A library in transit: how 9,000 books found their way to Vanuatu
It starts, as these things often do, with a question. What do you do with a lifetime of books?
For CHL alum, Dr Matthew Spriggs, the answer began to take shape after retirement, when he found himself in Vanuatu, volunteering at the national library. The Pacific collection was there—but not substantial. It felt incomplete.
So, he made a decision. He would give them his library.
What followed was less a single act than a quiet chain reaction. A call went out across ANU, answered by many colleagues, especially from the ANU School of Culture, History & Language within the College of Asia and the Pacific. Books began arriving from across academic lifetimes—collections built over decades, now finding a new destination. Volumes came from scholars like Darrell Tryon, Jeff Siegel, David Walsh, and Peter Bellwood.
Some arrived through careful planning. Others carried their own small stories—a handwritten note left with boxes at the doorstep, a daughter driving across France to pass on her father’s books, a handful of volumes tucked into a suitcase and carried across borders.
And then there was the question of Jack Golson’s library.
For years, those books had remained close. Letting them go was not simply logistical. But in January 2026, they arrived in Vanuatu. As Spriggs opened the boxes and began to count, the scale of what had taken shape became clear: 9,000 new acquisitions. Of these, 3,500 were Golson’s Pacific volumes, joined by more than 2,500 from Spriggs’ own shelves and hundreds more from colleagues and collaborators.
“Jack would have been very pleased,” Spriggs says. His final fieldwork, after all, had been in Vanuatu.
Today, the collection sits in a reference library in Vanuatu—used by school students, researchers, linguists, and even those navigating land disputes. In a country with the highest number of languages per capita in the world, the significance is hard to overstate. Much of the scholarship on these languages has long been held elsewhere, often in Australia. This begins, in some small way, to shift that balance.
There is more to come. Plans are underway to expand the space, to raise the library’s profile, and, by 2030—the 50th anniversary of Vanuatu’s independence—to digitise key materials in Vanuatu languages held abroad.
For Spriggs, this project is part of a broader shift. In recent years, he has been steadily donating materials to institutions including the National Library of Australia and archival collections. “I don’t throw away anything,” he says. “It is satisfying—the knowledge is important. It’s my entire career.”
But here, that knowledge has taken on a different kind of life. Not stored. Not static. Still moving—across shelves, across borders, and into the hands of those it speaks most closely to.
If the numbers suggest scale, the details reveal something else.
Among the collection are early missionary translations of Pacific languages, fragments of linguistic history that exist in only a handful of copies worldwide. There is a second edition of a 17th-century account of the Spanish explorer Pedro Fernandes de Queirós’s encounter with Vanuatu. And, almost by accident, a small, worn volume of 48 traditional Māori songs printed in South Africa in 1857—one of only four known copies outside of libraries in Australia and New Zealand.
Finding it was not planned. It simply looked old enough to include in an exhibition. Only later did its rarity become clear.
Getting the books there, however, was anything but accidental. At one point, Spriggs’ apartment was overtaken—books stacked across every available surface. In total, 188 boxes were packed into a shipping container. The hardest part, he says, was not deciding what to give away, rather the logistics: gathering everything, coordinating contributions, and moving a lifetime of material across the ocean.
Sixteen boxes still remain unopened.