Ralph Harry

Ralph Lindsay Harry AC CBE (10 March 1917 – 7 October 2002) was an Australian jurist and diplomat, Ambassador to the United Nations, and the nestor of the Australian Esperanto Movement.

Family, youth and education

Harry's father was director of a high school, and his mother descended from an influential family of politicians (the first Speaker of the Australian House of Representatives, Sir Frederick Holder, was his grandfather). Due to his above-average performance at school and as a student in his studies and in sports, he gained a Rhodes Scholarship which enabled him to study law at the University of Oxford, England.

In the 1930s Harry was active in Christian circles and tended towards pacifism. He started studying Esperanto in 1937. During the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, he participated in a congress of the World Christian Youth Movement in The Hague, Netherlands. Due to the atrocities of the war he started doubting the existence of God and whether pacifism was an adequate way to a better world. His ideal became practical, non-revolutionary action within the existing international institutions, which led him to become a diplomat.

Professional career

Right after the war, Harry was a member of the Australian delegation which helped to prepare the structure of future United Nations (UN). Even in his old age he was proud about his contribution to the wording of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter and the International Law of the Seas.

In the following years he was the Australian representative to several countries:

After retiring from diplomatic activity, he was appointed Director of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS)

Harry was Director of the Australian Institute of International Affairs.

Honours

In 1960 Harry was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).[1] In 1963 he was raised to Commander level (CBE).[2]

In 1980 he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), "for public service, particularly as a diplomatic representative".[3]

Esperanto

Since his pre-war contact with Esperanto, Harry advocated the idea of a "neutral" language, avoiding to discriminate non-native speakers in international contacts. Due to his many activities on several fields of the Esperanto community he became the nestor of the Australian movement.

Lexicology and terminology

Before the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany, Harry translated into Esperanto several important UN documents, such as the Charter and Universal Declaration. He edited a modest booklet with sport related terms in Esperanto and their translation into English, French and German. For decades he collected specific Australian terms and idioms and published the very first Australian English-Esperanto dictionary. Other terminological works include an English-Esperanto bridge (card game) dictionary, review of Peter Benson's Comprehensive English-Esperanto Dictionary (CEED, 1995) and as his last achievement in this field a collection of familiar quotations (flugilhavaj vortoj, literally "words with wings") from languages around the world together with their Esperanto equivalents.

Literature

Harry was the main translator of the Aŭstralia Antologio (Australian Anthology, 1988) which bridges Australian literature to the Esperanto-speaking world. Inspired by the well-known Esperanto-cabaretist Raymond Schwartz, he published humorous short stories and memories from his professional life in many Esperanto periodicals, looking at the world with a wink. They were collected in the reader La diplomato, kiu ridas (1997) (English version The Diplomat Who Laughed).

Activities in the organised Esperanto movement

Although Harry was unambitious to fulfill positions in any of the internal Esperanto organisations like Universala Esperanto-Asocio (UEA), he presided over the Australian Esperanto Association (AEA) in 1960–61 and then for several years after his retirement. He was member of AEA's examination commission and funded several of its projects. With Ivo Lapenna, former president of UEA, he worked together in the Internacia Esperanto-Asocio de Juristoj (IEAJ) and contributed to its organ Internacia Jura Revuo (IJR), mainly on topics of international public law. In 1967 he was honoured by UEA with a rare membership in the Honora Patrona Komitato.[4]

Publications

Literature

External links

References

  1. ↑ It's an Honour: OBE. Retrieved 13 February 2014
  2. ↑ It's an Honour: CBE. Retrieved 13 February 2014
  3. ↑ It's an Honour: AC. Retrieved 13 February 2014
  4. ↑ At present there are only six living members to this committee, one of them being the German Nobel laureate Reinhard Selten.