Vale, Emeritus Professor Andrew Kenneth Pawley FAHA FRSNZ (1941–2026)

By Darja Hoenigman

Andrew Pawley died peacefully on 22 March 2026, after a decade-long, brave fight with Parkinson’s Disease. He was just nine days shy of his 85th birthday.  

Andy joined the ANU in 1990, succeeding Stephen Wurm as the Head of the Department of Linguistics at the then Research School of Pacific Studies (RSPS), which he led until his retirement at the end of 2006. Andy remained an active part of the Department, supervising PhD students as well as continuing with his research projects even after his illness prevented him from attending campus. 

Andy was born on 31 March 1941 in Sydney. His parents separated when he was two, and he did not see his father again until he was 33. His mother, a high school teacher, followed work opportunities wherever they came up, so Andy had a peripatetic childhood, attending a dozen different primary schools, mostly in Tasmania and New Zealand. 

At the age of 16 he decided to enrol at the University of Auckland to study anthropology. In his first year he met four scholars who helped shape his career: Jack Golson sparked his interest in archaeology; anthropologist Ralph Bulmer inspired him with his vivid descriptions of Highland New Guinea, eventually inviting Andy to join him in a research project with the Kalam people in the remote Schrader Range of Madang Province in the then Territory of Papua and New Guinea (a project which first provided Andy with his PhD and then turned into one of his life-long commitments); linguist Bruce Biggs’ course in descriptive linguistics convinced Andy that he wanted to be a linguist and specialise in research on the indigenous languages of the Pacific; while archaeologist Roger Green was a key advocate for combining archaeology with other disciplines, especially historical linguistics, as a means of reconstructing the history of Pacific Island peoples and their cultures.  

It was this background, together with Andy’s natural talent and keen interest in Pacific languages that shaped him as a scholar. He was fluent in Māori (his ability to give long speeches in te reo Māori impressed many in the Māori community), Samoan, Tok Pisin, Kalam, Wayan Fijian and Bauan Fijian. He spoke some Motu, and could hold a conversation in Tongan. In Tahitian, though, he said he could only sing songs.  

Continuing the work of Ralph Bulmer, assisted by Kalam speakers John Kias, Simon Peter Gi and Ian Saem Majnep, Andy produced an ethnographically rich dictionary of the Kalam language, comprising more than 14,000 entries. Together with Timoci Sayaba he authored a dictionary of Wayan Fijian with more than 30,000 distinct lexical units. While these two dictionaries were his biggest projects, they were far from his only work. Andy’s many contributions to Austronesian, Papuan and general linguistics are summarized on Wikipedia. His 2010 Festschrift A journey through Austronesian and Papuan linguistic and cultural space highlights the depth and breadth of Andy's interests. 

After his PhD, Andy taught linguistics at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland (1965–1989), with periods at the University of Hawaii (1973–1975, 1977-1978). In 1969 he took a year off to introduce courses in linguistics at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the newly established University of Papua New Guinea.  

After his arrival at the ANU in 1990, Andy invested himself in mending relations between the two departments of Linguistics – one at the Research School of Pacific Studies (now CHL, CAP) and the other at the Faculties (now CASS) – whose founding professors had fallen out many years before. Andy encouraged interdepartmental collegiality and collaboration​ (leading by example by volunteering to teach ​a course on Lexicography at the other department​) and thus ​​helped form a single Linguistics ​community at the ANU.  

Andy initially felt that the other departments in RSPAS (Anthropology, History, Prehistory, Human Geography, Political Studies and Social Change) were preoccupied with human society and regarded linguistic studies as arcane and less than central to their interests. But as he had started his academic career, and developed his research interests, in a multidisciplinary environment, Andy embarked on an ambitious project which was to challenge this perception. With Malcolm Ross and Meredith Osmond he produced a series of six volumes (the first published in 1998, the last in 2023) in which they reconstructed and analysed the lexicon of Proto-Oceanic, the Austronesian language associated with the bearers of the Lapita culture. This opened the door to many multidisciplinary collaborations (e.g. Papuan Pasts), which have since become a hallmark of CHL.  

Andy’s relationship with Ralph Bulmer and with the Kalam continued throughout his life. During Bulmer’s early and terminal illness he organised and edited the major 624 page festschrift for Bulmer (1991), and in collaboration with Robin Hide completed and edited Bulmer’s second and unfinished book of a planned Kalam ethnobiology trilogy with Ian Saem Majnep, Animals the Ancestors Hunted (2007). 

Andy was not only a remarkable scholar, but also a distinctly kind and caring man, unencumbered by concerns for hierarchy or status. A warm, curious and encouraging presence who was always good fun to be with. Andy and his wife Medina were enormously generous to generations of students, as well as to speakers of Kalam and Wayan Fijian – many of them collaborators on Andy’s projects – who came to stay with them for extended periods, and whom Andy helped in countless ways. His death is a great loss to his family, his students, and the many friends and colleagues whom he inspired and charmed over 65 years of research and teaching.  

Rest in peace, Andy. We miss you greatly.