The Australian National University has a long history of anthropological research in Papua New Guinea. First contact by an Australian Patrol Officer was made with the people of the Highlands region in 1932, and after the close of hostilities of the second World War, many anthropologists from the ANU focused their attention on Papua New Guinea and on the largely unstudied Highlands region in particular. This research has continued to today, with modern anthropologists often being called on to document changing traditions, transcribe oral histories, chronicle kinship stories and traditional land claims, and record the myriad of cultures that make up Papua New Guinea. Below are biographies of just a few of the many ANU anthropologists who have studied Papua New Guinea.
Marie Reay, "Our Lady of Perpetual Fieldwork"
Marie Reay began her career in anthropology at the University of Sydney, where for her MA she undertook fieldwork among Aboriginal communities in western New South Wales in the mid-to-late 1940s, However, she changed her focus to Papua New Guinea in 1950. Her first fieldwork in Papua New Guinea was cut short by the eruption of, as she put it "Mount Lamington, an allegedly extinct volcano." The eruption caused massive devastation and Reay, along with other surviving Europeans, was evacuated from the area. Her niece, Heather Turner, remembered that Marie Reay's recollections of the eruption had been quite traumatic, and made a deep impression on her.
In 1953, Marie Reay won a scholarship to study at the then Research School of Pacific Studies (now Pacific and Asian Studies) at the Australian National University as a doctoral student under the tutelage of S. F. Nadel and W. E. Stanner in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology. In 1953 she arrived at Minj in the Highlands and began her groundbreaking work on the Kuma. Reay was the first female anthropologist in the region and managed to install herself among the Kuma despite the disapproval of the local district officer, who had very particular views on "the British Empire" and "white prestige" (Ethnographic Presents, pp.141; 151) and who she scandalised by wearing shorts.
In her own recollections, Marie Reay stated, "My fifteen months with the Kuma changed my life" (Ethnographic Presents, p.157). Reay submitted her PhD work in 1957, which was published as The Kuma: Freedom and Conformity in the New Guinea Highlands in 1959.
Shortly after completing her PhD, Reay was appointed as a research fellow in the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University, where she remained until her retirement in 1988, after being promoted to Fellow and Senior Fellow. For a few years, Reay returned to her original study of Aboriginal communities in Australia, this time in Borroloola in the Northern Territory. However, after publishing some articles, she abandoned the project and returned to the research that had changed her life.
Marie Reay continued to do fieldwork in Highlands region of Papua New Guinea throughout her life, maintaining a home at Minj. Reay studied many changes in Papua New Guinea, especially in religion, social structures, politics and elections. Marie Reay was in Papua New Guinea so often that a colleague dubbed her "Our Lady of Perpetual Fieldwork." She died in Booragul, NSW on 16 September 2004. In 2011, her papers were donated to the ANU Archives, where they were discovered by Francesca Merlan, including a nearly complete manuscript, Wives and Wanderers, which Merlan edited and brought to publication in 2014. Reay's work, had it appeared earlier, "would have had a central place in anthropological literature on Papua New Guinean societies, especially those of the Central Highlands... the foundational, indeed the first, book on women's lives in that part of the world" (Wives and Wanderers, p.1). With the publication of Wives and Wanderers, in many ways still a very important text on the condition of women in the Central Highlands even many years after the original studies, there was renewed interest in Marie Reay's research and legacy. In 2019, the ANU opened the new Marie Reay Teaching Centre in the Kambri development, in honour of her important contributions to anthropology at ANU.
Ralph Bulmer, working with the Kalam
Ralph Bulmer was a social anthropologist, naturalist, and ethnobiologist noted for his work in Papua New Guinea, particularly with the Kalam. He received his BA in anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 1953. He studied Sami culture in Sweden and Norway before pursuing his PhD at Australian National University. His fieldwork for his thesis was based in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, in particular among the Kyaka-Enga people in the Baiyer Valley. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1962. He then became a Lecturer, and later Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland.
In 1964, Bulmer began his work among the Kalam in Papua New Guinea. He took the at the time unusual step of changing the role of his Kalam informants to that of collaborators and co-authors, involving them in the documentation of their culture. Ian Saem Majnep, a Kalam naturalist, was his primary collaborator and co-authored a number of publications with Bulmer. The Kalam project set out by Bulmer eventually included two anthropologists, two linguists, and more than twenty zoologists, botanists, and other scientific colleagues. He became the Foundation Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Papua New Guinea in 1968, serving until 1973. He then returned to the University of Auckland as Chair in Social Anthropology until 1988, when he died, aged 60. Ralph Bulmer collected a large number of artefacts during his early fieldwork trips which he donated to the Australian National University’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology Collections, and many are on view in this exhibition.
Robert (Bob) Glasse
Bob Glasse graduated from City College New York in 1951. He joined the Australian National University as PhD student in 1953 and shortly began his field work in Papua New Guinea, where he lived among and studied the Huli people on two extended research trips from April 1955 to June 1956, and again from June 1959 to February 1960. He completed his thesis, “The cognatic descent system of the Huli of Papua” in 1963.
Bob Glasse was the anthropologist on a New Guinea Public Health Department team that studied the deadly kuru disease from 1961 to 1963. The project helped win a Nobel Prize for its chief epidemiologist, D. Carleton Gajdusek.
Bob Glasse continued his study of the Huli people throughout his career. He published a book, Huli of Papua, in 1968, based largely on the themes he explored in his earlier PhD thesis at the Australian National University. He returned to Papua New Guinea for additional field work in 1979, to document the changes in Huli culture after conversion to Christianity. He died in 1993 in New York.
Bob Glasse collected a large number of artefacts during his early fieldwork trips which he donated to the Australian National University’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology Collections, and many are on view in this exhibition.
Murray Charles Groves
Murray Groves was long connected to Papua New Guinea before he became associated with the Australian National University. Born in 1926, his parents had met in Rabaul, where they had both been teachers, and his father would go on to be the Director of Education in the Territory of Papua New Guinea from 1946 to 1968. After enrolling in Melbourne University in 1944, Groves left university to move to Port Moresby, where he continued his education by correspondence and worked as a judge's assistant in the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea and taught English classes in Hanuabada, in the Western Motu villages on Port Moresby Harbour. He returned to Melbourne in 1949 to complete his degree in History and Literature with first class honours. From 1950-1952 he taught in History at the University of Melbourne, until he decided to pursue a Diploma in Anthropology, which led to his switch to social anthropology as his discipline for his PhD. His fieldwork studied Motu communities near Port Moresby, and in 1956 he completed his PhD thesis titled “The Motu and the modern world” from the University of Oxford.
Groves joined the Australian National University in 1956, where he was a research fellow in the Department of Pacific History, where he continued his research on the Motu. In 1959 he was appointed senior lecturer in Social Anthropology (becoming an associate professor in 1964) at the University of Auckland. Groves left Auckland in 1965 to take up the foundation Chair of Sociology at the University of Singapore. From mid-1969 until his retirement in 1988, Groves was Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of Hong Kong. In mid-1992, he spent four months working on Motu research at the Australian National University and moved permanently to Canberra in 1994 as a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. He died on 5 May 2011 in Canberra.
Kenneth E Read
Read had graduated from the University of Sydney, with Second Class Honors, in 1939 as World War Two began. During the war, Read served in the Royal Australian Army; for some months in the Northern Territory, in and out of Alice Springs, and later in New Guinea. He returned to the University of Sydney after the War to work on his MA in Anthropology (First Class Honors) and completed his PhD in Anthropology at the University of London in 1948, having studied with Raymond Firth and SF Nadel. Read returned to Australia and was hired as Research Fellow by SF Nadel, Founding Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. He became Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the Australian School of Pacific Administration in Sydney 1953-1956. In 1957 he moved to Seattle, Washington, first as Visiting Professor, followed by his appointment as Associate Professor 1958-61, and Professor 1961- c. 1985 in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington. Read died on 13 November1995 in Seattle, Washington, USA.
Michael Young
Michael Young is a social anthropologist with research interests in Melanesian anthropology, particularly that of Papua New Guinea, and in the history of social anthropology. Between 1966 and 1992 he conducted fieldwork in about a dozen different locations – including Halmahera in Eastern Indonesia and Epi Island in Vanuatu – although his principal focus was Goodenough Island, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, about which he has published two monographs and some fifty articles.
Born in Urmston, Lancashire, Michael Young obtained a BA Hons (1963) and MA (1965) from the University of London, followed by a PhD (1970) from The Australian National University (ANU) and an MA (1970) from the University of Cambridge. During his career at the ANU Research School of Pacific Studies (RSPAS), he was a Fellow (1974-1983), Senior Fellow (1983-1998), and latterly a Visiting Fellow (1999-).
As a consultant anthropologist, Young undertook four studies in eastern Papua New Guinea prior to 1995: a Social Impact Study for Oil Palm plantations in Milne Bay, Mullins Harbour and Buhutu Valley (1981); a Socio-Economic Impact Study for the Wapolu Gold Mine, Fergusson Island (1987); a Sociological Survey of Woodlark Island relating to ‘Logging versus Conservation’ (1990); a Social Mapping Study of South Normanby Island for a possible gold mine (1992). Papers related to all of these studies are available at the ANU Archives.
