Series 749 - Bill Clarke Pacific literature and poetry collection

William Clarke graduated with a BA degree in anthropology, MA and PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. Clarke began research in the Pacific Islands in 1964 as a member of a National Science Foundation research project ‘Human ecology of the New Guinea rainforest’. On the basis of his year’s research among the Maring people of the remote Simbai Valley, he wrote a PhD thesis in geography, which was later published as Place and People: An Ecology of a New Guinean Community (University of California Press, 1971). He taught for a year at the University of Hawai’i and then took up a Research Fellowship in the Department of Human Geography in the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University. He was then appointed geography professorships at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, Monash University in Melbourne, and the University of Papua New Guinea.