I was a regular contributor to PIM in the 1960s and early 1970s. And later, people of my acquaintance will not be surprised to learn, a regular luncher.

In fact, it was at one of those lunches on the first floor of the old Occidental Hotel in Kent Street on 3 February 1983 where I heard that prime minister Malcolm Fraser had called an election and I was off and running in my first, and only, attempt at elected politics. But that’s another story.

At next Friday’s PIM lunch, now held in the Law Society dining room on Phillip Street, old and young Pacific Islands hands will foregather over twice cooked pork belly with tamarind curry sauce, crispy rice wafer, seared scallop and bok choy, washed down by the required few glasses of red.

PIM June 1961

And at this ancient gathering, Bob Lawrence’s latest book, ‘A Short History of the Pacific Islands Monthly Magazine’, will be launched in a limited edition as the definitive work on a publication established in the Great Depression in August 1930 and which, over the following 70 years until June 2000, when it was cruelly shuttered by new owner Rupert Murdoch, became the ‘Pacific Bible’.

Pacific Islands Monthly was a brave publication that informed the colonies and countries that spanned one-third of the globe from Torres Strait and Papua New Guinea through Micronesia to Hawaii, the Samoas, Norfolk and Cook Islands, Nauru, Fiji, Vanuatu and New Caledonia.

PIM told all the great stories of the Pacific. Stories about the desperate people who fled the Depression to find gold in New Guinea, to the horrors of World War II and the unsolved mysteries of the disappearance of Americans Amelia Earhart and Michael Rockefeller.

It reported on the Pacific’s conmen and carpet baggers, people searching for lost 16th century Spanish galleons and the growth of the major Pacific trading houses and shipping and airline companies that connected remote island countries as they grew to independent nations.

It also related the experiences of average people - the planters, public servants and yachtsmen – as well as international celebrities like Errol Flynn, James A Michener, Margaret Mead and Raymond Burr.

Now Bob Lawrence, an ABC news journalist, despatched to help out the National Broadcasting Commission of PNG in the early 1970s before independence, has written a history of this eminent magazine.

PIM October 1976

Its New Zealand founder/editor, RW (Robbie) Robson, later wrote that in 1930 he “decided that a career in metropolitan daily newspaper journalism held no future for people after middle age. I was 45. It was a gamble.”

Through PIM, Robson and his later long-term editors, Judy Tudor, Stuart Inder and Gus Smales, with their staff and many contributors, championed the Pacific and its issues, fought for its development and were successful in helping create organisations such as the Pacific Forum.

In the mid-1950s, Robson also bought the Fiji Times newspaper published in Suva. Many years later, both publications were purchased by the Herald and Weekly Times Group.

But when the Murdoch empire swallowed HWT there was no place for PIM and its operations were relocated to Suva (the lunch stayed in Sydney!).

But, with the exception of The Australian, Murdoch has never been a sentimentalist and an under-resourced PIM it wilted until it was suddenly closed in June 2000, with nostalgia taking a back seat, one month before its 70th anniversary.

But the PIM Lunch remained. It had begun in the 1960s because expatriate Australians employed in the Pacific were always keen to share food and drink with Sydney-based PIM editors and reporters.

Initially, a weekly lunch time and place was established and advertised in the columns of PIM.

And so it was that Pacific politicians, planters, patrol officers, publicans, pedagogues and plebeians regularly broke bread with the PIM team.

In 2017, the Sydney-based author Bob Lawrence delivered a eulogy for his friend, the former PIM editor Gus Smales.

ABC journalists attached to the PNG National Broadcasting Commission in 1975: Sean Dorney, Bruce Bertram, Albert Asbury and Bob Lawrence (Don Hook)

It was at this time that Bob realised he should accept the responsibility of memorialising in print that story of this brave little magazine and its devoted staff.

Bob first came across PIM in November 1974, soon after arriving in Port Moresby. When his friend and colleague Sean Dorney gave him a copy of the latest magazine, Bob was hooked.

In July 1975, Bob became journalist-in-charge at Rabaul and found hundreds of back copies of PIM stacked in the newsroom and these became his night time reading. On leaving PNG to work in Parliament House, Canberra, Bob became a long-time subscriber.

PIM lunches are held at the Law Society Dining Room, 170 Phillip St, Sydney NSW on the first Friday of each month, February to December. All welcome. Contact Tony Gentile on 0412 303 757 or email to PIM Lunch [email protected]