On his first day in Hawai'i, Gavan Daws sat on a bus bound for the University of Hawai'i, where he was to begin work as a graduate assistant in history, and found himself momentarily lost.
The signs were in English. The two women sitting in front of him were speaking in Japanese. The two men behind him were chatting in Hawaiian.
Thus began what would be Daws' continuing exploration into the history and character of Hawai'i.
"It seemed important for me to find out where the hell I was," Daws told The Advertiser in 1970.
Daws was born in a small town in Australia in 1933. At 16, he moved to Melbourne and found work, first as a reporter for the Melbourne Herald and later as a high school teacher.
With a degree in history and English from the University of Melbourne in hand, Daws boarded a freighter hauling sugar from Fiji to Vancouver, British Columbia, and made his way to Honolulu.
As a graduate student and teacher at UH (he was the first to earn a Ph.D. in Pacific history), Daws immersed himself in the hazy and largely uncollected history of Hawai'i. After selling an article about Ni'ihau to American Heritage magazine, Daws landed a contract to write a definitive history of the Islands.
"Shoal of Time" was published in 1968 and immediately was hailed as a major achievement. It remains a staple of college classrooms statewide.
In the years since, each new book by Daws has been greeted as an event of historical significance. Written with acuity of a gifted academic and the engaging touch of a novelist, books like "Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai" and "Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific" drew readers with the force of history given fresh voice.
The extent to which Daws came to understand the inner workings of Hawai'i was evident in "Land and Power in Hawaii," an ambitious collaboration with George Cooper that offered a comprehensive and revealing look into the relationship between land and politics from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s.
