In memoriam Noel Barnard (23 February 1922 – 14 February 2016)

Abstract

Sadly, Noel Barnard, who died on 14 February, 2016, had long retired by the time I arrived at the Australian National University (ANU) in 2009 to take up a post with the College of Asia and the Pacific. I had to content myself with the occasional visit to his house in Hackett, both to admire his extensive library (since acquired by the library of Jilin University in Changchun) and, as a fellow New Zealander, to hear his reminiscences of his early days growing up in small-town New Zealand. Noel's story is a remarkable one. Born in the Taranaki township of Hawera on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand, he grew up in Taihape, the equally small and isolated North Island town that now proclaims itself the Gumboot Capital of the World. It was there that, whilst at high school, he began his study of Cantonese, in a language exchange with a classmate who was the son of a local market gardener. His lessons were supplemented by frequent attendance at services of the local Chinese Baptist church. For the rest of his life, when voicing the classical Chinese texts that became the focus of his research, he would do so in Cantonese. Prevented from joining either the Royal New Zealand Navy or the Royal New Zealand Air force by reason of difficulties with his hearing, it was suggested to him that, as he knew Chinese, he might care to join up as a guard at the Featherston Prisoner of War camp. The POWs housed at the camp, where there had recently (25 February, 1943) been an attempted breakout that resulted in the death of 48 prisoners and a local guard, were of course Japanese rather than Chinese, a confusion that perhaps captures something of the isolated circumstances of the New Zealand of those days. Soon after his arrival at the camp, however, Noel Barnard was chosen as one of the four guards to learn spoken Japanese (and one of the two also to learn to read and write the language), a Japanese officer having been appointed to teach

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