'Outside man' revisited: Harold Brookfield's contributions to population studies in the Pacific in the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

Abstract: Harold Brookfield's contribution to population studies has not been given much prominence in the literature. In this paper, I revisit a number of his major papers written in the 1960s and 1970s in two contexts: first, with reference to his response to the intellectual debates that were transforming the discipline of geography at this time, and second, with reference to my experiences as a postgraduate student at the Australian National University, in the ‘Brookfield school’ and, later, as a research colleague in Brookfield's interdisciplinary island ecosystems project in Fiji. Although Brookfield increasingly saw himself as an ‘outsider’ in the changing mainstream of human geography, he remained an extremely influential writer for successive generations of geographers who chose to work on population issues in the western Pacific. His research contribution was immense, and remains relevant, which is more than can be said for much that was written by those ‘inside’ the discipline in the heady years of intellectual foment that characterised the social sciences, including geography, in last quarter of the twentieth century.

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