Research School of Pacific (and Asian) Studies

These early professorial appointments each charted their own course in the 1950s, seeking to recruit staff and graduate students willing to move to the small 'bush capital' that Canberra still was. Davidson effectively created a sub-field of 'Pacific History' through a journal of that name and a manuscript collection, defining it around the smaller colonies of the South Pacific. The Professors were not eager to see a strong Director appointed as envisaged in the early planning, and took turns as low-key Dean  – first Nadel, then Davidson.[8] But in 1961 the Vice-Chancellor Leonard Huxley persuaded John Crawford to move from permanent headship of the Department of Trade to be first Director of RSPacS, re-establishing its purpose as providing intellectual depth for Australian policies in the Asia-Pacific region. International Relations, Strategic Studies, and strong regional foci on New Guinea and Japan were features of his directorship.[9] He agreed also to be foundation Professor of Economics in the School, specifically to work on "underdeveloped and primitive economies, with emphasis on the building up of a systematic empirical knowledge of the Pacific and Southeast Asia".[10] Davidson and Spate were encouraged to make their first (short-lived) appointments on Southeast Asia – Bobby Ho and Terry McGee in Geography; John Bastin, Herb Feith and Emily Sadka in History.

Since Crawford was also busy with other policy-related roles in Canberra, he decided to pass his Economics Department in 1963 to Professor Heinz Arndt, already in Canberra in the undergraduate-focused Canberra University College. Though without previous Southeast Asia experience, Arndt decided to focus his efforts on the then-floundering economy of Indonesia. He invited the few economists specialising in this field to join his Indonesia Project, as permanent staff (D.H. Penny) or visitors, and attracted Australian graduate students with the promise of scholarships and pioneering a new field. At a time when the Economics profession was heading in a theoretical and mathematical direction, Arndt's Department became unique in the Anglosphere for its focus on empirical work on a developing country. The strong first generation of students, including Hal Hill, Peter McCawley, Anne Booth and Chris Manning, helped to carry the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies (BIES) Arndt founded in 1966, and to sustain a popular Indonesia Update from the 1981. An Economics-focused 'Indonesia Project' was supported externally first by the Ford Foundation and later by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs.[11]

Crawford also sought to fill the gap in studying the contemporary societies of the Asia-Pacific by proposing, as Vice-Chancellor, that RSPacS should inaugurate two new departments, of Sociology and Political Science. There was much internal discussion under Directors Anthony Low and Wang Gungwu before a single chair in Political and Social Change (PSC) was advertised, a novel name intended to signal that the department should focus on empirical research on Southeast Asia rather than theoretical speculation. It was eventually filled in 1978 by the first Australia-born professor (other than Crawford) of the School in Jamie Mackie, who had been the founding Director of Australia's first American-style Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, at Monash University. The School's Moresby-based New Guinea Research Unit was transferred to the new Papua New Guinea Government at the same time, leaving its former field director Ronald J. May as a second tenured member of the new PSC department.[12]

Asian languages and other related undergraduate subjects were taught not at RSPAS but at the School of Oriental Studies established in 1952 at Canberra University College. This became a Faculty of ANU in 1960-61, renamed the Faculty of Asian Studies in 1970. Its eventual merger with RSPAS to form CAP in 2006-9 reduced some duplication, but led to an overall decline in Asian Humanities.

The retirement of C. P. Fitzgerald, who had built a Far Eastern History Department devoid of modern historians, created the opportunity to lure Wang Gungwu from the University of Malaya in 1968. He was a young Professor already well published on the Southeast Asian Chinese as well as China. He directed attention towards modern history, thereby attracting students like Stephen Fitzgerald, whose later appointment to the staff marked the School's first engagement with modern China, interrupted by Fitzgerald's appointment as the first Australian ambassador to Beijing (1973-6).[13]

Jim Davidson's early death in 1973 led to a rethink of the Pacific History Department as dualistic, renamed as Pacific & Southeast Asian History (PacSea History) and envisaged as having one professor for each half. In the event it proved easier to find young talent than established scholars, and the Southeast Asian chair was converted to a tenured fellowship and filled by American Vietnamist David G. Marr in 1975. New Zealand-born Indonesianist Anthony Reid had been recruited from the University of Malaya in 1969 to lead the Southeast Asian side and would eventually fill the chair in 1989. Reid and Marr used their tenured positions for more ambitious studies  – Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce (Yale UP, 1988–93) and Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920–1945 (U. of California, 1981).[14] Meanwhile, the American disillusion with the field that followed the fall of Saigon in 1975 drove young US-trained scholars to the new Australian frontier, many of whom used research fellowships in PacSEA History to begin their careers – including Reynaldo Ileto, A.W. McCoy, Glenn May, Craig Reynolds, Leonard Andaya, Barbara Andaya and Milagros Guerrero. This facilitated pioneering multi-author monographs across the region exploring themes such as Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia (Heineman, 1979), Southeast Asia under Japanese Occupation (Yale SE Asia Studies, 1979), Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (St Martin's, 1983), Death and Disease in Southeast Asia (Oxford UP, 1987), Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese (Allen & Unwin, 1996), Asian Freedoms: The Idea of Freedom in East and Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 1998).

South Asian History had not been considered part of the School's field until the appointment as Director in 1973 of Anthony Low, a prominent British Historian who had worked on both East Africa and India. He introduced a small 'Director's unit' on India, to which he attracted Ranajit Guha, founder of the influential Subaltern Studies school of Indian history (1981–88).

The disciplinary organisational principal of the founders led to the fragmenting of the original four departments in the 1960s. Linguistics and Prehistory both split away from an original beachhead in Anthropology under the strong leadership of Stephen Wurm and Jack Golson (for a time joined by Australian pioneer John Mulvaney) respectively. In both cases Australia and the Southwest Pacific offered an extraordinary diversity of languages and cultures in Australia and the Southwest Pacific, overdue for systematic scholarly work. Both these Departments were encouraged to work on Papua New Guinea. Wurm and his colleagues classified all the languages of Papua New Guinea, went on to publish a two-part Atlas of Languages of the Pacific[15] and inaugurated in 1963 a prolific series, Pacific Linguistics, published in-house.

The Prehistory Department set up its own Radiocarbon dating lab and in collaboration with ANU earth scientists helped push back the dating of human settlement in Australia and New Guinea.[16] Geography also split at this time, the physical geographers forming a separate Department of Biogeography and Geomorphology. Led by Donald Walker, this was largely occupied with constructing the deep-time climatic history of Australia and New Guinea through pollen analysis.

This was the final form of the original Departmental structure, as diminishing core funding in the 1990s necessitated the establishment of policy-related centres and projects such as the long-standing Strategic & Defence Studies Centre, the Australian Centre on China in the World, and the Regime Change and Regime Maintenance in Asia and the Pacific (RCRMAP) project followed by the Regulatory Institutions Network (REGNET). These and the original Departments were assembled into Divisions in the last decade of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS).

In 2006, under Vice-Chancellor Ian Chubb (2001–11), ANU was reorganised to form seven Colleges, grouping together Research Schools, Faculties and Centres, each of which leads both teaching and research.[17] The new College of Asia and the Pacific (CAP) was formed through the amalgamation of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS) and the Faculty of Asian Studies at the end of 2009. The disciplines and units of the college were distributed among four Schools:

• Crawford School of Public Policy
• Coral Bell School of Asia and Pacific Affairs
• School of Regulation and Global Governance
• School of Culture History & Language

• Professor S.F. Nadel (Dean), 1952–1956
• Professor Jim Davidson (Dean), 1956–1960
• Sir John Crawford, 1960–1967
• Professor Oskar H. K. Spate, 1967–1972
• Professor Anthony Low, 1973–1975
• Professor Wang Gungwu, 1975–1980
• Professor Gerard Ward, 1980–1993
• Professor Merle Ricklefs, 1993–1998
• Professor James J. Fox, 1998–2006
• Professor Robin Jeffrey, 2006–2009