Nugget Coombs: a Reforming Life Tim Rowse Frontmatter More Information

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-81783-7 - Nugget Coombs: A Reforming Life Tim Rowse Frontmatter More information

NUGGET COOMBS

A REFORMING LIFE

Born in 1906 and trained as an economist, H. C. Coombs was Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia from 1949 to 1968. How- ever, the breadth of his activities and his commitment to public affairs over seven decades makes his life story a cameo of Australians’ many- sided quest for a better life. Coombs spent his childhood and youth in Western Australia. As Director-General of Post War Reconstruction he advised the Labor governments of the 1940s. In the Menzies years, he added performing arts and tertiary education to his duties in banking. Upon retirement in 1968 he continued to shape arts policy and took up a new reform interest as chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. Particularly interested in Coombs as an economist, Tim Rowse shows that Coombs understood ‘economic rationality’ as the socially integrative mission of private and public sector elites. When his Keynesian conﬁdence faltered in the early 1970s, Coombs reformulated his ideas of economy and governance to meet the challenges of environmental degradation and indigenous renaissance. Ceaselessly testing the adaptability of twentieth-century liberalism, and straddling the gap between public servant and public intellectual, Coombs made his career a ‘reforming life’.

Tim Rowse was born in 1951 and educated at Sydney and Flinders Universities. Best known for his work in Aboriginal history and policy, Rowse has published eight books since 1978. He has taught at Macquarie University, researched and lived in Central Australia for almost ten years, before arriving in Canberra in 1997. He is currently a Research Fellow in the History Program at the Australian National University.

To Jan Mackay, Anna Mackay, Kathleen Rowse and Ian Rowse

NUGGET COOMBS A REFORMING LIFE

Tim Rowse

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011–4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

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This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2002

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication data Rowse, Tim, 1951– . Nugget Coombs: a reforming life. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 521 81783 8. 1. Coombs, H. C. (Herbert Cole), 1906–1997. 2. Economists – Australia – Biography. I. Title. 330.092

ISBN 0 521 81783 8 hardback

Contents

Acknowledgements viii Abbreviations x

Auream Particulam 1

Part 1 Learning and teaching 11 Childhood and youth 12 Schooling 16 Self-possession 19 Busselton 21 Claremont 23 Wheat Belt days 28 Night student 32 Finding the words 35 Representing 37 Murdoch 47

Part 2 Liberalism’s crisis 51 LSE student 52 Politics versus Economics 55 The Money Power and its critics 59 Poor Britain 65

Part 3 The experts we need 71 A vacancy? 72 The economists 75 From people’s bank to central bank 82 Sweden and Australia 87

vi CONTENTS

Part 4 New orders 91 Trusting the people 92 Reconstruction and feminism 99 Fighting for Yes 105 Soldiers and workers 108

Part 5 Internationalist 115 Labor’s new internationalism 116 The diplomacy of security 121 Success in London 125 Global temptations 129 Geneva 132 Havana 137 An ofﬁcial community 140 Coombs the Keynesian 144

Part 6 From Labor to Liberal 153 Chiﬂey’s ‘family’ 154 The commanding heights? 161 The Cold War and CSIRO 166 Vice-Chancellor? 172 Reconstructing Papua New Guinea 178 Governor and father 181 Chiﬂey’s man? 185 Menzies’ man? 187 Corporate Elizabethan 192

Part 7 Other people’s money 199 Inﬂation and war 200 Wage-earners’ democracy 202 Horror budget 206 The Governor muted 209 Stern mentor? 214 Coombs as boss 220 Carrots and sticks 223 Women at the Bank 227 A culture of inﬂation 231 Separation 234 A Melanesian way? 237 Poor man’s overdraft 243 Frustrated internationalist 248

CONTENTS vii

Part 8 Managing creativity 253 Reasonable liberty 254 Visualising Australia 260 Nuclear matters 264 Opera 268 Ballet 273 In search of an audience 277 Re-designing Australia 281

Part 9 Labor’s second chance 287 Retirement 288 Whitlam conscripts Coombs 290 Trade reform 293 Two cultural constituencies 296 Wages and taxes 302

Part 10 Rethink 309 The stuffed owl of Minerva 310 Nature and human nature 318 Economies and communities 324 Losing the master key 329 The responsive public servant 331

Part 11 Elite outrider 339 A Torres Strait agenda 340 Conservation and Aborigines 344 Bapa Dhumbul 346

Conclusion 353 Histories nostalgic and hopeful 354

Notes 363 References 397 Index 408

Acknowledgements

I WROTE THIS BOOK and its predecessor with the help of a number of institutions. For ﬁve years the Australian Research Council made a grant to the University of Sydney for my salary and expenses. My host there was the Depart- ment of Government and Public Administration. During and after my time in that Department I was a Visiting Fellow and then a Fellow of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University. Finally, I ﬁnished my writing while in the History Program, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU. I’m grateful to Martin Painter, Graeme Gill, Jon Altman and Barry Higman for their warm support, as the heads/directors of those three ‘homes’, for my Coombs research. Almost as much a ‘home’, since I spent so much time there, was the Reserve Bank itself. Allan Seymour, Virginia MacDonald and Cheryl Lindwall make it a pleasure to visit the Bank’s archives. I also thank Graeme Powell and staff at the Manuscript Room, National Library of Australia, and the staff of the National Archives, Canberra. Film Australia allowed me to use interview transcripts from their Australian Biography series, produced under Film Australia’s National Interest Program, with interviewees Robin Hughes and Frank Heimans. Dr Coombs supported my research, letting me use his papers, and talking to me at length on several occasions. I had met him before I made my approach – both in an academic setting and over dinner in the Darwin home of our friend Cath Elderton. I was told that he cherished his privacy, so I made it clear when initiating the idea of a biography that what interested me was his public life. I had been well advised. Coombs’ reply to my suggestion that I write his biography expressed reservations.

In the past I have discouraged exercises in that mode whether in written or in oral form – recorded interviews etc, when they have been designed to involve me in the work. I believe anyone working in a job which has ‘public’ responsibilities (whether paid or unpaid) has an obligation to be accountable and therefore to explain the basis on which those responsibilities have been performed. I think that on the whole I

viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

have left a reasonable account of my various stewardships and have been ready to supplement that account where necessary and practicable. I dislike being asked to defend or justify or to answer questions in which ‘judgment’ is involved. Partly because that is the function of others and partly because I am conscious that it is very difﬁcult for a person to be wholly honest in that task. Also such exercises inevitably, whether deliberately or by accident, intrude on ‘personal space’ – attitudes, beliefs, relationships which I have always tried to protect as private. Few people are capable of articulating the content of their own personal space and I doubt whether I am one of them. I have therefore preferred to ‘look outward’.

In a postscript he apologised for sounding ‘pompous’. Coombs’ deposited papers do not include items that reveal what he considered to be his private life. Two of his children (Janet and Jim) thought it appropriate that I know a little of Coombs’ family relationships, but my consent to Coombs’ public/private boundary restrained me from exploring that theme very far. The resulting book is more impersonal than most readers of biographies would wish. Making a virtue of impersonality, I have cast my study of Coombs’ life as an exploration of some themes in Australia’s twentieth-century history. In particular I have been stimulated by Paul Kelly’s framing of twentieth-century Australian history as the persistence and then dissolution of what he calls ‘the Australian Settlement’. The reader will see in my Conclusion that Coombs’ political and intellectual itinerary, as I present it, cannot be fitted to Kelly’s narrative without our becoming aware how Kelly’s influential tale limits our appreciation of the options that have faced and continue to face Australians. Approaching Coombs’ life in this way has determined what I have covered and not covered. There is more of Coombs’ public life than I have told here. For example, his restructuring of the external debts of India in a World Bank con- sultancy in 1972 would make a meaty study for another scholar. And there is more still … a subject difficult to exhaust. Many people have helped me: Eric Alcock, Kim Armitage, Christine Bapty, Geoffrey Bolton, Nick Brown, John Burton, Ann Capling, Lindsay Cleland, Cecily Close, Janet Coombs, Jim Coombs, Melanie Coombs, Sharon Connolly, Selwyn Cornish, Pam Crichton, Michael Crozier, Dick Denton, Margaret Denton, Robin Derricourt, Barrie Dexter, Frank Fenner, Graeme Gill, Elizabeth Green, Phyllis Hatt, Dorothea Heron, Barry Hill, Brian Honner, Ralph Honner, Ian Hunter, Ken Inglis, Evan Jones, Marilyn Lake, Cheryl Lindwall, Virginia MacDonald, Stuart Macintyre, Janet Mackenzie, Phillipa McGuinness, Leslie Melville, Shannon Murphy-Townsend, Ettie Oakman, Rod O’Donnell, Cecily Osborne, John Pepper, M. John Phillips, Graeme Powell, Geoff Raby, Marian Sawer, Bob Scott, Tom Stannage, Allan Seymour, Arthur Tange, Bob and Myrna Tonkinson, Sean Turnell, Paul Watt and Nancy Williams. I thank them all, and I hope they enjoy the book.

Abbreviations

ABC Australian Broadcasting Commission (later Corporation) ACF Australian Conservation Foundation ACFTA Australian Council for the Arts ACTU Australian Council of Trade Unions AIAS Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies ALP Australian Labor Party Angau Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit ANU Australian National University ANZAAS Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science ASOPA Australian School of Pacific Administration CAA Council for Aboriginal Affairs CBOA Commonwealth Bank Officers Association CDEP Community Development Employment Projects CSIR Council for Scientific and Industrial Research CSIRO Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation CUC Canberra University College DLP Democratic Labor Party ECOSOC Economic and Social Council (of the United Nations) FAO Food and Agriculture Organisation F&E Committee Finance and Economic Advisory Committee GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade IMF International Monetary Fund ITO International Trade Organisation LGS liquid assets and government securities LSE London School of Economics NSRB National Security Resources Board NUWM National Unemployed Workers Movement SAC Society for Aboriginal Civilisation UAP United Australia Party UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development VSO Victorian Symphony Orchestra