Percy Smith (ethnologist)

Working on the family farm, he developed an interest in the local flora and fauna, and was taught to paint by landscape artist John Gully.

[2] Smith was not formally trained in ethnology, but became familiar with Māori language and culture, partly out of necessity in his work, and also because he was interested in it as a scholar.

[2] During his survey expeditions, he collected and recorded information about Māori history and culture, which became the basis for his later career, after his retirement from the civil service, as a Polynesian scholar.

[2] During this time Smith also published a large number of articles, books, and pamphlets on the history, mythology, and traditions of Polynesian peoples.

Spending four to five months there, he gathered information which he used to write Niue-fekai (or Savage) Island and its people (1903), and A vocabulary and grammar of the Niue dialect of the Polynesian language (1907, with Edward Tregear).

The nevertheless high standard, for the period, of his own work and its publication provided a touchstone for later amplification which is being revised only today by more developed archaeological and critical techniques".

As a successful civil servant and respected scholar he was perhaps one of New Zealand's most prolific intellectuals of the late nineteenth century, and was a major contributor to the scientific debate over the origins and nature of the Maori".

Smith obtained details about places in Rarotonga and Tahiti during a visit in 1897, while Jury provided information about Māori canoes in New Zealand.

Their joint work was published in two books, in which Jury and Smith falsely attributed much of their information to two 19th-century tohunga, Moihi Te Mātorohanga and Nēpia Pōhūhū".

Skinner had just been given the position of lecturer in anthropology at the University of Otago in Dunedin, an appointment which signalled the first academic recognition of the discipline in the country.

Skinner decided that the money should be used to fund the Percy Smith Medal in honour of his work, in particular the foundation of the Polynesian Society.