Marjorie Tuainekore Crocombe

Who is Marjorie Tuainekore Crocombe?

Marjorie Tuainekore Tere Crocombe, born Marjorie Hosking in Rarotonga in 1930, was a Cook Islands author, educator, and academic regarded as one of the most important figures in modern Pacific scholarship and literature. Educated at Titikaveka Primary School before winning a Maui Pomare scholarship to complete her secondary schooling in New Zealand, she returned home to become, in 1955, the first female lecturer from the Cook Islands at Nikao Teachers College, where she also helped develop primary school readers in the Cook Islands Maori language. Working alongside her husband, the Pacific scholar Ron Crocombe, she translated and edited "The Works of Ta'unga: Records of a Polynesian Traveller in the Southern Seas, 1833-1896" and, decades later, brought the Rarotongan missionary Maretu's manuscript to publication as "Cannibals and Converts". After a career at the University of the South Pacific, she became founding director of the Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Auckland from 1990 to 1993. In 2011 the University of the South Pacific awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters, and she was widely described as the Cook Islands' most venerated living author until her death in 2022 at the age of ninety-two.

Sources: Marjorie Crocombe — Wikipedia biographical summary · Cook Islands News, "Marjorie Tua'inekore Crocombe — An exceptional life" · Obituaries Australia, "Crocombe, Marjorie Tuainekore" obituary record