PNG ATTITUDE

Peter Ryan, MM

Peter Allen Ryan was born on 4 September 1923, and educated at Malvern Grammar School. He joined the Victorian Crown Law Department but left in 1941 at the age of 18 to enlist in the Army. For eighteen months he worked on special intelligence work in PNG behind Japanese lines, winning the Military Medal in 1943 and being mentioned in dispatches.

When he returned to Australia he was posted to Victoria Barracks in Melbourne. In 1944-45 he was an officer in the Army's Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs under Colonel Alf Conlon, serving both in Melbourne and at the Land Headquarters School of Civil Affairs – ASOPA’s progenitor - at Duntroon.

In 1946-48, Peter was at the University of Melbourne, graduating with an honours degree in History. While studying Australian history he was taught by Manning Clark. In time, Peter was to become Clark's publisher of the six volumes of a History of Australia. In 1993 he caused a major controversy by publishing a long essay in Quadrant criticising Clark's character and his writings.

From 1958-62, Peter was Public Relations Manager of Imperial Chemical Industries and in 1962 became Director of Melbourne University Press, where he was to remain until his retirement in 1988. Works published during his directorship of MUP included the first twelve volumes of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (to which Ryan was also a contributor), Insects of Australia and Norman Lindsay's Micomicana and books by such well-known authors as Manning Clark, Macfarlane Burnet, Paul Hasluck and AD Hope. Ryan was also pivotal in establishing MUP's high quality publishing subsidiary, Miegunyah Press.

Later Peter held a number of executive positions, including member of the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (1985-88); Executive Officer for the Council of Legal Education (1988-2003); Administrative Officer, the Council of Law Reporting in Victoria; and Secretary of the Victorian Board of Examiners for Barristers and Solicitors. He retired from the latter two appointments in 2003.

In addition to numerous press articles and book reviews, Peter wrote several books including Fear Drive My Feet (1959), Redmond Barry (1972), William Macmahon Ball: A Memoir (1990), Black Bonanza: A Landslide of Gold (1991), Chance Encounters: AD Hope (1992), Lines of Fire: Manning Clark and Other Writings (1997) and Brief Lives (2004).

Ruth Fink Latukefu

In 1960, Dr Ruth Fink, the 28-year old daughter of German Jewish refugees, came to ASOPA. The illustrious anthropologist, Professor AP Elkin, whose course she took over, had referred her. Ruth’s research background was among the Wajarri Aboriginal people of the Murchison region, 450 km north of Perth and an hour’s drive inland from Geraldton.

Ruth was an instant success at ASOPA, where she lectured Cadet Education Officers and Patrol Officers in Anthropology – although, as the following extract from a letter of November 1964 shows, she was a little awed by the hard living kiaps:

“This year lecturing to the Patrol Officers for the first time has made me feel more confident, as they are a very tough group of young men and I expected they would resent having a woman lecturer. They proved very charming and well behaved, even though they are hulking masculine types who drink and swear and lead a rough life.

“A lucky thing happened early in the year, which helped me a lot with them. I had set them an essay and discovered that they were plotting a hoax. Several of them referred to a Dr CJ Blunge, supposedly a famous Belgian anthropologist, who had worked not only in New Guinea but also in Siberia. I started to get suspicious when he was quoted in a number of the essays I was marking and I thought it was a test to see if I was actually reading them.

"I said nothing, but for the next assignment, on their notice board I listed books that they should consult, and scattered among them were several new papers by Herr Blunge (which I had made up). Later I told them that Dr Blunge had been branded a Communist and no further works by him were to be kept in the ASOPA Library.”

In 1965, Ruth took up an appointment at Sydney University. She had by then met her future husband, Sione Latukefu, a Tongan Methodist Minister who later became a noted Pacific historian.

By 1967 Ruth and Sione were living in Port Moresby and teaching at the new University of Papua New Guinea. Ruth says: “We remained for 18 years... Our time in PNG was an unforgettable part of our lives.”

The full story of Ruth Fink Latukefu can be found in the March issue of The Mail [see ASOPA People Extra].

Kenneth E 'Mick' Read

Mick Read was born in Sydney in 1917 and succumbed to cancer at his long time home in Seattle in 1995 aged 78. He was Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington.

Mick was born into the privileges of an upper class Australian country family and grew up in the outback, which coloured his values and gave him a love of nature, but forever made him over-sensitive to light and prone to cancer. His father was a wealthy grazier near Boggabri.

Read's undergraduate degree was taken at the University of Sydney. During World War II he served in the Australian Army in New Guinea. He spent two years in the Markham Valley, largely isolated from his comrades, and it was here he first became acquainted with village life, reporting that in the last few months he was dependent upon villagers for daily handouts of food to sustain him. He completed his PhD in Anthropology after the war. In his first and best known book, ‘The High Valley’, published in 1965, Read thanks Ian Hogbin as ‘my first teacher in anthropology (who) introduced me to the people of Melanesia and New Guinea’.

Read returned to the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University and returned to the PNG Highlands for two years (1950-52) to study the basic elements of social structure, religion, and social change following the war among the Gahuku-Gama people.

It is claimed by many that Mick Read opened Highlands anthropology as a culture area to the anthropological imagination, through the combination of his intensive theoretical and ethnographic studies. These were capped by his articles ‘Nama Cult of the Central Highlands’ in 1952 and two years later the landmark piece ‘Cultures of the Central Highlands’, both of which constituted initial reading for all serious students of New Guinea for a generation to come.

Read's career took him from ANU to Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the ASOPA in 1953-1956, where he taught culture and language. Here he made contact with some of the most influential names in the history of colonial New Guinea, including the Leahy brothers, who became friends. He moved to Seattle, Washington, in 1957.

Source: From an obituary written by Gilbert Herdt

Ann Prendergast

Ann was born in Hay NSW in 1934 and grew up on a property 100 km out of town town. Her early education was through lessons mailed each week from Blackfriars Correspondence School in Sydney. She completed her secondary education with the Sisters of St Joseph at their boarding schools in Leeton and Goulburn. In 1953 Ann was awarded a scholarship to Wagga Teachers College, where she trained as an infants teacher.

After three years country service in her hometown of Hay, in 1958 Ann was appointed to Norfolk Street Infants School in Newtown and began evening study at Sydney University majoring in history and completing an honours year followed by an MA. In 1963 she was appointed to ASOPA, where she was a popular lecturer - her earnest and softly spoken style and pleasant good looks a constraint on even the most boisterous male students..

Ann was encouraged by Principal Charles Rowley to apply for a scholarship to the East West Centre at the University of Hawaii, established by the American government during the Kennedy administration to promote cultural contact between Asia, the Pacific and the US. Here, Ann began work on the culture and history of the Pacific. Her doctoral thesis was on the history of the early years of the London Missionary Society in Papua. She later spent time working in the archives of the Society in London.

Having finished her PhD in 1968, Ann returned to teach at Balmain Teachers College, later Kuring-gai College of Education, which was incorporated into the Sydney University of Technology. She rose to the position of Head of the Department of Social Science. In 1990 Ann retired after forty years of challenging, interesting and productive academic life.

Ann retains a lively interest in ASOPA affairs and was disappointed that physical immobility prevented her attendance at the recent reunion in Brisbane.

Source: Sophie McGrath in Newsletter (vol 6 no 1, April 2006) of the Golding Centre for Women’s History, Theology and Spirituality, Australian Catholic University, Strathfield NSW

Sir Edward Hallstrom

Sir Edward Hallstrom [1886-1970] founded Taronga Zoo Park and directed it from 1941-67. It was in this capacity he gave lectures at ASOPA in 1962 on ‘Capturing of Wild Animals’ and ‘Wild Life in TPNG’, the latter disappointingly offering no advice on how to deal with outstation social excesses let alone activities at Port Moresby’s bottom pub.

As a young man he exhibited an adventurous spirit. In December 1909, he transported one of Australia’s first aircraft, a glider, to the sandhills at Narrabeen Beach and flew it as a kite to make sure it was stable and would support a man.

He had left school at 13 to be apprenticed to a cabinet-maker and studied using the Harmsworth Self-Educator, encyclopaedias and scientific magazines. Intelligent and hard working, he soon had charge of a furniture factory which made innerspring mattresses – the first in Australia. He quit after trying to interest his employers in kerosene-powered incubators. The mattress makers couldn’t understand the leap in logic at all.

In 1923 Hallstrom produced his first Icy Ball absorption refrigerator, a chest model run by kerosene, which he sold around the outback. He then took his idea a step further, adapting the power unit to manufacture Australia’s first electric refrigerator, the Silent Knight. It launched in 1935 and made him a very wealthy man indeed.

By the mid-1940s Hallstroms Pty Ltd was turning out 1,200 refrigerators per week and employed over 700 people. He subsequently invented a machine for refrigerating anaesthetics which he presented to Sydney Hospital.

By this time Hallstrom could afford to indulge two passions—a love of birds and animals (a childhood obsession) and philanthropy. With the proceeds of the sale of five hundred kerosene refrigerators in Africa in 1937, he bought two rhinoceroses which he presented to the Taronga Zoological Park Trust. These were the first of many gifts which gave him extraordinary influence. In 1941 he was appointed a trustee of the zoo which he was to dominate for the next 26 years. As head curator, Hallstrom controversially did away with the miniature railway, elephant and camel rides and performing seals saying, “It’s a zoo, not a circus”.

From 1966 he was also under covert surveillance for illegal trafficking in rare Australian fauna. In 1970, 35 people were convicted and it was thought Hallstrom may have used his influence to have his involvement concealed. The 1993 book, Smuggled, accused him of doing so, but Hallstrom was long dead and the allegations was never proven. Sir Edward died in 1970, aged 83, disspirited by the criminal investigations and with his loss of control over the zoo.

The Hallstrom Pacific Library, established from a £10,000 gift he made to ASOPA, was transferred to the University of NSW upon the demise of the campus in 1998. When ASOP transformed to ITI, the library steadily built a collection of hats donated by students. It was an unusual tribute to Sir Edward Hallstrom, who himself collected the hats of famous men, including Chaplin, Churchill, Truman, Eisenhower and Menzies.

[Lower photo: Jack Davey, Hallstrom and artist Albert Namatjira on Davey's radio show c 1950]

J K Murray

Sir Jack Keith Murray OBE [1889-1979] was an agriculturalist, a soldier and an administrator – and he excelled in every field. His parents separated when he was two and his mother supported him by working as a domestic servant. Murray later wrote he found it 'impossible to pay an adequate tribute to her'. His mother saved the money that enabled him to enter St Joseph's College, Hunters Hill, in 1904.

He graduated from Sydney University just after the start of World War 1 with a BScAgr, BA and, after service with the Sydney University Scouts, a diploma of military science. In 1916 he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force and, after service in France and post-war agricultural studies, he was demobilised in 1920.

In 1923 he became principal of the Queensland Agricultural High School at Gatton and later took up a concurrent appointment as foundation professor of agriculture at the University of Queensland. Gatton, severely run down, was transformed under his direction and Murray became a leading figure in Queensland affairs.

In 1940, at the age of 51, he rejoined the Army as Colonel and was given command of the 25^th Battalion, Darling Downs Regiment, spending the next three years administering army training establishments. He looked the part: fit, wiry, of middle height and upright bearing. He wore a full moustache, clipped at the ends.

In February 1944, Alf Conlon appointed Murray as chief instructor at the School of Civil Affairs in Canberra, the precursor to ASOPA, where he trained personnel to administer Australia's territories. As PNG returned to civil control after the war, Minister for External Territories Eddie Ward wanted an Administrator who would pursue his reformist aims for the territory. Murray was sworn in on 16 October 1945.

Murray dealt with problems of reconstruction, paying special attention to the plight of the people in villages devastated by war. Each year he spent months visiting outlying districts, talking with village leaders and missionaries, encouraging his staff, and restoring confidence in the Australian administration. He obtained from Canberra neither policy direction nor decisions. He believed action could best be taken in Port Moresby.

In pursuit of a 'new deal' for Papuans and New Guineans, Murray supervised the establishment of village courts, village councils, cooperative societies, extension courses in agriculture, aid posts, training of indigenous medical officers and orderlies, and moved the workforce from an indenture system to one of free labour. The local white establishment found Murray's attitude to Papua New Guineans scandalous. When the Murrays invited Papuans to functions at Government House, whites boycotted them and Murray was dubbed 'Kanaka Jack'.

As a Labor appointee, Murray was regarded with suspicion when Robert Menzies was elected in 1949. A major rift occurred in 1950 when Murray disagreed with an order from Canberra that Papua New Guineans should not speak directly to a visiting mission from the United Nations. In 1952, new Territories Minister Paul Hasluck dismissed Murray, not offering him the opportunity to retire or resign, and replaced him with Liberal Party operative Donald Cleland.

Murray lived in retirement at St Lucia, Brisbane. He was a member (1953-68) of the senate of the University of Queensland. In 1959 he was appointed OBE and he was knighted in 1978. He died on 10 December 1979 at Jindalee.

JK Murray focused and epitomised reform in postwar PNG. While he was Administrator, change was the central issue. By the time he was removed from office, the pattern had been set, and the best policies of the following decades flowed from those he had supported and proposed.

[Source: Brian Jinks, 'Murray, Sir Jack Keith (1889 - 1979)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol 15, Melbourne University Press, 2000]

Ida Leeson

Ida Emily Leeson [1885-1964] attended Sydney Girls High and Sydney University, graduating with a BA in 1906 and finding a job as a library assistant. In 1909 she transferred to the Mitchell Library and by 1919 occupied one of the Library's senior positions, principal accessions officer. Over this period she developed a great interest in Australian and Pacific materials. In 1927, during a visit to Britain, she discovered, in the Public Record Office, the missing third volume of Matthew Flinders’ 1801-08 log.

In 1932 Ida Leeson became the first woman to be appointed Mitchell Librarian, but only after a public controversy about whether it was appropriate to appoint a female to such a senior position. The trustees reorganised the library's senior management, reducing the status and salary of the Librarian - a move criticised in vain by feminists such as Jessie Street.

Under Ida Leeson's direction the Mitchell Library consolidated its position as the pre-eminent repository of Australian and Pacific documents. Numerous important collections were acquired and the library's role expanded. During World War 2, while regular library services were curtailed, the establishment of General MacArthur's headquarters in Melbourne in 1942 led to frequent requests of the library for intelligence information about the Pacific. Ida Leeson was the right person to go to.

In April 1944 Alf Conlon secured her secondment as a research officer in ASOPA’s predecessor, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs. As Major Leeson she became a key member of Conlon's team which included people like John Kerr, James McAuley and JK Murray. Later she referred to Conlon as a “life-changer”. She did not return to the Mitchell after the war, preferring instead to become the first ASOPA librarian. In 1949 she moved to the South Pacific Commission where she worked until 1956.

Ida Leeson was a diminutive and forceful person who resisted easy classification. She became a trailblazer for women and for librarians and was a champion of the lively literary culture of Australia in the 1930s and 1940s. She was a close friend of Walter Burley Griffin and for some time Ida and her partner Florence Birch lived as part of the Griffins’ bohemian enclave in Castlecrag.

In her later years Ida Leeson continued to research for universities and other bodies and was generous with advice and assistance. She died on 22 January 1964.

Sources: [1] Baiba Berzins, ‘Australian Dictionary of Biography’, vol 10, Melbourne University Press, 1986. [2] Sylvia Martin, ‘Ida Leeson: A Life’, Allen and Unwin, 2006

Dorothy Shineberg

Professor Dorothy Shineberg [1927–2004] was a legend among Pacific historians, described as “wise, humane and sagacious” and “an ornament to the discipline”. She wrote They Came for Sandalwood (1967), the pioneering and definitive account of the 19th century sandalwood trade in Melanesia, and in retirement completed her long project The People Trade, a sharply focused study of imported Pacific Island labourers in New Caledonia.

After graduating from Melbourne University she was recruited by Alf Conlon in 1948 to join the staff of ASOPA, where she taught Pacific History, hitherto an unknown discipline. Her subsequent teaching career spanned four decades mainly at ANU where she developed the first stand-alone university course in Pacific History.

They Came for Sandalwood is the work for which Dorothy Shineberg will be best remembered. It was original in presenting history in a way that incorporated Melanesian perceptions, while at the same time avoiding a romanticised view of Melanesian culture. It also set a standard for close, documentary research - not always easy in the investigation of the activities of nineteenth century Pacific traders.

To her lasting regret, Dr Shineberg was never appointed to a permanent research position at ANU. It was the tragedy of her professional life, a tremendous disappointment to her and a loss to scholarship. She was channelled instead into undergraduate teaching, which she did remarkably well. She would have been the first to admit that she was not a flamboyant or entertaining lecturer. But what was lacking in presentation was made up for in careful preparation. Her reputation as teacher was widely bruited by her students; and her Head of Department (Manning Clark) spoke for everyone with the observation that she ‘brought grace and wisdom to the teaching of Pacific history’. The self-reliance that her mother instilled carried over into her teaching: she expected her students to show initiative as well as enthusiasm, and took early retirement when they started asking for a bunch of photocopied articles as a substitute for their own research.

Dorothy Shineberg once said that she felt fortunate in having all her life known so many interesting people. She herself was intensely interesting and very good company, noted among other things for her robust sense of humour. There were other sides to her life besides being an academic historian, including an informed appreciation of classical music. Like many academics from Melbourne she was passionate about her football club (Collingwood). She was an equally ardent, and knowledgeable, follower of the Australian cricket team, although disliking the boorishness of some of the players. Not least were her concern for social justice, a product of her precarious upbringing, and her love for her family. She was described as a lioness—‘and no lioness,’ said her daughter Susan, ‘defended her cubs more fiercely’.

[Source: Obituary by Doug Munro, The Journal of Pacific Studies, vol 27 no 2, 2004]

Read Dorothy Shineberg's account of how she landed at ASOPA in the latest Mail, out today

Ian Hogbin

Ian Hogbin [1904-1989] belonged to Anthropology's heroic age. Recruited by AR Radcliffe-Brown, mentored by Bronislaw Malinowski and a member of the brilliant generation - including Raymond Firth, Reo Fortune, Margaret Mead and Douglas Oliver - who pioneered modern field research in the South Pacific.

Like many anthropologists in World War 2, Hogbin served as an adviser to the armed forces, lending expertise to problems of indigenous populations overtaken by the upheaval. Controversially, he maintained that when the Japanese occupied New Guinea, the people had no alternative but to do as they were told. He argued they “couldn’t be counted as traitors even if they were Japanese village policemen or worked for the Japanese... The government of the day were the Japanese, the Japanese had conquered the country”. Hogbin’s view was not accepted by ANGAU and New Guinean ‘traitors’ were publicly hanged or otherwise punished.

At Sydney University after the war, he inspired a new generation of anthropologists with his enthusiasm for field work and the absolute importance of clear writing. Hogbin was remarkable for the extent of his research and the volume of his writings: he worked in no fewer than five Pacific communities and published nine books. By the outbreak of   the Pacific war, he had completed studies in Malaita, Guadalcanal and Wogeo. He travelled extensively in the Solomons and PNG during the war, and made a final study of Busama in the late 1940s.

Hogbin was well known for his perceptive and sensitive approach to field work. A Solomon Islander remarked, “At last we have found a European who is a black man, even if his skin is white”.

After the appearance of his last monograph, The Leaders and the Led, in 1978, Ian's friends hoped he would commit to writing the stories with which he had often entertained them over the dinner table. Regrettably other commitments and a degree of reticence prevented him undertaking the task until he found himself physically unable to write.

[Further reading: Jeremy Beckett, ‘Conversations with Ian Hogbin’, Oceania Monograph 35; Oceania Publications, University of Sydney]

Peter Lawrence

Peter Lawrence [1921-1987] was born in Lancashire and read classics at Cambridge. After war service in naval intelligence, he returned to Cambridge to study anthropology and earned his PhD for research amongst the PNG Garia people of the southern Madang Province in the late 1940s. Lawrence had a real love affair with the Garia and eventually managed to visit them each year from 1971 until shortly before his death. Lawrence’s book on the Garia, critics said, was the work of a determined, resourceful and distinguished contributor to Melanesian ethnology.

Lawrence's professional career was spent in Australia, where he was Professor of Anthropology at both Queensland University (1966-70), and Sydney University (1970-86). He was a frequent visitor to North America, where he lectured widely.

His principal theoretical interest was in the intellectual life of primitive peoples, with perhaps his best known books being Road Belong Cargo and Gods, Ghosts and Men in Melanesia. He wrote on religion, social structure, politics and law. But much of his teaching emphasised the applied value of anthropology, particularly for colonial administrators committed to indigenous development.

Lawrence’s first and enduring passion, he admitted, was teaching at the Australian School of Pacific Administration, beginning in 1957, where he created the Anthropology curriculum.

He had a major role, too, in the transformation of ASOPA to the International Training Institute, which contributed much to the education and careers of administrators from Third World countries. Peter Lawrence in Sydney died of a stroke on 12 December 1987.

Fred Kaad

In 1964 Fred Kaad OBE was District Commissioner in Madang when the light aircraft in which he was flying crashed, fatally injuring the pilot and leaving Fred a paraplegic with third degree burns to both legs, continuing neuropathic pain and rotator cuff problems. He was, as the result of that tragic event, confined to a wheelchair. But it didn’t stop him embarking on a second and equally distinguished career.

Following a long period in hospital and in convalescence, Fred spent a year at Robb College in the University of New England completing a Masters Degree in Educational Administration. He subsequently became a course director and lecturer at the Australian School of Pacific Administration and stayed on there when it transformed into the International Training Institute, where I first met him.

After retirement Fred worked as a consultant but has spent an increasing amount of time on honorary work in the area of spinal injuries. He remains Deputy Chairman and Honorary Director of Spinal Cure Australia and as a Patron, along with the Governor-General, of the PNG Association of Australia.

Charles Rowley

I can’t go back to the former ASOPA campus, and I return from time to time, without recapturing the spirit of Professor Charles Rowley – who taught me, and many others, both at the School and at the University of Papua New Guinea. He was a great man – knowledgeable, reasoned, patient and kind.

Back at ASOPA again on Saturday, along with Rowley’s ghost, I reflected on what the late Donald Horne wrote of him in one of his last articles, which was about the so-called ‘history wars’. “One of the achievements of the '60s,” Horne said, ”was the careful conceptualisation by the social scientist Charles Rowley that what went with that dispossession was as, above all, ‘the destruction of Aboriginal society’. What mattered most was not how many massacres there had been, but that dispossession disintegrated the structure of the Aboriginal societies.

“In his index, Rowley gave almost two columns to ‘society’ and less than a sixth of a column to ‘massacres’. (Another aberration? If everyone involved in the Windschuttle skirmish had set their course by Rowley's clear conceptual vision, discussion would not have veered into the squalid and the plain silly.)”

[Source: ‘Still lucky, but getting smarter’ by Donald Horne, The Age, 28 August 2004]

James McAuley

James McAuley AM [1917-76] was born in Lakemba, NSW, and was educated at the University of Sydney, graduating with an MA in 1940. At University he was an outstanding intellectual figure, distinguishing himself as a conversationalist, poet, jazz pianist, drinker and bohemian. Drafted into the army in 1942, he was appointed to the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs convened by Alf Conlon. In this position he instructed members of the Australian New Guinea Administration Unit.

From this time, McAuley maintained a great interest in Papua New Guinea, and was a lecturer at ASOPA from 1946-60. His essays on PNG, published in the journal South Pacific, were acclaimed. McAuley became editor of Quadrant in 1956 and was named reader in poetry at the University of Tasmania in 1961, prior to becoming professor of English. He died after a lingering illness at the age of 59.The James McAuley Lecture is delivered annually in his honour at the University of Tasmania.

MAGPIE

By James McAuley

The magpie's mood is never surly
every morning, wakening early,
he gargles music in his throat,
the liquid squabble of his throat.

Its silver stridencies of sound,
the bright confusions and the round
bell-cadences are pealed
over the frosty, half-ploughed field.

Then swooping down self confidently
from the fence-post or the tree,
he swaggers in pied feather coat,
and slips the fat worms down his throat.

[Sources: Oldpoetry.com and The-rathouse.com]

Marie Reay

Marie Reay [1922-2004] was a senior fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the Australian National University, author of The Kuma and numerous articles on the New Guinea Highlands. She also spent time at ASOPA. The anthropologist AP Elkin inspired her with an interest in Aborigines and in the mid-1940s she became the first anthropologist to study contemporary conditions among Aborigines in Northern NSW.

After a year as a research assistant at the London School of Economics, Marie spent two years lecturing at ASOPA. She then began a study of the Orokaiva in Papua. This project was aborted by the eruption of Mt Lamington, in which she was caught up and after which she suffered a nervous breakdown.

In 1953, however, she returned to New Guinea and was the first woman anthropologist to go to the Highlands, though the authorities took a good deal of persuading, and imposed absurd restrictions including dress, which once in the field she was able to ignore. The journalist, Colin Simpson discovered her there, and featured her in his travelogue, Adam in Plumes (1954).

Marie remained at ANU for the rest of her career and, despite increasing infirmity, continued to return to the Wahgi, where she maintained a house, almost to the end of her life.

[Source: Australian Journal of Anthropology, December 2005 by Paula Brown Glick and Jeremy Beckett]

John Kerr

I’ll be attending former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s 90^th birthday celebration on Tuesday 11 July. It will be held, appropriately some might feel, at Sydney’s Machiavelli Restaurant. It’s impossible to mention Whitlam, of course, without thinking of his nemesis, John Kerr, the first Principal of ASOPA.

Sir John Kerr [1914-91], a former Chief Justice of NSW and Australia’s 18^th Governor-General, dismissed Gough Whitlam’s Labor government on 11 November 1975, provoking one of the most significant political crises in Australian history. Kerr was born in Balmain, his father a boiler-maker, and won a scholarship to Sydney University, graduating in law. He spent World War 2 working for an Australian intelligence organisation, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, under Colonel Alf Conlon. In 1946 he became the first Principal of ASOPA and the first Secretary-General of the South Pacific Commission before returning to the bar in 1948, where he became one of Sydney's leading industrial lawyers.

Camilla Wedgwood

Camilla Hildegarde Wedgwood [1901-55], anthropologist and educationist, was born in England, a descendant of Josiah Wedgwood, the master potter. In 1920 she went to Cambridge to study anthropology. She passed with first-class honours in 1924 but the university did not award degrees to women until 1948.

In 1928 she was appointed lecturer in anthropology at Sydney University from where, in 1932-34, she undertook fieldwork on Manam, a volcanic island of 4000 inhabitants off the north coast of New Guinea. She then spent 1935 in Nauru.

It was clear from her research on Manam and Nauru that, in spite of her own unmarried independence, she saw a subordinate role for women in marriage and the wider society as part of the natural order.

In 1935 Wedgwood was appointed principal of Women's College at the University of Sydney. As principal and daughter of a well-known British Labour politician, Lord Wedgwood, she was a public figure in Sydney, prominent in charitable causes as well as a member of the strongly pacifist Quakers.

In 1944 Wedgwood was commissioned lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army and served as a research officer in Alf Conlon's Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs. Here she developed policies for postwar educational reconstruction in Papua New Guinea, where she served intermittently in 1944-45. On an army bivouac, when offered a cigarette by her young cadets, she replied: “No thanks, I roll my own”.

Following demobilisation in 1946, she became a popular figure at ASOPA, where she was senior lecturer in native administration.

Camilla Wedgwood died of cancer on 17 May 1955 at Royal North Shore Hospital. A girls' secondary school at Goroka in the New Guinea Highlands and a memorial lecture in Port Moresby were named after her and her friend James McAuley dedicated his poem Winter Nightfall to her.

Author: David Wetherell

Photo: Australian War Memorial

Read more in The Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Alf Conlon

Colonel Alfred (Alf) Conlon [1908-61] chaired Prime Minister John Curtin's committee on national morale in 1942 and, the following year, reporting to commander-in-chief General Sir Thomas Blamey, assumed charge of the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs. In this role, he assembled around him a group of talented people, among them John Kerr, James Plimsoll, James McAuley, Harold Stewart, Camilla Wedgwood, HIP Hogbin, WEH Stanner and Isa Leeson.

One of the Directorate’s main functions was to provide policy advice on the government of the Trust Territory - Papua - and the Mandated Territory - New Guinea. Even in this early post-war period, Conlon' s activity extended beyond military exigency to anticipate PNG's independence. Under his leadership the Directorate performed work of enduring value: the two Territories were placed under one administration, their laws consolidated and codified, and the School of Civil Affairs was established to train service personnel as colonial administrators. In peacetime this became the Australian School of Pacific Administration.

Conlon's propensity for informal contact, deliberate avoidance of regular channels and neglect of administrative process (attributes later much emulated in PNG under Australian administration) led to clashes with official bodies. So Conlon relinquished this appointment, only to spend 1948-49 as an unsuccessful and unhappy principal of ASOPA.

Thereafter he resumed his medical degree at the University of Sydney and qualified, with difficulty, afterwards conducting a mainly psychiatric practice from his North Sydney home.

Conlon was of tall and bulky build. He smoked, drank and ate liberally, avoided fresh air and shunned exercise. He declared he was not interested in a long life, and he did not have one. But his enterprise and energy created a solid foundation for ASOPA and for the development of Papua New Guinea.

Read more in The Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Author: Peter Ryan

Hal Wootten

Hal Wootten QC AC, one of Australia's most brilliant legal minds, is a former NSW Supreme Court judge, a former Chairman of the Press Council and an expert on Aboriginal and Papua New Guinea affairs. He was also one of the founding staff members of ASOPA immediately after World War 2.

In an interview with Peter Thompson of ABC Radio National, he tells of how this came about…..

"Well, when I was working for the private solicitor and feeling very unhappy, and wondering what I’d do, I got a phone call out of the blue from someone who said his name was John Kerr. He wanted to talk to me about the possibility of a job, and would I meet him in a coffee shop. He described to me what a Colonel’s uniform looked like, and I went down.

"He had just become Principal of the Australian School of Pacific Administration, which was the civilian metamorphosis of the LHQ of Civil Affairs, which had trained people to go back for the administration of British North Borneo when it was re-taken from the Japs, and had done other work.

"The Australian School of Pacific Administration was to be a permanent school training field staff, magistrates, patrol officers and so on for New Guinea, for the resumption of civil administration. These of course were still in the days of the great post-war idealistic outburst before the Cold War had really killed everyone’s enthusiasm, poverty was to be tackled, colonialism was to be got rid of, racial discrimination was to be eliminated and there was a whole brave new world to be built.

"Part of the picture of ASOPA was that it was to work towards preparing Papua-New Guinea for independence, as part of the world-wide decolonisation process. So there was a very attractive, a very idealistic agenda associated with the School. Anyway I ended up going there, initially as a general tutor and then as a law lecturer, and I was there for five years which were very interesting years.