Up Front

with the Editor

“Jim Davidson is a living man. He lives for the people of the Pacific. He came to help us at the time of our awakened consciousness. He leaves us his strength.”

The words are those of Father John Momis, the Bougainvillean deputy chairman of the Papua New Guinea Constitutional Planning Com mittee, paying tribute in Port Moresby to Professor J. W. Davidson, who died suddenly in that New Guinea city on April 8. Tributes like that were made about Jim Davidson all around the Islands and later in Can berra at a crowded memorial meeting.

His formal obituary on p 127 out lines his impressive academic career, but it doesn’t reveal what a human bloke he was, or tell of the extra ordinary variety of friends he had, or of the clever intrigues he was party to, or repeat even one of the stories of Pacific personalities and affairs that Jim was forever updating and exchanging.

Jim Davidson loved to gossip always relevant, well-informed and in formative gossip, with an occasional superb touch of malice just when it was needed—and he shared his stories with everybody.

Gossip, to Jim, was the stuff of con temporary Pacific history in an area noted for its orators and talking chiefs and not for its writers. Islanders revel in the spoken word, as Jim did, and it was Jim’s warm and informal verbal involvement that made him the complete Pacific historian.

On his death he was still the only man to have held a university chair in Pacific History, and nobody who follows him can have both the same personal attributes and the unique era in which Jim was able to practise them. The 23 years in which he held his Canberra post with the Australian National University will, I think, when the record is closed, prove to be the most vital years of political develop ment in the Pacific Islands. In these years the Islands became independent or self-governing, or have almost be come so, and Jim Davidson has been a key, yet unobtrusive figure in the political attainments of many of them.

There is no Island leader who was not his friend.

I regret, among many regrets at Jim’s death, that the Pacific will not have a full record of these years written by Jim himself from the point of view of his personal involvement.

What a fascinating, living record such a history would have been.

We can hope that the role of a dedicated contemporary historian will be carried on by some of the Pacific Island students who will now be able to continue their higher education in Australia as a result of the Davidson Memorial Fund being launched by the Australian National University to pro vide scholarships. The decision to establish this fund was made at the Canberra memorial meeting a few days after Jim’s death.

But, meanwhile, many of us shall retain the warm picture of the lanky, slightly-stooped New Zealander with the big grin, occasional stutter and limp handshake, who could be de pended upon to wear outrageously in formal dress of beach shirt, brief shorts and rubber thongs while every body else stupidly sweated it out in long sleeves and tie.

Some people you miss, and Jim is one.

Stuart Inder

Jim Davidson.