Thomas Edward Dutton (1935–2021)

Abstract

Thomas Edward Dutton (1935–2021) Andrew Pawley 1. PROLOGUE.1 Thomas (Tom) Edward Dutton died on December 21, 2021, aged eighty-six. He made important contributions to the study of New Guinea languages in several domains. He carried out surveys of the 100 or so indigenous languages of Central and Southeast Papua and did in-depth descriptions of several of these, especially Koiari and Koita. He wrote textbooks for Tok Pisin and Police Motu, the chief lingue franche of Papua New Guinea (PNG). He contributed many maps and articles to the massive twovolume Language Atlas of the Pacific. He was the Foundation Professor of Linguistics at The University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) from 1975 to 1977. He served as managing editor of Pacific Linguistics (PL) publications between 1987 and 1996. He co-supervised the dissertations of many PhD students who worked on languages of New Guinea. 2. EARLY YEARS Thomas Dutton was born on May 10, 1935, at Dayboro, near Brisbane, the eldest of five children of Lewis (Ted) and Mary Dutton, but grew up near Bundaberg where Lewis was a school teacher. Tom decided to follow in his father's footsteps and in 1953 went to Queensland Teachers College. The following year he was posted to East Bundaberg State School and began a BA as an extramural student of The University of Queensland. In midyear, he was called up for National Service and was selected for training as a pilot. He was invited to make flying for the Royal Australian Air Force his career but declined and returned to teaching. 3. PNG CALLS 1957 proved to be a watershed year for Tom. He had come round to the view that there must be more to life than being a school teacher in Queensland. He heard that the Administration of what was then the Australian Territory of Papua needed "Education Officers" and he applied. He hitchhiked to Sydney and attended a six-week course training teachers for Papua. In June, he took up an appointment as head of Rigo Intermediate School, east of Port [End Page 602] Moresby. In 1959, he was promoted to Area Education Officer in charge of Administration and Mission schools from Manumanu to Gaire. The diversity of languages spoken by his Papuan students interested him. He began learning Police Motu, the main lingua franca of Papua, and its source language, Motu, an Austronesian language spoken around Port Moresby. In 1960, Tom was one of three Education Officers chosen to attend the first six-week Language Learning course for Administration field officers run by the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Goroka. He was then posted to Chimbu Sub-District and later to Okapa in the Eastern Highlands. During that period he studied Gahuku (spoken around Goroka), Kuman (Chimbu) and compiled a set of lessons on Fore (Okapa). He also began to learn Tok Pisin (New Guinea Pidgin English), the lingua franca used by the Australian Administration in the Trust Territory of New Guinea. Tom was now hooked on the study of languages and realized that he needed to get some serious academic training in linguistics. In 1961, he took leave from Papua and in 1962 finished his BA at The University of Queensland, majoring in English with minors in mathematics and philosophy. In 1962, he married Corinne Scott, a school teacher who hailed from Nanango, near Kingaroy, and was working for Tom's father. Corinne flew light aircraft for a hobby, and Tom was assigned to be her copilot on a flight to the Gold Coast. Thus began a successful partnership of almost sixty years. From 1963–65 Tom studied for a Master's degree in English linguistics while employed as a Research Fellow in the Queensland Speech Survey, recording and analyzing varieties of English spoken by local Aboriginal communities and "Broken," the creole of Torres Straits Islanders. His Master's thesis was titled "The informal English of Palm Islanders" and ran to 457 pages. 4. DOCTORAL STUDIES AT THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY (ANU) In 1967, Tom became one of the first PhD students in linguistics in the Research School of Pacific Studies (RSPacS) at the ANU. The ANU had been created by the Federal Government...