Scholars at War: Australasian Social Scientists, 1939-1945

300 Pages·2012·1.174 MB·English

by  Geoffrey Gray & Doug Munro & Christine Winter

SCHOLARS AT WAR
AUSTRALASIAN SOCIAL SCIENTISTS, 1939-1945

SCHOLARS AT WAR
AUSTRALASIAN SOCIAL SCIENTISTS, 1939-1945
Edited by Geoffrey Gray,
Doug Munro and Christine Winter
Published by ANU E Press
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200, Australia
Email: [email protected]
This title is also available online at: http://epress.anu.edu.au
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Title: Scholars at war : Australasian social scientists, 1939-1945 /
edited by Geoffrey Gray, Doug Munro and Christine Winter.
ISBN: 9781921862496 (pbk.) 9781921862502 (ebook)
Subjects: Anthropologists--Australia--Biography.
Anthropologists--New Zealand--Biography.
Historians--Australia--Biography.
Historians--New Zealand--Biography.
World War, 1939-1945--Science.
Social sciences--Australia.
Social sciences--New Zealand.
Other Authors/Contributors:
Gray, Geoffrey G.
Munro, Doug.
Winter, Christine.
Dewey Number: 301.0922
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cover design and layout by ANU E Press
Cover image: Canberra, ACT, 1945-05-29, Members of the Instructional Staff of the Land HQ
School of Civil Affairs at Duntroon Military College. Australian War Memorial ID 108449.
Printed by Griffin Press
This edition © 2012 ANU E Press
Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii
Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Abbreviations and Acronyms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Geoffrey Gray, Doug Munro and Christine Winter
Part I: The Australians 29
Geoffrey Gray and Christine Winter
1 . A . P . Elkin: Public morale and propaganda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
John Pomeroy
2 . Conlon’s Remarkable Circus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Cassandra Pybus
3. H. Ian Hogbin: ‘Official adviser on native affairs’ . . . . . . . . . . 73
Geoffrey Gray
4 . W . E . H . Stanner: Wasted war years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Geoffrey Gray
5 . Camilla Wedgwood: ‘what are you educating natives for’ . . . 117
David Wetherell
6 . Ronald Murray Berndt: ‘Work of national importance’ . . . . . . 133
Geoffrey Gray
7 . The Road to Conlon’s Circus—and Beyond:
A personal retrospective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
J. D. Legge
Part II: The New Zealanders 163
Doug Munro
8 . Derek Freeman at War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Peter Hempenstall
v
9 . J . W . Davidson on the Home Front . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Doug Munro
10 . Neville Phillips and the Mother Country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Jock Phillips
11 . Dan Davin: The literary legacy of war . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Janet Wilson
Consolidated Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
vi
Preface
The idea for this book was initiated when Geoff Gray and Doug Munro first met,
at a workshop on Pacific biography, ‘Telling Pacific Lives’, held at The Australian
National University in December 2005. There was an apparent synchronicity,
and certainly a meeting of minds. One of us was writing biographies of Pacific
historians and, in passing, their wartime experiences; the other had written
on Australian anthropologists and how the war impacted on the discipline and
its development in Australia. Christine Winter, who joined in the project later,
was writing about National Socialism in New Guinea and Oceania. By the time
we next met, 12 months later in Dunedin at the Pacific History Association
Conference, the idea for the present volume had congealed. We agreed that
an examination of the war work done by Australian and New Zealand social
scientists—especially anthropologists and historians during World War II—
would enable a discussion of the way in which war affected the lives and careers
of a selected group of scholars from the two countries.
We were aware that, in Australia, the readjustments of war provided
opportunities for intellectual talent to play a role in government policy and
in the plans for postwar reconstruction that would not otherwise have been
available. This group of mostly men was confident of their ability to influence
the course of events—if not during the war then certainly in the postwar period;
they saw themselves as liberal, reform-minded progressives, with a nationalist
agenda and a bias for state intervention. They were representative of the new
academic and professional elite that emerged during the war and which was to
play an influential part in public life during the decades following the war. The
different circumstances of New Zealand limited the mobilisation of scholarship
for the war effort. The majority of university graduates served in the armed
forces in combat roles. Only occasionally were their talents channelled into war
work more in keeping with their scholarly callings, be it scientific research or
security intelligence.
The fact that we live in different countries has encouraged a trans-Tasman
approach that allows comparisons that might not otherwise have been evident.
That said, there is an element of pragmatism—unavoidably—in the selection of
the individual scholars represented in this collection. Others could conceivably
have been included but the final line-up was, in the last resort, a function of the
availability of contributors. We hope that this volume will inspire further work
on the broad subject of scholars at war and, in particular, attention to those
individuals (such as the Australian museum anthropologist Norman Tindale and
the New Zealand historian Angus Ross) not included in the pages that follow.
Geoffrey Gray, Canberra
Doug Munro, Wellington
Christine Winter, Canberra vii

Contributors
Geoffrey Gray
Geoffrey Gray is Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Studies, and Adjunct Professor of History, University
of Queensland. His publications include A Cautious Silence: The politics of
Australian anthropology (Canberra, 2007).
Peter Hempenstall
Peter Hempenstall is Conjoint Professor of History, University of Newcastle,
NSW. His publications include The Lost Man: Wilhelm Solf in German history
(Wiesbaden, 2005), co-authored with Paula Tanaka Mochida.
John Legge
John Legge is Emeritus Professor of History at Monash University. Publications
include Australian Outlook: A history of the Australian Institute of International
Affairs (Canberra, 1999).
Doug Munro
Doug Munro is a Wellington-based biographer and historian, and an Honorary
Associate Professor, University of Queensland. Publications include The Ivory
Tower and Beyond: Participant historians of the Pacific (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009).
Jock Phillips
Jock Phillips is the General Editor of Te Ara (the Encyclopedia of New Zealand
project), Ministry of Culture and Heritage, New Zealand. Publications include
Settlers: New Zealand immigrants from England, Ireland and Scotland, 1800–
1945 (Auckland, 2008), co-authored with Terry Hearn.
John Pomeroy
John Pomeroy is an independent scholar and author of ‘Morale on the Home
Front in Australia During the Second World War’, PhD thesis, University of
Sydney, 1995.
ix
Scholars at War: Australasian social scientists, 1939–1945
Cassandra Pybus
Cassandra Pybus is Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the
Department of History, University of Sydney. Publications include The Devil
and James McAuley (Brisbane, 1999).
David Wetherell
David Wetherell is Senior Lecturer in History at Deakin University. Publications
include Charles Abel and the Kwato Mission of Papua New Guinea, 1891–1975
(Melbourne, 1996).
Janet Wilson
Janet Wilson is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University
of Northampton, UK. Publications include (as editor) The Gorse Blooms Pale:
Dan Davin’s Southland stories (Dunedin, 2007).
Christine Winter
Christine Winter is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of History,
Philosophy, Religion and Classics at the University of Queensland, and a Visiting
Fellow in the School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the
Pacific, at The Australian National University.
x