Academy Fellow

Obituary

20 May 1933 - 16 January 2023

Ralph Gerard Ward, known widely as Gerry, came to the ANU in December 1971 as the Foundation Professor of Human Geography in the Research School of Pacific Studies. The new department was created by the separation of the Department of Geography into the Department of Human Geography and the Department of Geomorphology and Biogeography. In 1980 he became the Director of the Research School of Pacific Studies and remained in that position until 1993. When he resigned from the position of Director of the School he returned to the Department of Human Geography where he was Head of Department and Professor until his retirement in 1998.

Gerry Ward was born on 20 May, 1933 in Taupo, a small town on the shores of the large volcanic lake in the centre of the North Island of New Zealand. Gerry’s father Ralph Ward had been gassed in France in 1918 and settled in Taupo for the climate. He had studied law before the war, and despite periods of illness, became involved in local government and newspapers. He published newspaper articles on local Māori history and the Taupo landscape, and owned a launch that was used for fishing trips, to carry freight across the lake and for family camping trips. The lake, the Taupo landscape and the Māori community played an important part in Gerry’s childhood and led to his lifelong interest in land and society. He attended Taupo Primary School and Kings College in Auckland. 

From Kings College, Gerry entered Auckland University College and was awarded a BA in 1954 with the prize in Geography. He then completed a two-year Masters degree with 1st Class Honours in 1956 which included a thesis on development of land around Lake Taupo that was published in the New Zealand Geographer. He became a Junior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Auckland. During this period, he also fulfilled his compulsory military training requirement in the Royal New Zealand Artillery Regiment. The Auckland Geography Department had a research project in Western Samoa led by Professor Ken Cumberland and Gerry offered to fill the need for a field assistant and so was introduced to the Pacific, where he was to work for the rest of his life. From this work he published a paper on Samoa’s banana industry and three chapters on village agriculture in J.W. Fox and K.B. Cumberland, Western Samoa: Land, Life and Agriculture in Tropical Polynesia published in 1962.

In 1957 Clifford Darby, Professor of Geography at University College London, visited Auckland and read Gerry’s Masters thesis. He offered Gerry a year-long Research Assistant post at UCL that was used to provide promising graduates the opportunity to undertake research. Gerry took leave from his lectureship at Auckland to take up a year of postgraduate studies at the University College London in 1958. The Samoan work on village population and land use, influenced him to apply for a Colonial Social Science Research Grant to go to the British colony of Fiji where he completed an outstanding fieldwork-based study of the distribution of the Fijian and Indian populations and their occupation and use of land. He presented a thesis to the University of London which was published by Her Majesty’s Stationary Office as Land Use and Population in Fiji: a Geographical Study, in 1965. This work anticipated the conditions in Fiji that ultimately led to the military coup of May 1987. Gerry maintained a strong research interest in Fiji until his retirement and published on the contrasts between the Fijian and Indian rural economies, the leasehold system for Fijian land and the way in which land tenure influenced the sugar and copra industries. A two-sheet 1:250,000 land use map of Fiji published by the Directorate of Overseas Surveys was another outcome of this work. Both maps were reprinted in 1976.

Gerry stayed on as a lecturer at the University College London from 1961 to 1967. During this period his recognition of the importance of historical change that he had developed as a young man at Taupo where pre-European Māori settlement remained accessible, led him to become the editor of the 8 volume American Activities in the Central Pacific between 1790-1870, published by Gregg Press in the USA, in which the contacts between islanders and the crews of whaling and trading ships were documented in detail and are available for those interested in the spread of diseases, the emigration of islanders and of early change in the Pacific. From London he visited the Department of Geography at the University of Minnesota in 1964 and the University of Victoria in Canada in 1966.

Gerry met Marion Solly at Auckland University in 1952 and again in 1958 in Singapore where she was doing postgraduate fieldwork from the University of Minnesota and Gerry was on his way to London. They married in Minnesota in 1959, spent time in Fiji where Gerry was on fieldwork and returned to Auckland where Marion had been appointed as a Lecturer in Geography and Gerry had been promoted. So began joint careers in which they juggled their individual academic appointments, fieldwork and consultancies, around raising their family. Together they co-authored one book, a book chapter, 2 peer reviewed journal papers and 2 consultancy reports.

In 1963, at Minister Hasluck’s request, Oskar Spate, then Professor of Geography at ANU, joined George Currie, former Vice-Chancellor at the Universities of Western Australia and New Zealand, and John Gunther, Assistant Administrator of Papua and New Guinea, to determine whether a university should be established in Papua New Guinea. The University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) accepted its first students in 1966. Aware of Gerry’s Fijian research through his own work there and his association with University College London, Oskar Spate recommended Gerry’s appointment as the foundation Professor of Geography at UPNG in August 1967. The UPNG Department of Geography became staffed with outstanding academics, who were committed to the creation of an educated cadre of teachers and public servants in the new nation. Included were: Bill Jonas, later to become the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner as well as Race Discrimination Commissioner in Australia; David Lea an ANU graduate and later a professor at the University of New England; William Clarke, to become a professor at Monash University and the University of the South Pacific; and Richard Jackson to become a professor at James Cook University and an expert on mining in developing countries. Field trips and training in how to do research in rural areas were a feature of the department begun under Gerry’s leadership.

UPNG had very close relations with ANU. ANU Vice-Chancellors Sir John Crawford and Peter Karmel were both Chancellors of UPNG, a number of the teaching staff were ANU postgraduates and the ANU’s New Guinea Research Unit, where Marion Ward was the director, was adjacent to the UPNG campus. When the ANU Research School of Pacific Studies Department of Geography was divided in two in 1971, Oskar Spate was the Director of the School. Gerry Ward was appointed the first Professor of Human Geography at the age of 37 years. He was awarded the PNG Silver Jubilee Medal for his services to UPNG. He retained strong formal connections with UPNG as a member of the UPNG Council from 1985 to 1996. Gerry began to supervise ANU postgraduate students while still at UPNG; while he was Head of Human Geography, 24 graduated PhD, many of whom he supervised directly. He has been described as a “genial and supportive” supervisor. 

Between 1971 and 1998 Gerry authored (and edited) 16 books and monographs, 35 papers in peer reviewed journals and 34 chapters in edited books. Included are the first atlas of PNG with David Lea and two monographs on Port Moresby. In retirement he wrote another 3 books, 20 papers and book chapters and 8 other papers and conference presentations. In this work Gerry maintained his Pacific focus, often revisited his earlier studies to document change and covered a broad range of subjects: population change, migration, rural-urban movement, agricultural change, rural development and markets, land tenure and the development of towns and the settlement history of the Pacific including the use of computer simulations to assess whether Pacific Island voyages between islands and to New Zealand were deliberate or were accidental drift voyages. He also applied this method to enquire into whether coconuts could have drifted across the Pacific or must have been carried by people. 

Gerry carried out a number of consultancies in the Pacific, Fiji and Samoa. Notable was the 1978-79 South Pacific Agricultural Survey for the Asian Development Bank, the final report published as a book co-authored with Andrew Proctor in 1980, South Pacific Agriculture: Choices and Constraints. He led two studies of growth centres and markets in the PNG highlands, carried out a Special Study on Food Supply and Distribution Systems in the South Pacific in 1981 with his wife Marion Ward, and with her in 1986 reported on the development of the social sciences at the National University of Western Samoa. In 1989 he wrote a report on tourism opportunities in the Pacific, and was a member of the Group of Eminent Persons that reviewed the inter-governmental structure of ESCAP. In 1991 Gerry reported to the South Pacific Forum Secretariat on the subsistence sector of Western Samoa, and was a member of the committee that reviewed the University of the South Pacific for the Commonwealth Fund for Technical Cooperation. In 2003 and 2004 he wrote two further reports on the same university. 

Over the same period, Gerry served on numerous scholarly bodies in the Pacific, Australia and internationally. In 1974, while still in PNG, he was made a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. He greatly valued the Academy’s multi-disciplinary character and through it widened his range of scholarly contacts across Australia. Between 1983 and 1986 he was particularly involved in the multi-disciplinary ‘Australia and the South-West Pacific Project’. The project brought together Australian and Pacific Islands administrators, academics and private individuals to consider basic questions underlying social, economic and political issues and tension in the Pacific. He was also Chair of Panel A of the Academy from 1997 to 2000. Between 1991 and 1995 he was Chair of the Australia-China Exchange Committee, and between 1993 and 2001 was a member of the International Relations Committee of the Academy.

Gerry was also President and Vice-President of the Pacific Science Association; was President and Vice-President of the Institute of Australian Geographers and was awarded the Institute’s Australian-International Medal in 2016. He was a member of the councils of the University of Samoa and the University of Papua New Guinea. He participated in 20 reviews of departments of the ANU, in addition to reviews of university departments at Sydney University, Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Auckland.

Relatively late in life Gerry obtained a private pilot’s licence and with Sue Serjeantson, edited And Then the Engines Stopped, a collection of personal accounts of flying in light aircraft in Papua New Guinea, which all had happy endings. With Marion Ward, he also edited a collection of his father’s articles on Taupo, Tauponui a Tia: Tales of the Taupo Country for the Lake Taupo Museum and Art Gallery.

I first met Gerry in Port Moresby in 1970 at the ANZAAS conference held at UPNG. When I returned in 1971 as an ANU postgraduate scholar he was still at UPNG but had been appointed Professor of Human Geography and was my supervisor. He and Marion were fulsomely hospitable to my family and me and in 1972, Gerry and daughter Lesley visited us in our village house near Dreikikir in East Sepik Province to review my PhD fieldwork. Gerry slung his large South American hammock across our house but woke in the night to find himself lying on the floor. The walls of our bush materials house had moved inwards and lowered him gently to the floor. Back in Canberra, Gerry and Marion’s hospitality continued and Gerry’s management of slow thesis writing and fractured grammar was continually good humoured and sympathetic.

Gerry died on 16 January 2023 in Adelaide where he and Marion had moved to be near their two daughters Lesley, a mathematician and Alison a senior physician. Son Derek lives in Denmark.

*Written by Bryant Allen

• R. Gerard Ward (1999) Widening Worlds, Shrinking Worlds: The Reshaping of Oceania. Canberra: Centre for the Contemporary Pacific.
• R.G. Ward and P. Ashcroft (1998) Samoa: Mapping the Diversity, 145 pp. Suva and Apia: Institute of Pacific Studies, USP and Nat. Univ. of Samoa.
• R. G. Ward and E. Kingdon (eds.) (1995) Land, Custom and Practice in the South Pacific, 290 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• R.G. Ward and A. Proctor (eds.) (1980) South Pacific Agriculture: Choices and Constraints, 525 pp. Canberra: Asian Development Bank and ANU Press.
• M. Levison, R.G. Ward and J.W. Webb (1973) The Settlement of Polynesia: a Computer Simulation, 137pp. Canberra: ANU Press.
• R. Gerard Ward (ed.) (1966) American Activities in the Central Pacific, 8 vols. Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press.
• R. Gerard Ward (1965) Land Use and Population in Fiji. London: HMSO, pp309.