By Gavan Daws: The Writer and His Books

The Hawaiian Historical Society is pleased to host an evening with author Gavan Daws Thursday, January 25, 2007, at 7:30 p.m. in the Mission Memorial Auditorium, 550 South King Street, Honolulu. The program is free and open to the public.

Daws will share his experiences and perspectives as a writer of historical and biographical works. He will speak particularly about four of his books about Hawaii published between the nineteen sixties and the nineteen eighties: Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (1968), The Hawaiians (1970), Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai (1973), and Land and Power in Hawaii: The Democratic Years (1985).

He will tell how he came to do these books, each very different from the others, and discuss what happened to each of the books after publication. He will relate anecdoates and behind-the-scene stores, told in public for the first time.

Gavan Daws came to Hawai‘i from Australia in 1958 to work as a graduate assistant in the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa History Department. He stayed on as a faculty member and in a decade of teaching lectured to more than sixty thousand students. He left the Manoa campus in 1974 to take up a professorial chair in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University, where he headed historical research on the Pacific and Southeast Asia for fifteen years. He also served as Pacific member to the UNESCO Commission on the Scientific and Cultural History of Humankind.

Daws is the author of thirteen books plus screenplays, a stage play, the libretto for an opera, and songs. His latest work in print is his 1966 dissertation, Honolulu: The First Century, published in 2006 by Mutual Publishing.

Among his awards and honors, the Hawaiian Historical Society in 1992 named Daws a Distinguished Historian.

Free parking for the Mission Memorial Auditorium is available in the City and County Parking Garage. Enter on Alapai Street or South Beretania Street across from the Board of Water Supply.

For further information, contact the Hawaiian Historical Society office, 560 Kawaiaha‘o Street, Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96813. Telephone 808-537-6271.