Missionary Work and the Pacific Collections

A number of the missionaries who felt called to work among the people of Moana Nui a Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean) had a strong interest in the history and traditions of the people among whom they lived. Two such individuals with connections to Tūhura Otago Museum are the Rev. Dr Charles Fox, and Arthur Henry Voyce.

Charles Elliot Fox was born in 1878 and joined the (Anglican) Melanesian Mission in 1902. He served with the Mission in various capacities for over seventy years, most of that time spent in the southeast Solomon Islands. He was a talented linguist, chess player, and a coast-watcher during the Japanese occupation in WWII. Fox collected a group of taoka from the island of Makira for Tūhura Otago Museum in the early 1920s – bowls, fishing floats, shell money, personal ornaments, adzes, fishhooks, coconut-shell scoops and spears. He was in New Zealand on leave in 1923, travelling with his Makiran friend and colleague, Ben Monongai. During their time in Ōtepoti Dunedin, the men visited the Museum, and Fox translated Monongai's comments about a number of the works he had sent to it.

A.H. Voyce began what would be over 30 years of Methodist missionary work on the island of Bougainville in 1926, only months after marrying. During the years he and Beryl were there, Voyce also amassed a very large collection of artefacts, and facilitated collecting by other individuals and institutions. He was also an enthusiastic philatelist and conchologist. Voyce maintained contact with the Auckland Museum, the Australian Museum in Sydney, Tūhura Otago Museum, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and Harry Beasley's personal museum in Kent, England. The couple retired in 1958.

Research Articles

'Your study of the things would be valuable': The Solomon Islands collection of the Revd Charles Elliot Fox. Journal of the History of Collections.

'The material culture of Makira' in Vastly Ingenious: The Archaeology of Pacific Material Culture in Honour of Janet M. Davidson (eds) Anderson, Green and Leach, 2007

'Your list is certainly a formidable one': the Rev. A.H. Voyce and the Auckland Museum. Records of the Auckland Museum 53: 27-41.

More information about the Rev. Dr C E Fox: