“A man of firm conviction .."

It is difficult for me to write objectively or dispassionately about Robbie. He had too great an influence on my life. I met him first at Levuka in the early 19305, when he was on a cruise in the old Union Company vessel, Marama, in the early days of accumulating the know ledge of the South Pacific and Pacific people which eventually became encyclopaedic. After that first meeting we kept in touch through my own very occasional visits to Sydney and Robbie’s to Fiji, but mainly through fairly regular correspondence. I then disco vered Robbie’s habit of getting information from personal let ters and turning it into re written items of news or com ment in Pacific Islands Monthly.

This was sometimes discon certing, but it was typical of Robbie’s approach to the journalist’s craft and to the interest that dominated his life.

He was a newspaperman, first, and always. His mind was constantly alert, constantly on the lookout for news, and his pen was always at the ready so that he could pass on that news in the special Robson manner.

PIM was an extension of his own lively and enquiring mind, a reflection of his stimulating personality. He was a man of firm views his critics would say prejudices but whether PIM subscribers agreed with him or not they still kept on reading what he had to say because he said it so well and with clearly honest conviction.

It is impossible to write about Robbie after the thirties without linking him with Judy Tudor.

They formed a unique com bination, with unity of style and purpose, the same kind of drive and determination, the same intense interest in people and in particular people of the South

Len Usher, for more than 50 years at the centre of Fiji affairs, was associated with R.W.Robson in the publication of The Fiji Times , and knew him as friend and colleague both before that and until Robson’s death. Len was one of the old friends present at Robbie’s 99th birthday, and freely admits that his acquaintance had an indelible effect upon his life.

We asked Len Usher to write a memoir of Robbie. It was done with gentleness, affec tion and perception and is published here with our thanks.

Pacific, the same publishing initiative and technical skill, the same genius for friendship and, especially notable, the gradual ly evolved ability to write with out impairing their own indi viduality of style, but with a harmony so close that PIM acquired a special Robson- Tudor flavor.

I think that it had long been one of Robbie’s dreams that some day he might become head of a Pacific newspaper empire. He was 71 years old when part of the dream came true in his purchase of The Fiji Times.

For a good many years he had said to me that when (it was never ‘if because he was accustomed to having his way in the end), he got The Fiji Times he would want me to help him run it. And so it came to pass, and for 15 years I was closely and directly in contact with Robbie, in an enterprise which was at first entirely new to me but which, under Rob bie’s patient and knowledge able guidance, I gradually learned to control.

As time went by I got to a

position, through asking ques tions and reading intensively and travelling to look at other newspaper and printing plants, when I was able to make some radical suggestions about the way in which The Fiji Times should develop technically. I suggested a change from letter press to offset printing, away from hot metal to cold type and from composing on the stone to computer-controlled photo typesetting and paste-up com position. This is commonplace enough now, but was re volutionary at the time and was particularly new to Robbie. But newness or change or the cost implicit in both never dismayed him.

He needed only to be con vinced that the developments proposed fitted in with his aim of giving the people of Fiji the best possible newspaper and printing service it was within his power to provide. He was by now in his eighties, but that didn’t worry him either. He had behind him a lifetime of know ledge of the basic techniques of printing and of converting ideas and reported facts into words on a printed page, and he set out to master the new proces ses, or at least the way in which they could be used.

Robbie was brought up in a tough school not in any formal place of education, be cause he never had that advan tage, but in the demanding world of pioneering life in the remoteness of Central Otago.

The pioneering spirit never left him. It was behind his founda tion of Pacific Islands Monthly and the accompanying territo rial handbooks, and it showed whenever he moved to some new home or workplace.

It never occurred to him that he should hire someone else to dig drains or form paths. He did

the work himself, and revelled in it.

After he died my daughter recalled some girlhood mem ories. She wrote to me: ”1 remember him as an incredibly courteous person who always took a real interest in what I was doing.” That was the essential Robbie I knew for more than half a century.

He could be, and often was, irascible and impatient. He told

me once that he deliberately turned on outbursts of temper every now and then to make sure he got his way.

But, that was on the surface.

The real man was always there, a courtly, kindly and generous friend.

Mellower, and reflective, RWR, 99 years old, at home at Avoca Beach, just before he died.