Humping my drum, a memoir

by J.A.Barnes
Published by www.lulu.com as a print-on-demand  paperback 2007
466 pages. $30.00  USD

Also available from amazon.com


After a lifetime of not keeping a diary John Barnes has reconstructed his past from a good memory and those few documents that do record his life and times. His story starts with his childhood in Reading, his schooldays and undergraduate career.  Although six years of war interrupted his academic progress, they gave him experiences in the Fleet Air Arm that may have prepared him for the rigors of his first anthropological fieldwork in Northern Rhodesia.

The life of an academic is seldom smooth and various universities in England and Australia augmented his scholastic duties with ample tests of his diplomatic and political skills.  In pages crowded with the names of colleagues, friends, family and rivals, Barnes brings a social scientist’s eye to bear on the disciplines of anthropology and sociology themselves.


Nota Bene
The phrase is Australian. It refers to the practice of carrying one's belongings from place to place in a four gallon drum with a wire handle. What else could it mean?