, 139.41 See Mark Slobin, Folk Music: a very short introduction (New York 2011), 14; Paul Wolffram, ‘“Singingspirits and the dancing dead”: sonic geography, music and ritual performance in a Melanesian com-munity’, in Birgit Abels (ed.), Austronesian Soundscapes: performing arts in Oceania and Southeast Asia

(Amsterdam 2011), 169–91.42 See Lamont Lindstrom, ‘Big men as ancestors: inspiration and copyrights on Tanna (Vanuatu)’,Ethnology, 29:4 (1990), 313–26. See also Michelle Stephen, ‘Dreams of change: the innovative role ofaltered states of consciousness in traditional Melanesian religion’, Oceania, 50:1 (1979), 3–22.43 Inglis, In the New Hebrides, 151.

HEART, SPIRIT AND UNDERSTANDING 9

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

power structures’.44 The kind of ambivalence-mixed-with-curiosity shown towardshymns and hymnody may have also been attributable to ‘a [broad] characteristicfor which Melanesian cultures have long been noted: namely, their highly developedpropensities to borrow one another’s traits’,45 their ‘propensities to traffic in rituals’.46

That Islanders were fearful of, or at least guarded towards, hymn singing butthat they passed these hymns on orally and aurally themselves can be observed in anumber of recorded incidents. For example, George Sarawia of the Banks Islands,Vanuatu, recalled the following as a young potential recruit on board the ship ofthe Anglican Melanesian Mission, which anchored at Vanua Lava in 1857: ‘Weheard them sing a hymn, and looked at one another, very much afraid. We wantedto run away but could not as we were inside the ship, so we just sat there, frightened’.47

Elsewhere in Vanuatu, the Presbyterian Thomas Smaill noted that on Ambrym in thelate 1880s, ‘the people were not at all sure at first if it would be “canny” to allow us tosing a hymn in their village’.48 Another Presbyterian, Oscar Michelsen, reported fromTongoa: ‘Our hymns are making their way where I am not permitted to appear inperson. Several of the hymns are known and sung at the village where they forbademe to preach some two months ago’.49 In a final example, hymns were suspect bytheir association with reading and books. In the 1870s, when Peter (1834–1924)and Mary Jane (1849–1908) Milne established the Presbyterian mission on NgunaIsland to the north of Efate in Vanuatu,

five boys came to stay with us, and we began at once to teach them toread. Some of them were making good progress, and had also learnedto sing some of the hymns; but when their friends knew it, theyreproved them, forbade them to learn to read, and told them thatif they took the books they would die.50

Such fear of hymn singing implies a strong belief in the power of songs and singing.Islanders carefully evaluated the meanings of hymns and began to learn and circulatethem as items of powerful new knowledge.51

In some places, the early missionaries were seen as rival ritual specialists.52 In1891 the Revd William Bromilow (1857–1929), with his wife Lilly (1854–1937), com-menced a Methodist mission in the D’Entrecasteaux Islands in Papua, now Papua

44 Lindstrom, ‘Big men as ancestors’, 317.45 Harrison, ‘The commerce of cultures in Melanesia’, 141–42.46 Ibid., 140.47 He included this recollection in his memoir (translated from the Mota language): GeorgeSarawia, They Came to My Island: the beginnings of the mission to the Banks Islands (Honiara 1973), 4.In 1873 Sarawia became the first Melanesian to be ordained an Anglican priest. Ibid., ii.48 Thomas Smaill, ‘Mission outlook – New Hebrides Mission’, Christian Outlook, 14 Apr. 1894, 100.49 Oscar Michelsen, ‘Missionary review – New Hebrides –MrMichelsen to Rev. Bannerman’, NewZealand Presbyterian, 2 Feb. 1880, 153.50 Peter Milne, ‘Letter from Rev. P. Milne, New Hebrides’, Evangelist, 1 Nov. 1873, 332.51 See Lindstrom, ‘Big men as ancestors’, 316.52 Bronwen Douglas, Across the Great Divide: journeys in history and anthropology (Amsterdam 1998), 235.

10 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

New Guinea (PNG), with its headquarters on the island of Dobu. In his memoir, Bro-milow noted that local sorcerers perceived the mounting popularity of hymns on theisland as a challenge to Dobuan knowledge regimes, and hence a threat to local auth-ority structures. The sorcerers, he wrote, ‘warned their heretofore subservient believ-ers that if they continued to sing the hymns their crops would be blighted. To thefishermen who sang in their canoes, they said the singing would drive the fish awayfrom the sea around Dobu’.53 Bromilow continued:

They then placed a taboo on Mrs. Bromilow’s organ, saying anyonewho attended the services would risk their lives, because the organcontained an epidemic which would strike them and be carried bythem throughout the island, until all perished of it. Mrs. Bromilowplayed a concertina at the open air services, and this the sorcerersdeclared they would silence.54

He concluded, not without satisfaction, that they ‘found it awkward to explain them-selves when it still continued to send forth its sounds, nobody being the worse for it’.55

C.T.J. Luxton described a similar situation among the Methodists at Roviana, NewGeorgia, in the western Solomon Islands. There sorcerers ‘banned the singing ofhymns in the villages’, he informed, ‘but very soon the whole lagoon was echoingto the singing of a newly-translated hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers”’.56

Another account of a related sort is worth mentioning. In the early 1840s onViti Levu, Fiji, when the Rewa and Bau people were involved in an escalating war,‘The king [of Rewa] sent a request [to the nearby Methodist mission] that thereshould be no more singing at the Christian worship, lest his gods should beoffended’.57 It is likely in this case that the hymnody of Christian converts, which rep-resented a rival power base, was seen as weakening the local chiefs’ prospects ofvictory over Bau.

Two further incidents from the missionary literature cast light on Islanders’early perceptions of hymnody. The Revd George Brown, who in 1875 founded theMethodist mission in the New Britain area, travelled the following year to the south-west coast of New Ireland to open the first church there. At a service, Brown led thesinging of a hymn that he had translated into the Duke of York Islands language. In hismemoir he recorded:

I gave out the first attempt of a translation of the hymn ‘Come toJesus’. I had to act as the precentor; and, though I had neverbefore been thought to possess any great vocal talents, the noveltyof the affair must, I suppose, have excited the imagination of the

53 William Bromilow, Twenty Years among Primitive Papuans (London 1929), 83–84.54 Ibid.55 Ibid.56 C.T.J. Luxton, Isles of Solomon: a tale of missionary adventure (Auckland 1955), 46.57 James Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, vol. 2:Mission History, ed. George Stringer Rowe (London 1858),178.

HEART, SPIRIT AND UNDERSTANDING 11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

natives, to the detriment of their musical taste. They professed to bevery much pleased with the song in ‘Duke of York talk’. Two of themwaited on me…with some wild ginger plant, as an expression oftheir admiration.58

The missionary’s self-deprecation as a song leader notwithstanding, the pres-entation of wild ginger indicates that, to villagers, he was a ritual specialist, since inMelanesia ginger is believed to possess magical properties.59 It appears that theginger was offered in exchange for the hymn, since Melanesian cultures are ‘importingcultures’,60 and Islanders make no rigid distinction between material and immaterialobjects of trade. As Heinz Schuette has emphasised, in that area villagers ‘buy and selldances, songs and magical knowledge as well’.61 That Brown misread the situationcan be seen from the conclusion he drew concerning the presentation of the ginger:

I might have been proud, if I could only have felt that this was anentirely disinterested tribute of appreciation, but alas! the conscious-ness that I was expected to pay for the worthless ginger, by a presentof food and a viler but more valuable weed called tobacco, excited inme the fear that the delight they expressed was more attributable totheir desire for tobacco than to their true appreciation of our hymn.62

Bromilow recounted an interaction over hymnody similarly surrounded byintercultural misunderstanding. His account begins:

The Dobuan possesses a strong trading instinct, which can takeamusing forms – as I soon found out: My wife and I conducted aservice at the station of one of the [Polynesian] teachers, duringwhich we sang a duet, to the apparent delight of the congregation.One woman wept copiously.

After the service, as they boarded their boat to leave,

the tearful one of the service came nearer and said, ‘Oh, that hymn!’ Iasked her if she had enjoyed it very much. ‘I did’, she replied. ‘Didn’t

58 George Brown, George Brown, D.D., Pioneer-Missionary and Explorer: an autobiography… (London1908), 156–57.59 See Wolffram, ‘Langoron’, 190, including n. 21 and n. 22.60 Harrison, ‘The commerce of cultures in Melanesia’, 146.61 Heinz Schuette, ‘Methodist mission in German New Guinea’, Catalyst, 16:4 (1986), 328. For aquote from Benjamin Danks regarding the purchase of a women’s dance in the Duke of YorkIslands as a profit-making venture, see Heinz Schütte, ‘Topulu and his brothers: aspects of societaltransition in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea during the 1870s and 1880s’, Journalde la Société des océanistes 88–89 (1989), 57 n. 30. See also Herbert Cayley-Webster, Through New Guinea

and the Cannibal Countries (London 1898), 88. Harrison provided an overview of the widespread prac-tice among Melanesian societies of trading in rituals and components of ritual systems. Harrison,‘The commerce of cultures in Melanesia’, 139–58.62 Brown, George Brown, D.D., 157.

12 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

you see me weeping?’ I said I had noticed her tears. This was thepoint she desired to reach. ‘Won’t you pay me for crying?’ sheasked.63

Here, as in the George Brown case, the Islanders were, in the words of Gardner andPhilp, ‘enacting the to-and-fro of reciprocity that accompanied all displays of econ-omic, spiritual or technological ability in a region where payment was normallydemanded for all sorts of transactions, including spells… [and] novel forms of appeal-ing to the spiritual realm’.64

The harmonium, which was to them a hitherto unimaginable form of musicaltechnology, greatly aroused the Islanders’ interest, and as seen above, also provokedthe ire of some. The instrument served as a bridge between the musical and culturalworlds of villagers and the visitors, and was all the more fascinating because it wasplayed mostly by women. Indeed, the fact that missionary men brought their wivesand children to live in the Islands was a key positive factor distinguishing missionariesfrom other Europeans who had begun to frequent Melanesian shores, since it led to awholly different kind of social as well as cultural relations.

HARMONIUM FASCINATION

It is well known that in 19th-century Britain, as ‘an ornament to society, music as a so-called accomplishment was an important aspect of the domestic agenda confiningwomen to the home’.65 Middle-class girls were educated either in the home or at alocal day school several days a week for several years, followed by a period at boardingand finishing schools. Within the ‘small, home-like settings’ of these schools where‘social performance’ was emphasised, girls ‘learned a smattering of subjects such asreading, spelling, arithmetic, grammar, geography and history, with time set asidefor the accomplishments – music, art, needlework, French’.66 This was the back-ground of many missionary women serving in Vanuatu and elsewhere in Melanesiain the second half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries.67 In Victorian times,

63 William Bromilow, Twenty Years among Primitive Papuans, 101.64 Helen Gardner and Jude Philp, ‘Photography and Christian mission: George Brown’s images ofthe New Britain Mission 1875–80’, Journal of Pacific History, 41:2 (2006), 178.65 Judith Barger, Elizabeth Stirling and the Musical Life of Female Organists in Nineteenth-Century England

(Aldershot 2007), 1.66 Ibid., 2.67 See for example a vignette detailing a ‘nice Ladies’ Meeting’ in Vanuatu in 1874, where fromtheir different island mission stations, four missionary wives – Agnes Watt, Mary Milne, AliceAnnand and Margaret (Maggie) Paton – spent several weeks together at the Paton mission homeon Aniwa while their husbands attended the Presbyterian Annual Synod on Tanna. MaggiePaton reported in a letter that they occupied themselves with a daily round of household tasks,letter writing, chatting, drawing and painting, sewing, reading aloud and singing togetheraround a harmonium. Paton, Letters and Sketches, 185.

HEART, SPIRIT AND UNDERSTANDING 13

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

music was seen as ‘a unique and potent moral influence’ and became strongly associ-ated with moral betterment.68 For missionaries, this increasingly influential notioncame to inform both their efforts to transplant 19th-century hymn culture to theIslands and their vision of domesticity reforms. In missionaries’ home countries,young women were ‘encouraged to offer their music in service to others rather thanfor self-aggrandizement’;69 once in Melanesia, married and single women, and insome cases missionary daughters, became deeply involved in the work of hymninstruction and hymn-making. This was at a time when hymnody was accorded pri-ority in early evangelisation work, and generally music was found to be highly effectivein initiating contact and establishing relationships with Islanders.

Many of the missionary women who arrived in the various islands of Vanuatuare associated in the literature with the harmonium or reed organ, a musical instru-ment that was also known as the ‘missionary organ’.70 Immensely popular in the 19thcentury, the harmonium was ‘promoted as an instrument for women, a tool withwhich they might engender moral values in the home’.71 During the Victorian age,‘worship and entertainment became closely related; those who owned organs couldcreate the sound of sacred music any time of the week’.72 The harmonium wasparticularly common among women missionaries in southern and central Vanuatu,although it was also used in parts of the Solomon Islands, eastern PNG and theTorres Strait Islands. In Vanuatu, for example, over a span of little more than twodecades from 1848, the women who owned and played a reed organ (or accordion)and who became engaged in hymnody work at some level included CharlotteGeddie (on Aneityum from 1848), Jessie Inglis (on Aneityum from 1852), EllenGordon (on Erromango from 1857), Elizabeth ‘Betsie’ Johnston (on Tanna from1859), Margaret Paton (on Aniwa from 1865), Christina Morrison (on Efatefrom 1864), Mary McNair (on Erromango from 1866), Agnes Watt (on Tannafrom 1869) and Mary Milne (on Nguna from 1870).

The Victorian overlap between sacred and entertainment music led mission-ary women in the Islands to initiate and sustain contact by means of the harmonium.This was especially effective in the domestic domain, and some kept a portable instru-ment in the mission house parlour or on the veranda.73 Islanders’ fascination with theharmonium (or accordion) began to be reported in the 1850s and was remarked upon

68 Paula Gillett, Musical Women in England, 1870–1914: ‘encroaching on all man’s privileges’ (New York2000), 36.69 Barger, Elizabeth Stirling, 9.70 Denis Waring, Manufacturing the Muse: Estey organs and consumer culture in Victorian America (Middle-town 2002), 53.71 Ibid., 52.72 Ibid., 4.73 Catherine Deck of the South Seas Evangelical Mission in the central Solomon Islands wrote thatin the 1910s, ‘We used to take with us in our dinghy an organ, a sleeping doll and Bible pictures’.The doll ‘broke the ice’, and music and pictures were effective means of communication in situ-ations where the missionaries were not familiar with the local language. Catherine M.A. Deck, ASon of the Solomons (Melbourne 1940), 11.

14 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

for many decades. The language used to describe interactions over the instrument isinteresting for what it reveals about how missionaries perceived, or at leastrepresented, the Islanders’ worldview. For example, George Gordon wrote fromErromango in 1858, less than a year after he arrived there:

Now, we are very well acquainted with natives in every importantsettlement, by our visits to them and theirs to us. They come to seethe inside of our house, and to hear Mrs. Gordon play on the Harmo-neum [sic]. On first hearing instrumental music some are quite frigh-tened; but when assured no strange spirit is at work they becomequite charmed and go through a variety of grotesque manoeuvres.74

In the account, fear gives way to being ‘charmed’, following assurance that no malevo-lent spirit is involved, and what is possibly a dance-type response is depicted as‘grotesque manoeuvres’. This report conveys that missionaries believed they hadthe upper hand in such encounters, owing to their technological superiority and cul-tural sophistication.

Capturing the attention of Native villagers on the mission field by musicalmeans was considered an extension ‘and appropriate [use], of traditional, nurturingfemale attributes’.75 This was confirmed by Robert Steel, a Sydney clergyman, inremarks concerning the unmarried missionary James Gordon, who in 1864 suc-ceeded his brother George (quoted above concerning the harmonium), after heand his wife Ellen were killed on Erromango in 1861, and who himself was killedthere in 1872:

He felt his solitude, and the want of some one to charm the savageislanders with music, as the missionary’s wife has often done. Tomake up for this, he commissioned me to get in Sydney a barrelorgan, on which he could play to the natives. One was procuredcapable of playing thirty tunes, and which had, besides the organ,two French horns and a tambourine.76

74 James D. Gordon, The Last Martyrs of Eromanga: being a memoir of the Rev. George N. Gordon and Ellen

Catherine Powell, his wife (Halifax 1863), 140. Parallel ‘harmonium encounters’ were described in thePresbyterian mission literature pertaining to Vanuatu. For Betsie Johnston on Tanna in 1860 (thisinteraction involving the accordion), see Patterson, Memoirs of the Rev. S.F. Johnston, 262. For MaryMcNair on Erromango in 1869, see James McNair, ‘Dangers at Erromango – letter fromRev. J. M’Nair’, Reformed Presbyterian Magazine, 1 Feb. 1870, 51. For Margaret Paton on Aniwafrom 1869, see Paton, Letters and Sketches, 18, 56, 77. For Agnes Watt on Tanna in 1869, seeAgnes C.P. Watt, Agnes C.P. Watt: twenty-five years’ mission life on Tanna, New Hebrides (Scotland1896), 82, 138. For Clara Paton on Tanna in 1897, see Frank H.L. Paton, Lomai of Lenakel: a heroof the New Hebrides (London 1903), 51.75 Paula Gillett, Musical Women in England, 36.76 Robert Steel, The New Hebrides and Christian missions: with a sketch of the labour traffic, and notes of a cruise

through the group by the mission vessel (London 1880), 204–05. James Gordon’s barrel organ was surelyone of the first mechanical sound reproducing devices to be heard in a Melanesian village.

HEART, SPIRIT AND UNDERSTANDING 15

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

While harmonium playing drew Islanders closer to the missionaries’ world, women’smusical involvement in the Christianisation of Indigenous communities oftenextended beyond their provision of diversionary entertainment. Generally themusical labour was divided – men studied the local language and composed and(or) translated hymn texts, and women did the song teaching. Some missionarywomen, however, became accomplished in all aspects of the development of hymnculture, as can be seen from the following brief account of the contributions ofAgnes Watt in Vanuatu.

A NOTABLE HYMNODIST

Agnes Watt (1846–94) was in her early 20s when she went to Tanna, Vanuatu, withher husband William in 1869. She began learning the local language as soon as shearrived at Kwamera77 and took a great interest in Tannese customs and culture.Agnes discovered that the Islanders placed a high value on music, especially onnovel songs, and that they believed in a spiritual source of song and dance. In an1870 letter she explained:

During a great part of the year they are busy feasting, singing anddancing. Each new season has its new music. In this, you see, theyare in no way behind more civilized countries. One of their song-compilers retires into the bush and meets the gods of song, fromwhom he receives the new dance music for the forth-coming perform-ance. Having acquired it, he returns and teaches it to those of his ownvillage, and so on, until a great many know it.78

Mrs Watt came to devote herself to the expansion of the Tannese hymnal, possiblyurged on by this new understanding. When the Watts had arrived, in worship theyrelied on the half dozen hymns prepared by the Revd John Paton, who had residedon Tanna for several years from 1858 before being forced off the island.79

Equipped with musical skills and, eventually, ‘a wonderfully accurate knowl-edge’ of the language,80 Agnes Watt turned her attention to hymn composing, whereshe apparently displayed ‘a happy faculty of seizing the leading ideas of an Englishhymn or psalm and turning them into idiomatic and melodious Tannese’.81 Overtime, throughout her correspondence she updated readers regarding the number ofnew hymns that she had composed or translated, almost as a measure of herongoing dedication to this task. The first time she provided a tally, it was simply toconvey how her time was occupied: ‘January and February were filled up with themonotony of daily life…making and printing a number of new hymns, which

77 See Watt, Agnes C.P. Watt, 79.78 Ibid., 111.79 Ibid., 86.80 Ibid., 42.81 Ibid., 43.

16 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

brings our collection up to sixty-nine’.82 Two years later she wrote, ‘We are strong inhymns on Tanna; we have over seventy; and doubtless our people sing well’.83 Notlong after this, she announced yet another increase, while providing an account ofthe Tannese pursuit of hymnody that contains several striking parallels to thepassage above concerning customary songs and dances:

Our hymnal now contains eighty-two pieces. The Tannese arepassionately fond of music and the demand for new hymns isendless. Ofttimes they listen to us while at worship, and if the tunetakes their fancy, they give us no rest till we make a hymn to suit it.84

Attracted by the tunes, Islanders considered the missionaries’ songs as authoritativeforms of knowledge.

Throughout her 25 years as a missionary, Mrs Watt continued to meet thedemand for hymns, and, it appears, she devoted equal energy to the teaching ofthem. In a letter written the year before she died, on Tanna, she explained:

Notwithstanding all our sickness at Kwamera, we managed to getseven new hymns printed, bringing our hymnal up to ninety-five…We practise morning and evening, and we pray that the savingtruths thus committed to memory may prove good seed sown on agood soil.85

These brief excerpts refer only to the initial stages in developing the Kwamerahymnal, which was much expanded over ensuing decades. In the end, this lastquoted passage reveals, it was her concern for the Islanders’ ultimate spiritualdestiny that drove her on to make new hymns, since she believed these werecapable of knitting Christian truth into the body through habitual use. She mustalso have inspired or at least encouraged Tannese to attempt to compose hymns,for in her correspondence she reported ‘a unique thing in this Mission’.86 A mannamed Kaiasi ‘made a hymn to the tune, “Jesus in mine”, which has become agreat favourite on the island’ and which was included in one of the earliestKwamera hymnals, coming to be sung ‘everywhere’ with ‘heartiness’.87

Lamont Lindstrom has recently argued that over the years she was on Tanna,Agnes Watt’s ‘Scottish Presbyterian personhood’ came to converge with ‘Tannesepersonhood’.88 Hymnody certainly brought her very close to Tannese women, chil-dren and men – and they to her – through the learning and performing over timeof the novel expressive form, where both parties became immersed in its hybrid

82 Ibid., 241–42, emphasis original.83 Ibid., 285.84 Ibid., 286–87.85 Ibid., 364, emphasis original.86 Ibid., 305.87 Ibid., 306.88 Lamont Lindstrom, ‘Agnes C.P. Watt and Melanesian personhood’, Journal of Pacific History, 48:3(2013), 244.

HEART, SPIRIT AND UNDERSTANDING 17

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

aesthetics. Mrs Watt seems to have summed up her own cultural and spiritual trans-formation when she explained, ‘Though to some ears the Tannese language maysound harsh, yet I can assure you I feel the power of many of our hymns quite asmuch when sung in this barbarous tongue as when sung in English’.89

MAKING MUSICAL PROGRESS

As might have been expected, in the first decades of missionisation, when hymns werenew to Islanders and missionaries were new to the Islands, progress in establishing theculture of hymnody was slow. In those years, the focus was simultaneously on thecultivation of literacy among villagers. The whole process was impeded by mission-aries’ own faltering grasp of the language, which also meant that the texts they pro-duced were on occasion incomprehensible.90 The hymn transmission process couldalso be cumbersome. The traditional Scottish Presbyterian practice of ‘lining’ wascommonly employed, which developed in a time when congregations were generallyilliterate. Here a precentor or song leader sang a Psalm or hymn line-by-line while thecongregation repeated each line in echo. Maggie Paton’s description of the method inaction on Tanna in 1865 is repeated elsewhere in the literature, including amongMethodists: ‘We sang a hymn in Tannese, which Mr. Paton had translated inearlier days – he reading the line, and Mr. Morrison leading the tune, Old Hundred,which went bravely’.91 While necessary, it would have been tedious for Islandersand difficult for them to gain an overall sense of a melody, since the actual musicsystem was also new.

Close to each other geographically, Aneityum and Tanna were evaluated asunequal in terms of their inhabitants’ musical competency. When Maggie Patonarrived at Aneityum in 1865, 17 years after the Geddies founded the mission there,upon hearing the congregational singing she recorded that she found it ‘hard tocontrol [her] risible faculties’.92 Mrs Paton declared that the Islanders’ ‘attainmentsin music were very limited’,93 although she admitted, ‘They sing “Auld Lang Syne”

89 Watt, Agnes C.P. Watt, 287.90 The Revd Robert Fraser (1851–1921), Presbyterian missionary to Epi Island, Vanuatu, from1882 to 1905, wrote two hymns when he had been there only a few months. He later reflected,‘As my knowledge of the language increased I recognised that the grammar of these two hymnswas so atrocious that the people could only have had a very faint idea of their meaning’.J. Heyer, Fraser of Epi: the late Rev. Robert M. Fraser, missionary in the New Hebrides (Launceston1921), 17. See also the statement by the Anglican priest Albert Maclaren, that his early attemptsat hymn writing in PNG, which he hoped would ‘suggest some faint glimmerings of what hewould be at’, were afterwards found ‘entirely incorrect’. Arthur Kent Chignell, Twenty-One Yearsin Papua: a history of the English Church Mission in New Guinea, 1891–1912 (London 1913), 25.91 Paton, Letters and Sketches, 22.92 Ibid., 10.93 Inglis, In the New Hebrides, 147. In her own description of this first encounter, Maggie Paton wrote,‘They hold on very tightly to their books, and that with both hands, but they do not by any meansstick so fast to the tune’. Paton, Letters and Sketches, 10.

18 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

pretty well, to a nice hymn, which Mr. Inglis composed’.94 The Revd Robert Steel,who visited and preached at Aneityum in 1874, found that ‘in singing they arerather deficient. They are evidently not a musical people, and the English metresare foreign to their native style. Their hymn-book, however, is well known, andthoroughly appreciated’.95 John Inglis, who knew the Aneityum people well, assessedtheir musical potential as moderate, explaining that they ‘possess a fair amount ofmusical talent… [and] are capable of attaining an average degree of proficiencywherever the requisite instruction is bestowed’.96

Concerning the singing on nearby Tanna, Agnes Watt was more complimen-tary. ‘Without doubt our Tannese have an ear for music’, she wrote, ‘and if undertraining, would prove very good pupils’.97 The Revd Steel also visited Tanna andwas moved by the singing he heard there:

We attended their evening worship with the natives round their [theWatts’] house. The singing, led by the skilful voice of Mr. Watt, wasvery beautiful and melting. The hymn sung was ‘Nearer, my God, toThee’. Often since, I fancy that I hear these musical Tannese swellingthe chorus with their fine voices in their own tongue.98

A third writer qualified his assessment, explaining, ‘The Tannese are veryfond of music… [and] may not sing artistically but they certainly do so with a loudnoise’.99 Finally the missionary doctor Campbell Nicholson, in a 1903 letter fromTanna, wrote of how he and his wife Isabel had ‘taught them some of the newhymns [and] also polished up some of the old as they had the tunes so altered thatsometimes they were unrecognizable’.100

Some writers identified specific musical ‘failings’. In PNG in 1909, theAnglican priest Arthur Chignell (1870–1951) came to expect that congregationalsinging would drop in pitch:

For some reason one is glad enough to be without the Americanorgan that you find in country churches in Australia. Everyone in[Wanigela] sings flat… but in the absence of any particular standardin these matters we are not reproached by constant mechanicalreminders of how flat we are.101

94 Paton, Letters and Sketches, 10. Around five years after Maggie Paton arrived, another visitor to theAneityum mission observed of the Geddies’ congregation that ‘their efforts in the way of music werenot of a very successful character, an instrument [i.e., a harmonium] being much wanted’. F.A.Campbell, A Year in the New Hebrides, Loyalty Islands, and New Caledonia… (Geelong 1873), 86.95 Steel, The New Hebrides and Christian Missions, 375.96 Inglis, In the New Hebrides, 147.97 Watt, ‘Mrs Watt’s general (continued)’, New Zealand Presbyterian, 1 Dec. 1893, 118.98 Steel, The New Hebrides and Christian Missions, 456.99 Albert Kent Langridge, The Conquest of Cannibal Tanna: a brief record of Christian persistency in the NewHebrides Islands (London 1934), 100.100 Barbara Mayne, A Remarkable Man (Victoria, BC 2006), 32.101 Arthur Kent Chignell. An Outpost in Papua (London 1911), 362.

HEART, SPIRIT AND UNDERSTANDING 19

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

For Chignell, maintaining tempo was also a struggle, as he explained, by way of acurious musical comparison:

[With] the ordinary measured hymn tunes, such as those in Ancient andModern, you must either let them be taken with dirgelike slowness, andaccording to the native notions of time and metre, or run the risk ofhearing them sung in giddy rag time.102

The Revd Dr William Gunn (1853–1935), Presbyterian missionary on Futuna insouthern Vanuatu from 1883 to 1917, also emphasised the importance of singingat the correct tempo:

On singing ‘Jesus shall reign’ in Futunese, to the tune of ‘Warrington,[Nailo, Gunn’s assistant who corrected his hymn translations] saidjokingly, ‘That is a hymn to begin to sing in the morning’, implyingthat the natives would drag it. I was prepared by this warning, andkept them up to time.103

It is likely that the differences in assessment as well as the technical ‘faults’highlighted were the result of the singers’ unfamiliarity with the foreign musicsystem, inadequate or irregular musical instruction, or the listener’s aesthetic expec-tations. Local musical logics must also have played a part in interpretive idiosyncra-sies. Inglis’s notion of a ‘charitable ear’104 is important to consider here, since fromthe last quarter of the 19th century, missionaries and others became ever more enthu-siastic in their responses to Melanesians’ mounting hymnodic competence. For Inglis,listening to Islanders’ hymn-singing with a ‘charitable ear’meant being mindful of ‘thepits out of which these singers had been dug, and the rocks out of which they had beenhewn’.105 Hence one should be moved not only by the conviction of the singing but bywhat it communicated in terms of the spiritual and cultural progress the singers hadmade.

According to Victoria Morgan, in the 19th century in England and America,hymns had proven efficacious as both ‘a method and display of conversion’.106 The‘sweetening’ of a female singer’s voice, through the singing of hymns and joiningthe congregational choir, became a trope of female conversion in the Melanesianmissionary literature and is related to Inglis’s concept of the ‘charitable ear’. It wasan indication that as a result of mission teaching and domesticity training, a girl’sor woman’s cultural and spiritual transformation was both complete and genuine.While a detailed consideration of this phenomenon is not possible here, commentssuch as the following by the Revd Benjamin Butcher (1877–1973), an LMSmissionary

102 Ibid.103 William Gunn and Mrs Gunn, Heralds of the Dawn: early converts in the New Hebrides (London 1924),99.104 Inglis, In the New Hebrides, 147.105 Ibid.106 Morgan, Emily Dickinson and Hymn Culture, 26.

20 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

from 1905 to 1938 in the Kikori River Delta of the Papuan Gulf, PNG, make thepoint clear: ‘Nowhere have I seen women looking more degraded and yet nowherein Papua have I heard girls with sweeter voices than some of their daughters whomMrs. Holmes had taught to sing’.107 Similarly the Anglican missionary Julia Farr(1864–1951) was profoundly moved upon hearing young Melanesian men andwomen singing at St Barnabas College Chapel on Norfolk Island, where sheworked for nine months in 1892: ‘Their voices when they sing seem to touch one’sheart with a pathetic longing like souls trying to find light, striving for faith’.108 Tosee and hear the sincere hymn singing of the descendants of those first evangelisedwas to witness Christian and cultural regeneration in process.

One other quality of the ‘charitable ear’ idea bears mentioning: as part of other-wise complimentary assessments of Islanders’ congregational singing, some missionaryobservers qualified their judgment by remarking that the singing would be even betterif the singers’ voices were trained. This appears to indicate that, unlike John Inglis,whose comments on Aneityumese singing were quoted at the outset, some missionarieswere unable to accept the nascent Melanesian choral sound aesthetic. That is, these mis-sionaries were unwilling to listen with a charitable ear, believing instead that all hymnodyshould aspire to sounding European. Perhaps they considered that their work was notcomplete until Indigenous congregational singing sounded ‘trained’, which would be aclear sign that they had been thoroughly and truly Christianised.

BECOMING ‘MUSICAL’

From around the beginning of the 20th century, the literature reveals, missionaries’(and others’) appreciation of Indigenous hymnody began to increase, at which timeIslanders also started to gain a reputation for being a musical people. This was attribu-table to a number of factors: Islanders’ ever increasing familiarity with hymns (includ-ing through hymn books, which began to proliferate), the introduction of the widelypopular American gospel hymns by missionaries and Islanders returning from theQueensland cane fields, and a new musical emphasis – the teaching of SATBharmony. Melanesians began to participate more enthusiastically in hymnody asthey attained greater proficiency, which in various ways drew them more closelyinto the world of Europeans who were complimentary of their performances. It canbe argued that as Melanesian congregations came to sound more ‘European’, theybecame ever more ‘Melanesian’. This tension will now be explored by consideringthe relationship between Islanders’ full-throated singing style, learning to sing inharmony and their almost relentless pursuit of new songs.

107 Benjamin T. Butcher, We Lived with Headhunters (London 1963), 172. Alice Middleton Holmes(d. 1941) was the wife of the Revd J.H. Holmes (1866–1934); the Holmeses were LMS missionariesin the Papuan Gulf from 1894 to 1919.108 Quoted in Janet Crawford, ‘Unpretending labours: Julia Farr and the Melanesian Mission’,paper presented at the First Biennial TransTasman Conference: ANZ Missionaries, at Homeand Abroad, Australian National University, 8–10 Oct. 2004, 4.

HEART, SPIRIT AND UNDERSTANDING 21

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

Paul Wolffram has noted that ‘many societies in Melanesia and Tongaperceive forceful vocal attack and substantial volume as indicators of musicalquality’.109 As they encountered Melanesians singing Western hymns, some listenersfound the Melanesian vocal tone harsh, or at least ‘other’. This is clear from the RevdWilliam Gunn’s comment that his Futunese translator ‘Nailo had a fine musical voice,unspoiled by yelling native songs’.110 Women’s voices were sometimes singled out forcomment; for example, on hearing Tolai congregational singing near Rabaul in 1920,an Australian female visitor opined, ‘men have melodious voices, but there is toomuch rivalry among the girls – whose shouts nearly split one’s eardrums’.111 TheRevd Arthur Hopkins (1869–1943), an Anglican missionary to Malaita in theSolomon Islands from 1902 to 1914, found ‘the women’s voices… shrill, and at alittle distance the sound is like that of a brass band broken loose’.112 Chignell inPNG was kinder:

These girls of ours have voices of surprising strength and shrillness,and when the general congregation has dropped and flattened untilnearly everyone is trying to sing bass, one of them, in a distantcorner, will suddenly pipe up an octave, or even two octaves,higher, and until the hymn is ended your ears will be thrilled bysounds, not unmusical, but more shrill and piercing than anythingyou thought a human voice could compass.113

Others were considerably more positive. In Bromilow’s mind, the Islanders that heworked among were the musical equals of Polynesians, who were generally held tobe culturally advanced: ‘The Dobuans, in common with the Pacific Islanders, gener-ally have a distinctive musical sense, the women possessing excellent singing voices’.114

From the 1870s, references to the vigour of Melanesian hymn singing aboundin the missionary literature. Of Tannese children’s singing, Agnes Watt wrote that they‘may not sing skilfully, but they obey the other injunction of the Psalmist and sing “witha loud noise”. The iron [roof of the church] makes their voices resound clearly, andsometimes we are almost deafened’.115 ‘Spirited’, ‘most hearty and enthusiastic’,‘strong and hearty’ and ‘lustily’ were qualifiers regularly used in descriptions of congre-gational hymnody in the Islands. Missionaries became enthusiastic about the Islandsmode of singing, tending to hear in it increasing commitment to the Christian faith.

The Anglican priest Albert Maclaren (1853–91) was one of the first mission-aries to ponder the meaning behind Melanesians’ vocal exertion. Visiting the YuleIsland area to the west of Port Moresby, PNG, in 1890, he was prompted to note

109 Wolffram, ‘Music and dance performance’, 256.110 Gunn and Gunn, Heralds of the Dawn, 99.111 Lilian Overell, A Woman’s Impressions of German New Guinea (New York 1923), 17–18.112 A.I. Hopkins, In the Isles of King Solomon: an account of twenty-five years spent amongst the primitive SolomonIslanders (London 1928), 258.113 Chignell, An Outpost in Papua, 362.114 Bromilow, Twenty Years among Primitive Papuans, 217.115 Watt, Agnes C.P. Watt, 285.

22 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

in his diary, ‘Strength of voice is power in New Guinea’.116 In music-making, vocalexuberance is a declaration of both individual bodily and collective social vitality. Adescription of congregational singing from the early 1850s on Maré in the LoyaltyIslands, which presents a picture of concentrated power, provides an indication,perhaps, that through hymnody a new kind of social solidarity and communalityhad begun to be expressed:

Nothing here is so wonderful to me as the people’s singing; there is allthe Maori correctness of time without anything flat; the boys’ andwomen’s voices keep up the pitch wonderfully – it is quite deafening.There were at least 1000 people in the church, and I suppose everyone of them singing with the whole strength of his voice.117

A decade later, before settling on Aniwa, Maggie Paton stopped at Maré in theLoyalty Islands and attended Sabbath services there; she noted that ‘the singing,which they took in parts, was most beautiful’.118 Melanesian communities came to dis-cover an enervating fit between hymns, their powerfully intense way of singing andfour-part harmony of the SATB (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) type.

The process by which harmony singing was introduced varied from place toplace. For example, the Loyalty Islanders that Maggie Paton heard had benefittedfrom the singing instruction of the resident Samoan and Rarotongan evangelists.She herself introduced part-singing to Aniwans. In a letter written in 1879, MrsPaton related a fascinating story of hymn and harmony transmission that conveysdetails of just how eagerly young Melanesians of that day sought out the new songsand sounds that were in circulation. The narrative is also revealing of the wayharmony invited participation – from this and parallel accounts it can be extrapolatedthat the music served as a metaphor for cooperation between outsiders and Islanders:

[A young man] had gone on a voyage in the Dayspring as one of theboat’s crew, when his year’s engagement with us was up, and hadlearnt to sing In the Sweet By-and-Bye from the sailors. He came backfull of it, and begged John [Paton] to translate it – which he did,chorus and all – and we had a fine large Singing Class everyevening, with the piano wheeled into the Dining-Room. I took thebass with the Boys, as the Girls, who had decidedly the best voices,needed no help with the air. I never saw them enter so heartilyinto any hymn, and they manage the parts well. They would havesung the whole night if they might, and would go into the Cook-House after I dismissed them and have a rehearsal there.119

116 Frances M. Synge, Albert Maclaren: pioneer missionary in New Guinea (Westminster 1908), 84.117 This excerpt, taken from the diary of the Revd Nihill, who attempted unsuccessfully to establishthe work of the Melanesian Mission on Maré, is quoted in The Island Mission: being a history of the Mel-

anesian Mission from its commencement (London 1869), 50.118 Paton, Letters and Sketches, 16.119 Ibid., 316–17.

HEART, SPIRIT AND UNDERSTANDING 23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

Maggie Paton immersed herself in the action, and a pervasive sense of camaraderieand mutual enjoyment and interdependency is projected, no doubt energised bythe sentimental lyrics (in translation) and the bouncy tune with its responsorial chorus.

After 1903 at the Methodist Mission on New Georgia Island in the westernSolomon Islands, Helena Goldie apparently ‘taught the people to sing in a waythat makes the old-time Missionaries to the Pacific open their eyes with astonish-ment’.120 Methodist Islanders’ ability to sing in SATB harmony would have been sur-prising to earlier generations of missionaries to Melanesia, who frequently reportedtheir struggle to secure recognisable renditions of the hymns they taught. HelenaGoldie’s fellow missionary Mabelle Davey must be given a share of the credit forthis achievement. Davey became heavily involved in hymn writing and translation fol-lowing her arrival on New Georgia in 1909. Referring to a mission celebration,mission colleague Alice McNeish reported in a letter in 1911 that ‘the church wasfull to overflowing and the singing splendid. Sister Mabelle is a splendid musicianand has all fairly well trained, the parts off to perfection’.121

The Revd John Wheen’s description of the singing at a Christian meetingheld on nearby Choiseul Island in 1917 provides some idea of just how radically Mel-anesian societies were being reordered while learning how to perform hymns inharmony, and how this was a great encouragement to missionaries:

The singing was both hearty and melodious. Some of the SolomonIsland natives have very fine voices, and quite naturally take theirparts – soprano, alto, tenor, baritone are all clearly distinguishablein the congregational singing, and the result is often very pleasing.When the singers have had some training, as often happens on ourMission stations, it is a treat to hear their rendering of our hymns.122

While these Islanders were deemed naturally musical, they nevertheless benefittedfrom training.

That hymnody was socially and culturally transforming cannot be doubted.Decades later on Santa Isabel Island, to the east of New Georgia and southeast ofChoiseul, dramatic narratives of Christian conversion were re-enacted; one skit por-trayed Indigenous catechists struggling to teach the rudiments of hymn singing to agroup of villagers, which was one among a series of ‘phases’ villagers passedthrough in the ‘acquisition of Christian identity’.123 According to Geoffrey White,the skits concluded with the ‘loud and forceful singing of well-practiced hymns’,

120 B.D., ‘Na Buka Kinera Lotu te Jesu Karisito. Pa Zinama Roviana Popoa Solomoni’, AustralasianMethodist Missionary Review, 4 Oct. 1912, 13. The wife of the mission chairman, the Revd JohnGoldie, Helena was a Methodist equivalent of Agnes Watt – a prolific hymn writer, translator,hymnal compiler and singing instructor. See C.T.J. Luxton, Isles of Solomon, 45.121 Alice E. McNeish to Benjamin Danks, Kokenqolo, Rubiana [Solomon Islands], 30 Jan. 1911,Sydney, Mitchell Library, correspondence of Methodist Overseas Mission, box 116–118, 4/5.122 John G. Wheen, ‘In the isles of the sunny seas’, Australasian Methodist Missionary Review, 4 July1917, 6.123 Geoffrey White, Identity through History: living in a Solomon Islands society (Cambridge 1991), 152.

24 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

where the identity of heathen ancestors and mission-educated students merged as‘contemporary Christian persons’.124

A MELANESIAN HYMNODY

Around the beginning of the 20th century, as the music was absorbed into localframeworks of expression, strains of an emerging Melanesian hymnody began to beidentified in the Islands.125 The independent accounts that attempt to describe suchsounds are unified by the fact that they find aspects of the music’s ‘grain’ – its toneand textures – almost elusive, that is, difficult to define or describe. Each performancedepicted in the vignettes that follow was experienced first-hand. The writer of each ofthe accounts perceived that a musical logic and aesthetics were at work and that themusic that they heard was somehow and in some way a synthesis of local and Europeanelements. Each account of the musical phenomenon encountered is complimentary.

Port Moresby, PNG

Charles Abel included this description of the singing of a 500-strong Port MoresbyLMS congregation in a letter he wrote within a week of arriving in PNG in 1891to begin missionary work with the society:

The remarkable singing of these people would not be improved, ifany attempt was made to assist in the usual way [that is, withorgan accompaniment]. Some tunes, which have been familiar tome since I was a child, are only just recognizable as they are sungby the natives. When a new hymn is introduced here, the planseems to be to sing the tune over a few times, and then the nativeswork it sufficiently out of shape to make it musical to their ears,and agreeable to their peculiar taste. They do not sing in unison,and yet it would puzzle any musician to write down their harmony.126

The inclusion of the phrase ‘peculiar taste’ indicates that he believed a local aestheticwas at work, and as is almost always the case in such accounts, it acknowledges somequality or process involved that is obscure to European understanding.

Nggela, Solomon Islands

This account by Ellen Wilson dating from 1909–10 describes the singing of MelanesianMission congregations she heard in the Nggela or Florida Islands of the Solomon Islands:

124 Ibid., 153.125 Relatedly, distinct Australian Aboriginal styles of hymn singing have been reported. See Hurley,‘German–Indigenous musical flows’, 13.126 King and Thompson, W.G. Lawes, 269–70.

HEART, SPIRIT AND UNDERSTANDING 25

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

There were large churches to be seen everywhere, and the servicesreverent with very sweet singing. The Gela singing is remarkableboth for its sweetness of tone, and for the fact that the womenalways lead. It has a singular effect; the women’s voices pitched ina key too high for an English voice to attain, and the men’s voicesjoining in at the second line. Singular, yet not without its charm.127

Wilson employed the trope of the sweet female singing voice, which she consideredunique in ‘effect’ as well as register. The singing was possibly in octaves and unisononly, rather than in parts. The reference to the ‘charm’ of the choral sound impliesthat she found it both ‘other’ and appealing.

Aniwa, Vanuatu

Around the same year as Wilson’s report was written, the medical missionary DrCampbell Nicholson attempted to capture in words the exciting sound of Presbyteriancongregational singing on the tiny island of Aniwa. In the absence of a concept of fixedkey, singers as a group resorted to octave displacement, which produced a distinctivemusical effect. Voice parts were not organised according to SATB priorities but rathera local system. Campbell was at a loss to describe the overall effect, the sonic ebb andflow, and so evoked the local soundscape:

I never tire of the Aniwan singing, although the tune may have beenan ordinary Psalm one, or from Alexander’s or Sankey’s hymn book,it has new elements introduced into it which are peculiar to theIsland. They also perform musical gymnastic feats, which to anewcomer are startling. One favourite one is to commence a hymntoo high or too low and then suddenly raise it or lower it an octavefor maybe a line or two, then as suddenly go back to the originalkey. They have part singing peculiar to themselves. The higherparts of the tune will be taken by those capable, the lower parts byothers, while all swing into the middle reaches with vigour. Thenin all their singing there is a cadence suggestive of the musicalsounds of the reef or the wind blowing through the oaks whichgrow along the shore. But I am wholly incapable of analysing theirmusic or any other.128

Suva, Fiji

In his book, The Fiji of Today, published in 1910 following almost eight years as a mis-sionary among Indian labourers on Fiji’s sugar estates, John Wear Burton imaginedhow a visitor to Suva would find the Sunday Methodist worship. Besides the sheer

127 [Ellen Wilson], The Isles that Wait (London 1912), 78–79.128 Campbell Nicholson, ‘A visit to Aniwa’, Our Missionaries at Work, May 1914, 13–14.

26 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

power of the singing, Burton’s guest would be impressed with the contrasting qualitiesof the Fijian voices:

An American organ gives the chord of the hymn, the congregationcatches it up, and four or five hundred lungs all in full power and effi-ciency swell the note into a musical version of ‘Crown Him, Lord ofall’. Here and there is a variation from the English tune. Sometimes itseems an improvement, but often otherwise; whether or not, it isalways in perfect harmony. The fine baritone voices of the menawake response from the rich contralto of the women, and thenjoin in a magnificent chorus. Now and then a youthful tenor voice… causes the stranger to look up and say to himself, ‘If that ladhad only training he might captivate the world’. The Fijians cansing, and revel in their power.129

While the imaginary listener (Burton’s viewpoint?) could not decide whether the local-isation of the English hymn was an improvement, he would be unequivocal regardingthe harmonic perfection that the Fijian congregation brought to their rendering of thetune. It should be noted that Burton, like other missionaries, believed that despitemaking a strong impression in combination, at the individual level Melanesians’voices would nevertheless benefit from training, a line of thinking that for decadesto come pervaded visitors’ commentary on Indigenous hymnody (as the commentsby the Revd John Wheen quoted above attest).

Rabaul, PNG

Sarah Chinnery, wife of the government anthropologist E.W.P. Chinnery, was one ofthe first residents of Rabaul not affiliated with the mission to note down herimpressions of the choral sound of the New Britain area. An entry in her diaryfrom May 1929 reads:

Some of the finest singing I have ever heard was by the natives of theGeorge Brown Mission. Founded 52 years ago by the late ReverendGeorge Brown, the mission is still going strong, and anyone who hasever heard these natives singing will never forget it. An apt descrip-tion is that it is like the musical booming of the Pacific on the greatreefs that fringe their islands. Years ago I heard Welsh choirs sing,and thought it wonderful; but I never expected to hear in a placelike New Guinea anything so wonderful as this. Those brawnynatives, deep-chested from years of rowing and other manual toilin their primitive environment, seemed to combine some of theelemental music of their fierce ancestry with the cultured music ofthe Western world.130

129 John W. Burton, The Fiji of Today (London 1910), 139.130 Sarah Johnston Chinnery, Malaguna Road: the Papua and New Guinea diaries of Sarah Chinnery, ed.Kate Fortune (Canberra 1998), 41.

HEART, SPIRIT AND UNDERSTANDING 27

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

Chinnery’s account is structured around (1) appreciation – the sound is unforgettable,(2) analogy – it is like waves booming against a reef, (3) comparison – with the legend-ary Welsh choirs, and (4) explanation – physiological and cultural, the latter a fortui-tous blend.

The Revd Rodger Brown, a Methodist, attributed the New Britain choralsound – which he found distinctive and thrilling when he first heard it around 1930– in part to oral transmission processes but also to the unconventional way SATBparts were allocated:

All the music was unaccompanied, and choirs usually depended onthe knowledge of the conductor and his ability to sing well. Thisoften led to quite remarkable variations from the written music. Itwas a fantastic experience to come newly to this kind of music.There was a long-established tradition for most of the singing thatthe strong baritone people sang the air, with the women singingthe alto and men the tenor and the base [sic], although sometimeswomen sang the tenor.131

Tulagi, Solomon Islands

The performance referred to in this report took place in the same area as that heardabout 30 years earlier by Ellen Wilson (discussed above). During the Pacific War, USserviceman Jack Poulton was stationed at Tulagi in the Solomon Islands, where oneSunday in 1943 he attended a village church service. In a letter to his wife, heattempted to communicate the special qualities of the congregation’s choral renditionof the well-known Wesleyan hymn set to the tune Aurelia:

They sang The Church’s One Foundation with native words and noaccompaniment, the choir of about twenty, mixed. A little odd. Ithink they don’t have much range so different parts of the choirtake different short registers, perfectly pitched and their tonal qual-ities are clear and bell-like. I was a bit prickly along the back aboutit all and hope I shall be able to remember and wish I could makea record. Wish that I could bring them back with me. People athome who like music ought not miss it.132

In this account and several of the others, the singing of a familiar hymn in an unfamiliarway moved the listener emotionally. Protestant hymnody had come full circle. Originally

131 Rodger Brown, Talatala: Kath and Rodger Brown’s life in pre- and post-war PNG and their escape from the

Japanese, ed. Margaret L. Henderson (St Morris, SA 2001), 41. It is unclear what ‘long-establishedtradition’ Brown is referring to here, although it may be the choral sound associated with therenowned Matupit conductor, Ephraim Tami, who emerged in the 1930s.132 Jack Poulton, A Better Legend: from the World War II letters of Jack and Jane Poulton, ed. Jane WeaverPoulton (Charlottesville 1993), 95.

28 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5

employed by outsiders as a tool to bring about spiritual change inMelanesian individualsand communities, as a cultural system and repertoire it had been absorbed, aestheticallyreworked, then sung back, as it were. In the process, Melanesian hymnody was able tobring about a kind of spiritual change, even if fleetingly, in the listening outsider.

CONCLUSION

This paper has examined aspects of the impact of Protestant hymnody in Melanesiaover the century that began with the advent of Christian missions in the 1840s andclosed with the Pacific War in the 1940s. From the time of their introduction,hymns were taken seriously in Island communities. Because songs were believed tooriginate in the spirit realm, hymns were often approached with caution. As noveltyitems, some wished to barter for them; others employed sorcery in an effort toprevent them from being sung. The association of hymns with literacy, publicationsand the harmonium, and the fact that European women were often closely involvedin their transmission in the early years, added to their curiosity and value as a form ofcultural and social-relational currency in the Islands.

Hymn culture gained a foothold as local congregations became evermore com-petent performers of hymns, particularly after the introduction of SATB part-singing.The music became strongly associated with the changes village societies were experien-cing as a result of evangelisation, and colonisation more broadly – through its emotionaland spiritual impact, as well as in the ways singing in harmony technically reorganisedrelationships among performers. Through their participation in hymnody, Melanesianscame to envision new ways of being in the world, and as a lingua franca it enabled themto glimpse the possibilities of greater unity in a region marked by extreme linguisticdiversity. Some missionaries sensed this as early as 1918 – one wrote:

So much has been said about the fondness of the people for singingand the good effect of Christian music upon them that it may bewell to consider whether or not the faculty might be developed soas to form a strong bond not only between the people of any oneisland, but also between those of different islands.133

As village congregational singing became more acceptable and pleasing to Europeans,the singers’ collective identity was shifting towards becoming Melanesian – socially,culturally and politically. Without doubt, hymnody has had a profound and oftenregrettable impact on Indigenous musical culture; in many places its rise has beenaccompanied by a corresponding diminishing in significance of local expressive andritual forms, or at very least a recontextualisation of these. Ultimately, however,hymns became Melanesians’ ‘own songs and their own music’134 as they sang themwith heart, with spirit and with their own understandings.

133 Alexander Don, Light in Dark Isles: a jubilee record and study of the New Hebrides Mission of the Presbyterian

Church of New Zealand (Dunedin 1918), 172.134 Inglis, In the New Hebrides, 153.

HEART, SPIRIT AND UNDERSTANDING 29

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mic

hael

Web

b] a

t 14:

51 1

4 A

ugus

t 201

5