Batting for the South Pacific

Greg Urwin is a Southern Hemisphere man, right down to his collection of Hawaiian shirts. Picture / Brett Phibbs

An Aussie diplomat. Surely that's a contradiction in terms? Greg Urwin would hasten to correct you: for a start, although he spent more than 30 years in Australia's foreign service, he is now the Pacific Forum's Secretary-General and is emphatically no longer Canberra's man.

Second, he would dismiss the jibe as he has always got irritated by the tendency of New Zealand and Australia to snipe at one another.

So we won't be mentioning the cricket, then. Urwin's eyes crinkle up as he bursts into chuckles.

"Your choice, not mine. I'm a cricket nut!" He has proudly passed the mania on to his stepsons - all three were in the Samoan cricket team for the latest Pacific Games.

"I don't think that's happened since the Chappells," he says, eyes twinkling. As for the transtasman series, "that Gilchrist bloke" is as good a cricketer as he's ever seen in his 58 years, and the Black Caps are "cruelly struck with injuries".

He says he remembers all too well when New Zealand regularly beat Australia in the 1980s.

Very generous. Very diplomatic. Urwin has the slight bureaucrat tendency to speak in pre-rehearsed paragraphs and generalities, but you can see why he's well-liked in his job, to-ing and fro-ing between 16 Pacific states, cajoling the governments into working together.

Even when the niceties are put aside, Urwin has a reputation for actually caring. The respect was hard-earned; his appointment to the Pacific Forum 18 months ago was controversial, to say the least ("you noticed?" he asks in mock surprise).

By convention, since the forum was established in 1971, the secretary-general had never come from Australia or New Zealand.

There were worries that an Australian would be a "Trojan horse" for Australian interests in the Pacific. And Australian Prime Minister John Howard's tactics to lobby for Urwin's appointment - gatecrashing a meeting of smaller island states, for example - were seen to be heavy-handed. It took a "considerably drawn out" five rounds of voting before Urwin was confirmed in the post.

But, says Urwin: "I never had any sense of animosity towards me personally, there was just a range of views on my parents' wisdom in conceiving me in New South Wales ... Perhaps I'm being a little big-headed about it but I thought there were some potential distinctions to make between my identity as an Australian and my identity as me."

Translation: he was already known and trusted by a lot of the people he was going to be working with. It probably helped that at the time of his appointment he was, by choice, living in Samoa rather than Australia, with his Samoan wife Penny and his collection of Hawaiian shirts.

"You have to have Hawaiian shirts, though I do not look good in them," he sighs. Actually, being short and stout, white-haired and button-nosed, he'd probably look like a tropical, beardless garden gnome.

He first set foot on a Pacific Island in 1977, after turning down a post in Washington DC, because the chance to run his own show at age 31 as Australia's first High Commissioner to Samoa was irresistible.

He says he felt no pangs of culture shock but fell in "love at first sight" with the country. Are we really talking about the country here? Urwin insists so, even though his eyes first met Penny's across cocktails at a party thrown for him by the Samoan Government.

She was a member of the prominent Samoan-German Keil clan, and a widow with three young boys, who Urwin subsequently raised as his own.

Over the next two decades, he was an Australian representative in Vanuatu, New Zealand and Fiji, chief of every mission he went on, apart from Wellington, where he was deputy. It was hard there, he admits, to get used to being number two again, although the size of the operation saved him from chafing too much.

Not that his style of leadership is autocratic. Forum staff are pleased that he reads the newspapers to stay in touch with what's happening around him - a small thing perhaps, but not something all his predecessors were known to do. He's busy making the forum more relevant to its member states via a Pacific version of shuttle diplomacy.

"There is simply no substitute for talking to people face-to-face," he says, even if irregular flight schedules mean he gets stuck in backwaters on the odd weekend (not that he'd ever talk about any of the Pacific states so dismissively).

He doesn't spend as much time at home as his wife would like, but as he has "enough air points to go to the moon" she sometimes travels with him. Until this weekend, he'd been on the road - or rather, in the air - solidly for four weeks: Japan, Australia, Samoa, American Samoa and finally New Zealand, for the annual Pacific Forum meeting.

That's long enough to make his gravelly, lightly accented voice rather tired.

Other people travel to Pacific Islands for holidays; Urwin's idea of bliss is to stay put. But in case he's mistaken for a complainer, he hastens to add that "it's a fascinating job - you can get stuck into all sorts of things".

At least the flights give the history graduate a chance to read - and it's mainly histories. He's thinking of writing a history of Australia's relations with the Pacific when he retires. He'll have to do something; he tried "not doing very much" in Samoa for a few months before getting the forum job, and felt he "had turned into a geriatric very quickly and was vegetating".

His one story of diplomatic danger happened at the unlikely venue of the 1973 United Nations General Assembly.

Late one night, Urwin was listening to Cuba addressing the half-empty hall when an argument broke out among some of the Latino countries, including Honduras, sitting right behind him.

"In the end, one of them pulled a gun. So the very brave Australian delegation hit the floor."

He and Penny are based in Suva, but home is still Apia. Though his understanding of the Samoan language is limited to knowing when he's being made fun of by friends and family, Urwin has picked up some of the habits. He eats kina, which most palagi avoid, and admits to wearing a lavalava in bed.

"I think I'm a natural Southern Hemisphere person. Every time I go into the Northern Hemisphere I sort of have a feeling of not wanting to spend too much time up there."

"Down here, people still care about one another in a way I think has been lost in large parts of the world."

And that's about as undiplomatic as he gets.