Riding The Island Book Boom

The Region

An island bookseller taps a growing market.

By Garth Cartwright

BOOKS ON the Pacific are the spe cialty of Auckland’s Karangahape Road’s Polynesian Bookshop. You want The Haircutting Ceremony of the Cook Islands? It’s there. You want Life and Leadership in Melanesia? It’s there. You want Modern Communications in the South Pacific? It’s there, too. And plenty of others as well.

The shop had its humble beginnings in the Three Lamps shopping centre in Pon sonby 12 years ago. Today, spacious and colourful on a new site, the Polynesian Bookshop has prospered and kept pace with Auckland’s own image of itself as capital city of the Pacific.

Manager Robert Holding is a middle aged, good-humoured pakeha. His inter est and concern for the Pacific region is deep. “The premises we bought back in 1976 was a very rundown old barbershop.

It was filled with three-year-old Easter eggs, bare-breasted ashtrays, tobacco and barber’s chairs.

“Back then the Ponsonby area was very down at heel. People laughed at us. They said: ‘There’s no way a bookshop can last in Ponsonby’, ‘your bookshop’s only for wogs’. It was rather discouraging at first, to say the least.

“We realised a bookshop dealing only in Maori and Polynesian material couldn’t survive so we sold anything The Lis tener, Women s Weekly and pulp paper backs alongside the small variety of works centred around Pacific cultures.

“The first 18 months were terrible. I al

most took a second job, but having lived on $2O a month in Samoa I was able to cope. Then suddenly a few big libraries came to our rescue and we were off and running.”

Why an Australian hospital adminis trator would want to set up a bookshop ca tering to minorities who were generally ignored by the publishing companies (and almost everyone else) in a then working class neighbourhood may seem at best quixotic, at worst mad. But Robert has al ways had a faith in New Zealand being open to new ideas, and a faith in the Po lynesian community.

“I lived in Samoa for six years,” he says, “from 1970 to 1976. While there I was run ning a bookshop for the Methodist Church.

It was a fantastic six years. I met my wife Sheena there. She knew Samoa and the Samoans well as she had taught and lived in their villages. We were married a tra ditional Samoan wedding but we had to leave eventually as Samoan custom is that outsiders can’t own land; a rule with which, incidentally, I agree.

“Originally we were heading back to Adelaide but we decided we didn’t want to lose our contact with Polynesia, so we came to New Zealand instead as immigrants and had a fairly traumatic time.”

Holding brought the concept of the Po lynesian Bookshop with him. Borrowing $lOOO, he and his wife set up and watched the bookshop expand until the Samoan Consulate General, which valued the Holdings’ commitment to the Polynesian

community, invited them to into Samoa House Arcade, Karangahape Road.

“In Ponsonby we had slowly increased the amount of Maori and Polynesian books until we had an upstairs exclusively for Pa cific materials and a downstairs for the general bookshop. Then, when the new site was offered a year ago, I felt it was finally viable to have a totally Polynesian-Maori bookshop.

“We have really exposed the Polyne sian community to a huge amount of books. They have always come in to buy their Bibles from us but they often leave with a stack of other books. Seeing books such as The Health Handbook for Pacific Women being purchased is, to me, really encouraging.”

As well as healthy book sales, The Po lynesian Bookshop stocks a wide range of Pacific music. Samoan groups remain perennial favourites. Interestingly, while 90 per cent of the customers in the shop are Polynesian, more than half the total sales are to institutions libraries and schools.

“Over the years we’ve had a lot of cus tomers from libraries who now realise that New Zealand is a Pacific country,” says Holding. “At a recent conference Albert Wendt said, ‘Books of the Pacific are for pakehas as much as Polynesians’. I’ve been trying to get that message across for years.

“Most Auckland areas are very posi tive, and demand is high from overseas.

Other countries regard New Zealand as a pure place because of its anti-nuclear stand. We receive orders every day from around the world; even from Russia.”

Holding’s most ambitious move so far has been to establish Polynesian Press a publishing outlet for projects he found were ignored by other publishers. Titles published so far included Simplified Dic tionary of Modern Samoan (10,000 copies sold make it something of a bestseller), Samoan Verbal Expressions, Cook Is land Politics: The Inside Story (this being a book of considerable impact as it helped bring down Albert Henry and, most re cently, Tale O Le Vavae {Myths, Legends & Customs of Old Samoa).

Says Holding: “What I really want to do is publish books for Pacific islanders rather than about them. Many of our books are written in a Pacific language and illus trated by Pacific islanders.

Holding plans to publish dictionaries in a variety of languages. These, and an as sortment of titles including childrens’ and art books, should keep the Polynesian Bookshop’s business booming. □

Robert Holding in his Polynesian Bookshop.