DAWS, Gavan 1933-

PERSONAL:

Born 1933, in Shepparton, Victoria, Australia; son of two school teachers; married; wife's name Carolyn. Education: University of Melbourne, B.A., 1954; University of Hawaii, M.A., 1960, Ph.D., 1966.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Regal Literary, Inc., 52 Warfield St., Montclair, NJ 07043.

CAREER:

Taught for three years during the 1950s; has worked as a reporter for the Melbourne Herald, Melbourne, Australia; University of Hawaii, professor of history; Australian National University, Institute of Advanced Studies, professor in the School of Pacific and Asian Studies. Military service: Served in Australian army during the Korean War.

WRITINGS:

Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1968.

(With Oswald A. Bushnell and Andrew Berger) The Illustrated Atlas of Hawaii, Island Heritage (Norfolk Island, Australia), 1970.

(With Ed Sheehan) The Hawaiians, Island Heritage (Norfolk Island, Australia), 1970.

Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai, Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1973.

A Dream of Islands: Voyages of Self-Discovery in the South Seas: John Williams, Herman Melville, Walter Murray Gibson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Gauguin, Norton (New York, NY), 1980.

(With others) Angels of War (video), Australian National University, Research School of Pacific Studies (Canberra, Australia), 1981.

Night of the Dolphins, Deakin University (Waurn Ponds, Australia), 1982.

(With George Cooper) Land and Power in Hawaii: The Democratic Years, Benchmark Books (Honolulu, HI), 1985.

Hawaii, the Islands of Life, Signature Publishing (Honolulu, HI), 1988.

Hawaii, 1959-1989, Publishers Group Hawaii (Honolulu, HI), 1989.

Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific, Morrow (New York, NY), 1994.

(With Jac Holzman) Follow the Music: The Life and High Times of Elektra Records in the Great Years of American Pop Culture, FirstMedia Books (Santa Monica, CA), 1998.

(With Marty Fujita) Archipelago: The Islands of Indonesia: From the Nineteenth-Century Discoveries of Alfred Russel Wallace to the Fate of Forests and Reefs in the Twenty-first Century, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1999.

Bite the Hand: A Play, El Leon Literary Arts (Berkeley, CA), 2002.

Contributor to periodicals, including Times Literary Supplement and American Heritage.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

An opera libretto.

SIDELIGHTS:

Gavan Daws's working life has taken him back and forth between Australia and the United States, with years spent in the Pacific and stints in Europe and Asia. He has written general history, military history, biographies, and books on the environment and politics. Daws's work reflects a strong interest in putting historical research at the service of present-day issues. For example, with Archipelago: The Islands of Indonesia: From the Nineteenth-Century Discoveries of Alfred Russel Wallace to the Fate of Forests and Reefs in the Twenty-first Century, said Nancy J. Moeckel in Library Journal, the "book serves as an urgent call for awareness and conservation of these unique and important islands." In Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific, Daws tells of the experiences of many survivors and launches an emotional effort to have those POWs acknowledged by both Japanese and American governments. In a review for People, Thomas Fields-Meyer commented that the POWs "were sacrificed, [Daws] says, to geopolitics: With the Cold War looming and the Soviet Union threatening to dominate the Pacific, it became more politically expedient for America to resume relations with Japan and forgo prosecuting thousands of known war criminals." As Daws says in his book, "If my puny efforts can add even one decibel to the volume of noise to attract the attention of the Japanese government, then it will have been worth it."

An Economist reviewer described the book as "horrible but necessary." It was conceived while Daws was sitting in a bar in Honolulu, where he overheard a World War II veteran telling a friend of the atrocities he suffered as a Japanese POW in Shanghai. He began talking to the vet, Harry Jeffries, who began recounting his experiences in what Daws describes as an epiphany. Jeffries introduced Daws to other veterans, and the resulting interviews and ten years of archival research culminated in Daws's disturbing but highly acclaimed exposé. Ken Ringle noted in the Seattle Times that the book, through narrative and photographs, chronicles the Bataan Death March, where "the Japanese beheaded or bayoneted so many starving men that they left a dead body every 15 yards for a hundred miles. He details the horror of the building of the 250-mile Burma-Siam railroad, where 12,500 POWs and about 200,000 Asian slave laborers were starved and worked to death," and other horrific atrocities. A reviewer for American Heritage said the book is "heartbreaking.… Japanese prison camps killed more than ten thousand Americans, and this book, so far, is their only memorial."

Archipelago, which Daws wrote with Marty Fujita, was described by Chris Ballard in the Journal of Pacific History as "truly high tea—a sumptuous volume at the top end of the coffee table." The book centers on the life of nineteenth-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who spent eight years combing more than 14,000 miles on the islands of the Malay Archipelago and who simultaneously with—and independently of—Charles Darwin developed the theories of evolution and natural selection. The lavishly illustrated book is also a "call to conservation action," according to Stephen F. Siebert of the Quarterly Review of Biology. A reviewer for the Jakarta Post called it "a fascinating story of the discoveries of Wallace and the beginning of ecological awareness and conservation biology." The authors include excerpts from the naturalist's personal journals and his 1869 publication, The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orangutan, and the Bird of Paradise. "This book is a reminder that long before there ever was a global economy there was a global ecology, a web of life imbuing species and ecosystems with a common future," wrote Mehru Jaffer in Science. An Observer reviewer called it "a vivid offering—filled with glorious modern photographs of Indonesian islands and a succinct text—that satisfies both eye and intellect."

Daws's Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai was described by J. F. Thorning in the National Review as the "first adequate account by an independent scholar about Joseph de Veuster," known as Father Damien, a Catholic priest from Belgium who spent sixteen years serving leprosy sufferers on Molokai, Hawaii. Daws's exhaustive research presents what Michael F. McCauley described in Commonweal as "not the first biography of the Leper of Molokai [but] the most perceptive. It remained for a 'non-Catholic, indeed a non-Christian in the strict sense of the word' … to make historical and biographical sense out of the life of the man who, despite the disservice done him by previous biographers, remains both an enigma and a challenge." In conjunction with writing the book, Daws worked successfully to have the site of Damien's leprosy settlement declared a national historic park.

Daws's books on the Hawaiian and South Seas Islands have also received critical acclaim. Harold Whitman Bradley, writing for American Historical Review, called Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands "an eminently readable survey of Hawaiian history from the discovery of the islands … to state-hood in 1959," adding that it is "a well-balanced blend of social, economic, and political history." And a Publishers Weekly contributor described A Dream of Islands: Voyages of Self-Discovery in the South Seas: John Williams, Herman Melville, Walter Murray Gibson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Gauguin as an "insightful, readable, well-researched portrait of these 'eminent Victorians of the South Seas.'"

Daws told CA: "One way or another, all my work is about words and audiences—trying to find the best language, the best medium, the best shape and structure and flow, for telling stories that have human value."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Daws, Gavan, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific, Morrow (New York, NY), 1994.

PERIODICALS

American Heritage, February-March, 1995, review of Prisoners of the Japanese, p. 78.

American Historical Review, April, 1970, Harold Whitman Bradley, review of Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands, p. 1182.

Billboard, May 9, 1998, Jim Bessman, review of Follow the Music: The Life and High Times of Elektra Records in the Great Years of American Pop Culture, p. 11, 92.

Commonweal, February 8, 1974, Michael F. McCauley, review of Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai, pp. 466-467.

Economist, February 11, 1995, review of Prisoners of the Japanese, p. 78.

Jakarta Post, January 23, 2000, review of Archipelago: The Islands of Indonesia: From the Nineteenth-Century Discoveries of Alfred Russel Wallace to the Fate of Forests and Reefs in the Twenty-first Century, p. 1.

Journal of Pacific History, December 2000, Chris Ballard, review of Archipelago.

Library Journal, January, 2000, Nancy J. Moeckel, review of Archipelago, p. 150.

National Review, J. F. Thorning, review of Holy Man, p. 1135.

New York Times, March 16, 1969, Robert Trumbull, review of Shoal of Time, p. 7; March 23, 1980, Edward Hoagland, review of A Dream of Islands:Voyages of Self-Discovery in the South Seas: John Williams, Herman Melville, Walter Murray Gibson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Gauguin, p. 9

Observer, January 9, 2000, "How Darwin's Other Half Lived," review of Archipelago.

People, August 21, 1995, Thomas Fields-Meyer, "Forgotten Infamy: Gavan Daws Wants Japan to Apologize to American World War II POWs," pp. 84-88.

Publishers Weekly, August 12, 1968, review of Shoal of Time, p. 50; February 1, 1980, review of A Dream of Islands, p. 96; October 10, 1994, review of Prisoners of the Japanese, p. 55.

Quarterly Review of Biology, September, 2000, Stephen F. Siebert, review of Archipelago, p. 304.

Science, May 19, 1989, Laura F. Huenneke, review of Hawaii: The Islands of Life, p. 854; December 3, 1999, Mehru Jaffer, review of Archipelago, p. 1862.

Seattle Times, March 17, 1995, "WWII Historian Seeks Reckoning for Japanese," p. A16.

Variety, June 8, 1998, Phil Gallo, review of Follow the Music, p. 5.