EVEN THOUGH HE was born in Melbourne, Murray Groves, who has died in Canberra at the age of 84, was always influenced by Papua New Guinea, where his parents met, where they lived for more than 20 years and where he lived for two years and visited frequently.

His father was Bill Groves, an educational administrator in the Pacific and a long-serving Director of Education in PNG, who was very influential in the post-war Administration and laid the foundations of the nation’s public education system.

Murray Groves entered Melbourne University in 1944 to study history and law, but moved to Port Moresby for two years (1947-48), where he completed his law subjects by correspondence.

He was greatly influenced by these two years in Moresby, where he worked as a judge’s associate in the Supreme Court and taught English in Hanuabada.

In 1952 he did a diploma of anthropology at Oxford and then studied social anthropology for his doctoral research. He made a comparative study of three Motu villages where traditional life had been affected by their varying distances from Port Moresby.

Groves was considered a scholar of well-disciplined, forceful and original mind, an imaginative teacher and an able administrator. Groves was to display these qualities as he served various institutions in his academic career.

When he retired in 1988, Groves re-engaged with his Motu fieldwork, which he regretted not having published earlier. This reconnection focussed on Manumanu, 50 km from Moresby and the most traditional of the three villages where he had worked.

These further studies took place in the context of what he saw as the pernicious influence of post-modernism on contemporary social anthropology. He wrote two articles on fishing and fishermen in Manumanu.

Having been appointed a visiting fellow at the Australian National University in 1994, he made the occasional visit to PNG, but suffered continuing health problems from the late 1990s.

Source: The Saturday Age.   Spotter: Ross Wilkinson