Speaker: Prof. John Connell
Abstract: The lives and livelihoods of the people of Siwai were first recounted in Douglas Oliver's A Solomon Island Society (1955) based on his fieldwork in 1938. Prof John first stayed there in 1974-76 and returned on several subsequent occasions, most recently in 2016. Thus a partial, fragmented 78-year-old ethnography exists: unusual in Oceania. This enables reflections on the long-term longitudinal study of a people whose lives have obviously changed substantially over that period, and the various interlocking strands, such as cash-cropping to the Kingdom of Papaala, of what constitutes the frustrating search for 'development'.
Biography: John Connell completed his PhD at University College, London in the late 1960s. In 1970, Prof Fred Fisk at the Research School of Pacific Studies, ANU, offered John a research job in Bougainville, PNG (John recalls ‘when I found where it was on the map I was sold’). This led to extended field work among the Siwai which fuelled many of John’s key research interests in development. In 1977 John took up a lecturing post at the University of Sydney, where he has remained ever since – apart from three years on secondment at the South Pacific Commission in Noumea (1981-84). John was elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia in 2000 and in 2007 won the NSW Geographical Society’s McDonald Holmes Medal, and in 2009 was award the AUSTRALIA-INTERNATIONAL MEDAL by Institute of Australian Geographers (IAG). In 2021 John was the recipient of Member (AM) of the Order of Australia. John has published extensively, especially on the Pacific, in total more than 40 books and 250 articles.
