In memory of Andrew Pawley
Eight years before he died, Andrew Pawley’s autobiographical essay, ‘Memoirs of an anthropological linguist’, was published in Te Reo, the journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand.[1] Rarely has the subject of an obituary helped its writer as much as Andy has helped me. The essay is a delightful and detailed, easy-to-read piece about his academic career, inextricably interwoven with lively anecdotes, quietly humorous and never boastful—as reflects Andy’s personality. The reader will excuse me for referring to him as “Andy”, but this is what all his friends and colleagues called him, and he was such a people person that he would, I think, be quite distressed if I called him anything more formal.
Andy passed away peacefully on 22 March 2026, just nine days before his 85th birthday, ending a ten-year battle with Parkinson’s Disease. He had been bedridden for about three years. During that time he had continued to work as long as concentration allowed, correcting a book manuscript he had co-authored, organising old field notebooks, editing the dictionary manuscript left by a missionary who was long gone. When I visited him and asked how he was, the reply was usually, “Fair to middling.”
Andy opens his essay with the words, “I’ve had a fairly complicated career…” He certainly did. Much of his research and teaching concerned Austronesian and Papuan languages. He described them, reconstructed their histories, and worked out “what linguistics and other disciplines can tell us about the history of human settlement in the Pacific.” But he also wrote seminal papers on what it means to have a nativelike command of a language, on the vernacular English of his Tasmanian relatives, on the language of cricket commentaries, on ethnobiology and on the craft of compiling dictionaries. In this last he was both brilliant and amply experienced. He compiled and wrote encyclopaedic and ethnographically rich dictionaries of the Papuan language Kalam (with Ralph Bulmer)[2] and the Austronesian language of Waya in the west of the Fijian archipelago (with native speaker Timoci Sayaba),[3] and edited and published anthropologist Ann Chowning’s dictionaries of Lakalai (Nakanai) and Kove, both Austronesian languages of New Britain. Meanwhile, he also conceived and led the project that became the six volumes of The lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society (see below).[4]
The foregoing hardly does justice to Andy’s work, but it gives some insight into the extraordinary width and depth of Andy’s creative engagement with language as a carrier of human culture.
Andy was born in Sydney on 31 March 1941. His parents separated when he was two, leading to a rather peripatetic childhood, thanks to his mother’s profession as a high school teacher. He attended a dozen or so different primary schools, mainly in Tasmania and New Zealand, and from 1954 to 1957 Napier Boys High School on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island. He writes, “There I played quite a lot of sport and did English, French, History and Geography for University Entrance exams, and taught myself a bit of German on the side.” He also developed an interest in learning Māori because he was captivated by the Māori girls while he was helping his mother, who was producing a musical at the girls high school.
Then came the “watershed year” of 1958 that “pretty much determined the direction of the rest of my life.” Andy went to study anthropology at Auckland University. There he met four young staff members who were to play profound roles in his life: Jack Golson, an archaeologist with whom he experienced the discipline’s hard labour (and decided it wasn’t for him); Roger Green, also an archaeologist, whose interdisciplinary approach to Pacific prehistory had a deep influence on him (they co-wrote papers later); Ralph Bulmer, an anthropologist who later drew him into fieldwork among the Kalam in Papua New Guinea; and Bruce Biggs, a linguist who taught Māori and introduced him to linguistic analysis. All became Andy’s lifelong friends. In 1959, Andy took a course with Biggs that included a weekly field methods session with a native speaker of Rotuman, spoken on an island 400 km north-west of Fiji. Andy writes, “After taking this course I knew that I wanted to be a linguist and to specialise in research on indigenous languages of the Pacific.” But there was no linguistics major at Auckland, so he majored in Anthropology for his BA and continued learning Māori. Meanwhile he had become friends with some young Samoans, so he started to learn Samoan and was able to write his MA on its analysis.
By now, Bulmer had begun studying the way of life and the ethnobiology of the Kalam people of the Upper Kaironk Valley, in the Schrader Range, in what was then the Madang District of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea. He needed a linguist, and Andy accompanied him to his field site for several months in late 1963. He was to write a Kalam grammar for his PhD and then to collaborate on a dictionary (a massive work, published 48 years later in 2011). Andy details his Kalam experiences in his essay, but his account of learning Kalam is unduly modest, as the language differs in significant ways from anything Andy (or any other linguist at the time) had encountered. His PhD thesis was submitted in 1966. It has never been published: Andy told me he simply wasn’t satisfied with it. But he continued to write and publish on Kalam over the years, made eight field trips to the Upper Kaironk, and remained in contact with a number of Kalam speakers until his illness prevented it.
While Andy was on his first field study in the Kaironk, Biggs had accepted an invitation to spend most of 1964 at the East West Center at the University of Hawai’i, and to bring a PhD student with him. He only had one, and that was Andy. So Andy travelled to Hawai’i with the Biggs family in January 1964. They stopped on the way to visit old friends of Bruce’s in Fiji, and then Andy met several young Fijian men who were studying at the East West Center, one of whom then gave Andy lessons in Standard Fijian. The University had a recently established linguistics department that was focused on Austronesian languages. Another visitor at the Center was George Grace, the leading specialist in the historical linguistics of Oceanic Austronesian languages, who inspired Andy to write two papers that reshaped our understanding of Polynesian linguistic prehistory. Meanwhile, Andy made the acquaintance of Biggs’ and Grace’s research assistant, Medina Asuncion from the northern Philippines, and after a while they got engaged. We don’t know how long this ‘while’ was, because, Grace writes in his contribution to Andy’s festschrift, “their courtship was conducted pretty much below the radar. When they got married, I was surprised — I hadn’t been sure they were actually aware of each other.” Medina and Andy were married in Honolulu in August 1965 and almost immediately moved to Auckland.
In 1966, Andy became a lecturer in linguistics at the University of Auckland. The following year, the consultant for one of his courses was Merewalesi Sayaba, a young woman from the Fijian island of Waya mentioned earlier. Andy received funding for fieldwork at three sites in Fiji, and during the summer beak of 1967–68, Mere, Medina and Andy spent 11 weeks on Waya. Andy worked mainly with Merewalesi’s father, Ratu Timoci Sayaba, later co-author of the Wayan dictionary, starting the project that led to the dictionary’s publication 54 years later. In the following years Andy and Timoci travelled to villages in various parts of Fiji , mostly Viti Levu, and gathered data on local lects. Paul Geraghty writes (The Fiji Times 28 March 2026), “These studies resulted in a paper that was the first to demonstrate scientifically that there are two major subgroups of Fijian, western and eastern, and that they are so distinct they should be referred to as separate ‘languages’, as different as, for example, English and Dutch.”[5]
If Kalam was Andy’s first linguistic love, Wayan was his second. Work on the dictionary began in earnest in 1980, and Andy travelled to Waya during summer breaks, or Timoci or another family member would visit Auckland for an extended period (Timoci died unexpectedly in 1987). Work on the dictionary continued in Canberra from 1990, with large parcels of drafts being sent off from Canberra to Wayan speakers for checking, a process that lasted more than twenty years.
In 1969, Andy took leave from Auckland to help introduce courses in linguistics at the new University of Papua New Guinea, laying the foundations of the Department of Language, established in 1975. While he was there, he also collected data for a paper that was the basis of a paper on the history of the Oceanic Austronesian languages of the then Central District around Port Moresby. The paper was published in 1975.[6] By that time I was on staff at Goroka Teachers’ College, taking my first hesitant steps in historical linguistic research as a hobby alongside my work teaching advanced English to and training future high-school teachers of English. Andy’s paper was a model of clarity, and I applied his model to a group of Oceanic languages on the coast of what became the Sepik Provinces. We had not met, but I sent him a copy. It arrived back with plentiful comments and written across the top of the front page the laconic “Where have you sprung from?”
Andy’s influence in PNG went well beyond Kalam and UPNG. Apoi Yarapea, a Kewa speaker from the Southern Highlands, now a Senior Lecturer in linguistics at UPNG, was a PhD student in Andy’s department at the ANU, and wrote a grammar of his dialect of Kewa for his 2010 doctoral thesis. Andy was Apoi’s principal supervisor, and Apoi speaks of him “as a genuine and compassionate man who loved Papua New Guinea, its people and their indigenous languages [whose] kindness and respect for Papua New Guineans touched the hearts of all those fortunate individuals who worked or studied with him.”
May Huvi, a schoolteacher and speaker and student of the Nakanai language of New Britain, tells how Andy went out of his way to get copies of Ann Chowning’s Lakalai dictionary to Ann’s adoptive Lakalai family and others. He had been editing the dictionary for Ann during her last illness, saw May’s name in a conference programme, contacted her and asked if she would deliver the dictionaries to the appropriate recipients. He then sent several large parcels, and May was able to report their delivery to Ann via Andy before Ann’s death in 2016.
But back to 1973, which saw Medina, Andy and their sons Victor and Matthew back at the University of Hawai’i. Andy had been seconded from Auckland. They were there until 1978, except for a long gap in 1977. In his essay, Andy reports this as an important period of intellectual development, particularly due to the influence of George Grace, who taught a (in Andy’s words) “brilliantly subversive” course in which he showed that the conventional division of language description into grammar and lexicon was inappropriate. There was the problem of describing how to say things in a nativelike manner: their description renders the grammar/lexicon division void. It also affects translation: close translation between languages X and Y is impossible when X and Y have different conventions for representing certain kinds of events and situations. Andy saw where his dissatisfaction with his unpublished PhD on Kalam had come from, and this led to the writing of several papers in the 1980s developing Grace’s ideas.[7] Its effect is visible in his dictionaries. The word as the basic unit to be recorded was now replaced by the ‘sense unit’, expressed by one or more words in the form of a particular grammatical construction These concepts were adopted in various versions of Construction Grammar from 1995 and into the 2000s, and are quite widely accepted, but sadly the names Grace and Pawley are rarely associated with them. An exception, perhaps, is the paper that Andy co-wrote about English with his mother.[8] Both men were outstanding linguistic thinkers, but evidently not good publicists (and both would have thought they had better things to do with their time).
In 1990 the family moved to Canberra, as Andy was succeeding Stephen Wurm as head of “the leading centre for research on languages of New Guinea and Island Melanesia”, the Linguistics Department in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS) at the Australian National University. It was a research-only department, its students all pursuing a PhD. The ANU had another linguistics department, in the Arts Faculty, which taught undergraduate courses as well as training Master’s and PhD students. Andy was determined to mend relations between them, as “their respective foundation professors had fallen out many years before.” Actually, the rest of the staff in the two departments related to each other quite well (I had been in Wurm’s department since 1983), and Andy was able to restore relations quite quickly. He never acted with enmity toward anyone. The resulting collegiality and collaboration benefitted both departments, only a few minutes walk from each other. It meant shared supervision of graduate students, the teaching of some undergraduate courses by RSPAS linguists, and attendance at each others’ seminars. For the RSPAS department it meant that some excellent graduate students from the Arts department moved to RSPAS to do PhD theses on Pacific and SE Asian languages.
In the 1990s Andy led two projects, initially grant-financed, in historical linguistics with a team that included himself, Meredith Osmond and me. The first project revisited the ambitious but much criticised Trans New Guinea hypothesis, proposed by Stephen Wurm and associates in the 1970s. This claimed, on very slender evidence, that almost 500 of the 800 or so Papuan languages of the New Guinea area belong to a single family. We published papers presenting evidence that a version of the Trans New Guinea hypothesis, one with reduced membership, is valid.
According to his essay, Andy felt that the other departments in RSPAS, which focussed on societies of the Pacific and (mostly southeast) Asia, regarded linguistics as irrelevant and arcane. To change this, he proposed a second project that resulted in The lexicon of Proto Oceanic (mentioned earlier) and Meredith Osmond and I became his co-workers. Proto Oceanic was the language of the Lapita people, whose culture appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago around 1350 BCE. They reached eastward to become the first human inhabitants of many Pacific islands. The first volume appeared in 1998 and the others sporadically over the years, culminating in volume 6, published in 2023. The work’s chapters each take an aspect of their culture, using reconstructed terminologies to draw inferences about particular cultural and environmental domains of the ancestral Oceanic speech community. Andy (co-)wrote many of the chapters and edited them all. The launch of volumes 5 and 6 and the completion of the project were celebrated at a lunch on 24 October 2023. Andy was brought from his care home. By this time, Parkinson’s was taking its toll on him, but Andy bravely persisted in giving a short speech, much appreciated by his audience, difficult though he found it. This was one of his last visits to the ANU, perhaps the very last.
In June 2025 the 13th Conference on Oceanic Linguistics took place at the ANU. By this time, Andy was unable to leave the care home, and so many of his old friends who were participating in the conference were ferried to the home to visit him. Beth Evans did most of the ferrying. She says Andy enjoyed these visits enormously. He loved people, and he had a huge network of family, friends and acquaintances, former students and colleagues, folk he had worked with in the Kaironk and on Waya, and many of them will miss him greatly.
Andy is survived by his wife Medina and their sons Victor and Matthew and their children.
If there is one quality that those who knew him well (and not so well) have talked and written about since his passing, it is his kindness to all. He had a rare ability for spotting talent in others that could be put to good use. He helped and mentored people in many ways, often changing their lives quite significantly. His colleagues around the world also knew him as an outstanding scholar. Andy was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1989 and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1991.
Footnotes
[1] 2018, Memoirs of an anthropological linguist, Te Reo 61:95–113.
[2] with Ralph Bulmer. 2011. A dictionary of Kalam with ethnographic notes. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. (Pacific Linguistics 630) http://hdl.handle.net/1885/209981
[3] with Timoci Sayaba,. 2022. Words of Waya: A dictionary of the Wayan dialect of the Western Fijian language. Canberra: School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/315760
[4] Malcolm Ross, Andrew Pawley & Meredith Osmond (eds.), The lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society. In six volumes. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/106908
[5] Andrew Pawley & Timoci Sayaba, 1971. Fijian dialect divisions: Eastern and Western Fijian. Journal of the Polynesian Society 80: 405-436.
[6] 1975. The relationships of the Austronesian languages of Central Papua. In T.E. Dutton (ed.), Studies in languages of central and south-east Papua, 3-106. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. (Pacific Linguistics C-29).
[7] In particular, (1) 1985. On speech formulas and linguistic competence. Lenguas modernas (Universidad de Chile) 12: 84-104. (2) 1987, Encoding events in Kalam and English: different logics for reporting experience, in R. Tomlin ed., Coherence and grounding in discourse, 329-360 (Amsterdam: Benjamins). (3) 1993, A language which defies description by ordinary means, in W. Foley ed., The role of theory in language description, 87-129. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter).
[8] with Frances Hodgetts Syder, 1983, Two puzzles for linguistic theory: nativelike selection and nativelike fluency, in J. Richards & R. Schmidt eds., Language and communication, 191–226 (London: Longman).
