Emeritus Professor Donald John Noble Denoon (29 July 1940–3 July 2024), who was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1992, was a much esteemed writer and teacher of African, Pacific, Australian, and comparative colonial histories. Born in Scotland during the first year of World War II, he relocated to South Africa with his family and completed a BA at the University of Natal in 1961. He returned to the UK to do his PhD at Cambridge (1965) on colonial history in South Africa. Soon after graduation, he was appointed to a lectureship at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. With his first wife, Australian laboratory technician Pamela Tod (1942–1988), Donald spent six years in Africa, where their three children were born, including a year at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.
The experience of teaching African students in an African environment convinced Donald that South African history must be approached from an African continental perspective, rather than that of a British white dominion. In collaboration with Balam Nyeko, he gave preliminary expression to this principle in the text book Southern Africa Since 1800 (Longman, 1972, rewritten 1984). His doctoral thesis was the basis for his first monograph, A Grand Illusion: The Failure of Imperial Policy in the Transvaal Colony during the Period of Reconstruction 1900–1905 (Longman, 1973). In the book’s Preface, Donald acknowledged his dependence as a colonial historian on official British materials and regretted the paucity of information on ‘unofficial opinion and activity’, let alone ‘African opinions’, beyond those of a very small elite. His desire ‘to understand why Africans behaved in particular ways at particular times’ presaged a career-long commitment to foregrounding Indigenous and non-elite activities, which he ultimately brought to bear on settler societies across the Southern Hemisphere and on Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the Pacific Islands.
In 1973, the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) appointed Donald as Professor of History and Religious Studies – the latter is ironic, given his self-proclaimed rationalism and religious scepticism. He succeeded the legendary foundation Professor Ken Inglis who became the University’s second Vice-Chancellor. UPNG at the time offered exciting intellectual and creative environments. Donald’s colleagues included historians Bill Gammage, Jim Griffin, Rod Lacey, Sione Lātūkefu, John Waiko, and Edgar Waters, as well as Ulli Beier – the inspiring ‘anthropologist-poet-art historian-impresario’ and African literature specialist whose biography Donald tried unsucessfully to write. He detailed his struggles with this project in a penetrating, typically dry and self-deprecating contribution to Pacific Lives (2001), co-edited by Brij Lal, FAHA, and Peter Hempenstall: ‘One problem is age: Ulli was in his 50s, I was in my 30s when we met, and I have never been able to close the gap…. He is not willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for his biographer, and I brood upon the disconcerting knowledge that many of his family have survived into their 90s’.
Donald’s arrival in PNG immediately preceded the official implementation of self-government in the former Australian colony, while his early tenure overlapped PNG’s transition to an independent state, celebrated on 16 September 1975. Unsurprisingly, that process and its tangled aftermaths were key foci in his subsequent historical writings, coupled with ongoing concern to compare and explicate the ambiguities of settler colonialisms and wider Oceanic histories. Donald’s inaugural lecture of 17 April 1973, entitled ‘People’s History’, encapsulates two main themes: his anti-objectivist conviction that ‘there is absolutely no last word in the interpretation and meaning of events’; and his forceful argument that the histories taught, researched, and written by UPNG historians should be ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. Not only is his subsequent academic production consistently true to these credos, it is otherwise doubly notable: for a wide thematic range, including historiography and agricultural, medical, mining, and political histories; and for a profound commitment to collegial collaboration and mentoring, as both writer and editor.
All these qualities are evident in Donald’s major publications on PNG. Oral Tradition in Melanesia (1981, but collated several years earlier) was co-edited with Lacey and includes methodological reflections and several essays by UPNG graduates. A time to plant and a time to uproot: A History of Agriculture in Papua New Guinea (1980) was co-edited with Catherine Snowden for the PNG Department of Primary Industry. The title page of Public Health in Papua New Guinea: Medical Possibility and Social Constraint, 1884–1984 (CUP, 1989) acknowledges Donald’s colleagues Kathleen Dugan and Leslie Marshall. This book draws on a blend of documentary research and interviews with a broad sample of colonial or national medical personnel. While not an intimate, village-based study, it evinces Donald’s career-long focus on ordinary Indigenous experience in the face of colonial or élite control and his principled belief in effective democracy. His important single-authored books on PNG include Getting Under the Skin: The Bougainville Copper Agreement and the Creation of the Panguna Mine (MUP, 2000); and his final major academic work, A Trial Separation: Australia and the Decolonisation of Papua New Guinea (Pandanus, 2005).
Donald, Pamela, and their children left PNG in 1981 and the following year he took up a Senior Research Fellowship in the then Department of Pacific and Southeast Asian History at the Australian National University (ANU). Shortly thereafter, he published a major monograph encapsulating his comparative method: Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (OUP, 1983). This innovative book introduced the important concept ‘settler capitalism’, juxtaposing distinctive forms of political economy and governance, rooted in white settlement and racial oppression of Indigenous people, which developed in British dominions and parts of South America. It remains an influential work.
In 1988, Donald and his family were devastated by Pamela’s death from leukaemia, after a two-year illness. Four years later, he and their friend Mary Mortimer forged an equally happy marriage. He had been appointed Professor of Pacific History at the ANU in 1990, within the newly-formed Division of Pacific and Asian History, of which he was the first Convenor. Until retiring as Emeritus Professor in 2003, Donald continued to write histories on a varied assortment of themes and places. As always, he combined practical collegiality in research and publication with service in administration or consultancy to the university, the discipline, and national or international bodies, including UNESCO. This later phase of Donald’s formal academic career saw the appearance of two important collaborative general histories. He conceived and edited The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders (CUP, 1997), assisted by Stewart Firth, Jocelyn Linnekin, Malama Meleisea, and Karen Nero, with numerous other named and unnamed contributors, many of them Pacific Islanders. Launching the book, Ken Inglis noted its novel composition and commented: ‘How artfully comparative analysis is built into its structure!’ In 2000, Donald and Philippa Mein-Smith, with Marivic Wyndham, co-authored A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Blackwell, 2000). Unusually in both Australian and New Zealand historiography, this work integrated the island continent, Aotearoa, and the Pacific Islands within a broad historical perspective.
As well as monographs and jointly authored collections, Donald published many, often provocative articles or chapters on PNG, Australian, Australasian, and Pacific history. They include ‘History and Culture in Papua New Guinea’ (in Historical Disciplines & Culture in Australasia, ed. John A. Moses, UQP, 1979); ‘The Isolation of Australian History’ in 1986 and ‘Re-Membering Australasia: A Repressed Memory’ in 2003, both in Australian Historical Studies; and ‘Black Mischief: The Trouble with African Analogies’ in 1999 in the Journal of Pacific History. Such works epitomize a characteristic stylistic strain in Donald’s prose, always astute, often wry, as in this prophetic epigram in the 1979 chapter: ‘The white dominions have a surplus of history … and a dearth of culture …. The black dominions are often conceived as having a surplus of culture and a dearth of history…. What remains to be seen [in independent PNG] is whether the internal surplus of “culture” can be processed into a nutritious history, or whether—like caviar—history will disappear from the intellectual market’.
In retirement, Donald largely abandoned academic writing but published two novels: Afterlife: A Divine Comedy (Pandanus, 2004) and Distrust Territory (UPNG Press, 2010). He and Mary left Canberra to live in Pyrmont, on Sydney’s waterfront, where they became deeply involved in community and municipal affairs. On Donald’s death, the Lord Mayor moved a resolution that the City of Sydney Council should observe a minute’s silence as ‘a mark of respect’, warmly commemorating Donald and his great ‘contribution to the Pyrmont community and academic research’. He is greatly missed by former colleagues, by his many friends, and especially by his and Mary’s shared families.
Professor Bronwen Douglas FAHA
Australian National University
15 June 2026
