Brilliant Career Of

E. W. P. Chinnery

New Guinea Anthropologist to Attend International Conference

From a Special Correspondent

THE Government Anthropologist of the Mandated Territory of New Guinea, Mr. E. W. Pearson Chinnery, who has been selected to attend the International Con ference of Anthropological and Ethno logical Sciences to be held at University College, London, in July and August of this year, is peculiarly fitted for such an im portant job.

Joining the administrative service of Papua in the early days of the Murray regime, when the life was one of adventure, uncertainty and eternal loneliness, he quickly established a reputation as an Intrepid patrol official and a sound out station administrative officer. It was dur ing his service in Papua that his interest in native life and sociology, apart from the administrative field, became known to Dr. Haddon, of Cambridge, the father of modern anthropology and the initiator of field-research in that science. Dr. Haddon collaborated with Mr. Chinnery in a num ber of studies dealing with various aspects of primitive Papuan culture and social life. With the pursuit of this interest, came a definite belief in the value of an thropological methods in native adminis

tration, and a desire to continue study of this subject along directed academic lines.

The latter stage of the Great War found Mr. Chinnery in Europe as a junior officer in the Royal Air Force. After the war, he seized the opportunity of studying anthropology at Cambridge under Dr. Haddon and the anthropo-psychologist, the late Dr. W. H. Rivers. Both Dr. Haddon and Dr. Rivers had been members of the Cam bridge Anthropological Expedition to Tor res Straits, which was the beginning of the transfer of anthropology from the study to the field; the precursor of the many ethnographic field studies of recent times.

In 1919 Mr. Chinnery was invited to ad dress the Royal Anthropoligical Institute (of which he is a fellow) in London on the practical value of anthropological methods in administration, and there suggested, amongst other things, that a training in anthropology should be made available to officials of New Guinea and Papua.

After spending two academic years at Cambridge, he returned to Papua, and there accepted the important and unprece dented position of taking charge of the native labour organisation of the New

Guinea Copper Mines at Laloki. This appointment offered him the unique op portunity of seeing the native from an entirely different and non-official angle.

His work, during the three years in this position, consisted of organizing and con trolling about 1,000 natives who lived and worked on the mines and were entirely away from the influences of village life.

During those three years there was no case of desertion nor was there one single

Mr. E. W. P. Chinnery.

complaint laid to the Government by any native employee. Mr. Chinnery was, in effect, the welfare officer of the labourers.

In 1928, Section 2 of the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, held at Melbourne, asked the Commonwealth Government to give consideration to the appointment of a Gov ernment anthropologist to New Guinea (Papua had done so in 1921, thus leading the world in this important step); and to endow a Chair of Anthropology at Sydney University, introducing the cadet training system to New Guinea. Both suggestions were favourably received by the Common wealth Government and Mr. Chinnery was the obvious choice for the post of Govern ment Anthropologist.

Arriving in Rabaul in 1924, he quietly set about the enormous job of reducing to some order the mass of data already gath ered regarding native cultures in the Ter ritory. He published six comprehensive official reports, and was largely instru mental in getting the Australian National Research Council interested in the New Guinea field of research for its workers, under the Rockefeller fund. In 1931 he visited U.S.A. as a Rockefeller travelling research-fellow, and there studied certain aspects of demography. The same year he accompanied the Australian delegation to the League of Nations as adviser, and gave interesting illustrated talks to the august Mandates Commission as well as in Paris and London.

In 1932, when there was a unification of all sections of the Administration that were concerned with native affairs, he became the first Director of Native Affairs and District Services, which position he still holds. He is, ex-officio, a member of the newly-created Legislative Council of New Guinea. In that year, too, he was President of Section F of the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science, his presidential address, in Syd ney, being a survey of the subject of Applied Anthropology in New Guinea, which subject he approached from his customary practical angle.

For long years Mr. Chinnery, in his quiet and unobtrusive way, and in defiance of an almost unimaginably hostile European community, waited to see the day when in New Guinea there would be a body of re search workers engaged in the systematic study of the native, and handing on their knowledge to the Administration to de

cide on policies to be adopted. Now, only in the early forties, there should be long years of useful service ahead of “Chin.”

A good companion and an excellent racon teur, adaptable to almost any situation or assembly, he will worthily represent Australia at the important conference where the whole world will be represented, and he will, it is believed, go on to Geneva later to assist our representatives before the League of Nations.

Good luck, “Chin.”! The goodwill of all who acknowledge allegiance to Anthropos goes with you!