27 Facts About Hubert Murray

Sir John Hubert Plunkett Murray was a judge and Lieutenant-Governor of Papua from 1908 until his death at Samarai.

Between 1872 and 1877 Hubert Murray attended Sydney Grammar School where he won several sporting prizes and was school captain in 1877.

Hubert Murray then moved to England in 1878 and attended Brighton College and Oxford University, where he attended Magdalen College.

In 1892 Hubert Murray became a legal draftsman for the Parliament of New South Wales but described his time there as "living death in Macquarie Street" and left in 1896 to lead a more adventurous life.

Hubert Murray took an interest in the volunteer movement, and in 1898 was in command of the New South Wales Irish rifles.

Hubert Murray was a Lieutenant-Colonel with the Australian Forces mounted infantry brigade in the Boer War.

Hubert Murray held the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the Australian forces and of major in the Imperial service.

In 1904, Hubert Murray was appointed as a judge in what was still British New Guinea.

Hubert Murray was appointed Acting Administrator in 1907 and Lieutenant-Governor in 1908, a position he held until his death at Samarai in 1940.

When Hubert Murray first went to Papua there were 64 white residents.

Hubert Murray set himself to understand the native mind, and found that an appeal to vanity was often more effective than punishment.

Hubert Murray eventually wiped out cannibalism and head-hunting, largely by ridiculing tribes that followed those practices, and praising those that did not.

Hubert Murray was involved in controversy of the "dog incident", when he attended a meeting called to suppress the activities of sorcerers, when local people attempted to demonstrate the power of their vadas by reviving a dog that had been killed.

In 1912 Hubert Murray published Papua or British New Guinea, in which the chapters on "The Native Population" and "The Administration of justice" give good descriptions of the many problems he had to deal with.

Hubert Murray held too that each native was an individual entitled to his own life, his own family, and his own village.

Hubert Murray recognised that natives had their own codes of behaviour, and if these came into conflict with European codes no good could come from what he called the "swift injustice" of punitive expeditions.

Hubert Murray preferred to lead his people into better ways and he persuaded them to keep their villages clean, because only inferior races preferred dirt; to pay taxes, because a man who did not do so was a social defaulter; to be vaccinated, because that was a sign of government approval.

Hubert Murray trained suitable men to be policemen, and he had Sydney University opened to others to be trained in first aid and rudimentary medicine to fit them to be assistants to white doctors.

In some of these things Hubert Murray was only carrying on or extending what his predecessor Sir William MacGregor had begun, but it is an additional merit in an administrator to recognise the value of earlier men's work.

Hubert Murray was the leader of the Australasian delegates to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress held at Tokyo in 1926, and president of the meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science in 1932.

Hubert Murray went steadily on with his work until he died at Samarai, Papua, on 27 February 1940.

The Hubert Murray family was among the early settlers of the Canberra district of New South Wales, where his father Sir Terence Aubrey Hubert Murray owned Yarralumla, and Windradeen, at Lake George.

Hubert Murray's grandfather, Captain Terence Murray, was a member of the Coldstream Guards and came to Australia as the paymaster for the 48th Regiment after having been the Paymaster of the Irish Brigade of Guards since 1811.

Hubert Murray's sisters resided separately, at Yarralmula, with their grandparents Colonel and Elizabeth Gibbes, after the death of their mother.

James 'Aubrey' Gibbes Hubert Murray, described by Gilbert as shy and retiring, was a draftsman for the NSW Department of Lands.

In 1889 Hubert Murray married Miss Sybil Maud Jenkins.

On 20 February 1930 Hubert Murray married an Irish widow Mrs Mildred Blanche Vernon nee Trench.