Academy Fellow

9 March 1926 – 22 May 2022

Harold Chillingworth Brookfield had two periods at the ANU. He came to the Geography Department in the Research School of Pacific Studies (RSPacS) in March 1957 as a Senior Research Fellow and remained until 1969. He returned in August 1982 as the Professor and Head of the Department of Human Geography in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. Later he was the first Convenor of the Division of Society and Environment until his retirement in 1991. He continued after retirement in the Department of Anthropology in RSPAS, as an Emeritus Professor and established the UN University funded applied research project, People, Land Management and Environmental Change (PLEC), with participants in Brazil, China, Ghana, Guinea, Papua New Guinea, Uganda and Tanzania.

Harold Brookfield was born on 9 March 1926 in Stoke Newington, London. Chillingworth was his mother’s family name. He attended a primary school at Palmers Green and from there won a position at Michenden Secondary School. The area was bombed from 1939 to 1941 but this did not prevent Harold from being introduced by a teacher at the school to Stanley Beaver, a lecturer at the London School of Economics (LSE). In 1943 aged 17 he began an honours degree course in geography at the LSE. The LSE had evacuated out of London to Cambridge and Harold took up residence there. In 1944 he volunteered for the Royal Air Force (RAF), was enlisted for ground crew training but was immediately placed on deferred service, so that he was able to sit his final exams and receive 1st Class Honours from LSE. He applied for a postgraduate scholarship, but the RAF finally called him for basic training in 1946 and then put him to work in RAF Records at Gloucester on the demobilization of thousands of servicemen back into civilian life. It was here that he learned that the government wanted all qualified people out of the services, registered himself, and was shortly afterwards discharged from the RAF and told to take up an LSE scholarship. On his return to LSE, now back in London, Professor Dudley Stamp offered Harold a position as a Student Demonstrator. Stamp also introduced him to Oskar Spate who was to be his postgraduate research supervisor. He wrote a thesis on the history of urbanisation on the south coast of England, extended his research to the west of Ireland, began teaching ex-servicemen at Birkbeck College, University of London, and married Muriel Blight, who he had met as a final year student at King’s College, University of London. Just before the end of his contract at Birkbeck, he was offered a position as a lecturer at the University of Natal. He and Muriel travelled there by ship in 1952.

The University of Natal was located on two campuses only one of which, in Durban, taught non-white students. Harold did most of his teaching there where he was left in charge, his professor being on a white only campus some distance away. As a result of a visit by the Director of LSE who knew that Harold was an LSE graduate, he was provided with funds to do fieldwork in Mauritius. He published papers on demography and the sugar industry from this work in international peer-reviewed journals as he had done from his PhD research and the work in Ireland. In Durban he and Muriel had joined the anti-apartheid Liberal party and it became apparent that some colleagues who were also members were being deported. So, in 1954 he accepted an offer of a position at the University of New England in Armidale. They first returned to the UK by ship. A fellow passenger was a young Desmond Tutu, with whom Muriel played numerous games of Scrabble. In 1955 Harold attended the ANZAAS conference in Melbourne where he again met Oskar Spate, who was now the Professor of Geography in the Research School of Pacific Studies at the newly established Australian National University. In 1956 Harold successfully applied for a position of Senior Research Fellow at the ANU and in March 1957 took up residence in Canberra.

The inclusion of a Research School of Pacific Studies as part of the new university was largely the outcome of recognition by the Australian Army’s Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs that Australia needed to know much more about the territories it was about governing, especially the Territory of Papua and New Guinea. Oskar Spate, the foundation professor of geography and the author of an outstanding report on India and Pakistan, had become an advisor to the Minister for Territories and began to assemble information about New Guinea. He wanted Harold to work there. After his arrival in Canberra, Harold met Paula Brown a new appointment in anthropology, who was being persuaded by S.F. Nadel, Professor of Anthropology, to do fieldwork in the central highlands of New Guinea on social change. It was one of the most densely settled parts of PNG, had local road access and was environmentally diverse. They created a field base at Mintima village, on the road just west of Kundiawa in Chimbu District. From there Harold mapped land use, land ownership and residence of the members of two clans and Paula studied their social organization. Harold’s detailed fieldwork at a local scale, his use of air photography (including taking his own air photographs from a light aircraft), to create an understanding of the clans’ land and Paula’s information about the social relationships between owners and users of the land, was highly innovative, in both their disciplines, and in their publishing of papers and a book together. It was in Chimbu, that Harold first realised his abiding concern with ‘the adaptation of the use and management of land to variability and change in society, economy and natural environment’, which he came to believe was the ‘soul’ of geography. Back at ANU, from 1964 to 1969 he was a member of the New Guinea Research Unit management committee. His work began to attract postgraduate students who wanted to work in PNG and elsewhere in the Pacific and to use his methods. By 1968 when he left ANU, he had supervised nine students in the field, four in PNG, two in Fiji (one a Fijian), one in Vanuatu, one in Tonga and one who worked on trade between Pacific countries. In 1973, Harold edited The Pacific in Transition with chapters by all of them.

In 1968, Oskar Spate, Professor of Geography and soon to be the Director of RSPacS, and the ANU Vice-Chancellor, Sir John Crawford, decided that the Department of Geography was too big and should be split, with the geomorphology and biogeography streams to be separate from the human geography. Harold, who thought geography should be the study of the associations between the physical and natural environments and human societies, opposed the idea. At around the same time, in the discipline of geography, the quantitative revolution was underway in the UK and the USA, in which statistics and mathematical models were significant. Harold was sceptical it would lead to anything new. but Professor Spate wanted to see it represented at the ANU. In both cases Harold vigorously maintained his argument that discipline was the study of “structure, process and transformation within man-environment systems “. Then in what he later called a “colossal mistake”, instead of negotiating an offer of the chair of Human Geography in RSPacS, Harold accepted a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania and left Canberra.

There began a period of 13 years in which Harold struggled to find an academic home. despite publishing Melanesia: a Geographical Interpretation of an Island World with Doreen Hart in 1971, described as ‘very influential’, and ‘a classical regional text’; being a Guggenheim Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at Norwich University in the UK in 1973 and writing the very successful Interdependent Development in 1975 (republished in 2013). He spent a year in Pennsylvania, five years at McGill University in Canada, two years on a UNESCO/UNFPA Man and the Biosphere Program in the Eastern Islands of Fiji followed by a year in Barbados on an unsuccessful MAB project and five years as Professor of Geography at Melbourne University. He then came back to the ANU in 1982 to take up the Chair of Human Geography in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. 

Back at Human Geography in 1983, Harold became leader of a new School research initiative on industrialization on the Malayan Peninsula which resulted in 1991 in a book on urbanization around Kuala Lumpur with two Malaysian co-authors. He returned to Fiji as a consultant to the European Union’s Fiji Employment and Development Mission, and with Dick Bedford, Tim Bayliss-Smith and Muriel Brookfield, revisited former MAB research sites using a Fiji government ship as transport, reported this work in another book. In 1984 he returned to Chimbu in PNG with Paula Brown to update their 1974 fieldwork, as well as to give ANU’s house at Mintima to the local landowners. Harold took advantage of the development of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software, unavailable in 1974, and with cartographer Robin Grau, entered all the Chimbu data into a GIS with what he called “spectacular results” on how and why people managed land use and land tenure, which was published in Human Ecology in 1990. In 1984, Piers Blaikie, who was developing within geography the new discipline of political ecology, accepted Harold’s invitation to visit ANU. Blaikie argued that soil erosion and land degradation was not necessarily the results of poor decisions or ignorance by farmers but was frequently forced on them by political, social and economic circumstances beyond their control. He and Harold jointly hosted a workshop at ANU, the contributions of which were published in 1987 as the co-edited book Land Degradation and Society, which has been twice reprinted by the publishers. He also resurrected a number of unpublished studies of the 1972 frost and drought in PNG. He co-edited the older and new papers into a special edition of Mountain Research and Development in 1989, which included an analysis of rainfall records, El Niño Southern Oscillation records, field reports and newspaper reports, with Bryant Allen and Yvonne Byron. When invited to participate in a US funded research project on environmentally critical areas in Malaysia and Borneo, Harold asked Lesley Potter, a McGill graduate whom he had supervised, and who was then at Adelaide University, to join him. Together, with Research Assistant Yvonne Byron, they published the book In Place of the Forest: Environmental and Social Transformation in Borneo and the eastern Malay Peninsula in 1995. In 2001 Harold was involved in the establishment of the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program in the School.

From 1985 Harold was the Acting-Director of RSPAS a number of times and was a leader in a move to divide the Research School into four disciplinary divisions. He became the first Convenor of the Division of Society and Environment. In 1988, Roland Fuchs, formerly the Chairman of the International Geographical Union (IGU) and then the Vice-Rector of the United Nations University (UNU) headquartered in Japan, asked Harold to organise the first of a series of regional international conferences on environmental sustainability at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta. With Yvonne Byron, he edited the proceedings into a book, South-east Asia’s Environmental Future: the Search for Sustainability, published by Oxford in 1993. The UNU then asked Harold to lead a research program into how population growth inevitably causes land degradation, but he turned down the offer because he did not agree with the premise. Juha Uitto of the UN then asked Harold what sort of program he would like to lead. He outlined an applied research program, which was to become, after some fairly radical changes in UNU thinking, the People, Land Management and Environmental Change Program (PLEC). ‘Clusters’ were established in Brazil, China, Ghana, Guinea, Papua New Guinea, Uganda and Tanzania, where the knowledge of the most successful small farmers at rural research sites was documented and was spread to other farmers and to extension agencies. Meetings in China, Uganda and Brazil and a regular newsletter, kept Cluster members in contact with each other and their field sites were visited by a core group of advisors. After writing and rewriting his proposals and negotiating the fearsome bureaucracies of a multilateral organisation, Harold was successful in gaining support from the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) for an extension of PLEC to 2002. From the PLEC work, Harold published three books, one with Christine Padoch, Helen Parsons and Michael Stocking, Cultivating Biodiversity: Understanding, Analysing and Using Agricultural Diversity (2002); one with Helen Parsons and Muriel Brookfield, Agrodiversity: Learning from Farmers Across the World (2003) and one with Helen Parsons, Family Farms: Survival and Prospect (2007).

Harold’s last paper, ‘Raised fields and shifting cultivation: an essay’ which he wrote in 2015, will be published posthumously in 2022 in Farmer Innovations and Best Practices by Shifting Cultivators in Asia-Pacific, a book edited by Malcom Cairns, an RSPAS anthropology graduate whom Harold helped supervise. 

By the end of his active research life, Harold Brookfield’s work had been widely recognised. He was a J.S. Guggenheim Fellow in 1973; received the Back Award of the Royal Geographical Society for Geographical Studies of the Pacific region in 1975; became a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 1977; was given a Laureat D'Honneur by the International Geographical Union in 1996; the Robert McC. Netting Award by the Association of American Geographers in 1997; the Australia-International Medal of the Institute of Australian Geographers in 2005; and he became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009.

Harold Brookfield was a giant in his field; he had an important influence on geographical thinking which will continue long after his death.   

*Obituary written by Bryant Allen

• (2003) Agrodiversity: learning from farmers across the world. Tokyo: United Nations Univdersity Press.
• (2002) Cultivating Biodiversity. London: ITDG Publications.
• Harold Brookfield (2001) Exploring Agrodiversity. New York: Columbia University Press.