Professor Harold Brookfield was a British and Australian geographer with interests in rural development, family farming, land use and society in developing countries. He completed a BA and PhD at the London School of Economics. He was briefly a lecturer in Geography and Birkbeck College, London and Lecturer in Charge at the Department of Geography, University of Natal where he began engaging with development and social justice issues in South Africa and Mauritius. After three years, he moved to Australia to join the University of New England and in 1957 joined the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University where he spent most of his academic career. He spent two periods at the Geography (later Human Geography) Department in RSPAS – the first from 1957 to 1969, and then again from 1982 until his retirement in 1991, at one point becoming the Head of the Human Geography Department and Acting Director of the School.
Brookfield conducted field work in Papua New Guinea, the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, Bougainville and the Philippines. His interests focussed on Papua New Guinea where he conducted fieldwork in the highlands and collaborated with anthropologists from the Research School. In the 1970s his work extended to smaller islands of the Caribbean and the smaller eastern islands of Fiji. His work largely focused on the relationship between humans and their landscapes, particularly as this was understood through the lens of agricultural production. His work on agricultural intensification, land use and land degradation, and the impact of El Nino events was ground-breaking and innovative.