Pioneer

Passing Of A

William Blacklock, of Samoa

ONCE Consul-General for the United States in Samoa, Mr. William Black- Icck, died at his home in Woollahra (Sydney) on February 6, aged 86.

Though Australian-born, and educated partly in NZ in the days when his father, Hon. John Blacklock, was Provincial Treasurer of pioneer Southland (the southern extremity of the Dominion), he went to Oregon when a lad with his parents, became an American citizen, and retained traces of an American accent all his life.

William Blacklock, tall, rugged, quietly spoken, roamed the Pacific in the days when fortunes could still be made by the adventurous. At one time he was one of the best known Islands merchants in

Samoa, with connections in Auckland and Sydney. At one stage, he leased islands in the Phoenix Group, now important as seaplane bases.

He was a leading trader in Apia when Robert Louis Stevenson directed world attention to the Samoan islands. In fact, he became a friend of the celebrated writer, and used to recall, with a smile, the extremely choice language in which that master of English prose indulged when things went wrong.

Mr. Blacklock was very friendly with the Samoan chiefs. Together with certain of his contemporaries, he received the thanks of the US Government for saving lives during the great hurricane of 1889.

Mr. Blacklock and his Samoan friends, hand in hand, waded into the whirling waters, and brought half-drowned sailors to shore. Though there was material in him for a book, of such matters he did not care to talk —at any rate, not at any length.

For many years after he left Samoa, in 1905, Mr. Blacklock lived in quiet retire ment at Woy Woy, NSW. It was only when ill-health came to him long after he had reached the life span allotted to man that he came to Sydney to spend his last days with his daughter, Miss Eva Blacklock. To the last, he retained his in terest in the Pacific and in Islands affairs —one of his last visitors was Mrs. Alfred Page (chieftainess of the Pacific Islands Society), whom he had known as a child, and he spoke to her in Samoan.

He is survived by a second daughter, Miss Ella Blacklock, of Sydney, and one son, Charles, a resident of New York. —E.R.