Up Front

with the Editor

A year or two ago I flew to Hong Kong for a visit, via Port Moresby, and while flying over that immense central range of New Guinea mountains I got into conversation about the island with one of the pleasant Qantas hostesses, whose name turned out to be Woodford.

Probably it was our choice of sub ject, plus our close proximity to the Melanesian islands below, that made me ask Miss Woodford whether she was related to a famous early ad ministrator of those parts—the energetic C. M. Woodford, the first Resident Deputy Commissioner to the Solomon Islands Protectorate, and whose story, as far as we know it, is interesting stuff.

Yes, said the pretty Miss Wood ford, she was a relative. The late C. M. Woodford was her grandfather.

Her father—C.M.’s son—had come to Australia from England many years ago and he was now living in the Sydney area.

“That]s extraordinary,” I said.

“And did your father bring any of C. M. Woodford’s papers with him to Australia? He was a prolific writer and I heard he had an unfinished manuscript, or certainly some notes.”

“Yes,” said Miss Woodford, in this aeroplane over New Guinea nearly 75 years after Woodford first took over the administration of the nearby Solomons. “Father still has his papers, which are all in a trunk at home.”

Naturally I was intensely interested in the contents of the trunk whose existence was revealed so un expectedly in this chance conversa tion, and back in Sydney PIM fol lowed up the matter.

But Mr. Woodford was reluctant to have anything to do with our inquiry. He valued both his privacy and his father’s papers—an approach that we could hardly condemn, in that presumably it had guaranteed the survival to date of those im portant historical documents.

But we on PIM didn’t feel the situation should rest there. Accidents happen, or documents later come into the possession of others who don’t see their significance and who lose sight of them.

We felt somebody with experience should at least examine them and evaluate them now they were known to be in existence, so we passed on the information to the School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University.

They followed through with en thusiasm. They found that Mr.

Woodford and his wife both had a great interest in the papers, and cer tainly did not want to see them lost.

The Woodfords hoped they might eventually be held by a library, but meanwhile agreed that the university should sort and catalogue them and perhaps allow them to be used by scholars.

Their contents

The university has finished its cataloguing. Some of the material has in fact been studied by re searchers. C. M. Woodford’s papers are an interesting collection that should fill the gaps from time to time in the work of many people.

There are a number of letters, and there is also a fine collection of news paper clippings on the Western Pacific drawn from the Press of the time, and offprints of articles written by Woodford and his friends.

There is a lot of anthropological material and historical background to the area and an interesting diary of a visit Woodford made to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in 1884. Wood ford did not become Resident Deputy Commissioner in the Solomons until 1896, but he had served briefly in Fiji in the early 1880’s, and before his appointment he made other expe ditions, including an expedition as a naturalist to the Solomons.

He published on the Solomons several scientific papers and a book.

In the book he commented that he knew of no place “where firm and

paternal government would sooner produce beneficial results than in the Solomons”. Here was “an object worthy indeed of the devotion of one’s life”.

As Deryck Scarr has helped to show in his recent book, Fragments of Empire (which is a history of the Western Pacific High Commission from 1877 to 1914) Woodford’s words weren’t empty. He was even able to convince the Colonial Office that it should deviate from its policy of avoiding expenditure in islands such as the Solomons, on the com mendable principle that they should pay for themeslves if they were worth having at all. In 1897 he got a grant in-aid of £1,200, with which to erect a residency on Tulagi, and establish the nucleus of a local administration.

Grants-in-aid these days, all of 75 years later, are still a fact of life in the Solomons, but for our future knowledge of what the first Resident Commissioner thought about it all we will be able to thank his son—and a lucky meeting aboard a Qantas 707 somewhere over New Guinea.

THIS subject of island administra tors reminds me of something.

I was again in New Guinea re cently, where I was depressed by the poor morale in the public service.

This is a subject I shall pursue else where in this issue, as it’s a compli cated one, but meanwhile the constant rumours to be found in New Guinea predicting an early departure from the scene of the Administrator himself, are not calculated to en courage his public servants to believe in their own permanency. During a couple of weeks in Port Moresby I was given, on the best authority, con flicting intelligence about the im minent resignation of Mr. David Hay. He was about to be appointed Australian Ambassador to Paris, Australian Ambassador to the United Nations, an Assistant Secretary in the Department of External Affairs, etc., etc. You name it and he was about to get it.

I suppose Administrators can al ways be removed from office, but I don’t believe there are any inten tions to remove Mr. Hay. And I will go out on a limb and say I don’t believe he has any intention of re signing. I suspect he has found some rough spots in New Guinea, and I believe that at one period he was ready to chuck it in. But I think that time has passed, and no announce ment is imminent that Administrator Hay is to stop administrating in that trouble spot. That’s how I read my crystal ball, anyway.