WILLIAM CLARKE

We, the undersigned, hereby nominate Dr. William C. (Bill) Clarke to be an Honorary Fellow of the Association.  For almost four decades, Dr. Clarke’s writing and teaching about Oceania have crossed disciplinary and geographic boundaries to enrich the entire field of Pacific Studies.

After graduating with highest honors in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, Bill changed his concentration to geography at Berkeley, continuing in the tradition of A. L. Kroeber, whose collegial relations with geographer Carl Sauer set an historic precedent for collaboration between the two disciplines. The blending of the disciplines made Bill an obvious choice to participate in the National Science Foundation project among the Maring of Papua New Guinea. (This project also included such anthropologists as Andrew Vayda and Roy Rappaport.)

The Maring work produced Bill’s Ph.D. thesis in 1968 and, more significantly, his book, Place and People: An Ecology of a New Guinean Community (1971, University of California Press) which may fairly be described as one of the foundational works in the study of Pacific cultural ecology.

Bill’s academic associations have been as many and varied as his intellectual interests. Considering only those with Pacific connections, they include the University of Hawai‘i (Manoa), the Research School of Pacific Studies at ANU, and professorships at the University of Papua New Guinea, Monash University, and the University of the South Pacific. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Hawai'i (Hilo). In the 1990s, he was a research scholar at the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies (University of Canterbury) and a fellow at the Institute of Pacific Studies at USP. Most recently, he has returned to ANU as a visiting fellow, first in the Resource Management Program, and then in the Centre for the Contemporary Pacific.

His publications have continued up to the present with equal variety and unusual quality. The principal themes include critical examinations of notions of “development” and of overly romantic ideas about the conservations projects of non-Western people, the potential of agroforestry, and sustainable food production.

However, Bill’s intellectual interests go beyond either anthropology or geography, narrowly defined. He is a published poet; one of his poems was selected for the Best Australian Poems 2004 (Black, Inc., Melbourne). Many would argue that his prose also takes on poetic dimensions. This was most strikingly demonstrated in his latest book, Remembering Papua New Guinea: An Eccentric Ethnography (2003). This beautiful publication combines photographs from his work with the Maring with ethnographic description and original poetry to create an extraordi-nary--indeed, unique--work.

Jill Nash
Buffalo State College

Gene Ogan
Honolulu, Hawai'i

(April 2006 Newsletter)