James Wightman Davidson (1915–73)

Abstract

JIM DAVIDSON DIED IN PORT MORESBY ON SUNDAY, 8 APRIL 1973. HE WAS 57, AND HIS DEATH came suddenly as he drove to a beach to go sailing. A plaque bearing his name attests unobtrusively to the fact of his cremation in Canberra; while the absence of peculiarly hurrying footfalls and a highly characteristic laugh from the corridors of the Institute of Advanced Studies, the loss of a resonant, cogent, irreverent voice from committee meetings, have all been inescapable: we realise that we shall never more hear pomposity punctured, while a bronzed hand ? in token of essential shyness ? beats nervous time with a cigarette; nor shall we mock again an elegantly-besuited Davidson who, returning from conference with hierarchs, seeks sheepishly and in haste to divest himself of jacket and tie. Yet the fact of death and of loss only comes finally home when his friends and colleagues set down on paper their feelings about a man who was more than commonly admired. And how shall one write faithfully about Jim who, as scholar and as friend, meant so much to so many people ? about a man who, as O. H. K. Spate truly says, had 'one of the liveliest minds and most distinctive personalities'1 to be found at the Australian National University? James Wightman Davidson was born in Wellington on 1 October 1915 and educated at Waitaki Boys High School and Victoria University, where he graduated Master of Arts in 1939 for a thesis on Scandinavian settlement in New Zealand. He left to do PhD work