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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
Before arriving in Canberra in 1950 as the foundation Professor of Pacific History at the Australian National University, J.W. (Jim) Davidson (1915-1973) was an Oxbridge don and author of a small book on The Northern Rhodesian Legislative Council (1948). A New Zealander by birth and upbringing, Davidson arrived at Cambridge in late 1938 on a Strathcona Scholarship and embarked on a PhD dissertation at St John's College, becoming a Fellow in 1945 and from 1 January 1947, a University Lecturer in Colonial Studies. While the formal details are easily established, little of substance is known about Davidson's activities at Cambridge. As Davidson's biographer-to-be, I was fortunate to receive a letter from P.E.H. Hair, one of Davidson's undergraduate students at Cambridge, who learned of my work from a footnote in one of my journal articles. Hair put me in contact with a fellow Davidson student, George Shepperson, which led to another fruitful correspondence.
Davidson is well known as the founding father of modern Pacific Islands historiography, and perhaps even better known as a Constitutional Advisor and Consultant to various Pacific territories approaching independence or self-government. These aspects of his life have been amply documented, not least by Davidson himself. A largely unknown aspect of Davidson's career is his undergraduate teaching: after all, he spent most of his working life at an institution devoted to research and postgraduate supervision, unfettered by the demands of undergraduate teaching. With this in mind, and with their permission, it was decided to publish the recollections of Paul Hair and George Shepperson of Jim Davidson as their History tutor at John's.
1 See the entries on Davidson by Denoon, Donald, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne, 1993), 13:579Google Scholar; Munro, Doug, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, 5 (Wellington, in press).Google Scholar Munro's research on Davidson received financial support from the Research Committee of the University of the South Pacific, to whom he expresses his galtitude.
2 Munro, Doug, “The Vaitupu Company Revisited: Second Thoughts on Methodology and Mindset,” History in Africa 24 (1997), 285n10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Davidson describes his work in Western Samoa, as New Zealand (government representative and later as the Samoans' Constitutional Adviser, in Samoa mo Samoa: the Emergence of the Independent State of Western Samoa (Melbourne, 1967).Google Scholar His contributions to the development of Pacific history include The Study of Pacific History: an Inaugural Lecture delivered in Canberra on 25 November 1954 (Canberra, 1955Google Scholar; a revised version appeared as “Problems of Pacific History,” Journal of Pacific History [hereafter JPH], 1 [1966], 5–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar); “Understandinig Pacific History: the Participant as Historian” in Munz, Peter,, ed., The Feel of Truth (Wellington, 1969), 25–46Google Scholar; “History, Art or Game? A Comment on ‘The Purity of Historical Method’,” New Zealand Journal of History 5 (1971), 115–20.Google Scholar More generally, see Denoon, Donald, “Pacific History at the Australian National University: the Place and the People,” JPH 31(1996), 202–14Google Scholar; Shineberg, Dorothy, “The Early Years of Pacific History,” Journal of Pacific Studies, 20(1996), 10.Google Scholar
4 The following is an almost exact reproduction of a formal account to Doug Munro dd 18 April 1999. See also Shepperson, George, “Edinburgh and Nyasaland” in Kirk-Greene, A.H.M., ed., The Emergence of African History in Australian Universities: an Autobiographical Approach (Oxford, 1995), 146–47.Google Scholar
5 On completing his PhD in 1942, Davidson worked in the Naval Intelligence Division at Cambridge, followed by short spell in the Colonial Office in 1945. Ward, K. Gerard, “Davidson's Contribution to the ‘Admiralty Handbooks’,” JPH, 29(1994), 238–40.Google Scholar
6 Foster, S.G. and Varghese, Margaret M., The Making of the Australian National University, 1946-1996 (Sydney, 1996), 107.Google Scholar The reproduction is a cutout from a group photograph and it certainly conveys nothing of the warmth anil exuberance of Davidson's personality. He was not, as it happened, very photogenic. There are few known photographs of Davidson.
7 See Forster, Honore, “:Bibliography—James Wightman Davidson,” JPH 28(1993), 278–81Google Scholar, which is fairly comprehensive.
8 Davidson was adamant that his acceptance among the Western Samoan leaders, which culminated in their insistence on his appointment as their Constitutional Adviser between 1959 to 1961, stemmed from his wholehearted identification with the people of Samoa, his sympathy with the ideal of Samoan self-determination, and his readiness to suffer the disapprobation of officials and other expatriates. Davidson, , Samoa mo Samoa, 193-94, 229-31, 354Google Scholar; Phelan, Nancy, Pices of Heaven: In the South Seas (Brisbane, 1996), 35.Google Scholar
9 The first draft was written while Davidson was still a PhD student.
10 Sir Stewart Gore-Browne was the grandson of Sir Thomas Gore-Browne, Governor of New Zealand from 1855 to 1861. Sir Stewart's liberal stance on native affairs made him doubly appealing to Davidson. See also Rotberg, Robert I., Black Heart: Gore-Brown and the Politics of Multi-Racial Zambia (Berkeley, 1974), 256.Google Scholar In his review of this hook (in African Affairs [October 1979]), that stern critic Andrew Roberts, formerly of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, mentions in passing that Davidson's Northern Rhodesian Legislative Council is an “excellent” piece of work.
11 Quoted in Rotberg, Robert I., A Political History of Tropical Africa (New York, 1965), 306–07.Google Scholar
12 Killingray, David, Race, Faith and Politics: Dr. Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples (London, 1999).Google Scholar
13 The following account is an amalgam of three informal letters to Doug Munro, dated 29 November 1977, 21 January 1999, and 11 May 1999.
14 Some of Davidson's Cambridge lecture notes are in the J.W. Davidson Papers, Box 2, Canberra, National Library of Australia, MS 5105.
15 On Davidson's 1947 mission, see Boyd, Mary, “The Record in Western Samoa Since 1945” in Ross, Angus, ed., New Zealand's Record in the Pacific Islands in the Twentieth Century (Auckland, 1969), 194-95, 202Google Scholar; Davidson, , Samoa mo Samoa, 167–79.Google Scholar
16 Davidson, reviewed both books in the Cambridge Journal, 1(1948), 321.Google Scholar
17 Minutes of the Board of Graduate Studies, 30 September 1955, ANU Central Archives; Foster, /Varghese, , The Making of the Australian National University, 153.Google Scholar
18 Gunson, Niel, “The Study of Pacific History” in Lal, Brij V., ed., Pacific Islands History: Journeys and Transformations (Canberra, 1992), 4–5Google Scholar; Davidson, “Understanding Pacific History.”
19 Peter Laslett, personal communication, 11 May 1999.
20 Sir Raymond Firth, personal communication, 30 September 1997. Firth is referring to the 1951 visit that he, Davidson, and Oskar Spate (ANU's Professor of Geography) made to Papua New Guinea to report for the Australian government on social and economic matters. See Spate, O.H.K., On the Margins of History: From the Punjab to Fiji (Canberra, 1991), 87–98.Google Scholar
21 That said, Davidson did fall out seriously with one of his PhD students at ANU; he was admittedly a very difficult person. On the other hand, Alan Ward (Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Newcastle in Australia) has high praise for the qualities that Davidson brought to supervising his doctoral dissertation. First was Davidson's recognition of what was to prove a very penetrating topic, which derived from his appreciation of settler/“native” dynamics in New Zealand and elsewhere. Second, Davidson encouraged the work with stimulating questions and discussions, but otherwise left Ward alone. Third was the meticulous reading of chapter drafts to achieve a fluent prose style. Ward was also encouraged that Davidson could lock horns with him in public—as, for example, during Ward's first work-in-progress seminar—but graciously concede the point if he stuck to it and had good grounds for doing so. Davidson, moreover, encouraged Ward to understand and appreciate the attitudes and actions of all historical actors, even when he disagreed with them (personal communications, 6 August and 9 August 1999.) Ward's dissertation was published as The Show of Justice: Racial “Amalgamation” in Nineteenth Century New Zealand (Canberra, 1974).Google Scholar A sequel appeared in May 1999, entitled An Unsettled History (Wellington, 1999).Google Scholar A prominent Maori leader, Eddie Durie (then Chief Judge of the Maori Land Court), described A Show of Justice as “a guide to mediating future race relations” in New Zealand (see the back cover of the second edition), and he repeated this assessment at the launch of An Unsettled History. (Durie is now a Judge of the High Court of New Zealand). Contributing to the success of his books, says Ward, was “the imaginativeness of Jim Davidson and his sense of race relations in the Pacific.”
22 After these words were written I was contacted by Michael Wolff, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an authority on Victorian Britain (personal communication, 5 December 1999). Again, Davidson made a number of interventions that helped to launch an academic career. They first met in the Spring of 1945 when Wolff visited Cambridge as a candidate for a history scholarship in a number of Cambridge colleges, having unsuccessfully sat one set of entrance exams at Oxford. Then aged seventeen, he does not remember much about the Cambridge exam. But he does recall that he and other aspirants to John's were interviewed by Jim Davidson and that everyone was given a fifteen-minute session. Wolff was last in the alphabetical list and his interview seemingly went on for hours. Directly afterwards, Jim intimated that he would be recommending Wolff for a scholarship and Wolff reciprocated by writing a poem for him, about sitting at the feet of Gamaliel. Wolff duly received a minor Open Scholarship, otherwise he would never have gone to Cambridge. Despite not being Wolff's tutor, Davidson was definitely a mentor. By his own admission, Wolff was a provocatively visible youngster and sported a straggly beard, among other things. This was perhaps unwise at a time when many undergraduates were demobilized servicemen who, as George Shepperson has indicated, were frustrated by university regulations. Matters came to a head and Wolff was assaulted in his room, forcibly shaven and made to get drunk. Typically it was Davidson, rather than Wolff's actual tutor, who took what action was necessary to prevent a scandal. Davidson also became a family friend and occasionally visited the Wolff household in London. Mrs Wolff was very taken with the personable don and remembered him fondly thereafter. When Wolff decided to try for graduate school in the United States in 1951, Davidson (by then in Canberra) obliged with a positive reference.
