HARRY MAUDE
1906 - 2006

H. E. (Harry) Maude’s major contributions to Pacific studies encompass almost 40 years in administrative positions in the central Pacific, as well as another 40 years of academic career as an “honorary” historian, as he put it to me. He maintained an extensive library that was incomparable for the range of papers and works both published and unpublished, which he shared with great generosity with students such as myself. Most of the material is now at the University of Adelaide. His main focus from the administrative angle was on the Gilbert and Ellice Colony, Ocean Island and Nauru, and the area covered by the Western Pacific High Commission. From this base he drew on his anthropological/historical wealth of knowledge to address wider issues such as the “Evolution of the Gilbertese Boti” (1963), an ethnohistorical interpretation, intrusions of traders, slaves and beachcombers, and other historical contemplations of the interactions between newly arrived colonial agents and their island hosts. His latest publication, Tungaru Traditions (1989), takes us along with him as he presents the papers of Sir Arthur Grimble, his predecessor and mentor as Colonial administrator in the Gilberts in the 1920s.

His administrative career began in l929 when he joined the British Colonial Service as a graduate from Cambridge with Honours in Anthropology. He was appointed as District Officer in the southern Gilberts, under Arthur Grimble as administrator of the Gilbert and Ellice Colony, as it was then known (now Kiribati and Tuvalu). Subsequently as Lands Commissioner he took note of the land hunger expressed by the Gilbertese. He instituted the first census of the Colony in 1931 as a basis for designing the Phoenix Islands Resettlement scheme in the 1930s and the resettlement of the Banabans from Ocean Island to Rabi Island in the Fiji group in l946. He rejected the Colonial Office’s proposition to disband the Gilbert and Ellice Colony, recommending more internal autonomy.

Professor Maude is remembered fondly by Gilbertese for his concern for maintenance and incorporation of local cultural principles into the new administrative procedures, rather than imposing the dictates of colonial policy, as his forerunners had done. In fact he reworded some of Grimble’s regulations, such as those on adoption, family obligations and uses of eating and sleeping houses, to reflect Gilbertese customary law, rather than British colonial law. His reform of local government led to the establishment in l946 of Island Councils, Island Courts, and Land Courts, all of which reflected local administrative procedures, though Island Council members were elected.

In l946 Maude became Assistant to the Western Pacific High Commissioner and spread his area of interest and influence across the central Pacific. He subsequently joined the newly established (l947) South Pacific Commission where he became Director of Social Development, carrying out his ideas throughout the nations affiliated to the Commission “seeking information and new experience,” as he states in the Preface to Of Islands and Men (l968).

“The one idea I had in life . . . was to go out to the South Seas and stay there,” as Maude recalled (l968:xii), so he regarded his opportunity to study the Pacific Islands as a special tripos subject at Cambridge as part of a fortune that has lasted him a lifetime. With his wife Honor “who loved the Pacific and its peoples as much as I did,” he has devoted his life’s endeavours to influencing the direction taken, both through implementation of policies and his scholarly contributions, creating his own mixture of anthropology with history. He has always been ready and willing to share his memories and papers with colleagues; I myself benefited from his generosity in sharing the Nauru materials he had collected in the course of his own work with me. At Australian National University he found “a haven in probably the only institution existing where I could still continue to study and write on the islands” (l968:xiii). There he has been affiliated for almost 50 years, contributing through his writing and his generous spirit to the ceaseless spirit of enquiry that he himself espoused. In his own words, “Could one ask more of the Fates?”

Nancy Pollock, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand (December 1998 Newsletter)