Selebresent blong tufala Big Man blong stadi long Melanesia: Harold Chillingworth Brookfield (1926–2022) and Murray Chapman (1935–2022)

In the 1960s, Harold Brookfield and Murray Chapman were undertaking intensive village-based field research in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands respectively. Their research in that decade and beyond generated publications that laid new foundations for the study of land and people in Melanesia. I had the privilege of working with both these scholars in Melanesia between the 1960s and the 1980s. Brookfield, born and educated in the United Kingdom, spent much of his life working out of Australian universities, especially the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. He was the primary supervisor for my PhD thesis on population movement in the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides (the Republic of Vanuatu since 1980) between 1968 and 1971. He was also the leader of a major interdisciplinary project on small island ecosystems, funded by UNESCO and UNFPA in the eastern islands of Fiji, that I was privileged to be part of in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Brookfield's field research in the 1960s was pushing conceptual and methodological boundaries in his search for generalisations about the interactions between villagers and their environments in the Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea.1 He was both an active participant in the quantitative revolution that was transforming the social sciences in the 1960s, as well as being very sceptical of findings from uncritical application of statistical techniques to data collected in highly diverse cultural, environmental and geopolitical contexts.2 Chapman, a fellow New Zealander (and Auckland University geography graduate in the late 1950s and early 1960s), spent most of his academic career at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. He happened to be undertaking fieldwork on patterns and processes of spatial mobility by village-based Solomon Islanders for a PhD in geography at the University of Washington (Seattle) at the same time that I was undertaking my ANU-based doctoral research in Vanuatu. Chapman subsequently went on to become a champion for research into population circulation that empowered concepts and methods rooted in indigenous epistemologies. He always questioned research into population movement that simply sought to replicate earlier studies by applying statistical techniques in migration studies without seeking to understand local cultural contexts and ways of knowing the world.3 In this brief reflection on some of the distinctive contributions to research in Melanesia by these two “big men” (a Melanesian term for leaders), I acknowledge some common circuits and pathways in their research journeys in the big islands of the western Pacific. Although Brookfield and Chapman both devoted a great deal of time to carry out field research on the dynamics of village societies in Melanesia between the 1960s and the 1990s they actually had little to do with each other personally. in special edited collections of essays in their honour in Asia Pacific Viewpoint, I have had an opportunity to reflect at some length on Chapman's research on circular mobility in the Solomon Islands (Bedford, 1999) and Brookfield's research on population change in Papua New Guinea (Bedford, 2005). Detailed lists of references to their research in Melanesia can be found in those papers. In this acknowledgement of their research and its impact, I focus on two things: innovations in epistemology and methodology that were inspired by intensive field research in villages in Melanesia, and the impact their writing has had on research by others in Melaesia and beyond. Bryant Allen (2022) provides a substantive authoritative review of the remarkable contribution that Brookfield made over his extensive career in universities, in sequence, in the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, Canada and then, from the early 1980s, back in Australia. Over the course of a lengthy career, his scholarship was recognised extensively through prizes, awards and fellowships. There is no question that his research had an impact on geographical inquiry at all scales: village, region, nation and international. Brookfield was a world leader in his field, something that was recognised by the International Geographical Union when he became one of their prestigious Laureat d'honneur in 1996. In the 1970s and 1980s, Brookfield was one of the most influential geographers writing about development, especially following the publication of Interdependent Development (1975, Methuen). He regarded this short book as something of an afterthought following the production of three books on the Pacific, including his iconic contribution to regional geography, Melanesia: A geographic interpretation of an island world (Brookfield, 1971, Methuen). Linked with this very detailed geography of the western Pacific was a shorter history of Melanesia, Colonialism, development and independence: the case of the Melanesian islands in the South Pacific (Brookfield, 1972, Cambridge University Press), and a collection of essays mainly authored by doctoral students he had supervised at the ANU, addressing processes of social and spatial transformation in the region, The Pacific in transition: geographical perspectives on adaptation and change (Brookfield, 1973, Edward Arnold). Brookfield's interpretation of Melanesia was not the classical regional geography that had dominated research and teaching in the discipline in the Anglophone world for decades. This was a study of an island world that included experimentation with a wide range of innovative conceptual framings and analytical techniques. Fifty years later, it remains the only substantive geography of Melanesia that has ever been published. Brookfield's explorations of theory were always informed by detailed field research, usually in rural settings, especially in the western Pacific between the 1960s and 1980s and later in the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and Latin America. In his obituary, Allen (2022) provides a very rich summary of Brookfield's ambitious and intellectually rewarding research career. It is sufficient to say here that he was a great exponent of interdisciplinary research into the associations between human societies and their physical and natural environments. A strong advocate for comparative method in research, Brookfield sought explanatory power and theoretical insights from comparison of findings from studies at micro-scale in a range of locations rather than by testing general concepts and models that had been developed through a process of hypothesis testing and deduction, in quite diverse spatial and cultural contexts. Although he experimented with both, Brookfield always seemed more comfortable seeking generalisation via inductive rather than deductive modes of inquiry. Murray Chapman's career played out in a smaller range of places and with much less fanfare than Brookfield's. His scholarship attracted less attention on the international stage, but his meticulous research into population mobility in the Solomon Islands, and his concern to ensure local voices were heard beyond the interpretations of expatriates studying their spatial behaviours, inspired a generation of indigenous scholars to write human geographies of their own peoples and places, especially but not exclusively in the Pacific. Three dimensions of Chapman's academic career, which is discussed at greater length in Bedford (1999), need to be acknowledged here. The first was his approach to achieving an understanding of population mobility in very different cultural contexts from his own. This is revealed not only in the ways he conducted his field inquiries and wrote up his research, but also in his approach to the scholarship of Pacific Islanders whether as students or as fellow academics. Second, there was his commitment to innovation in field research methodologies. Chapman's ‘mobility register’ for the inhabitants of villages in Tasimauri has had a major impact on approaches by population geographers to the study of mobility in Pacific Island village settings. Third was his commitment to making academic research ‘relevant’ for policy makers throughout his career. He did this by maintaining a strong working relationship with institutions, government departments and prominent indigenous leaders, especially in the Solomon Islands. A partnership with renowned British population geographer, Mansell Prothero from Liverpool University, in the late 1970s and early 1980s resulted in two classic studies that have had a profound impact on the study of population movement: Circulation in Third World countries (Prothero & Chapman, 1985) and Circulation in population movement: substance and concepts from the Melanesian case (Chapman & Prothero, 1985). These books include chapters by some of the most influential expatriate social scientists of the day, addressing population movement in what was then called “The Third World”: Clyde Mitchell, Graeme Hugo, Ronald Skeldon, Kenneth Swindell, William Gould, Walter Elkan, Sydney Goldstein, John Connell, Marilyn Strathern, Dawn Ryan and Joel Bonnemaison, amongst others. They also include chapters by indigenous scholars Dawn Marshall (Caribbean), Shekhar Mukherji and Surinder Bhardwaj (India), Rejieli Racule, Shashikant Nair and Sakiusa Tubuna (Fiji), and Morea Vele (Papua New Guinea). One of Chapman's fortes was bringing together established and new researchers to share their ideas about population movement. His two books with Prothero were prefaced by major symposia they organised at Liverpool and the University of Hawai'i in the late 1970s. He continued this facilitation of intellectual engagement and cross-fertilisation in a special symposium on mobility and identity at the Pacific Science Congress meeting in Dunedin in 1983. An impressive gathering of indigenous and expatriate scholars generated a special 300 page plus issue of Asia Pacific Viewpoint in (1985), edited by Chapman, which contains papers by indigenous scholars John Waiko (Papua New Guinea) and Konai Helu Thaman (Tonga), as well as renowned Anglo-American geographers Anne Buttimer (Ireland) and David Lowenthal (USA).4 Both Brookfield and Chapman continued engaging with their research colleagues and many of their former doctoral students well into their respective retirements. In Brookfield's case, it is erroneous to talk of ‘retirement’. As Allen (2022, p. 8) notes, “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 Malcolm Cairns, an RSPAS anthropology graduate whom Harold helped to supervise”. Allen has also drawn my attention to a recent book by James Wood (2020), The biodemography of subsistence farming, which references Brookfield's work extensively and refers to him as "the great agricultural geographer" (p. 164). Chapman's writing, following his retirement from the University of Hawai'i in Manoa in 2002, continued unabated in the form of extensive correspondence with a wide circle of colleagues and former students. I was on the edges of this correspondence; it was erudite, thought-provoking and engaging. It was one of the key things that several of his Pacific doctoral students recalled with some emotion in an impromtu virtual ‘wake’ in early August, following news of his death. Murray Chapman had been much more than a supervisor and a mentor; he had been a friend and a source of inspiration and support for them and their families throughout their post-university careers. While their research journeys have been quite different in substance and outcome, there is a common thread to Brookfield's and Chapman's approaches to understanding and explaining human spatial behaviour in Melanesia. They both recognised the importance of gaining an understanding of local ways of knowing the world before seeking explanations for the phenomena they were studying. In this sense, they were both practitioners of the following Māori proverb (whakatauki): Mā te rongo, ka mōhio Through listening comes awareness Mā te mōhio, ka mārama From awareness comes understanding Mā te mārama, ka matau Through understanding comes knowledge Mā te matau, kia ora! Through knowledge comes life and wellbeing! In very different ways, Harold Brookfield and Murray Chapman made outstanding contributions to our understanding of and knowledge about people and places in Melanesia. Their legacies in Melanesia live on in research by indigenous scholars who they have inspired and empowered.

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