William Bryce Harland QSO 1931-2006.

• Author: Hensley, Gerald
• Position: Director of New Zealand Institute of International Affairs - Biography

Former career diplomat and director of the NZIIA Bryce Harland died in Auckland on 1 February 2006 after a long illness.

An adventurous boy, he managed at the age of fifteen to go off for five months to the World Scouting Jambooree in France shortly after the Second World War. He said afterwards that it introduced him to the world of diplomacy which turned out to be his lifelong vocation, as true as that of any missionary. It was a rare blessing: he knew exactly what he wanted to do in life, did it well and never wanted to do anything else.

He joined what was then the Department of External Affairs in 1953, and the department in one of the wisest investments it ever made sent him for a year to the Fletcher School of Diplomacy in Boston. He was never the temporising, evasive diplomat of the caricatures. He agreed with those who thought that there were only two things to diplomacy: to know what you want and then to make sure that others know it too. Anyone who was vague about either of these would receive a bracing blast from Bryce's intellectual fire-hose.

Three years later, he was posted to Singapore, where he lived in a forgotten bachelor institution of Empire, a chummery. Subsequently, while serving in Thailand, he contracted a bad case of amoebic dysentery which affected his health permanently. Had he been a soldier it would have been recognised as a casualty of active service.

Postings to New York and Washington followed, with an interval in Wellington. He said of the United Nations that he knew of no place where the disparity between the work put in and the meagre results achieved was so great, but nonetheless he liked the challenge of multilateral diplomacy.

Bryce blossomed in Washington where New Zealand enjoyed unrivalled access in the mid-1960s. He described it at the best post-graduate course in international affairs, and his vigorous mind and talent for pattern-making won him a wide network of friends, colleagues and admiring analysts. It made a rich and rather intimidating inheritance for those who followed him--for months after he had left a State Department or other official would ask first for news of him.

He brought the same passion to his posting as the first ambassador to China, when diplomatic relations were opened in 1972. He relished the organisational detail of establishing an embassy, while studying Chinese and trying to make...