Series 835 - Papers of Donald Gardner

Donald Stanley Gardner was born in London and studied biology and anthropology as an undergraduate in England before arriving in Canberra in 1975 to take up a PhD scholarship in Anthropology in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts — the very first graduate student to do so. He carried out ethnographic fieldwork among the Mianmin people in PNG’s West Sepik Province.
He was awarded his PhD in 1981 and subsequently commenced as a Lecturer in Anthropology, a position he held until 2004 when he moved to Heidelberg before moving again to Lucerne in 2008.
During his time at the ANU, Donald made eight field trips to the Mianmin, spending some 40 months there in total. His research covered social organisation, ritual, historical transformation, demography, nutritional status, and the potential impact of a large-scale mining project. He took a multi-disciplinary approach and collaborated with Robert Attenborough, a biological anthropologist, on an ARC project that looked at epidemiology and demography in its ecological and sociological context.
He died in Canberra in September 2025.