Emeritus Professor John Dominic Lynch FAHA 1946 – 2021

The descriptive and historical linguist, John Lynch, died in Port Vila, Vanuatu, aged 74 in May 2021. His linguistic lineage was a particularly distinguished one. He was proud to say that as an undergraduate at Sydney University from 1964-8 he had been the final student of Pacific and Australian language scholar Arthur Capell (1902-1986), gaining from him a particular appreciation for the languages of southern Vanuatu, and writing an obituary upon his teacher’s death (Lynch, 1987). John’s first monograph, Lenakel Phonology (1975) was on one of the languages of Tanna Island, to be followed up by the Lenakel Dictionary (1977) and A Grammar of Lenakel (1978), all based on his phd research at the University of Hawai‘i that commenced in 1969.

John Lynch and his wife, Andonia, at the foot of Tanna volcano c. 2000

As a young scholar, Capell had been much influenced by the British linguist Sidney Herbert Ray (1858-1939), who had accompanied Alfred Haddon on the pioneering Torres Strait Anthropological Expedition of 1898. Capell had written one of the obituaries of Ray (Capell and Elkin, 1939). Capell’s third recorded publication was a translation of the Biblical Book of Ruth into Erromangan (today, Sie language) for the British and Foreign Bible Society (1932), prefiguring his much later collaborations with John Lynch on Sie vocabulary and grammar (Capell and Lynch, 1983; Lynch and Capell, 1983).

Sidney Ray’s first linguistic publications were on Vanuatu languages, beginning in 1887 with ‘A sketch of Nguna Grammar’ (Ray, 1887; see full listing in Haddon, 1939). He in turn had been much influenced by one of the first prolific Pacific linguists and anthropologists, the Melanesian Mission’s Reverend Robert H. Codrington (1830-1922), first meeting him in England in 1888 and later contributing an obituary upon his death (Ray, 1922). Codrington’s first linguistic publication was also on one of the languages of Vanuatu, A Sketch of Mota Grammar (1877).

To complete John Lynch’s intellectual genealogy, we must pass to the gifted missionary linguist, John Coleridge Patteson (1827-1871), Codrington’s boss as First Bishop of Melanesia from 1861 until his untimely death in 1871 (Fremantle, 1895; see also Wikipedia entry). He was an important stimulus to Codrington’s own linguistic interests and was said to speak 23 Pacific languages, publishing various works in the language of Mota in the Banks Islands of Vanuatu, which he chose as the Melanesian Mission lingua franca. He was a friend from Oxford days of the renowned linguist Max Müller. Like John Lynch, Patteson too was a keen cricketer.

John was a highly esteemed friend and valued mentor for many. All work colleagues and associates greatly appreciated his warm, approachable and sympathetic manner, and he was greatly respected by national leaders and other officials and professionals that he had cause to engage with in png, Vanuatu and the Pacific more widely. There was never anything flashy or ostentatious about John, and he seemed to be content, happy and at peace with where life had taken him. He had lost his wife Andonia (Andi) earlier and was always saddened at the memory of the early passing of his closest friend and colleague Terry Crowley (Lynch 2005), but in later years his ongoing close relationship with his own brothers, his involvement in the lives of his two sons, and his joy at sharing his home with grandchildren all meant so much to him. Others who were fortunate to be in John’s circle of local kava-drinking friends always valued being with him and he had an amazing memory of stories, anecdotes, jokes, and cricket information to share.

John’s abiding legacy is of course the depth and breadth of his linguistic academic contribution. His intellectual engagement never abated, and he was writing productively until his death, with his last academic paper being published posthumously in Oceanic Linguistics (Lynch 2022). He was the consummate academic: an excellent teacher and communicator, a prolific writer of high-quality teaching and learning materials, an insightful and thorough supervisor for postgraduate students, and a superb researcher, scholarly writer, and conference presenter, all the while rising through the ranks of university administration to the highest levels of leadership in two institutions, the University of Papua New Guinea (upng) and the University of the South Pacific (usp).

One of the measures of how greatly John’s linguistic output is recognized can be seen in the fact that the two already-published obituaries for him have been written by four other giants of Pacific linguistics. All four were contemporaries of John’s over the last decades in which so much pioneering, trailblazing and original research has been conducted on and about the languages of the Pacific region, and in Oceanic language history. Paul Geraghty and Andrew Pawley (2021) have comprehensively detailed John’s involvement in this work in their obituary in Oceanic Linguistics, and Malcolm Ross and Robert Blust’s (2021) tribute in Language and Linguistics in Melanesia is of great value in including more detail on the earlier years of John’s work while he was beginning his career at the University of Papua New Guinea.

In this obituary, so as not to go over ground already covered in the previous obituaries, RE provides some of the material that he was asked to present for the formal “narrative of life” as part of the eulogy at the burial service for John, and MS adds details of how John’s work in historical linguistics has contributed to the ongoing and developing understanding of Pacific prehistory that archaeologists have been pursuing.

John Lynch with shell in hand, at Maewo nakamal, Port Vila, 2015

John was Australian-born, to parents who came from families that had migrated from Ireland. His mother was Dorothy Patricia Conaghan, born in 1917. She worked as a high-school music teacher. His father was Gregory Joseph Lynch, born in 1913, who worked as a chemical engineer. John’s parents married in 1945, just as World War ii was ending. John himself was born in 1946, and had 4 brothers, all alive and able to be virtually present at John’s burial via livestreaming. Denis was born in 1948, Jeremy in 1950, Brendan in 1955, and Reg in 1960. At the time of his death, John had begun to write some of his early memories of growing up in Sydney, in the days when milk, bread and ice would be delivered to each house by horse-drawn cart. Unfortunately, John’s memoirs were not completed, but the first parts make for interesting reading. Hopefully later parts will be found on his computer; we may find out what sparked his interest in linguistics.

After his phd research at the University of Hawai‘i, John spent 21 years at upng, ending up as Vice-Chancellor. After some extremely challenging years there, and in search of a quieter life, John moved to the Emalus Campus of usp in Port Vila in 1991, taking over as Director of the Pacific Languages Unit (plu) from Terry Crowley. Just as they had done previously at upng, Terry and John developed plu to become a very strong teaching and research section. At one point, there were four on staff at the Unit, and one of their proudest moments was jointly to supervise the doctoral studies of Hannah Bogiri, who in 2012 became Vanuatu’s first ever Anglophone phd graduate, in any field of study, since Independence in 1980. John eventually worked for usp for 16 years, including influential terms of service as Emalus Campus Director and Pro-Vice Chancellor for all of usp’s regional campuses.

On his retirement in 2007 he was given the rare honour of being made an Emeritus Professor of the University of the South Pacific. In 2008 he was elected to another high academic honour, becoming an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2016, he was awarded Vanuatu’s 30th Independence Anniversary Medal, for his service to the nation in linguistics, language studies, and tertiary education. He had previously been awarded Papua New Guinea’s Tenth Anniversary Medal in recognition of his services to education in 1985.

Following on from his first study of the Lenakel language, John completed major studies of all the languages of Tanna, Erromango and Aneityum. Then, more recently, picking up work began by Terry Crowley, John did a great deal of research and writing about the structure, history and relationships of languages on Malakula (full bibliographies are provided in the two previously mentioned obituaries). His studies covered other areas as well, such as Bislama, the history of Pacific languages, and language planning and education. There is no other linguist who has ever had the same breadth and depth of knowledge of the languages of Vanuatu as John.

Even while holding senior management and leadership positions, John never ceased his academic activities: teaching students, conducting research, and writing articles and books. His colleagues were always in awe of the scale of his output. He was a prolific and outstanding research scholar, and authored or co-authored 14 books and more than 100 articles and book chapters. For those of us who have tried to emulate some of the things John has done, the standard of his writing remains a model that is very difficult to achieve. It seemed that without great effort, he could produce academic texts quickly and efficiently, with insight and depth, and yet with incredible clarity. During most of his retirement years he also served as the editor of Oceanic Linguistics, the most important journal for the languages of the Pacific. Even though he had been retired from usp for 14 years, his major 1998 textbook about the languages of the Pacific region was still being studied at the time of his death, in first semester 2021, by many hundreds of usp students throughout the region, including 55 in Vanuatu.

John’s legacy remains in the lives of the students he taught either directly or through his textbooks. It is also preserved in his academic contributions and writings. There is another more unseen impact of John’s life and work, and this became evident as so many messages were received from colleague linguists around the world when they heard of his death. They all commented on his superb linguistic accomplishments, but without fail they also highlighted his personal qualities. John led from the front and achieved the status of an eminent, internationally recognized scholar, but he always maintained warm and collegial relationships with his peers, and as a true mentor helped junior researchers and those who were coming along behind. He was held in the highest regard by all, for his quiet humility, his engaging wit, his generous support, and his genuine friendship. John loved his work, and some of the condolence messages received showed that in recent times he had completed examining a phd thesis of a student from New Zealand and had also been working on final revisions of yet another academic paper.

The only archaeologist John seems to have published with is MS, albeit in two papers that were not archaeologically focused (Lynch and Spriggs, 1995, 2011), although he also contributed chapters to three predominantly archaeological collections (Lynch, 1999a; Lynch 1999b; Lynch and Tepahae, 1999). He had much to do at upng with the brilliantly wayward archaeologist Les Groube and his png protégés Joe Mangi and John Muke, and with archaeologist Jean Kennedy who was also teaching there, albeit not in the Archaeology unit. There was a constant stream of visiting archaeologists passing through as well, particularly at the time of the Lapita Homeland Project of 1984-5, and many often-notorious parties centred on the Groube residence where John and Andonia provided a calm and steadying influence.

The historical linguistic focus of his work has provided much archaeological food for thought, particularly of course for archaeologists specializing in Vanuatu but also for those working more widely in the Pacific on issues such as the presence or absence of pigs and dogs at particular periods, and on the origins of kava and terms for it in the Pacific (for these wider issues see for example Lynch & Dutton, 1977; Lynch, 1981a & b; Lynch & Tryon, 1985; Lynch, 1991; 2002 and several of his edited or co-edited books). His subgrouping work on Vanuatu languages has proved a fertile ground for archaeologists examining the sometimes-stark culture historical differences between North-Central and Southern Vanuatu, as has his work on Polynesian loan words for aspects of social organization, sailing technology, crops and for words to do with kava and its preparation (see for instance Lynch and Fakamuria, 1994; Lynch, 1994, 1996, 1999c, 2000, 2001, 2016a & b). Examination of his bibliography of course reveals many other papers that would bear some further archaeological attention as well.

Over quite a few years, John had suffered significant physical decline from heart disease and other complications, but he had long since decided that he would see his days out in his adopted homeland, Vanuatu, rather than seek any medical treatment back in Australia. He continued his favourite regular past-time of sharing kava with friends until a few days before his passing, when he sadly succumbed to the effects of a stroke, with his family around him.

With thanks to the Journal de la Société des Océanistes who originally published this obituary in their 154 edition.

Early, R. and Spriggs, M. (2022). In Memoriam Emeritus Professor John Dominic Lynch (8 July 1946 – 25 May 2021) Journal de la Société des Océanistes, No 154(1), 199-203. https://doi.org/10.4000/jso.13833.

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