Up Front

with the Editor

It’ll be cold in Ottawa early in the new year when Robert Trumbull takes up his new post of chief cor respondent in Canada for the New York Times. It won’t feel much like the South Pacific, where Bob has been based these last five years, building upon his long reputation for dis tinguished reporting for the Times.

Now 61, he has been a Times staff writer for 30 years.

I’m giving over this column in a personal tribute to him because Bob Trumbull’s genuine interest in the Pacific Islands has been of inestimable value in getting the problems and ambitions of the Islands understood in the corridors of power.

We hear lots of criticism, de servedly, of what Michael Somare refers to as the “two-day journalists” who race through an Island territory, beat up a highly coloured story, and race off again—but the Trumbulls of the area are inclined to get taken for granted. They are always on the job, and they make no fuss. For several days each week in the last five years, Trumbull has been reporting, ex plaining, examining the problems of the emerging Pacific in his stories cabled from Sydney to New York.

In that time there has not been one important island, with the exception of the Marquesas, he hasn’t visited on his beat—but his stories have always been accurate, thought ful, sympathetic. They have lacked only sensationalism. His face is familiar, and welcome, in the Islands, as it always will be.

Bob’s interest in the Islands didn’t really start in 1968 when he was sent to Australia. Before the war he lived in Hawaii, and as the city editor of the Honolulu Advertiser he witnessed “j® 194 1 attack on Pearl Harbour. (That particular wheel came full circle when in September, 1945, for the Times, he covered the Japanese surrender in Tokyo aboard the

Missouri.)

Shortiy after Pearl Harbour, in m2 > he published the first of many

books he has written en route, this one called The Raft, the true story of three US Navy men who drifted 34 days from Samoa to Pukapuka, Fren ch Polynesia, after their plane crashed.

It was a Book Society choice, and is still in print.

Paradise in Trust, the story of Micronesia, was published in 1958.

In 1946 he had been the first American correspondent to tour Micronesia (before the war, of course, Micronesia was held by the Japanese, who discouraged visitors, and the last American writer to visit there had been Willard Price, in the 19305.) Bob and his wife Jean leave behind them in Sydney their youngest daugh ter, Stephanie, who in 1972 married David Bates, son of a well-known New Guinea family, Roma and the late Charles Bates, and thus their ties with the South Pacific are now ties of flesh and blood.

Bob Trumbull has been fascinated to observe the fight of the Pacific peoples to retain their own culture, and he says this is a problem shared by all Island people, from the Hawaiians to the Australian abo rigines.

“The Hawaiians have already lost out against the invading forces,” he says, “and I regret to have to say I think in time the others will fol low.”

There is no way in which Bob Trumbull’s knowledge of the Pacific Islands will not be used, even in Canada. And there is no way that he won’t continue to be roving am bassador for the peoples of the emerg ing Pacific.

Personally I’m glad he came our way when he did, because these are times when there is need for greater understanding of what is happening in the South Pacific—and informed, objective journalism of the kind that Bob Trumbull is master, is one of the best ways of ensuring it.

Stuart Inder