Description |
Dr Renaud was born in France in about 1900. His medical and administrative career in the French Government service took him to French colonies in Africa, the Antilles, Guiana and the Pacific. In about 1930 he was chief medical officer and surgeon at the Gaston Bourret hospital in Noumea, New Caledonia and between 1931-33 Resident and medical officer in Wallis and Futuna. While in Wallis, Dr Renaud discovered a carbon copy of an anonymous work on Wallisian grammar: Elements de grammaire wallisienne. It may be the grammar by Dr Maxim Viala. According to Paul Privat-Deschanel, cited by Patrick O'Reilly in his Bibliographie ... des Iles Wallis et Futuna (Paris: Musee de l'Homme, 1964). Dr Viala, while Resident and medical officer in Wallis in the early 1900s, compiled a Wallisian grammar and dictionary which was expected to be published. P. O'Reilly notes that to 1964, it had not appeared. Another, possibly the original, copy of the manuscript was owned in the 1950s by Prof. J. Guiart, then in New Caledonia. It was microfilmed under the South Pacific Commission's Preservation of Manuscripts programme and recorded in Deposit Notice 36. It is not clear (Dec. 1989) whether the master negative is held in the National Library of Australia or whether it is of sufficiently good quality for reproduction. Dr Renaud's copy is therefore re-filmed by the PMB, together with the text of a lecture Les Iles Wallis et Futuna given in Paris in about 1960 by Dr Renaud but based on his 1931-33 experiences and subsequent researches. See also PMB Doc.399. Elements de grammaire walliseienne n.d. n.p. 76p; carbon copy of typescript; pp.74 and 75 transposed.
Black and white photograph of Dr Renaud
Les iles Wallis et Futuna n.d. (1960?) typescript of lecture given in Paris by Dr Renaud; 11p.
PMB Identifier: AU PMB MS 1014
The digitisation of these microfilms was funded by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. |