Of time and place : essays in honour of O.H.K. Spate

Abstract

This book of essays honours Professor O.H.K. Spate of The Australian National University. Occupying the second University Chair of Geography to be created in Australia, Oskar Spate built a Department in the Research School of Pacific Studies there. Later, after serving for five years as Director of that School, he moved to its Department of Pacific and South Asian History where, as a Visiting Fellow, he is writing a three- volume history of the Pacific. The first volume, The Spanish Lake, was published by the ANU Press in mid- 1979. Sixteen of his colleagues and research students have contributed to this offering, which has been edited by two former members of his Department. The versatility of Spate{u2019}s scholarship is only partly reflected here, though it is evident in the bibliography of his writings and the biographical sketch. Nevertheless the contents of this volume display the twin polarities of his concern with human activities in a framework of both wide-ranging space and great depth in time. The first four essays are concerned with reactions of individuals in different walks of life to the unfamiliar Australasian environment. The next four demonstrate methodologically different approaches to problems of historical geography seated regionally from Australia to South East Asia and the Southwest Pacific. This core of the area to which the Research School of Pacific Studies is devoted also contains the next five essays, which deal with present day economic and social problems of neighbouring developing nations. The final contributions return to Australia, to the obduracy of its Empty Heart from which we have still not learned lessons for government policy. Geographers, historians and social scientists will here find new material of diverse appeal.