Doug Munro

Adjunct Professor

B A (Flin)
PhD (Macq)

Contact details

Email: munro47@yahoo.com

Profile

Doug started off as a Pacific historian and now thinks of himself as a biographer. He conducted fieldwork in Tuvalu in the late 1970s, was then Project Historian at the Port Arthur Historic Site in Tasmania, and successively taught at the University of Southern Queensland, Bond University and the University of the South Pacific, where he was Associate Professor and Head of Department. As well as being awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Yale University and a Harold White Fellowship at the National Library of Australia, he has been an Associate of the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University. Between 2001 and 2005, Doug was the regular interviewer for History Now and currently he is Review Editor of the Journal of Pacific History. As an undergraduate he founded the Flinders Journal of History and Politics and has twice been Guest Editor of the Journal of Pacific Studies.

Research areas

• Biography of J.W. Davidson, 1915-1973
• History of the New Zealand Opera Company, 1954-1971
• Suicide in New Zealand, 1900-1950

Publications

Books and edited collections

• (with Brij V. Lal), Texts and Contexts: foundations of Pacific Islands historiography ( Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006)
• (with Roman Grynberg and Michael White) Crisis: the collapse of the National Bank of Fiji (1st edition, Adelaide: Crawford House, 2002. 2nd impression, Suva: USP Book Centre, 2002)
• (with Michael Goldsmith) The Accidental Missionary: tales of Elekana ( Christchurch: Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury, 2002)
• (with Andrew Thornley) The Covenant Makers: Islander missionaries in the Pacific (Suva: Pacific Theological College; & Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific, 1996)

http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/
PacificStudies/image/129.pdf

• Guest editor, special issue of Journal of Pacific Studes, 20 (1996) on the theme Reflections on Pacific Historiography
• Guest Editor, special issue of Journal of Pacific Studies, 18 (1994/95) on the theme Migration and Labour
• (with Brij V. Lal and Edward D. Beechert) Plantation Workers: resistance and accommodation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993)
• (with Clive More and Jacqueline Leckie) Labour in the South Pacific (Townsville: James Cook University, 1990)
• (with Suamalie N.T. Ioesfa and Niko Besnier) Te Tala o Niuoku: the German plantation on Nukulaelae atoll, 1985-1890 (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific, 1990, 2nd ed 1991)
• (with Tito Isala) Te Aso Fiafia: te tala o te Kamupane Vaitupu, 1977-1887 (Funafuti & Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific, 1987)

Recent journal articles and book chapters

• ‘Richard Gilson – the perfectionist historian of Samoa’, Pacific Studies, in press
• (w ith Brij V. Lal) ‘The Text in its Context: introduction’, 1-14 ; ‘On Douglas Oliver’s The Pacific Islands’, 29-39; ‘Where the Waves Fall – or, playing the generalist game’, 51-62; (with Bronwen Douglas) ‘Of Islands and Sandalwood: Shineberg, Maude and the hidden history of trade’, 140-53; & ‘Distangling Samoan History: the contributions of Gilson and Davidson’, 225-37. In Doug Munro and Brij V. Lal (eds), Texts and Contexts: foundations of Pacific Islands historiography ( Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006)
• ‘In the Wake of the Leonidas: reflections on Indo-Fijian indenture historiography’, Journal of Pacific Studies, 28:1 (2005): 93-117

http://www.usp.ac.fj/editorial/
jpacs_new/DougMunro.pdf

• ‘J.W. Davidson’s Contribution to New Zealand Historiography’, Treaty of Waitangi Research Unit Occasional Paper no 9 ( Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 2005), 49pp
• ‘The Early Years of the New Zealand Opera Company, 1954-1957’, History Now, 11:1-2 (2005)

http://www.operafolks.com/
Cooke/Munro_Donald_page.html

• (with David McCreery and Stewart Firth) ‘Migrant Labourers as British Protected Persons: the Gilbertese experience, 1890-1908’, Journal of Pacific Studies, 27:2 (2004): 141-60

http://www.usp.ac.fj/editorial/
jpacs_new/MunroMcCreeryFirth.pdf

• ‘Archival Adventures: the search for J.W. Davidson’, Archifacts: Journal of the Archives and Records Association of New Zealand, October 2004: 33-47
• ‘Silences and Evasions: the widow Orwell and the biographer Spurling’, Biography and Source Studies ( New York), 8 (2004): 101-20
• ‘Becoming an Expatriate: J.W. Davidson and the brain drain’, Journal of New Zealand Studies, 2-3 (2003-04): 19-43
• (with Stewart Firth), ‘Towards Colonial Protectorates: the case of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands’ In Jane Samson (ed), British Imperial Strategies in the Pacific, 1750-1900 ( Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 233-41
• ‘Men and Women of the Century: the 20th Century Fijiproject’, Archifacts, April-October [double issue] 2003: 16-32
• ‘It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet: James Herriot and the ethical problems of contemporary biography’, Biography and Source Studies, 7 (2003): 63-81