Sir David Hay RIP

Kyt · Jun 7, 2009

Sir David Hay - Telegraph

Sir David Hay, who has died aged 92, served as a soldier in New Guinea during the Second World War, when he was awarded a DSO, then returned in 1967 as the Australian administrator with the task of preparing the territory for independence.

In February 1945 he arrived in New Guinea with the 2nd/6th Australian infantry battalion to build an airfield in the Tomacelli mountains, and to lead an enlarged company, known as "Hay Force". This was ordered to make no headlong assaults on the Japanese but to follow up bombardments with aggressive patrolling aimed at driving the enemy from a series of ridges.

After four months he stood up to get a better view of the enemy during a sharp counterattack and was shot by a sniper through the stomach and the kidney. He said he owed his life to the local "angels", spear-carrying natives said to appear before any action like boxing fans hoping for blood, who swiftly carried the wounded away to receive medical attention.

In January 1967 talk about the territory becoming a seventh Australian state had largely subsided, and Hay arrived to find an educated young political class, developing trade, and a police force whose reach was starting to extend throughout the country. If some felt he dressed too formally and came across as rather too dignified, he was still able to converse with the locals in pidgin.

Some members of Canberra's bureaucracy feared that change was too swift however, and Hay, who had expected to hand over power to a local government, found his mission being blocked by a senior official at home. Never ruffled, he bided his time then had a word with the prime minister, John Gorton, who shifted the obdurate bureaucrat out of harm's way.

The great-grandson of a Scottish pastoralist who arrived in Australia in 1844, David Osborne Hay was born on November 29 1916. He spent his early years on a sheep station which was home to an accountant, Mick Moon, who had won the VC in France in 1917.

At Geelong grammar school he played a Nubian slave in a dramatisation of The Aeneid for the 2,000th anniversary of Virgil's birth in 1931 and then the Emperor Francis II in a performance of Hardy's The Dynasts. But he became a school legend by spending six years in the First XI, scoring 36 in his first match, aged 13. The school magazine subsequently expressed some doubt about his footwork, but three years later he scored 284 before being caught. The record stood for more than 60 years until it was pipped by Justin Dery's 289 in 1993; Hay then donated Dery his bat.

On going to Brasenose, Oxford, he achieved a second in Greats, a matter of lifelong regret, but never excelled in his four matches for the university, though he made 96 against Lancashire in 1938. He returned home to find himself barred from entering the external affairs department without an Australian degree; but the Geelong headmaster, Jim Darling, arranged for him to sit the Melbourne University exams without having studied there. Hay briefly went to the treasury and then the external affairs departments before joining the 2nd/6th Australian infantry brigade on the outbreak of war.

He was first posted to Libya, where he was a platoon commander at Tobruk, and found himself placed in charge of 50 captured barrels of brandy. To prevent disorder he determined to destroy the booty, but pouring it away found that he only created a lake of the liquor, which he was then forced to set alight.

In Greece Hay was invited to dine with the headquarters staff of 6th New Zealand brigade just before its evacuation from Monemvasia. On the beach he remembered General Freyberg shouting that, as commanding officer, he wanted to be the last to leave, only to be told by a young midshipman: "If you don't get on board when I say you won't get on at all".

After returning to the external affairs department after the war Hay served in Ottawa, spent a year at the Imperial Defence College in London, and was ambassador in Thailand as the south-east Asia Treaty Organisation was created. When his eight-year-old son remarked on the quietness of his office, he replied that this was because many of secretaries were royal princesses.

In the early 1960s Hay was high commissioner in Ottawa, where his wife renovated the official residence and made her mark by adding a pair of sculpted ice kangaroos every winter.

He then became ambassador to the United Nations and was in the assembly the day a bazooka was fired at, but missed, the building (in protest against the presence of Che Guevara); asked about it afterwards, Hay said: "I've experienced more than one drop short over the years".

On his return from New Guinea in 1970 he headed the external affairs department for three years then was shuffled aside as defence ombudsman, dealing with personnel problems stemming from Australian involvement in the Vietnam War, and finally was secretary of the department of aboriginal affairs.

In retirement Hay wrote a history of 2nd/6th Battalion, Nothing Over Us (1986) and The Life And Times Of William Hay Of Boomanoomana (1990), recounting how his great-grandfather settled on the Murray River, near Mulwala in New South Wales, in a house which David Hay was later to purchase and restore.

David Hay who died on May 18, was appointed MBE in 1944, CBE in 1962 and knighted in 1979. His wife Alison, whom he married in 1944, died in 2002. They are survived by their two sons.
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spidge · Jun 7, 2009

A very interesting life!

RIP

Antipodean Andy · Jun 8, 2009

A most interesting life of service. RIP.

What's a second in Greats?

liverpool annie · Jun 8, 2009

Sir David Hay as he appeared in 1967 on the front cover of PNG's School Paper

KEITH JACKSON'S PNG ATTITUDE: Sir David Hay, former Administrator, dies at 92

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Sir David Hay RIP

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