Peter Dillon,

an unusual Irishman

The first time I met Jim Davidson nearly 30 years ago, he talked to me about Peter Dillon. The story of that unusual Irishman seemed to contain in itself, nearly always in highly colourful form, fascinating reflections of every aspect of Euro pean contact with the South Pacific in the first half of the 19th century.

Davidson was then already plan ning a book on Dillon and, when he was appointed to the Chair of Pacific History at the Australian National University, he continued to work on the biography now published. After his untimely death in April, 1973, the book was completed for publica tion by an old friend and colleague, O. H. K. Spate. It is the book that Davidson had thought of for decades, ripe in scholarship, rich in narrative and characterisation, and illuminat ing in its picture of the Old South Pacific.

The big red-headed Irishman, whom Charles X of France created Chevalier de I’Ordre royal de la Legion-d’Honneur, was an incorri gible romantic. An excellent seaman, a leader with real powers of enter prise, a man of astonishing perti nacity, Peter Dillon found his oppor tunities in the South Pacific. There he traded, risked his life many times with Islanders, rebuked missionaries who offended his humanity, searched for the last traces of La Perouse, made and lost money, and may have left in Fiji or Tahiti or New Zealand descendants unknown to any but local fame.

Dillon was a man of passion and energy, which could express itself in an insatiable, exacting search of knowledge, or no less certainly, in sudden outbursts of rage leading to dangerous violence. He had con tempt for narrow-minded missionaries who tried to force what he believed to be un-Christian ways on the Islanders and hapless Europeans liv ing in the Pacific.

He despised the scheming business-

men and systematic colonisers, who were behind the foundation of South Australia. He had a general im patience of legal purists, who looked for the letter rather than the spirit, condemning equally the famous James Stephen of the Colonial Office and Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur of Tasmania. Brave himself, he recognised courage (or the lack of it) in others, while as a navigator, he knew how to temper bold enter prise with caution in narrow or un known waters.

A born story-teller, who developed his gifts as a raconteur, he over shadowed men more silent, less eloquent, less conspicuous than him self and was never restrained by modesty or even honesty in gilding the lily when it suited his purpose to do so.

Unscrupulous sometimes, passion ate, active always, he lacked the judgment for a systematic career but had all the other qualities needed to make his presence felt while alive and keep his memory green when dead.

Davidson’s account of Dillon teems with noteworthy incidents and tells enough about the Islands, New South Wales, Tasmania, India, Eng land and France to let the reader see Dillon alive, in agony or ecstasy, humiliation or triumph. Every reader will have his own favourite passages.

I remember, especially, the skir mish at Dillon’s Rock in Fiji when Dillon nearly lost his life against overwhelming odds, and the legal shoals in which he was trapped in Hobart and had to serve two months imprisonment “in His Majesty’s Gaol” expiating his failure to cope with a crafty, dangerous enemy, who used words and the law as his wea pons.

Dillon was a big man physically and spiritually, and Davidson did justice to his largeness of vision, while recognising Dillon’s weaknesses of temper and judgment and not dis-

Jim Davidson

guising his occasional leaning to mere mischief and petulance.

Dillon epitomised a hard, rough period in European contacts with the Pacific Islands and his judgments of men and affairs, that Davidson re cords, are powerful guides to the understanding of the South Pacific

early last century and since.

John

M. Ward.

(Peter Dillon Of Vanikoro, By J

W. Davidson; edited by O. H. K. Spate.

Oxford University Press, 7 Bowen Cres cent, Melbourne. $16.00.)