People Australia

Fred Archer, 1916

Stater Library of Queensland, 2363149

Archer, Fred Palmer (1890-1977) motor driver, planter and philanthropist

Birth: 17 December 1890 at East Melbourne, Victoria, son of Thomas Palmer (Tom) Archer (1852-1948), a drover and station manager, born at Evandale, Tasmania, and Melbourne-born Laura Maude, née O’Ferrall (1864-1929). Unmarried. Death: 27 April 1977 in Princess Alexandra Hospital at South Brisbane, Queensland. Religion: Anglican [on service record]; cremated with Salvation Amy Forms. 

• Fred’s grandfather, John Kinder Archer (1816-1894), born at Ware Park Mill, Hertfordshire, England, had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1841 with his parents John Archer (1785-1852) and Mary Ann Kinder (1782-1914) and siblings.
• Fed’s father Tom had moved as a boy to Carrick, where his father owned the flour mill; he was educated at Horton College and entered Launceston Grammar School in 1860. In 1868 he took a position with his uncle near Warrnambool, and from 1894 was a drover, a station manager in Queensland, including at Burenda, in the Warrego Valley, and then a stock and station agent at Hughenden. Tom lived in retirement for many years at Hawthorn, Melbourne, before returning to Launceston late in life to live with a married daughter.
• Fred’s mother, known as Laura Palmer-Archer, was a writer of Australian stories and verse. Her brother Ernest O’Ferrall, also a writer and poet, contributed as ‘Kodak’ to the Bulletin.
• Fred grew up on stations run by his father at Mount Pleasant, Victoria, until 1894, then on Barendo, on the Warrego river, in the “Never Never” country in Queensland. Life on these properties was described by his mother in her journalism and her stories, collected in Racing in the Never Never (1898) and A Bush Honeymoon (1904). About 1900 Laura and her children settled in Melbourne, where her sons attended the Working Men’s College, but left school early to supplement the family finances, stretched during the 1890s depression. Fred took a job in an uncle’s accountancy office.
• Hating the city life, he then worked as a bullock driver, farm hand and sawmiller in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland and in about 1915 went into partnership in a successful small trucking business based at Winton, Queensland, with Eric Storm, who became his lifelong friend. Archer described himself as a motor lorry and car driver when he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force on 29 September 1916 at Hughenden.
• He served in the 5th Australian Flying Corps in England, employed as an aircraft mechanic and fitter. After gaining leave in March 1919 for five months experience in the motor industry at Vauxhall Motors Ltd, Luton, Bradford, he returned to Australia and was discharged in Brisbane on 23 December 1919.
• His older brother John Kinder Archer (1888-1949), a motor driver, also served in the AIF during World War I.
• After a few years apple-orcharding on a soldier settlement at Amiens, Queensland, in 1923 Fred went to New Guinea as a field officer with the Commonwealth Expropriation Board, which administered the transfer of former German-owned plantations to Australian soldier settlers. He was overseer or manager of a number of plantations, his favourite being Matty Island (Wuvulu). He was later to campaign successfully for recognition of Wuvulu’s native land-owners’ rights.
• In 1927 Archer purchased Jame (or Yame) Plantation, near Buka Passage, Bougainvaille, from the “Expro” board and ran it until the Japanese occupation of the island on 30 March 1942. He had been for a time a civilian coastwatcher. Rescued by an American submarine, he was taken to the British Solomon Islands, where he became a lieutenant in the British Solomon Islands Labour Corps.
• On 23 July 1945 he was commissioned lieutenant in the Australian Military Forces. Serving with ANGAU [the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit] in the Territory of New Guinea, he was present at the surrender of the Japanese forces at Buka Passage in September 1945. He ceased full time duty on 17 April 1947 and returned to Buka where he re-established his plantation and was prominent in a number of business ventures, including the establishment of shipping services between Rabaul and ports on Bougainville and Buka.
• On visits to Sydney he renewed his friendship with Storm. Archer retired to Rabaul in 1960, transferring his assets in 1961 to F. P. Archer Holdings Pty Ltd, under Storm’s oversight in Sydney. In the mid 1970s the company was converted into the Fred P. Archer Charitable Trust, which was still active in 2025.
• He returned to Queensland and lived with his niece at Tanah Merah, Logan, in the last months of his life. Cause of death: fulminant hepatitis B and liver failure (5 days). His ashes were interred at Wuvulu in a Seventh Day Adventist ceremony.
• Archer has been described as one of the Territory of New Guinea’s “most successful and influential planters”. 

Sources
Mary Archer Roberts, Fred Archer, Man of the Islands (Mudgeraba, Qld 2006); Fred Palmer Archer, papers relating to plantations, State Library of New South Wales, microfilm: PMB 1184; obituaries [see below].