I am as committed to e-mail as anyone I know. But I have come to freeze at the sight of a few headers — the ones that either contain no more than the name of a friend, or those, like the one I received yesterday, that say “Sad News.” I take a deep breath before opening such messages, for I know that it conveys an emotional body blow.

My wife, Adria, and I received such a message yesterday, forwarded by a Princeton neighbor currently doing research in Cape Town (a very 21st century communication, indeed). It reported the recent death of our Australian friend Greg Dening. This was a body blow for both of us. We knew that Greg’s health had not been good for some years, but he has continued to write wonderful books and we have been able to keep up an e-mail friendship with him, and with his equally talented wife, the historian Donna Merwick.

Greg was intellectually important to both of us. Adria is the Keeper of Oceania at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and Greg was one of the preeminent historians and anthropologists of the South Pacific. Just this morning I looked at the inscribed copies of Greg’s books that line her study shelf. And for me, Greg was one of the great humanists of the last century, an historian in mind and spirit.

Greg Dening began life as a Jesuit, but left the order for an academic career. He was among the first of the new breed of Australian scholars, those who went to the United States (Harvard) rather than Oxbridge for their doctoral training. His degree was in anthropology, but he had the instincts of an historian, and at his death he was Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Melbourne. His dissertation and first book, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, was a harbinger of his remarkable historical approach to the interaction of European and indigenous culture in the 18th-century South Pacific, his region if not his land — a series of stories “from both sides of the beach.”

For me the most interesting development in historiography during the 1970s and 1980s was the anthropological turn. I was fortunate enough to be at Princeton during the years when Clifford Geertz, Natalie Davis, and Bob Darnton were creating anthropological history. Greg was, along with Rhys Isaac, doing very much the same sort of thing for/to history in Australia at the same time. I first met him (and saw Donna, whom I had known for much longer) on my first trip to Oz in 1982. I have never stopped admiring his deeply interactive sense of history. You might want to listen to the recent ABC interview with Greg after the publication of his last book, Church Alive, the history of a Roman Catholic parish on the north shore of Sydney Harbor. Greg describes his work with the parishioners as “experiencing the Word as they hear it,” and his task as historian “to give back to the past its present in all its dimensions.” And so he does, and so he did. Thank you so much, Greg, for what you have given to all of us.

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