How Charles Rowley nearly missed the ASOPA gig
25 September 2007
It was early 1950. Alf Conlon’s principalship of ASOPA had come to a sticky end the previous September and the powers that be were looking for a replacement. They offered the job to Harry Maude.
Henry Evans (Harry) Maude OBE [1906-2006] graduated from Cambridge University with honours in Anthropology in 1928 and immediately nominated the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony as his only choice in the cadetship application he made to the Colonial Administrative Service.
He ended up spending 18 years there, finishing as Resident Commissioner. This included a stint in World War 2 when he was attached to US Naval Intelligence at Pearl Harbour as part of a group whose local knowledge was used to plan the amphibious offensives against the Japanese.
After the war, from 1949-55, he was seconded to the newly formed South Pacific Commission and it was during this period he was offered – and rejected – the post of ASOPA Principal, leaving the way clear for Charles Rowley, who took up the job in November 1950.
Maude spent the final years of his working life as Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Pacific History at ANU, where he founded the Journal of Pacific History that continues to this day. He lived a fulllife - he was 100 when he died - and he wrote and mentored young academics all the while.
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