Hubert Murray

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Sir John Hubert Plunkett Murray, (29 December 1861 – 27 February 1940) was Lieutenant-Governor of Papua from 1908 until his death at Samarai.

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[edit] Early life

Murray was born in Sydney, the son of Sir Terence Aubrey Murray (1810-73), and was educated at Sydney Grammar School, Brighton College (from which he was expelled after punching a master) and Oxford.

Murray was a tall (6'3" or 190 cms), powerfully built man, who played rugby for the Harlequins and won the English amateur heavyweight boxing title.

In 1892 he became a legal draftsmen for the New South Wales parliament but described his time there as "living death in Macquarie Street" and left in 1896 to lead a more adventurous life. He took an interest in the volunteer movement, and in 1898 was in command of the New South Wales Irish rifles. He was a Lieutenant-Colonel with the Australian Forces mounted infantry brigade in the Boer War.

[edit] New Guinea

In 1904, Murray was appointed as a judge in what was still British New Guinea. He was appointed Acting Administrator in 1907 and Lieutenant-Governor in 1908, a position he held until his death at Samarai in 1940. When Murray first went to Papua there were 64 white residents. There were 90,000 square miles of territory, much of it unexplored jungle land, with many native tribes of whom some were cannibals and head-hunters. He set himself to understand the native mind, and found that an appeal to vanity was often more effective than punishment. He eventually wiped out cannibalism and head-hunting, largely by ridiculing the tribes which followed those practices, and praising those which did not.

In 1912 he published his interesting Papua or British New Guinea, in which the chapters on "The Native Population" and "The Administration of justice" give good descriptions of the many problems with which he had to deal. In 1925 his Papua of Today appeared, which showed the progress that had been made in carrying out his ideas. Portions of this book included material from pamphlets published by Murray in 1919 and 1920 on the Australian Administration in Papua, and Recent Exploration in Papua. His sympathetic understanding of the native mind continued to be the strongest influence in his government. His policy had become more defined but its basis was always the "preservation of the native races, even of those weaker peoples who are not yet able to stand by themselves. The well-being and development of these peoples is declared by the League of Nations to form a sacred trust of civilization, and this declaration is entirely in accord with all the best traditions of British administration". Murray held too that each native was an individual entitled to his own life, his own family, and his own village. He recognised that natives had their own codes of behaviour, and if these came into conflict with European codes no good could come from what he called the "swift injustice" of punitive expeditions. He preferred to lead his people into better ways and he persuaded them to keep their villages clean, because only inferior races preferred dirt; to pay taxes, because a man who did not do so was a social defaulter; to be vaccinated, because that was a sign of government approval. He trained suitable men to be policemen, and he had Sydney University opened to others to be trained in first aid and rudimentary medicine to fit them to be assistants to white doctors. In some of these things Murray was only carrying on or extending what his predecessor Sir William MacGregor had begun, but it is an additional merit in an administrator to recognise the value of earlier men's work.

Murray was the leader of the Australasian delegates to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress held at Tokyo in 1926, and president of the meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science in 1932. He went steadily on with his work until he died at Samarai, Papua, on 27 February 1940, still in harness. The story is one of continued progress. Education of the natives had increased, a beginning had been made with native industrial enterprises, the natives had begun to understand European modes of conducting business, and not a few of them had banking accounts. This had been accomplished with as little breaking down as possible of native customs. He was succeeded as administrator by his nephew, Hubert Leonard Murray (1886-1963), who had been Official Secretary since 1916.

[edit] Family

The Murray family was among the early settlers of the Canberra district of New South Wales, where his father Sir Terence Aubrey Murray once owned Yarralumla.

Hubert was the brother of, and was survived by, Sir Gilbert Murray, KCMG, professor of Greek at Oxford University.

In 1889 Murray married Miss Sybil Maud Jenkins ( - 1929). They had three children:

  • Mary, later Mrs. Pinney
  • Major Terence Murray, D.S.O., M.C.
  • Patrick Desmond Fitzgerald Murray D.Sc.(1900-1967), professor of Zoology at Sydney University

In 1930 he married Mrs Mildred Blanche Vernon (1875 - 1960).

[edit] Legacy

In Port Moresby the PNG Army barracks, the leading "international" primary school, the Hubert Murray Stadium and the main highway are all named after him.

[edit] Publications

Papua Of To-Day or An Australian Colony in the Making, P.S. King and Son, London 1925

[edit] References

  • The Australia Year Book 1931 has an article on the early history of the Canberra district, including the Murray family connection with it.
  • Lewis Lett, Sir Hubert Murray of Papua: Statesman and Empire Builder, Collins, Sydney, 1949
  • Francis West, Hubert Murray: The Australian Pro-Consul, Oxford Uni. Press Melbourne, 1968
  • Francis West, Selected Letters Of Hubert Murray, Oxford University Press Melbourne 1970
  • This article incorporates text from the public domain 1949 edition of Dictionary of Australian Biography from Project Gutenberg of Australia, which is in the public domain in Australia and the United States of America.
Government offices
Preceded by
Francis Rickman Barton, acting		 Lieutenant-Governor of Papua
1908–1940		 Succeeded by
Hubert Leonard Murray, acting