Tom Harrisson

Dies In Crash

Tom Harrisson, the anthropologist and writer, whose book Savage Civilisation gave a valuable account of life in the Malekula (New Heb rides) bush in the 19305, has been killed in a bus accident in Bangkok.

He was 64. His wife, Belgian sculp tress Baronne Christine Forani, whom he married in 1971, also died in the accident.

Harrisson, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, arrived in the New Hebrides in 1933 and spent more than a year among the mountain people of Malekula who were still cannibal. He also worked in the New Hebrides as a civil servant to help finance his expedition and was in volved in the production of a film on island life.

War service in Sarawak and Dutch Borneo organising guerilla activities against the Japanese gained him a

Dso.

Dr Harrisson paid another visit to the New Hebrides in the late 19605.

Division, was fighting against Japan ese troops in the Sepik District.

He had a lucky escape when a camp of the 2/3rd was washed away by the rain-flooded Danmap River one dark night; several men were drowned. There was no large scale fighting like the battles in the Middle East, but the jungle warfare in New Guinea, too, claimed lives.

And malaria, scrub typhus and going ‘troppo’ (mental breakdown) were an even greater enemy than the Japanese who, in 1944, no longer received supplies from home, and who suffered even more.

In that campaign, 442 officers and men of the 6th Division were killed or died of wounds, 1,141 were wounded and 16,203 admitted to hospital because of sickness. Fearn side, no longer fit for front-line service, was sent home before the war ended.

Pacific Islanders, not least the Papua New Guineans, are beginning to write about their own or their people’s war-time experiences. It is important that they do so, because warfare, of some kind or other, has been a part of human existence since times immemorial. It must, therefore, be included in the histories of nations.

Half To Remember, the unpreten tious, sensitively-written account of one Australian’s war, does a lot more than is done by official histories and the like to put to Papua New Guineans and other Pacific islanders what the many graves in the war cemeteries at Bomana, Lae and Bita paka mean to Australians. And one does not have to be a political scientist or defence expert to see the message of those graves reflected in Australia’s policy and dealings concerning Papua New Guinea.

Many Jackman

(HALF TO REMEMBER By G. H. Fearnside, Haldane Publishing Co, 65 Campbell St, Surry Hills, NSW, Australia. $7.95).