Alan Ward is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Newcastle, NSW and contract historian for the Waitangi Tribunal, New Zealand. His Master's thesis was on the East Coast Maori Trust, in the Gisborne region of New Zealand's North Island where he was born and raised. During this research Ward became interested in customary Maori land tenure and its conversion to forms of title cognisable in the New Zealand courts and intended to facilitate land transfer and economic development. This interest lead to subsequent research on land tenure in the Pacific islands, particularly in New Caledonia, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea and to employment in land administration in the latter two countries. Emeritus Professor Ward is the author of a number of books on land issues in PNG, New Caledonia and New Zealand, the most recent being <I>An Unsettled History: Treaty Claims in New Zealand Today</I> (Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 1999).

Almost half of this record group is concerned with PNG. These papers were gathered when Ward was Lecturer in History at the University of Papua New Guinea and adviser to the Land Evaluation and Demarcation Project Study (LEAD). The collection includes correspondence, notes, articles and papers, draft legislation and press cuttings. A small portion of these papers relate to politics and land matters in Australia, New Zealand, Solomon Islands, Africa, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Vanuatu, Banaba, French Polynesia and Guadeloupe. The remainder of the documents are mainly concerned with New Caledonia between 1947 and 1990 and were assembled by Ward at La Trobe University, Melbourne, through the 1980s, particularly during the years of political uncertainty in the French Territory from 1984 to 1990. <b>The complete, two hundred page calender of microfilmed documents held in the Alan Ward papers is available. <a href=http://rspas.anu.edu.au/pambu/reels/manuscripts/PMB1168full.rtf> [rtf format]</a>, <a href=http://rspas.anu.edu.au/pambu/reels/manuscripts/PMB1168full.pdf> [pdf format]</a> </b>
<b>See reel list of file titles for a shorter summary</b>.