Interview with Emeritus Professor Geoffrey Sawer

From the ANU Oral History Archive
Interviews conducted 14 May and 4 June 1990
Interviewed by Daniel Connell
Edited and transferred to web media by Nik Fominas and Peter Stewart

Biographical introduction: Professor Sawer was born in Burma in 1910 and his family moved to Australia in 1913 where he attended State Schools and Scotch College. He studied law at Melbourne University and on graduation with his LL.M. in 1934 he was admitted as a barrister and solicitor in Victoria and of the High Court. His academic career began in 1934 when he was a resident tutor in law at Ormond College.

During World War II Professor Sawer was the officer in charge of short-wave broadcasts from Australia to Japan and Japanese occupied territories. In 1946 he returned to Melbourne University as a senior lecturer in law and was then appointed associate professor in 1948.

Professor Sawer has held many positions at the Australian National University. In 1950 he was appointed the first Professor of Law in the Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS). Between 1951 and 1956 he was Dean of RSSS and during 1973 and 1974 he was appointed Acting Director. During the twenty-five years he spent in RSSS he was appointed to various ANU positions, including Chairman of the Board of the Institute of Advanced Studies (1970) and Chairman of the Advisers on Legislation.

In 1975 he accepted the position of Pro Vice-Chancellor and retired from this position at the end of that year.

During his academic career Sawer received a number of national and international honours and appointments in recognition of his position as one of the foremost legal scholars in Australia.

The title of Emeritus Professor was conferred on him on his retirement and he accepted the offer of a Visiting Fellowship in the Faculty of Law at ANU to teach constitutional law.

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Transcript: Recording duration: 5 1/2 hours (6 tapes) Transcriber: Diana Nelson

BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE A

          Identification: This is side 1, tape 1 of the interview with Professor Geoffrey Sawer. I'm Daniel Connell and the date is 14 May 1990. End of identification.

          Professor Sawer, if we could start the interview with just a brief introduction about your family background.

Yes. I was born in Burma. My father was a sergeant in the Royal Irish Rifles, and my mother was the nursemaid to the officer commanding the Royal Irish Rifles which was how the two of them fetched up and married at Maymyo in upper Burma and I was duly born there. And because I was a sickly child they were advised to get me the hell out of Burma.

And at that time Billy Hughes started advertising in the Indian army to get warrant officers to come to Australia and run his newly introduced compulsory scheme of military training. So my dad applied for it and got appointed.

          This is the one that he didn't succeed in getting in 1916, or ...?

Oh no, it had nothing to do with that.

          This was Militia training?

This was Militia training. Militia training; that's right. Oh, that went back to the beginning, the early beginnings of the Labor Government, the Federal Labor Government. From the time, from the Fisher Government they had the desire to do this. So, my father and mother and myself hitched up in Adelaide, as it turned out, and shortly after that - this would have been in early 1914 - the first world war broke out.

My father, at once, enlisted in the AIF; rose to be a major MC and died on active service. And because of the accident, more or less, that he was taken to Melbourne, brought home to Melbourne to be buried. My mum and myself, who had been living in Adelaide, went across to Melbourne and she wanted to stay there where he was buried at Caulfield cemetery.

And she made friends with some sisters who ran a boarding house not far from there and they said to her, they were very upset about this whole history, 'Don't go back to Adelaide, settle down with us and we'll look after you'.

          These were two spinster sisters?

They were two spinster sisters. No, not spinsters, they were both married and one of them was the landlady of this place and the other one lived nearby and they formed a sort of consortium to look after this Sawer family. And the upshot of that was that we settled down in Melbourne. Mother got a home. She died about six years after that so I was now left an orphan.

          You would have been, what? In your teens?

I was fourteen when my mother died.

          You were an only child?

No, there's a complicated bit of the history here that I wasn't sure that I'd go back on. My father made two trips back to Australia as the outcome of this gassing at Ypres. The first trip he came back, begat a second child, immediately went back again and didn't get as far as the front before he had a further relapse and died.

So when my mother settled down with this family in Melbourne there were two of us, seven years apart in age. He ultimately, to get him out of the picture, went on to serve in the second world war, became a captain and finished up as one of the big-shots in BHP; their chief public relations bloke. He's now living in retirement in Melbourne.

I, then, guided by a lady whom I came to call Aunty Rose, who was no relation whatever, Rose Bowman .... She saw to it that when the opportunity arose through my doing well at school I got a war scholarship to Scotch College. Off I went to Scotch College and was there for four years. Then I was equal dux of Scotch College with three exhibitions and five first-classes and all this sort of jazz which earned a McCaughey bequest war scholarship, again open only to war orphans, to Melbourne University.

          Just before we leave Scotch College: I've had people mention the history master at Scotch College˙...

Yes. Clayton, 'Cock-eye' Clayton, or 'Forty-five' Clayton; his head was always on a slight angle like this because of some defect in his neck, a very, very nice man indeed and a very interesting historian. He did a great deal in waking up my mind.

          There's quite a long list of people like Stretton, Hugh Stretton, Jim ˙...

Yes. That's right, who have been influenced by Forty-five Clayton, that's right. Yes, when I got the Order of Australia a couple of years ago I had a letter from Forty-five congratulating me, so he evidently, at that time at any rate, was still alive. Yes.

The years at Scotch College were peculiar in a way because I didn't really get into the life of the school. I wasn't a sport. I didn't even take a very considerable part in student clubs and things of that sort. I was just a 'swot'; worked like hell and enjoyed working and as a result, of course, got this highly generous scholarship to the university.

So, I went to the university and enrolled for a mixed arts and law course but after I'd done one year of that I was summoned to a meeting of the trustees of the McCaughey bequest and told that they'd had legal advice that because the terms of the will, Sir Samuel McCaughey's will setting up this trust, they could only provide technical education for war orphans. And while a law course would qualify as a technical education, an arts course would not.

So, was I going to drop the arts course or would I carry on without their assistance? Sir John Monash was the chairman of the committee on this occasion. It was not long before he died; old boy squatting like this and speaking very kindly and the rest but I had no difficulty whatever in making up my mind on that. I said, 'Sure, I'll plunge straight into the law course'; so I did. So, once again, working like anything, but at the same time taking a certain amount of time off for the sort of activities which I hadn't much engaged in at school, local society activities.

For example, Alan Nicholls, who became a leading journalist in Melbourne, and myself edited the first two numbers of a wild, woolly magazine called Proletariat which took a very communist line on the general matters of politics and all the rest of it. I, myself, never joined the Communist Party.

          This is, no, this is after the ...

Oh yes, the Communist Party was well and truly there; and three of my colleagues in these activities were members of the Communist Party: Charlie Silver who stayed a Communist all his life, he became a school teacher, Alwyn Lee who departed from communism and, indeed, became a Catholic and settled in America and for many years he was the chief book reviewer of Time-Life, and Alan Nicholls and myself were the non-communist characters in this Labor Club which was a united front sort of thing.

And I also had a friendship with Cyril Altson Pearl who also became a leading journalist: editor of the Sydney Sunday Telegraph; worked for the Packer press for many years; and wrote some excellent books including a real beauty called Wild Men of Sydney all about the Norton family, the history of the Truth newspaper and some of its disgraceful political activities of one sort and another.

So that my years at the university really were fairly colourful in this sense; that I had these friendships with these ...

          What were the dates that you were at university?

Let's see, now.

          You started practising in '32?

No, no, I didn't. No, I started practising a bit later than that. I was admitted to practice in May 1934 so that I'd completed my course in the early years of 1934, and it went back, because of a period of illness when I had a pleural diffusion and spent three months in hospital, that went back five years. Five from thirty-three, that'd be twenty-seven. Yes, 1927 I think it was.

          So you were at university during the depression.

Yes, indeed, I was, that's right.

          Well, just coming at this question that's going to be quite an important part of the interview, the business of, you know, knowledge being harnessed to society's needs or knowledge being free, applied versus pure research, et cetera: do you feel that this period was giving you attitudes that you retained or you moved away from?

Yes, yes, it certainly did. In the first place I completely abandoned the fairly intense religious beliefs which I had had, largely I think as a result of my mother's death, for a period of two or three years thereafter. Going to the university which was a totally, so to speak, non-religious atmosphere, and forming these friendships with people, mostly a year or two older than me, who had much more definite non-religious or anti-religious views, I found myself fairly suddenly becoming a rationalist, and a sceptic in matters of that description.

And associated with that a somewhat radical, left-wingish, kind of political outlook. For various reasons of not accepting the specific teaching of Marx and Lenin and not accepting their general views on social structure, I was never in the slightest degree tempted to be a communist. I just didn't agree with some of their major theoretical propositions, but at the same time I did feel that society could be and needed to be reformed in various ways. I was sympathetic towards the Labor Party and its, and generally speaking, social democratic views on these matters.

          At a later stage, Oliphant and Hancock - I've got a vague memory of them having very serious discussions about whether or not communists, quite apart from their political reliability, were actually good researchers because of this business of being directed, in a sense, you know, the party line hovering in the background.

Yes, indeed. I don't remember ever discussing this either with Hancock or with Oliphant but it certainly was one of my objections to the communists when I was a student, and a close colleague of a number of these very highly committed communists, that their situation did deprive them of any autonomous capacity for making important decisions, either personally or for the life of the community.

And, of course, that was demonstrated in the most vivid fashion with the extraordinary tergiversations of communist policy in the run up to the second world war when one minute everybody had to be working against participating in the war, then the next minute, all of a sudden, Russia becomes the thing that has to be defended and 'We've all got to enlist at once'.

It really was a striking illustration of this necessary consequence of a highly centred, not merely nationally but internationally, movement especially, of course, after Stalin took over. That wasn't my thing at all. It seemed to me that people in various countries ought to exercise a good deal, so to speak, local autonomy.

So I was in favour, for example, of Australia gradually moving away from its reliance on and to some extent its being influenced by Britain although in many ways I had, because of my mother and father, I had a friendly feeling towards the British and always had very good relations with various British scholars and, indeed, had some distant relatives in Britain.

But when I joined the Round Table group and became the chief draughtsman of their periodical articles for the magazine called The Round Table which had a considerable circulation all round the Empire - it was some years before and after the second world war - I always, in that group and in the articles that I draughted, accepted or encouraged the gradual movement towards Australian autonomy in all sorts of ways, with the use of the Statute of Westminster and things of that description.

          A person coming of intellectual age in a sense, before the second world war, what was your feeling towards, perhaps - you're talking about it already but elaborating on it a bit more - the intellectual dominance, hegemony, heritage, whatever you want to use, of Britain over Australian intellectual life?

Well, of course, I was never conscious of that as constituting, in the slightest degree, a hegemony. Because the sort of influence which I valued and which I felt had put us on a satisfactory path in Australia was entirely confined to the law of the country, which I began to understand and know about in great detail, and in the general shape of Australia's political organisation.

That is to say, having the Westminster system as it's called politically, rather than the American system, but once again with all sorts of local variations and modifications as time has gone on. And in that matter I was considerably influenced by an early friendship with Bert Evatt. Bert, when he was a judge on the High Court came periodically to Melbourne and he had become acquainted with Guido Baracchi who was a very influential, at the time, ex-communist.

He'd had a row with them over various policy questions. Well-off man who had a nice home in Kew on the river and he was the son of the first Victorian government meteorologist who had made an enormous fortune by speculating in suburban land and left it to his only son, Guido, who immediately rushed off to Russia to take part in the formation of the Communist Party and be an active communist for the first few years of that organisation. But then he fell out with them because he thought that they ought to adopt very different tactics in a country like Australia.

Any rate, how Bert came to meet Guido I don't know but it was Guido who introduced me to Bert. And after that, for the rest of the time that Evatt remained on the bench, every time he came to Melbourne he invited me around to have a sandwich with him and a yarn about current cases and things like this. It was a most valuable friendship for me.

          You were a practising lawyer and he's a high court judge?

No, I wasn't. This started while I was still a law student. Evatt was appointed to the bench, I think, in 1931 - the High Court bench, I think it was '31 - and I was still at the university then and for the following year and the greater part of the year after that.

And Evatt and his wife introduced me to modern art and things of that sort, as well as to radical notions as to how the politics and the law of the country ought to go. But they were moderate radical politics. Evatt, himself, was by no means a wild political lefty. Indeed, he'd had his own rows with the New South Wales Labor Party precisely over issues of this sort.

          The Independent candidate for Balmain.

Yes, that's right, indeed. But that certainly did influence me in obtaining and retaining, for the whole of my subsequent life, a mixture of radicalism with Australian nationalism, but pursued in a way which acknowledged that we had to start from something.

We'd started with the British, that was the general set of ideas with which we were acquainted, and to which we would tend to return particularly, of course, in such things as literature, because the English tradition in this is so long and such a good one, and such a varied one; whereas in legal matters and in political matters and so forth my opinion was we should look around and borrow ideas from other systems or even generate our own ideas.

          Now, at some stage, was it about 1937 you joined the faculty at Melbourne University?

No. Well, what happened was this: after I'd been admitted to practice in May 1934 I went into residence as tutor at Ormond College and that provided me with a guaranteed modest income and my bread and butter, my lodging, so that I was able to take the risk of going to the bar. So I was then at the bar from 193.... I spent a short period with a solicitor's firm finding out more about litigation and things like that and then went to the bar. It would have been in early 1936, and was practising at the bar until the end of 1939.

And during the whole of that period was a resident tutor at Ormond College taking the boys in classes for three nights a week for all the subjects in the course. And the combination, of course, of the bar career and this tutoring and so forth kept me extremely busy.

But nevertheless I found time to join the Rationalists Society and the Y Club, which was a collection of rather radical-minded characters like Al Foster, that met once a month to discuss current issues. I was on the wharf to greet Egon Kisch when he jumped ashore and broke his leg.

          This is before the language test?

That's right. And discussed that case with Bert the next time that I ran into him. The deft way in which Bert managed to steer a path for Egon to stay in the country as long as he wanted to and the young characters at the meetings crying out, 'Kisch me Menzies, Kisch me Menzies'.

Yes, so that while working quite hard and doing reasonably well at the bar and doing this tutoring I did manage to mix it in with a certain amount of political and aesthetic activities; catching up with the great Herald impressionist exhibition to which the Evatts took me and pointed out the things that I was to admire and the things that I was not to admire; because Mary Alice Evatt was, herself, quite a competent artist and knew a great deal about this.

Yes, and it was against the background of all that, that all of a sudden just as I was on the point of deciding to get married to a girl with whom I was very fond, just before the outbreak of the second world war, the university suddenly invited me, quite out of the blue - there was no preliminary approach or anything of this sort - invited me to become a senior lecturer in the faculty of law; a full-time teaching job.

Now, this, when I say it was out of the blue, from the university's point of view it wasn't a sudden or irrational decision because right through those years I'd maintained a contact with the faculty to the extent of doing examination jobs for them at the annual exams; occasionally taking the lectures in constitutional law when, for one reason or another, Professor Bailey was going to be away for a week or two, and doing those lectures for a whole year, one of those years, when he was away on study leave.

So, you see, they'd had the opportunity of, so to speak, testing me as a teacher and somebody who got on well with the students and so forth. And from their point of view it was a fairly rational thing to invite me, but it just never occurred to me that .... No such position had ever before existed in any Australian university.

Up to that time the only full-time teachers in Australian universities had been professors; there was nobody below that rank. The rest of the teaching at all of the universities was done by part-time teachers taken from the local bar. So this was a revolutionary step to introduce into the teaching hierarchy a full-time teacher below the rank of professor, namely Senior Fellow.

          Well, given the political influences you've been talking about and your involvement with the universities during this time, and just thinking about the idea of Australia assuming a more independent role, what place did you think that the universities - I'm looking forward twenty years to the ANU at this stage - what place did you think the universities should play in that general national development?

Well, most particularly we had to build up a national scholarship in the various things that were directly relevant to our social structure and our ultimate, inevitable assumption of complete autonomy, becoming an independent nation which one could see must be the ultimate result of all this and ...

          There were plenty of people around who didn't see that.

Oh, I know. I was going to go on to say, and this certainly involved bringing about a whole lot of changes in, not so much the views of individual men but the type of men who were appointed to jobs. The situation up to that time had been that practically all of the senior professorships in Australian universities were occupied by original British people, such as my dear old Master of Ormond College, DK Picken. He'd thrown himself, absorbed himself particularly into the Christian life of the community. He was a passionately devoted Presbyterian Christian and besides running Ormond College quite well, he engaged in the politics of the church. And the influence that he brought to bear, of course, was a purely, so to speak, Scottish university-bred outlook on things.

These were amongst the things that we had to change. For some years after that it was still usual to look for vice-chancellors in England. I think that all of the vice-chancellors at the ANU had been˙.... Yes, that's right, they had been ....

          At Melbourne, do you mean?

No. At Melbourne, certainly, that went on longer but I was thinking of the ANU. I think that ....

          This is the '30s?

Yes.

          Are you thinking of the college?

No, no, I'm thinking of the ANU itself. You see our first operative vice-chancellor, Copland, was an Australian, but I think that the next two or three came from England.

          Melville didn't.

Yes, that's right. I'm thinking of Huxley, he was an Englishman and then the next one was a New Zealander. Low was an Englishman. Low was an Englishman, yes. Oh, the English share in these things inevitably continued to be fairly considerable, but it did seem to me that in some respects we had to change habits of this sort.

And certainly to see to it that, where perhaps for some technological reason that couldn't be avoided had to fill a vacancy from England as when we had Titterton as one of the chief physicists, we would hope that the general atmosphere of the place would influence them to become Australian, as indeed, of course, it happened to me, because after all I was a British Indian to begin with.

          Right. Just resuming after morning tea. You were talking before about the need to, in a sense, change the personnel who staffed the senior levels of universities in Australia. Looking to other aspects of their potential role in a nation becoming more independent, you did make reference earlier to building up a body of research relevant to Australian problems.

Yes. Quite. This was particularly apparent in relation to the law of Australia concerning government activities of one kind and another; constitutional law, administrative law and topics of that sort. The study of the Australian constitution had necessarily started when it was first established in 1901, and there had already, by the time I was becoming a student and a teacher, been a couple of books dealing with it but they had been written in, so to speak, the first flush of enthusiasm about the new system and necessarily without very much in the way of practical experience and judicial interpretation.

But by the time that I had become, first of all a tutor at Ormond College, and then after 1939, Senior Fellow in the Melbourne University law school, there was both a new generation of young scholars like myself and a very considerable body of judicial decisions and governmental activities and so forth which had taken the country on a decidedly new kind of path. The reason being that before the Engineers' case, in which Bob Menzies made his name as a very effective counsel and expert on constitutional law, before the Engineers' case the bent of the Australian system was towards state rights.

END TAPE 1, SIDE A

 

BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE B

          Identification: side 2, tape 1, Professor Sawer.

Then the decision of the High Court in the Engineers' case set the general trend of Australian constitutional law and, to some extent, influenced governmental practice as well in the direction of an increasing degree of power and authority in the Federal government and a decline in the relevant importance of the states.

And I happened to get pitchforked into this scene by a series of personal accidents, more or less, just at the time when we were beginning to digest all this. And of course my friendship with Bert Evatt was particularly important in these matters because he and McTiernan had been appointed to the High Court by the Labor Party, amongst other things, in the hope and expectation that they would do their best to influence by the course of their decisions.

          Could I ask, what were these series of personal events that got you involved in that particular circumstance?

Well, simply the fact that I'd been born at and been educated at a time that pitchforked me into all of these associations and these things having occurred just when this was becoming important; when there was opening in effect a career for experts in the constitutional system, the Australian consitutional system, particularly its federal aspects.

And a series of decisions of the High Court of Australia and to a lesser degree of the judicial committee of the Privy Council in London, which was opening up new vistas of the sort of powers which the Federal parliament might turn out to have. And in the administrative law was starting to develop a series of remedies available for the protection of individuals against governmental action.

So that the two put together, one more directed towards how politicians worked and in what parliaments they worked, and the other more directed towards the protection of the individual against the admittedly growing bureaucratisation of governmental processes and the degree to which the activities of officials trenched on private rights of one sort or another.

This really did, you see, open up a prospect of areas of teaching, areas of research, and even areas of participation as counsel advising governments and so forth of a kind which hadn't existed in such a degree previously.

          You mentioned that you became a Fellow in the law school at Melbourne ....

Yes, Senior Fellow.

          Senior Fellow, that must have been a new position, too, was it?

Yes, that was. As I said before, this was the first time that there had been a full-time teacher in any Australian university teaching law, because up to that ...

          As a Fellow your responsibilities were in teaching, just the same as lecturing - as a lecturer?

Yes. That's right. Sure. Indeed, it wasn't a senior fellowship, it was a senior lectureship; that was the title of it - Senior Lectureship.

          Oh, sorry.

Senior Lectureship, yes. Nowadays, of course, there are so many lecturers and senior lecturers in all sorts of faculties it's difficult to realise that if you go back to the immediate prewar period, 1939 or thereabouts, I was probably, I think, the only senior lecturer in any subject in an Australian university.

          How much research was going on in your areas? You mentioned a couple of books on the constitution. How much research was going on in Australian universities within, well for example, talking about the law most particularly?

Not a very great deal because of the fact that up till that time there had been in most of the universities one professor, in Melbourne and Sydney, alone, two professors, and they had responsibility for a fairly considerable part of the legal curriculum, particularly in the sort of things that the practising barrister was not apt to be interested in: jurisprudence, and general constitutional law, administrative law.

And the consequence of that, of course, was that they were so busy teaching and had such heavy responsibilities for the university as a whole, the law professor tended to be looked to to handle the business of the regulations of the university and the various tribunals which it needed to run for student discipline and things of this sort.

So that until there were more full-time members of law faculties, it was simply not possible that you would get a very great degree of research of the kind that lawyers nowadays carry on as a matter of course. And, of course, the man practising at the bar didn't have time to do such things either; they were too busy practising at the bar tending to very specific individual cases to get a broad view of the development of the subject as a whole.

          So do you think it's fair to say, in that prewar environment, that given the state of universities, and I think the same situation existed in economics and various other faculties as well in terms of the balance between teaching and research, that to actually develop a research function within Australia the logical thing might well have seemed, not as has happened with all of the universities essentially developing their own PhD programs, et cetera, but to actually have this centralised single place. That was a fairly logical planning step.

That's right.

          The ANU-to-be in other words.

That's right, yes indeed. Yes, the ANU certainly did introduce the general notion of research as a principal activity where before, certainly in the social sciences and to a lesser degree but still to some degree in the natural sciences, the principal job of the university professor, or whatever his rank was, was teaching.

And to a considerable extent, of course, but to a decreasing extent as the years went by, the basis of the teaching was apt to be British textbooks of one kind and another. So that, for example, my first introduction to the general notions of parliamentary government was through Dicey's famous book on the British constitution. And it hadn't occurred to anybody up to that stage, at any rate ...

          [Inaudible] constitution ...

That's right. It hadn't occurred to anybody up to that date to produce any independent study of how parliaments worked in Australia. The historians had done a certain amount of description of these things and, indeed, they'd done it since the nineteenth century. There'd been quite good books written about how the New South Wales parliament worked and so forth. But they were almost completely devoid of any general theoretical background; it was descriptive history.

          So this was the sort of atmosphere that would have animated people like Eggleston and Coombs.

That's right, indeed it was, because both of them, of course, had had an English experience as well as an Australian experience, and they knew what it was like to sit down and think about a problem in fairly abstract terms.

          When did you first come into contact with, for example, Eggleston was a Victorian, wasn't he? A Victorian lawyer.

Oh yes, I came into contact with him through one of the most curious sort of contacts that I did have through those years; and it lasted all through those years. And that was, as I mentioned before, being the principal initial draughtsman of the reports produced by the Round Table groups in Australia for publication in the British published journal called The Round Table, which had started off as a 'knitting the Empire together' enterprise.

But as time went on and it became apparent that the knitting process was not going to go on indefinitely and that, on the contrary, especially after 1931 the great dominions were going to go their own ways. After that it became, in a sense, a little more than a journal with quarterly reports on what was happening in the principal countries of the former empire in the hope that, at any rate, that they would maintain some interest in each other's welfare and would have on the whole friendly relations one with another.

This was the atmosphere when I was, rather to my own surprise, put forward by the Master of Ormond who was a member of the group as a member and then invited to start writing these quarterly reports. And I went on doing that then from the time that I went into residence at Ormond in 1936 until I went to Canberra in 1949; wrote these quarterly reports.

There's been a history of the time published in which you can see from the sort of people who were members of the Round Table group in Melbourne, were a cross-section of all of the principal business and political leaders with a fair amount of input of somewhat radical, or at any rate middle of the road, people: barristers, even a few businessmen whom you could classify like that, like Mr Dyason for example, Mr EC Dyason, and people from the universities such as myself.

          Were you still a lefty in the way that you'd been when you'd been editing The Proletariat?

Yes, yes, indeed I was and there used to be furious rows at times at the Round Table meetings, and I was perfectly conscious of the fact that these bright articles of mine in which I went crook at Tories and praised Laborites and so forth had to be broken down a bit; and they were broken down a bit but nevertheless the conclusion which the historian of these particular things, Leonie Foster, comes to is that it was a fairly middle of the road point of view as between Labor Party voting people like myself and 'Nats' and Liberals and such like, and that in this cross-fire ...

          It was more than just a legal journal, wasn't it?

Oh, it wasn't a legal journal at all. It was primarily concerned with politics and economics. And I was very much indebted, for example, to Dick Downing for help with the economics side of these things. We formed a close friendship because of our membership of the Round Table group. And Wilfred Prest, another Melbourne University economics professor.

So that the Round Table really did keep open for me, in a situation where I was plunged pretty much into technical law: its research and thinking about it and so forth, this kept me in touch with the broader issues that Australia was facing all through those years, running through the war and then in the immediate post-war situation.

          Was Eggleston involved in that?

Yes, yes. Eggleston was one of the members, yes, yes.

          Your memories of Eggleston, it would be interesting if you have any particular memories to ...

Oh. His style and his manner of speaking was unimpressive; he wasn't a gifted speaker by any means but he was so transparently honest and so transparently anxious to do the best thing, you know, for whatever it was that we were considering and he had such a wealth of experience. He'd known so many of the principal leaders, more probably in Victorian state politics than in federal politics but nevertheless a good many of both, so that his views on what sort of a character 'X' was and so forth was highly valued by myself and the Round Tablers. Yes, I liked him. He was not an inspiring man, you know; he was a rather doughy sort of a bloke, slow speaking and what not.

          He comes through as a very major figure on the University Council in the early '50s, later '40s in setting up the ANU.

Oh yes, he certainly had quite an influence in that; not as great though as the men who had a really incisive sort of mind, sharp minds, and capacity for explaining themselves; of whom, of course, I at once think of my friend Roy Wright, 'Panzee' Wright, P-A-N-Z-E-E, that is, it's short for Chimpanzee because of his physical appearance. And he was, in many ways I think, the most effective of that group of very bright people who were associated with building up the notion of a national university and getting it going.

          When did you first hear, I mean, that concept you've just mentioned in that phrase, when did that phrase first come your way, in the '30s?

No, no. I'd never heard it suggested, hadn't the remotest conception that such a thing would ever be brought about until about 1947, and it may just have been an accident of the particular sort of jobs that I had through the war that I wasn't in touch with the people who might have been thinking about it at that time.

You see, as it turned out I became first, second-in-command and then the boss of Radio Australia, engaging in shortwave broadcasts in Japanese and Chinese and so forth as part of the general war effort. And through those years, through those war years when I was doing that, I was also still on the staff of the university to the extent that I turned up twice a week in the early morning and in the late afternoon to give lectures on constitutional law; so that I maintained that part-time job for that purpose through those war years and otherwise was running this broadcasting job which often kept me up all night if there was some crisis on like the Battle of the Coral Sea, for example.

But probably therefore it was because of the fact that I was so embedded in those two wartime jobs that I just wasn't mixing with the sort of people - I don't believe, for example, that I saw Panzee Wright at any time through those years, although I'd known him earlier.

          Had there been, just before we leave that early period, had there been general talk about the need for more Australian research, leaving aside the ANU, had there been that sort of talk?

I believe that there was but once again how matters stood in subjects like physics and chemistry and engineering and so forth was completely outside of my range of contacts and interests at the time. I was buried in the law and to a small extent in political science as related to law, was connected with law. And I just wasn't mixing in with the people or with the issues where that had a particular sort of ambience and required a particular sort of outlook.

Because in what I was doing, which was largely Australian consitutional and administrative law, they were the key subjects that I was handling, the need for Australian work in this was self-evident. The field in which you found it was self-evident. And it was just a matter of getting to work and getting it on in print and circulated.

          Was it a void that people were conscious of? Or is it one that, although it was there, that only some people were aware this is a crying national need?

I think that the truth is that the law is so much associated, however high-falutin' its ultimate and higher theory is, it's so much associated with the practice of the law, with what goes on in courts and to some extent with what goes on in the making of the law in parliaments and by the bureaucracy in the form of regulations, that it's inevitably a much more applied body of knowledge than either physics or chemistry or mathematics or anything like that, particularly mathematics, needs to be.

The physicist really has a choice between dealing with events completely outside of the earth's structure altogether and having nothing to do with and no impact on what we do in daily life. Or, if he wants to come to the other extreme, of course, he can deal with the extremely small things where we could conceivably well have some impact on real life.

But the lawyer, unless he's going to really engage in some rather airy-fairy area of philosophy dealing with ethics and things like that; if he's dealing with what is unmistakably law then his nose is pushed to the grindstone of the activities of the various ranges of courts and how they're coordinated one with another, how you find out the ratio decidendi of a case, whether or not the snail case went too far or the underpants case qualified it in such and such a way and so forth. The nitty-gritty of the law inevitably enters into the study of it.

And if you're doing this with both a practising interest as I was when I was at the bar and a teaching interest with my classes at Ormond College, then you've really not got much choice; the foreground pushes itself into your attention.

          This is an outsider ignorant point of view: from one point of view in the interaction between, say, senior QCs analysing the history of a particular area and putting their arguments up and high court judges doing the same thing and handing their decisions down, in a sense from one point of view you can say, well, that's the research that you're talking about, that's the development of consititutional law, why do you need, in a sense, academic lawyers doing research separate from that?

Yes, quite. Well, I think that the academic lawyer has two advantages over the practitioners: the judge and the barrister who's actually appearing in the case. The first is that the judge's attention is continually being distracted from anything like a general interest in such and such a question because another case has come along which arises in a wholly different setting.

And the same of course applies to the barristers. They, too, are from day to day being so constantly tossed from one particular highly individual case to another highly particular individual case and it requires somebody in the position of the academic to sit back and afterwards read what the barrister has said in argument and what the court has decided and put that together with something which they might have done eighteen months before, or even ten years before and as a result get out of it the more general propositions which lie behind the particular decisions that they come to. And that, I think, is an important place for the legal academic.

It's not the only one because at the time of which I'm speaking there was barely beginning to be seen on the horizon, and that chiefly in America in the USA, than amongst ourselves, theorising about the nature of law in its application; trying to get behind, so to speak, the motivation of judges and even perhaps of barristers, or the influence on their decisions of various, more or less, accidental circumstances, the personality of judges. All of this stuff was beginning to be studied in the USA and it really came to us in the early immediate post-war period, 1946 onwards, as something of a shock.

For the first time to become aware of the famous Professor Llewellyn in the USA who had built up a whole theory of the operation of law in these respects.

          You've been stressing the close relationship of law to its practice but in looking at the history of the ANU it's interesting to note, from what I can see, that law was one of the subjects mentioned right from the beginning as one of the subjects that should be included in what was handled by the new ANU. Now, why was law in there with what you might call more obvious research topics?

Well, actually my own impression at the time is rather different from that which you've evidently had, and I suspect that probably your impression has been derived from the fact that there were a couple of lawyers, particularly Sir Frederick Eggleston, especially him, who kept injecting the necessity for something to be done about law in an atmosphere which was, on the whole, unfriendly to such suggestions; an atmosphere which was predominantly and inevitably technological and so far as dealing with ultimate verities and so forth, it was the ultimate verities of physics, not of either religion or of sociology or of law.

And I think that the course of events bears me out in this, that the ultimate decision to have a lawyer was made rather in these terms: well, it probably will be helpful to have a lawyer, there are a number of things that he can usefully do in a university as we all know from our experience of universities - drafting the university regulations and taking care of the dispute situations that arise in universities and so forth.

          Internal disputes?

That's right, internal disputes, yes. And there's no reason, of course, why you shouldn't carry on writing books about the law and so forth as we know from our English experience; quite a number of the law dons at All Souls College do. And that somebody would say, well, perhaps then we could have a lawyer but at a relatively junior grade, you know, there's no need to waste an entire chair on a lawyer. And they looked around rather in this spirit and that they finally lit on me, I think, after having made cautious enquiries from a couple of other possibilities ....

I must say I had taken it for granted, being engaged in a minor way in the conferences that preceded the setting up of the ANU ....

          Were you at the '48 conference?

Yes, yes I was.

          Oh, I'll come to that in a bit more detail later.

I'd come to the conclusion that in all probability they would have to and that they would indeed look around amongst the then senior professors in the Australian scene. I could see at least three who in my opinion would be excellent appointments and I would certainly expect t at one of them would be the appointee, namely Stone in Sydney who already had a brilliant record but also was known as a bit of a trouble-maker, George Paton in Melbourne who also had a brilliant record and was known to be an extremely pleasant, well-mannered, completely different from Julius Stone, not at all quarrelsome, and Beasley in Perth who, of those three, was the one who'd taken the most specific interest in constitutional law.

So I expected to see one of those three blokes appointed as professor and I was absolutely astonished when the invitation came to me. Would you like me to go ahead and tell you when and how that occurred?

          Yes, please.

I had got myself appointed, thanks to my friendship with Bert Evatt, as the most junior of the counsel in that great coruscation of counsel who went to London to argue the bank nationalisation appeal to the Privy Council in 1949, and we were put up at a hotel, a newly built hotel near Hyde Park.

And after I'd been working and beavering away on this case for two or three months Copland turned up in London and he was going to ...

          This is after you went to the United States, is it?

Oh, no, that was later on again. That was later on again. Oh, no, I hadn't been to the USA up to that point. He was wandering around interviewing various people. He had his celebrated row with Hancock on a bench in Hyde Park in which in effect Hancock delivered an ultimatum that he would come if they would accept his view that there should not be two social science schools, that they should be merged together. You've come across that argument, have you? Yes.

And Copland then, of course, proceeded to indicate to Hancock that that was the end of the negotiations and Hancock retired in dudgeon. Well, blow me down if Copland didn't then proceed to get in touch with me. And I went and sat, probably on the same bench in Hyde Park with Copland.

          Is this the first time you've met Copland?

Yes, this was the first time I'd met him. I knew of him, of course. I knew of his reputation and everything that I'd heard about him suggested to me that he was a very pleasant and able sort of bloke and certainly one of the foremost economists in Australia.

          Did you have mutual friends? Mutual contacts?

Yes, you see, through the Round Table group, Eggleston and quite a number of the people with whom Copland had had contacts of one sort and another, like Dick Downing. He was another member of the Round Table group, and, of course, he had been one of Copland's juniors in Melbourne. And a couple of the diplomats who'd been with Copland in his Chinese job, I think it was, that he had as Australian Minister to China. Yes, and Pat Shaw who was an External Affairs official. He too knew Copland quite well, and was a close friend of mine. Yes, so that my name would certainly have been known to them through my publications, to some extent through my Round Table membership and the mutual friends there, the members of the Round Table group who were also friends of Copland. And so he invited me to sit down and talk to him on this park bench.

END TAPE 1, SIDE B

 

BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A

          Identification: This is tape 2, side 1 of the interview with Professor Sawer. End of identification.

Copland then asked me whether I would be prepared to consider coming to the Australian National University in Canberra.

          What had he said to you? I mean, when he rang up, before you actually got to the park bench, how had the meeting actually happened?

He'd left a message for me at the hotel at which I was staying. He was at that very posh hotel that's immediately˙- butts on the park there, The Shaftesbury? I forget the name of the big hotel. I was in a more modest hotel in Park Street which was a narrow lane, and just at the back of Park Avenue. And he'd left a message for me to give him a ring. I gave him a ring and he said over the telephone, 'I'd like to discuss the question of an academic appointment with you'; he didn't say which on the telephone. 'Perhaps we could meet at the entrance to the hotel, such and such a time, such and such a day', at the weekend, because he knew I was engaged with the Privy Council through the week. And so I said, 'Yes', and not expecting anything in particular at that stage.

          But the only university he was involved with was the ANU, wasn't it?

Well, I didn't even know that much about exactly what it was he was doing in England, you see. For all I knew, he might have been engaged in some completely different enterprise. I'd certainly heard the arguments about the general structure of the university, and had been to two meetings in Canberra on that subject. But I didn't, frankly, at that time realise that Copland had been in effect appointed as the sort of expected Vice-Chancellor. For all I knew, he might have been engaged in business with the University of Melbourne where I think he was a professor at the time.

Any rate, I met him at the park bench and he came out straight away with this and he said that they were beginning to issue invitations to various people to come to Canberra and help form the Australian National University; would I be interested at all? Well, I said, yes, certainly I would be. I had already been to a couple of meetings concerned with this at which, in amongst other things, the place of law in such an institution had been discussed. So I said, 'Yes, certainly, of course I'd be interested in it. It would depend entirely on the kind of position that was offered'.

I was by then an associate professor at the Melbourne University. I think, again, the first associate professor in any Australian university. So that I wasn't inclined to take on this fairly daunting prospect of going to Canberra in a place, which was far as I know, had very little academic background or any history or experience; and building up an institution like this really from scratch.

          You weren't worried at all on the more personal level of .... I mean, the urban delights of Melbourne or Sydney weren't available in Canberra at that time.

That's right, yes. Perhaps not so much because the simple fact is that having through the war years worked so hard at this combination of the Radio Australia job and the limited amount of lecturing that I'd done at the University of Melbourne, I hadn't lived a life of engaging in the flesh spots at all. I'd hardly ever been to a theatre during that time, or even a picture show. I really did work extremely hard through those war years and was only just really beginning to develop a somewhat wider life by the time this thing came along; so that that sort of prospect didn't worry me or Mamie [Beatrice Mabel], my wife.

We were inclined to think that there'd be something to be said for living in this bush capital rather than in Kew, Melbourne, from the point of view of the children; however, the enquiries I made about that were somewhat later. What he then said was, 'Well, we're prepared to offer you a senior position; we haven't quite completely determined the nature of that position and we'd like to know whether you would be prepared to have your name considered'. So I said, 'Yes, but I think I would insist on having a chair because as I am at Melbourne at present as an associate professor, the chances are that I will have a chair there within the predictable future; the way in which things are going. And having regard to the very considerable break with the past that going to Canberra would constitute, I don't think I'd undertake it unless it was for a chair.' 'Yes', he said, 'That's perfectly reasonable'.

And I then carried on working for Bert on the bank nationalisation case and returned from England later in 1949 and there found a letter waiting for me from the Vice-Chancellor definitely offering me the chair in law.

          Well, before we follow the logical progression from that I'd like to double back a bit and .... Well, as much as you can tell me about, particularly that 1948 conference, but you mentioned two meetings that you'd been to in Canberra. Was that the first one or the second?

I can't remember now. My memory doesn't enable me to differentiate between those two meetings.

          They were about the same time, were they?

Yes. There was not much time separation between them.

          What were the circumstances that caused you to be invited to Canberra to take part?

I should think probably, mainly my close friendship with George Paton, the Dean of the Faculty of Law in Melbourne. You see, after Ken Bailey went off to Canberra to work as it turned out, of course, for Bert Evatt as Solicitor-General, and I was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, the main burden of running the faculty of law was on George and myself; and George had from the jump been one of the people closely consulted about the formation of the Australian National University and I think it would almost certainly have been his suggestion in the first place that I should be considered for the law chair.

          Actually just before we .... I know I'm diverting a bit here, but you mentioned a little while ago that in 1947 was the first time you heard the phrase. If you could just tell me that story and then go on with the story of the meeting.

Heard what phrase?

          The first time you heard mentioned the notion of a post-graduate research institution in Canberra.

Oh yes. Yes, that's right. I think, once again, that it would almost certainly have been George Paton who first spoke to me about this. It might have been Panzee Wright because Panzee and myself were very friendly at that time. And I had been to him actually, just before going off to a law conference in Adelaide because I had a bad throat and I was supposed to give an important paper at this conference.

So I went and consulted Panzee and he looked down my throat and told me that I should stop smoking. He put it in quite violent language. So I did in fact then stop smoking then and there. And it's quite possible that it was Panzee at one of those sort of meetings who first talked to me about the national university.

          You can't remember what he said?

No. Certainly George Paton did too. So that I could say that I was probably, from the first initiation of those plans and conferences and so forth, that by one route or the other through Panzee or through George or through both of them I was fairly well informed about the general bent and drift of the business; how it was in particular concerned with getting top grade physicists to initiate that kind of research in Australia and top grade medicos so as to build upon the Florey kind of tradition as the quite miraculous results which had followed from some of his work.

Those were really the two key issues: to see if you could get to Australia people of very high experimental rank in those fields. And the rest of it˙...

          Was Hancock mentioned in the same sort of breath?

No, no, he wasn't. No, Hancock was not mentioned at that stage in that sense. He certainly was one of the people who was consulted in England by the Australians concerned, such as Copland, when they went to England and were consulting there in the first place, very largely, trying to get a physicist and a medico.

          What sort of things were you saying in response to what Panzee Wright was saying to you, and also the others, that caused them to think, well, you're a person that they should have at that conference. Can you remember the sort of comments that you were making?

I must say that it came to me as something of a surprise to be invited. I honestly didn't think that I was quite at their height of academic achievement and so forth. And I'd just been plugging away at the fairly ordinary career of a teacher and to some extent a practitioner of law, and didn't therefore mix in the social circles in which a good deal, I think, of the preliminary planning of the Australian National University went on; to some extent in social circles, to some extent in political circles, because all of the principals in the negotiations had been in one way or another connected with the Australian government for wartime purposes.

It was there that they formed friendships between academics from all over Australia who otherwise might never have been brought together at all; partly because of the economic problems of the country and partly because of the specific engineering and such like problems and health problems of the country. And as I say, at that time, I regarded myself as a very junior member of this general academic community and I was frankly surprised when Copland opened up this subject to me on that park bench in London, quite surprised.

          You mentioned the concentration on physics and medicine, but going back to that Round Table group before the war, you were talking then about the need for the development, the evolution of a more independent nation and with all the need for research or intellectual development that that would involve; but that Round Table sort of thing isn't being discussed a lot in this immediate situation in the late '40s, leading up to the ANU, it's more the physics and the medicine?

Yes, it is. That's right. Yes, it is. It was indeed more the quite obvious specific importance of the atomic energy speculations. Not so much I should think in the view of the Chifley government, its wartime, that is to say, the atom bomb part of it but the expectation that this would be a form of energy production.

          The Snowy Mountain moves.

Well, the Snowy Mountains turned out to be a different thing altogether and came from a different direction. No, no, no. I think what they had in mind was, this is of course the British had in mind at the same time and the Americans had already started on, and that was the use of atomic energy as a substitute for other fuels for the power needs of the country.

          No, what I was referring to in talking about the Snowy Mountains was the idea of big, grand national projects.

Oh, you're quite right. Indeed, of course, there certainly was the general idea of big, grand national projects. But as far as the ANU was concerned that was more cut down to a more specific and immediate proposition, namely, that we did need to get one of the builders of the atomic bomb, preferably an Australian, and it turned out that there was one, one and only one, Australian who filled the bill, namely Oliphant. So that he was a natural, so to speak, from the beginning and of course, as it happened, he unlike the one other Australian possibility in London at the time, I forget his name now ...

          Massey.

That's right, Massey. Unlike Massey whose work had been not so much with the big engineering side of these things at all but with the sort of rays which are naturally sent down to the earth and cosmic rays and things of that description, and he was more of a theoretical physicist than an engineering physicist. Those were the only two Australians who anything like filled the bill, and of course they both did fill the bill pretty well.

But Oliphant perhaps in the ideas of that time a little bit more because it was natural enough for Australians and especially for a Labor government to think in terms of practical engineering projects which might well produce a specific result, than, as in the Massey case, with highly theoretical investigations of the interior content of the atom and so forth; the Rutherford sort of line of development which no doubt would be very good for Australian scholarship but which would not lead to any power houses.

          So when you're going off to Canberra in 1948 there was definitely an atmosphere that you're setting up an intellectual training house for an independent Australia, related to Australia's needs as an independent nation.

That's right, yes. And there were enough historians and economists connected with the project to make it inevitable that they would insist upon the atmosphere associated with the great British and American universities. That is to say, one in which there was a very wide range of research and teaching projects, not only in the natural sciences but also in the social sciences, and that this was to be preferred on various grounds of infusing into the general notion of the university, not simply a practical project achievement such as perhaps a workable atom fired furnace, but advances in general culture, increasing the cultural resources of the country. That certainly was from the beginning treated as one of the desiderata.

So that it then only became a question as to the relative size, the relative amount of the budget and so forth for this activity as compared with that. And it was inevitable in these circumstances that the very heavy expenditures should be in the physics and in the chemistry, and that the other sorts of activ ties would be attended to but not on anything like the same financial scale.

          That 1948 conference, because it's such a crucial conference in the development of the ANU, I'm just wondering whether you'd be willing to, in a sense, give me some more picturesque detail: the place where the conference took place, the sort of people who were there, the atmosphere of, say, the first day, who delivered the opening address, those sorts of things?

Turn this off for a minute, will you?

          Sorry, if I just explain. We were just looking for a photograph of the group who took part in the 1948 conference which we didn't find but which we'll find later.

Yes. And it was certainly held in one of the few big rooms at the old hospital building. I wouldn't be surprised if it had been something like a cafeteria or something of that description, very plain and certainly the fact that this was going to be very much of a bush university was made apparent to us right from the jump because the old hospital was situated in very, very big grounds with beautiful growth of eucalypts and all the rest of it, very much a bush setting.

          What kind of people were there?

Well, it was a mixture of academics, politicians and civil servants with a considerable majority of academics. For example, the three law professors who I mentioned before, Beasley from Perth, Stone from Sydney and Paton from Melbourne were there; and the celebrated economists of the time and various public service heads, Allen Brown who later on became Secretary of the Cabinet, and Nugget Coombs, and they probably would have been the people of whom I knew something or who I knew personally, who I expected to be most influential.

Oh, and of course, Panzee Wright, he was particularly important because he was the only one of the lot of us who really did have the ear of Curtin. And Curtin and he had formed a very close personal friendship and this was transferred to Chifley when Chifley became Prime Minister.

So that I've always, myself, been of the view that as between three or four people who were very influential: Nugget Coombs was one, Panzee was probably the most persuasive, the one who in the finish could be most relied upon to keep the project going, to keep progress in making the necessary arrangements and in persuading the government to take on the very considerable financial burden of doing such a thing.

          But he, in a sense, he wasn't from those hard sciences that you were talking about before. What was he thinking of?

Oh yes he was.

          I'm sorry, I'm wrong.

He was, you see, because he was one of the foremost Australian medical research blokes. He was one of the first of the Australian medical professors to devote a very, very considerable amount of his time and talents to medical research. And of course he was on terms of very closest friendship with Florey.

          What was his attitude to, well, we'll call them loosely, the social sciences and history?

Oh, he was one of the people who was most insistent on having a university and without being committed to any kind of social science he wanted a place in which you had a wide spread of talents, both in policy questions, in social questions, and in the basic physical sciences.

So that I'm sure that it was to a considerable extent his influence which did push the university in that direction, and also in a direction of having these all on the one campus so that they interlocked and influenced each other. Rather than one of the various alternatives that had been put up and which were much more popular with the state universities, namely, the idea of having a top layer on each of the state universities devoted to one particular, fairly broad specialisation, e.g. pick Adelaide for the engineering thing because of a number of practical physical advantages in doing such a thing in Adelaide; picking Brisbane for tropical medicine which was something that Chifley and Curtin were very anxious to push and which already had the foundation of such a research interest, perhaps pick Tasmania for the economics because, as it so happened, there had been a succession of celebrated economists there. Giblin, you see, had been there and then Copland before he migrated to the mainland.

So that was another scheme, an altogether different scheme; a federal topping on top of each of the state universities and all sorts of negotiations would have to go on to see who was allotted to which state university and how much of it.

          Social Sciences: what was meant by that term in the 1940s among that group?

I very much doubt whether the expression was used at all. I don't think that I really encountered the expression, social sciences, and used it with confidence to have a specific meaning until after I'd been at the national university for two or three years.

          I mean the school was called the Research School of Social Sciences.

Yes, it was, Research School of Social Sciences. Certainly the name was adopted but there was a sort of half a feeling around amongst a number of the people there that this was a rather American sort of idea and that we ought to get down to tintacks and think in terms of having law, perhaps general sociology though it was very much suspect both in Britain and in Australia, the idea of a general sociology, but more particularly demography. They were very keen on the idea of demography. And economics, and particularly applied economics, as it influenced public budgets and things of that description, and politics in one form and another, political science.

And in the initial discussions about this, I understand there was some moment when they'd been tossing these sorts of terms around and Sir Frederick Eggleston had spoken up and said, 'Perhaps we ought to have a spare part lawyer' [laughs].

          You've mentioned already Copland's argument with Hancock on the park bench about the two schools. Were the two schools discussed in '48?

Yes, we were certainly aware at a quite early stage which must therefore have been in 1948 that the government would insist on having a school that was specifically and particularly concerned with Australia's position in the Pacific, and that this required a great deal of field work, specific field work; a delineation of the sorts of societies with which we had to have contacts in matters of this sort. And certainly should not, at any rate in its early phases, be a highly theoretical thing.

And as against this there was a very respectable case based not upon Australia's particular position but on the history of European scholarship for a school in which what you might call the central European directed sort of studies was carried on; that's where you would have your people considering constitutional law and constitutional politics and the history, Australian history, and the history of European settlement and all of that kind of business.

Nobody at that time thought, of course, of a history of the Aborigines. But it was out of those sort of discussions that the two school thing came because it was so obvious that the government wouldn't be happy about trusting that any odd sociologist or any odd historian would take any interest in Australia's connections with the Pacific Ocean and with the countries fronting it.

          How was that discussed? I mean, people like Hancock obviously didn't like the idea at all.

No, he didn't, not at all.

          And there's a suggestion of a very practical applied aspect to it that aroused a fair bit of opposition?

Oh yes, it certainly did, particularly from the people who'd been deeply influenced by the British background in university affairs and particularly that of the old universities, Oxbridge. Oxbridge was the place which tended to provide the model for these sort of ideas.

          Not Princeton at all?

There's very little reference to American universities. I think I made more reference to it than most of them did because I was by that time interested in many aspects of American legal theory, and indeed of the practical methods of teaching adopted in America; the case book method as distinct from the textbook sort of method which we tended to use.

Yes, I think it is fair to say that there were very mixed opinions about whether or not there should be a school separately delineated as being concerned with Pacific affairs; and that it was mainly because of political insistence that that was brought about.

In the finish it really came down to this, that we were advised, particularly, by Panzee Wright that our chances of getting adequate funding from the government for a fairly wide range of social science subjects would depend entirely upon our willingness to allocate a specific part of it for the Pacific enterprise; and that they'd be most happy if this took the form of a separate school attending to it.

          Was Firth present at that conference?

I can't remember now whether - the Firth who became a professor in Tasmania?

          No, no, the ....

The Englishman. No, I don't think he was. The ex-New Zealander. No, no. He ...

          He brought a very anthropological, fairly limited notion to that school, didn't he?

Yes, he did indeed. And indeed the decision to try to get Firth was very largely influenced by the fact that he was (a) a person coming from the Pacific and (b) he was a person who was interested in the Pacific. And if we could only get him, this would perfectly satisfy these very deep-seated feelings of the government and particularly of Chifley and Curtin that we should pay special attention to Australia as a part of the Pacific.

And one of the most worrying setbacks of the university in its early days was Firth's ultimate decision not to come.

END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A

BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE B

          Identification: This is side 2, tape 2 of the interview with Professor Sawer. End of identification.

          Was Hancock present at that conference?

I can't remember. He certainly was present at a conference but I'm afraid you'd have to go to the university records to identify which ....

          I'm more interested in your personal meeting with him rather than in himself.

I don't think that I had any personal relations with Hancock until I had, in due course, become first Dean of the Research School of Social Sciences and once again set on foot the negotiations which resulted in Hancock ultimately coming as its first Director. I don't think that I encountered Hancock, at any rate to speak to and to make any close acquaintance with, before that time.

So it may be that he wasn't at these Canberra conferences at all or it may just be that there were so many people there, including people who I knew very well, and because I regarded myself as a very junior member of the assemblage that it didn't even occur to me to try to, you know, pick up an acquaintance with him.

          You went to the United States for a period of time in the late '40s, did you not, and that was before you took up your work?

Yes, that's right. What happened was that .... The sequence of events was that I had this brief to appear in the Privy Council case, the bank nationalisation case, which took up the first three to four months of 1949, and while I was there the result came through of an application which Paton - with whom I had very close, friendly relations, and liked him very much, admired him - Paton had put my name forward to the Carnegie Corporation for a Carnegie grant to enable me to pay a six-months visit to the United States and in particular to investigate certain law schools and see this case method in operation and things of that sort.

And it so happened that the favourable response to this suggestion came through at about the time that the Privy Council case finished and I flew back to Australia, and almost immediately flew out of Australia again in the opposite direction to America for this six months trip, taking my wife with me and leaving the kids in charge of a nurse in Melbourne.

          You knew that you were likely to get this position at the ANU?

Oh yes, indeed. The park bench conversation with Copland had already led to a formal letter from him making an offer and indicating what the scale of salaries was going to be for professors in the Research School of Social Sciences.

And he knew, because I told him, about the possibility of my taking this American trip, and he said, 'Oh, we'll be only too delighted for you to do so because quite a number of our people are going on trips on one and another financial basis. And it may even get to the point where the first formal meeting at the university will occur at the headquarters of the Carnegie Corporation in New York.' So this trip to America was highly approved.

          Did you go with a sort of a brief, thinking of your new job?

Oh yes, indeed I did, indeed I did. Initially I'd only been concerned to get into this fairly low level, so to speak technological question of how to teach law students. But now I expanded that to take a look at the few examples in the USA of something of this sort; of an institute of higher learning having a particular commitment to research and not necessarily closely linked with an existing university, though in point of fact most of such places in America, at that time certainly, were closely linked with a particular university.

But the one of course that was not was the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies, so that I spent two or three weeks at the Institute of Advanced Studies, talked to Einstein, and a few things of this description.

          How did you meet him?

He was a member of the Institute at that time.

          But he wouldn't have been that easy a person to meet?

Oh yes, he was, yes. It was extraordinary how .... It was only a very small number of people altogether at that institute; there weren't more than about a dozen or so leading professors of whom Einstein was far and away, of course, the most famous and what not. And they were only too glad to sort of show off their prize. And he, himself, was an extremely clubbable sort of man; delightful to talk to.

          What did you talk about?

We talked about atoms. You know, I said how much we had admired the direct way in which his experiments and his discoveries and so forth had led ultimately to the atom bomb. Oh, he pulled a long face about that. He said, 'Oh yes. Damn knows h‚r‚ditas, I fear', was how he put it; that what's going to happen ultimately in this business of a competition between the great powers to blow each other up. He wasn't at all .... He always had been, I think, from the beginning a bit dubious about the long range consequences of this. But he was at that time, of course, busily engaged in a thing about which I couldn't possibly talk to him at all, and that was the attempt to find a general theory of relativity, something which he never in fact succeeded in finding.

And indeed, I don't think it's been found to this day. You still get this hopeless business of the rays and what not being either like little bullets or being like waves; and with only a rather unsatisfactory mathematical compromise to describe the joint properties in operation. So this was the sort of stuff that he was talking to me and all I could do was to listen with respect while the physicists present at this lunch-hour meeting plied him with questions and he answered.

          Going to Princeton, what sort of ideas did you come away with relevant to the ANU?

Not really very many because the fact is that Princeton was at so high a level of operation, the numbers of people and the importance of the people who were few in numbers, in world scholarship their achievements and so forth are so enormous that there was very, very little possibility of reaching that in a completely newly constructed university setting. You see the Princeton Institute was deliberately built very close to Princeton University which was an old university with a very high reputation and already with a very considerable post-graduate school and so forth.

Canberra's problems were obviously going to be very different from that. There wasn't going to be any neighbouring institution of any reputation at all, even at national scales, let alone international scales. So that the most one could say was that we would certainly wish to preserve for the Canberra schools the potentiality of engaging in research work of as fundamental a character as that which was being carried on by Einstein and suchlike people at Princeton.

And we were encouraged by the American example generally, not only that one, but also the position of the graduate schools which were nearer to what, in effect, we were setting up; the graduate schools attached to Harvard and Yale and the university near New York, just north of New York city. That we must fight the tendency that all of these people told me had operated in the American universities at an earlier age, in the nineteenth century, to get distracted into highly specific research jobs connected with immediate problems, not to have an interest in the ultimate theory behind all these things. This was what in effect we learned from these various American institutions.

          You mentioned that you did have a fairly strongly worked out brief when you went there. Could you tell me a little bit more about that?

Oh yes. The brief was to do two things: one was these more general considerations to see if there was anything of specific that we could learn from, places like the Princeton Institute; but the other was to consider the possibilities of getting some professorial staff from those universities.

I talked to - now here's where my memory is rather vague as to how many such people I talked to - but I talked to a number of people at the University of California, the Berkeley branch, at CalTech, at Harvard, at Yale, and at the university in Viriginia. Is it called the University of Virginia? I think it is. It's a senior university in the southern states. I talked to a number of people there who either were Australians who'd migrated there, or who we knew to have some interest in Australia because they'd visited Australia or they'd corresponded with Australian scholars and so forth.

I was briefed about the possibilities of this sort. The person I was particularly interested in trying to get was a research experienced person in anthropology because already we were getting to be doubtful as to whether we would be able to get Firth and there were a couple of American anthopologists who we knew had done a lot of work, the greater part of their field work on Pacific island problems, Hogbin for example.

And there were half a dozen names of that sort who had been dished up to me. Some of them because of a specific Australian connection and some of them because of a subject connection. And I talked to them all and did in fact ultimately light on two people, I can't remember their names now, who I thought might be open to, at least, invitations to spend a period in Australia and not just a very short period, to come for a couple of years or something like that, who had an interest in that part of the world.

And in fact, ultimately, one of those chaps did come and spend quite a bit of time, an anthropologist, in the Research School of Pacific Studies. I can't remember his name now, but you'll certainly come across him as you proceed from school to school. I think he came on two or three occasions and spent a fairly considerable time, and each time we hoped that we would get him for good and each time it didn't come off.

          One of the things that I've seen referred to is a letter that you wrote to Copland about collaborative research and how it hadn't really worked, I think you said, in the United States.

Yes, that's perfectly true. One of the general ideas that was afoot at the time was that historians, economists, demographers, et cetera, should be able to collaborate and attack a research project each from his own particular point of view and bring out a sort of, in some ways, integrated result. Integration was the great thing they were achieving, and certainly one of the consequences of my American tour was to reinforce a conclusion I had already reached tentatively, that it's not at all easy for, e.g. a lawyer who's attacking a particular legal problem to introduce in some way a general sociologist with a theory of sociology which extends to, from his point of view, the association which constitutes a law court and its judge and parties and barristers and the rest of it; that generally speaking the distance between these various types of activity in real life is so considerable that the strong trend, certainly in the United States, has been for specialised research professorships, following more or less this sort of main heads of enterprise that had been developed earlier by European scholarship.

And that while you can certainly fruitfully have such people accommodated close together and meeting over a common room table and things like that, and exchanging ideas with each other, but that generally speaking each had to pursue his own particular slice of the scholarly research enterprise in the terms that have come to be dictated to him by the development of scholarship in that area over a long period, and a good deal of this attacking a single problem from many different points of view at the time can only produce a series of separate books, not one book. No one set of paradigms will serve the whole lot of these bits of investigation.

          One of the things that I've found interesting looking at the whole situation as an outsider who hasn't been involved in these activities on a personal level at all, is that the ANU is partly set up as a result of wartime influences, as a result of growing independence and a desire for increasing intellectual sophistication, increasing intellectual power behind the new national drive, but looking at the history of the ANU through the '50s and '60s there is this very strong individual orientation to the research coming through. And at the same time, just harking back for the moment to the second world war as I was referring to earlier before we started the interview, the second world war seemed to me a time when applied research and research directed at major national goals like organising the economy, organising industry, organising science to produce atomic weapons, where it had been a great time for applied research and big teams, and yet those sorts of notions and methods of going about intellectual work were almost repudiated by what actually happened.

Well, I suppose it was partly because of the fact that the circumstances of the second world war necessarily concentrated the attention, the immediate attention of the scientists concerned, both natural and social sciences, on the job of winning the war. So that the characters who built the atom bomb didn't do so for any conceivable reason associated with the peace-time working of an ordinary society. It was done wholly and solely for the purpose of producing an extremely effective weapon.

Now along the way, of course, a hell of a lot was learned which ultimately became very important and was turned to use both in the United States and in Britain, and even to some extent in France, in the setting up of nuclear operated power houses for generating steam, most of which have in due course been abandoned for a variety of reasons. Some concerned with the actual operation itself and the lessons of things like Chernobyl, and some because of a general fear of the ultimate possible consequences of such things, and the difficulties of getting rid of their waste products. So that it's not surprising to me that in wartime the demand should be so wholly applied.

But for the most part the scientists who got involved in it were not in the first place primarily concerned with winning wars. People like Mark Oliphant didn't take up his career in England in succession, in effect, of Rutherford as one of the great analysers of the atom with any such prospect in mind. Then he was drawn into this business and devoted about six years of his life to it in one way and another. And he was left with this general technique and skills which he'd developed during the war by using heavy industry methods of getting very quick results.

And if we had appointed Massey instead, the whole direction of that school would have been completely different. So that there is a considerable element of accident in how these things happen.

Massey had also been involved in the wartime activities, not as immediately and directly on the atom bomb as Oliphant was, but certainly in a great deal of the sort of theorising that had to go on even at that stage in working out the equations and so forth as to what would happen. But certainly he would now if he had come out to Australia and got precipitated into this kind of investigation, he would have emitted a huge sigh of relief and said, 'Thank God I don't have to have anything whatever to do with the production of weapons', and if anything he would have proceeded to make the subsequent course of events in that department a very much more theoretical course than it in fact turned to be with Oliphant in charge, and with the sort of assistants that he brought with him.

          I wasn't so much thinking of the production of weapons, I was just thinking of a comment made by Coombs in an interview that I did with him a number of years ago related to his work as a government mandarin during the second world war in which he said, we came out of the second world war - I'm paraphrasing it - very confident that we'd succeeded in organising this major national effort and we wanted to apply the skills that we'd used to win the war to solve the problems of peace: problems of health, education and those sorts of problems, but then .... You know, the conversation went on to concede that those grand hopes for national planning had been dissipated, but the ANU, in a sense, was part of that hope for national planning, wasn't it?

I suppose that it was at any rate in the mind of Nugget Coombs. I don't think that it was a driving force in the minds of many of the other people who were associated with this.

You take for example, Panzee Wright. He was very much concerned with developing medical research in Australia and medical research, of course, almost inevitably has a very considerable applied component; medical research workers are only very rarely philosophers of their own subject or concerned with the ultimate verities, so that the .... And this was so in peace-time as as much in wartime.

The fact that some of the things that Panzee had done especially in relation to the control of malaria in Papua New Guinea; the fact that that had contributed to the ultimate winning of that part of the war was of considerable importance. But the kind of research which was carried on and which produced that was exactly replicable in peace-time conditions in a way where you could say that, oh well, let Panzee carry on doing those sort of things as a professor at the Australian National University, if this is what he'd agreed to be, because there are other diseases in Papua New Guinea, yaws and what not which also require this sort of attention.

But in point of fact what happened in the John Curtin School of Medical Research was that quite soon, what turned out to be the most productive and the most important elements of its research were in fact connected with dealing with various diseases largely of animals in Australia. And one of the ultimate consequences of it was all this business of producing, by genetic means, 'super' cows and 'super' sheep, and so forth. So that in a sense these sorts of research projects especially in the natural sciences have an almost inevitable inbuilt tendency to finish up being highly applied research, even if that is not what the people who got it going wanted to bring about.

They might have wanted to bring about some ultimate general guiding set of principles as to the way in which the human constitution works, but in practice they are very likely to finish up producing a vaccine which will help you to rebut influenza, which was another thing that one of the John Curtin School blokes did.

And similarly with me, of course, I could have moved over into very rarified areas of general legal theory and tried to continue a line of mainly German research of this sort which has hardly any demonstrable connection whatever with any particular set of courts and barristers and parties, or the working of particular laws. But because of my background and general interests, inevitably, I remained pretty closely tied to what was happening here in Australia; what was happening in the high court, what was the influence of particular sorts of judges as compared with other sorts of judges, and what general balance of authority as between the commonwealth and the states would best serve the interests of the country. [Break in recording]

          Just a postscript to this morning's discussion.

I've always been curious about the question, whether either Julius Stone in Sydney, or George Paton in Melbourne, or Frank Beasley in Perth were invited to become the first Professor of Law at the Australian National University. I would have expected at the time that one of those was bound to be so invited because they were the outstanding professors at the time.

I was only just coming up the straight, so to speak, and unfortunately I was always too shy to ask them the direct question in later life, and now, of course, they're all dead, so I can't satisfy my curiosity on this point. But I can't help thinking that there must have been some suggestion put to them, and I can imagine reasons why none of the three of them would have accepted.

Julius was very much personally involved in Sydney affairs and wouldn't, I think, have relished being in effect rusticated to the very tiny town in the far wilds of the country. George Paton was not that much interested in research law, and Frank Beasley, he, I should think, might well have been the one of these who could well have accepted because he was primarily a constitutional lawyer and he had a particular interest in the working of federal politics and the federal judiciary, so from this point of view he, to me, is the greatest mystery. Did they decide that I was better than him, or did he knock them back?

          Oh, just one other question that occurred to me, that relates to this early period as well. That proposal you were talking about earlier to essentially put on a second layer onto the state universities, had that died or was that discussed at the '48 conference?

I can't remember whether it was discussed at the '48 conference, it certainly was discussed in various communications between the small steering committee and their various advisers and people that they wanted to get opinions from all around the country. And my understanding of it was, this is from some later conversations with Copland, that that general plan had run up against a very, very considerable difficulty, and that was the probable impossibility of getting the states to agree on the details of any such plan.

          Because it would have involved coordination beyond the states?

That's right. And also because each of the states were inclined to insist upon the desirability of being able to top up the existing institution in all of its major activities. So that they wouldn't agree to the idea of having only a super school of medical research, for example, in Sydney.

There would have to be similar things for each of the other state universities and so on with the major areas of thought. And the cost of doing a thing on that scale would have been far beyond anything that even Curtin and Chifley, for all their generosity on these bases could possibly contemplate.

END TAPE 2, SIDE B

 

BEGIN TAPE 1, 2ND INTERVIEW, SIDE A

          Identification: This the beginning of the second series of tapes, second interview with Professor Sawer. The date is 4th June 1990 and I'm Daniel Connell. End of identification.

          Right. We're just going to start the interview by discussing a little bit more the 1948 conference.

Yes. I've been able to find my copy of a photograph of the people obviously all social science sort of people, no natural scientists or anything like that, that was held in Canberra in '48. And Keith Hancock was in fact the Chairman of it.

And my memory had got tripped up in this business, partly because I had occasion to come to Canberra for a number of conferences at that time, not however connected with the ANU but connected with the bank nationalisation case in which I did a devilling job for Evatt and Bailey, the chief movers in that matter. And indeed ultimately went to England as one of the team of counsel in the Privy Council appeal.

But Hancock disappeared so completely from the ANU scene shortly after, of course, this conference took place, and this photograph in which he appears. And it was that complete disappearance which had made me wonder whether he even took part in this conference. I think, probably, he didn't play a very considerable part in it. My memory is that there were other people there who spoke up more boldly and freely about various problems. And in fact you can track them down if you trace who it was that was engaged in it.

For example, amongst the lawyers by far the most forceful and indeed interesting participant was Wolf Friedmann who had then recently been appointed as Professor of Public Law at the University of Melbourne, so that he was in a sense my boss at this time.

My part in this thing was very much more that of a humble junior listening to the wisdom of all his superiors because I notice that George Paton was also there. I don't however notice, at least in this photograph, Julius Stone. And it would be interesting to check up whether in fact he was there because he certainly would have been another very important and influential person in matters of this sort.

And indeed, I was astonished that I was appointed Professor of Law there rather than Julius Stone. I think it very likely that he had been offered the job and had refused it, but I've got no evidence that that is so.

          You were talking, the last time we were discussing this, about a feeling that you had that support for RSSS was very much dependent upon RSPacS getting off the ground. Now that you've been thinking about it a bit more, how do you feel about that particular observation?

I think I may have given a wrong impression if I thought that the social science thing was wholly dependent upon the Pacific thing. I don't think that that's the direction that matters took at all. There certainly was a firm decision to have the social sciences represented in the university. It then simply came down to a question as to whether or not there would be a separate Pacific studies place.

And I don't think it was the social science people only who were affected in this matter. I think that it went this far with Evatt and perhaps to a lesser extent with Chifley that they insisted that if the university thing as a whole was going to go ahead it must include provision for what they regarded as the special interest and place of Australia in Pacific happenings. And of course, in a very broad notion of Pacific happenings, going way up into Asia, into China as well as down to the Antarctic.

          And were they thinking of the medical and physical sciences in the same sort of context, expecting to harness them to the grand plan for Au tralian national development?

Yes, I think that they were, particularly of course, the physics because although Evatt and Labor Party people generally were, at least, very unhappy about the implications of the atom bomb, nevertheless since the bomb had been discovered and used, and successfully used, then they just had to accept the situation that Australia had, amongst other things, to fit itself into a world in which that sort of thing was going on. And without having any intention whatever of producing in Australia for Australia an atom bomb, they certainly wanted to have people around who were fully and completely informed about the physics of it and its engineering possibilities, its power generation possibilities and so forth.

And then of course as to the medical aspect of the matter, we Australians had a very special interest in that because one of the reasons why our troops did relatively better in standing up to the conditions of warfare in New Guinea was the fact that they had had behind them, fed into them, once again up to the minute medical science with the sulphanilamides and all of those sorts of things, and the Japanese had not been so well-equipped in such matters.

So there again there was something of a defence element even in the medical part of it, quite apart from the national pride in feeling that it was Florey, an Australian, who'd been so prominent in this matter and who at the early stages we hoped might be persuaded to come to Australia.

          Was this actually being discussed? Was it being written about? I mean, in terms of your contact with it at the time, were you encountering this in official speeches or was it the unofficial comment?

Yes.

          At what level was it being pursued?

Yes, I see what you mean. It would be quite impossible for me now to recollect precisely the setting in which I heard sentiments of this kind being uttered. I don't think that they were at this particular conference because I think that by the time of this conference the general shape of what was to come and that it would come had been sufficiently settled and we were now getting down to more detailed questions as to the sorts of departments or the sorts of research that would go on and in what order they would be established and things of that sort.

So that what I've just been saying to you is certainly the outcome of conversations that I've had, even you might say mini-conferences that I'd had, in Melbourne with the Melbourne people who were well known to me and who were involved in these things at a much more senior level.

Above all Panzee Wright, Professor Roy Wright who in my view was the most influential of the Australians concerned with this thing, the most influential with Mr Chifley and with Dr Evatt, partly because he, himself, was by this time already a very senior medical investigator and research bloke. And partly because of his personality which was jovial and yet forceful and had very definite opinions and he hit it off with Chifley extremely well from the first time that they were brought into contact with each other. And it's above all from Roy Wright that I got these early impressions of the nature of the Labor government's involvement in these affairs.

It's quite possible, too, that Evatt talked to me in the same way because I saw a good deal of him through those years because of the fact that I was devilling for this bank nationalisation business at its various stages.

          And I've read a quote from Dedman basically along the same lines, so there's obviously written .... This is a very important question from, obviously it's a very important question, but one of the things that is fascinating for me is that I've been interviewing a number of people and there are people, for example Sir Mark Oliphant, I think it's fair to mention his name, and some of the physical, Professor Frank Fenner, others, Sir Leslie Melville who are quite adamant that there was not this Australian agenda. I mean, Sir Mark Oliphant is very, very firm in arguing that what was being set up as far as he was concerned was something that was not at all nationalistic, it was part of the broad international community of scholarship with no nationalistic agenda. But you find statements from Coombs along the same lines; Eggleston - along the lines you're talking about. So what's your feeling when you hear of statements such as that from Sir Mark Oliphant?

It seems to me that there was no necessary inconsistency between what Mark thought that the whole business was about, because the simple fact, of course, was that Mark was distrustful by this time of the wartime use of nuclear power. And all of the people that you mentioned were people, of course, who thought and felt in international terms. My impression, a somewhat different one, was not conveyed to me by people like that at all but by the politicians with whom I had ...

          Were supplying the money.

Who were supplying the money, quite so. And of course they [interruption]. Yes, even as far as the government was concerned, of course, a man like Evatt would certainly have a commitment so to speak to scholarship for its own sake, but it was certainly my strong impression that from the talks that I had with Chifley and I can't remember that I ever talked with Dedman about it ...

          You were talking with Chifley?

Oh yes, yes, yes. Yes, I met Chifley a couple of times. You see I'd been brought in contact with him when there was that great row over some broadcasts that I gave in the last year of the war; broadcasts whose tone was dictated in effect over the telephone by Evatt. They were by way of being critical of the Americans because of the rather underhand way in which the Americans in Indonesia were aiding the Dutch and Evatt was very furious about this.

So that was when I came to meet and got to know 'Chif' and as a result subsequently ...

          This is to divert a little, but I can't help this. How did Chifley get involved in that particular ...?

Because he was Prime Minister.

          Oh, I know.

You see. Oh well, they summoned me up to .... This was in the last year of the war in 1945. And they summoned me up from Melbourne to Canberra to talk to Chifley and Dedman and Evatt and Calwell about this. Of course Calwell and Evatt were at daggers drawn with each other because they were on opposite sides of this argument as to who we should support in Indonesia. Evatt wanted to support Sukarno and the Nationalists and I think Chifley's position on this was fairly middle of the road.

          Calwell was basically pro-Dutch?

Oh, he was pro-Dutch. It wasn't that he liked the Dutch but he decided he distrusted the Indonesian Nationalists, partly because he was an anti-coloured sort of man and partly because of the fact that Sukarno had in effect been a puppet of the Japanese. So it was quite an argument. Yes, and so the result was that Chif said, 'Well, I believe that you came from the University of Melbourne, are you thinking of going back to it?'. And I said, 'Yes, in fact I'm certainly going back at the end of this year'. Of course, it was peace by this time. He said, 'Oh, that's fine. Back you go and don't try to invent foreign policy for us any more.'

So that led to, of course, every time that I was in Canberra concerned with either the bank case or with the national university that when I met Chifley we were on friendly terms with each other. And I certainly got the impression both from Chifley and from Evatt, and I think probably from Dedman too, that there was this very important factor in their minds of the state of knowledge of these sorts of things in Australia.

And indeed, the very special emphasis on having a separate school of Pacific Studies was entirely directed to satisfying Evatt's feeling that Australia must play a leading role in all of the affairs of this particular region.

          It was part of his notion of Australia as a middle power.

Yes, exactly, indeed it was. Yes, and of course Evatt had, at any rate, hoped that middle powers would be influential in these matters precisely because the great powers were so much at each other's throats on relevant questions; jealous of each other in one way and another. And it was the business of the middle powers like Australia to act as arbiters in such matters.

          Coming back to this question of the role of the ANU: very, very soon after it got started and particularly perhaps represented by the, what you might call the 'Big Four' coming from Britain, was this push away from the nationalistic agenda towards a much more diffuse collection of research aims, I think it might be fair to say?

Yes, that could well be the case in certain types of research, particularly in physics and in biology and matters of that sort, but so far as the medical aspects of it were concerned, that inevitably included a considerable quota of concern with and interest about matters of special importance to Australia, certainly flowing out of a general background of theoretical biochemistry and so forth.

But just as it very rapidly connected to specific Australian interests, in particular kinds of diseases that we had, and of course, in collaboration with the CSIRO in relevant ways to provide perhaps the little bit more pure research background to the somewhat more applied research background of CSIRO.

Yes, I certainly think that it would be misleading to try to build up the nature of the ANU in the mind either of those who were founding it or those who ultimately took positions in it as trying to exist in some kind of world which was entirely free of any kind of nationalist bias or interest, far from it. We were encouraged to look at matters from an Australian point of view.

          Once you were set up how was that encouragement expressed?

Well, it was expressed in the sort of things that were mentioned as appropriate for us to deal with. For example, in the conversations that I had with Copland after he'd appointed me on that park bench in London was entirely along these lines that I said I would be particularly interested in pursuing a fairly detailed account of the interaction of politics and constitutional law in the development of Australia's federal system of government.

And Copland was actually quite enthusiastic about this and said it was high time that somebody did it. So there certainly was never in the slightest degree, there wasn't even after Hancock came and did eventually become director, not the slightest pressure on us to depart from the fairly Australian oriented sort of work which all of us in the social sciences were doing: the economists, the historians.

Laurie Fitzhardinge was writing the life of Billy Hughes. The Pacific Studies people, of course, were very much involved with the Pacific necessarily, so that Jim Davidson was writing the definitive book on Samoa, Samoa: mo Samoa that's the way that things in fact went.

And there was never the slightest doubt in my mind in the preliminary stages that that was the direction in which they inevitably must go. Partly because the social sciences are in the course of their nature and their history at, what you might say, still a fairly applied level, lacking the kind of very basic ultimate general theory which you get for example above all in physics.

          Did you see law as part of social sciences in that sense?

Oh yes, I did, certainly. There again there was a background to that, that Australian academic lawyers, including myself, had been influenced to a considerable extent, could then quite recently within the previous ten years at the most in American developments in general legal theory which were beginning to tie the law in to a greater extent than had been usual with English and earlier Australian writers, with general social theory; trying to look at the law as a system of social control, along with other systems of social control, and getting away from, getting distance from the purely professional orientation of so much legal research before then.

And I was interested in this, of course, because I'd been in both parts of it. I'd practised at the Victorian bar for seven years, knew exactly what it meant to be a professional lawyer and the nature of professional legal theory of one sort and another. And then had gone and taken this, first senior lectureships and then associate professorship at the University of Melbourne, when I had the opportunity for developing an interest in American, recent American, theories of this sort.

          Were you publishing on these sorts of themes, and teaching on these themes? Or was it more private discussion at this stage?

No, no. I was teaching courses in legal theory and ...

          Explicitly connecting it with a broader social theory?

Yes, indeed. Explicitly, using American authors such as Karl Llewellyn who was the most influential of the American theorists of that sort at that time. Though what I had been writing up to that point was much more professionally oriented, and solely taken up with Australian events of one sort and another.

I wrote, in fact, the first sort of short, general introduction to the Australian system of government. A little book it was, published by the Melbourne University Press called Australian Government Today which ultimately went into fourteen editions. I only stopped preparing new editions of it about ten years ago. And while that, of course, was tied into the Australian material, it was written against a background of general theories about the nature of federalism and the nature of responsible government.

Then later on, many years later on, I wrote a book which was wholly tied in to the nature of responsible government and to various approaches to the consequences for the relations between Governor-General and Prime Minister, all of this arising out of the sacking of Gough Whitlam.

          Just going back to that '40s period, who else would you define, within the Australian legal scene, academic legal scene, as having the same sort of interests as you, publishing along the same themes, teaching ...?

The professor who had done the greatest amount of work of a very theoretical character, and against a background of both European as well as American work was Julius Stone at the University of Sydney. Now he had relatively recently been appointed to that professorship and he'd already made a considerable mark on the academic community because of papers and because he'd written the first form of what ultimately became a huge three-volume work covering most of the important general legal theories that had ever been conceived by the mind of man.

It was sometimes referred to by the students rather disrespectfully as 'Julius Prudence' and I must say that I had taken it for granted that it would be Julius who'd be appointed to the Law chair at the ANU because of his already considerable international reputation and because he was not an Australian.

He'd spent the greater part of his professional life up to that point in England where he did his basic studies and then in the USA. And it was from there that he'd come to the chair in Sydney in circumstances of some dispute because there was a party in the Sydney University, this was in the war years, who wanted to keep the chairs vacant until the boys came back from the front. And the outcome of that dispute was that by a very narrow majority those who said, 'No, no. Let's get the chair filled now so as to build the school up and be ready to deal with the boys when they come back, at the front', that party won.

And as I say, I've often wondered since whether Julius was actually offered the ANU chair. I'd be astonished if he hadn't been. He was the obvious bloke to do this because he'd already shown, in papers that he'd published and so forth, that he was seizing a pretty good grip on affairs in Australia, understanding Australia's particular problems, beginning to work in an awareness of the peculiar Australian form of federalism in his writings of subjects like that.

          You were both broadcasters, too, weren't you?

Yes, we were, that's right, yes. Indeed, of course I'd been introduced to it through running Radio Australia and then for some years I'd been broadcasting regular weekly commentaries at the weekend for a commercial radio station in Melbourne, yep.

          I'm just commenting on that because in a sense it's showing a more outward orientation than most academics in the social sciences were displaying. I mean, there weren't a lot of history professors rushing to be newspaper columnists for example.

I think that's quite true, and again I dare say that this was a consequence of my having spent that period at the Victorian bar, because although through the years that I was at the Victorian bar I was a resident tutor in law at Ormond College, so that I had a foot in, half a foot in the academic sort of interests, but because of the associations that came with doing bar work and with doing this job for Radio Australia, I certainly had become accustomed to, and took it for granted that, it was part of the business of an up to date, at any rate, research worker and writer and so forth to take the broader view and try to look for links between the purely professional shape of the law and the structure of the society around it, and the extent to which they influenced one another.

This was all taken for granted, partly because of my own experience and partly also because of my friendship with George Paton. He had, too, written a much more traditional sort of book on general theory of law, Paton's volume called Jurisprudence, and his own bent was more professionally directed than was Julius Stone's. But Paton had been a Rhodes scholar and he'd taken Greats at Oxford and he was a classicist as well, had Latin and could read Roman law which was something I couldn't do. So that Paton's influence was certainly not a narrowing one, on the contrary, he was a chap who had by nature an inquisitive and society-directed kind of interest, but much more professionally tied into it than was the case with Julius Stone.

          Can you see a group of people who have got academic training and academic status but who have also got this outward looking approach that we're talking about at the moment, in this case related to broadcasting, can you see a group of those in that early group involved in the ANU? Or were you a bit isolated?

I was a bit isolated as a matter of fact. The fact was, of course, that in the finish the Council of the university had to get work going on the basis of the sort of people that they could attract and they'd had quite a lot of knock backs in the early stages of this when you look at the number of people who'd been approached for one reason and another, and who after nibbling at it, finally didn't come.

And the consequence was that what tended to happen in the finish was: you got a collection there of very good - and I'll exclude myself from this for obvious reasons of modesty - but looking around you got a collection of very good people, the rising younger people already with a good research and publication record and so forth, but Australians, and buried in a sense in the Australian angle or whatever of whatever subject they taught.

People like Laurie Fitzhardinge for example, you see, who was a classicist who had become a historian and who was working on the life of Hughes. He was an obvious bloke to appoint to, and he was appointed as a Reader in the Department of History. John La Nauze who came from Melbourne, again, had written, was known to have already started work on a life of Deakin which he finished at the ANU, a two volume, the standard life of Deakin and not only of Deakin as a man but of his politics and the politics of the time. And of course, he wrote another extremely good book on the formation of the Australian constitution.

Now, these were the sort of people who were getting appointed; Borrie, the demographer, all of them competent, prominent technicians in a particular subject but with that extra little touch of the general interest in a general theory relating to their subject which had come to be a necessary part of the work, even of the most completely Australian-directed scholar at that time.

END TAPE 1, 2ND INTERVIEW, SIDE A

 

BEGIN TAPE 1, 2ND INTERVIEW, SIDE B

          Identification: This is side 2 of the second interview with Professor Sawer. End of identification.

          So you're saying that that particular group, after all the sifting through, even though they had the broad theoretical perspectives and they were very good technicians, they didn't have this outward going, is competence the right word, or perception of what they should be doing?

Well, that depends entirely on how much you think anybody can or should have that kind of interest. I would say that it was probably more difficult still even after the second world war, difficult in Australia to satisfy the desires and demands of a person who's interested particularly in social matters and matters of human society to live in Australia and work in Australia at the level that he might want to and with access to the sort of sources that he would need, because it wasn't until many years after the national university was founded that travelling backwards and forwards from Australia to England or America or Europe or wherever it might be was at all easy or quick.

All of us, as a matter of course until the university had been there for ten years or more, took it for granted that if we went to England, for example, on study leave to carry on with the particular sort of work, which I in fact did in 1954, '55, you would travel by boat, and that took about five weeks. Yeah. And you wouldn't expect to do it very frequently. I travelled to and from the bank nationalisation case by air and that was thought to be a terrific thing, extraordinary! It was also, of course, extremely expensive.

And the expectations of people junior to myself, non-professorial staff generally speaking, could hardly include very much of that kind of international direct contact and work for any considerable period in matters abroad. So that we were dependent very much, (a) on the locally available material which was relevant to a particular discipline, and (b) on contact with the outside world by reading the books and the learned papers and so forth of other people.

So one of the first things that we proceeded to set up as far as law was concerned in Canberra, was to see to it that between us and the National Library and the library of the government lawyers we had a very good collection of the leading law journals of all of the English speaking countries and a number of the French and German speaking countries. And this had, to some extent, to take the place of the sort of contact that you might otherwise like, would have preferred to have had by much more frequent visits abroad.

          Describing that group again, that you were talking about before, their rather inward-looking style. Do you think that there's a stronger element in Australia perhaps of that suggestion that to be involved in public affairs, public discussion and involved in the simplifications that inevitably comes with that was actually not complementary, in fact it was antagonistic to serious scholarship.

Yes. I dare say that in the case of a number of the people concerned, there would have been a feeling of that kind, but I don't think that it bothered either the social scientists or the 'Pacificos' as much as you might think because, as I've said before, the simple fact is that they are necessarily much more immediately culture bound than the pure scientist, the chap who's only concerned with an atom or with whatever is the unit of operation in living tissue and so forth, necessarily so.

After all there's no conceivable connection between an atom in a particular gas chamber or what not, whether it's considered in Petrograd or in Washington DC, in London or in Canberra.

This is just not so with the operation of governments; you very soon run into the sand of almost meaningless generalisations when you start to proceed outwards from how government is run in America, how it is run in Australia, how it is run in England, how it is currently being run in West and East Germany and so forth.

          I'm just thinking of Chifley, a non-graduate, Evatt obviously a very brilliant man of great academic distinction, but a person who'd chosen to play a very political role: were people like that expecting the early ANU to be perhaps more active in their involvement in public affairs than they were?

I don't think so. I think that on the contrary that certainly Chifley and I think probably Evatt too, would be a little bit suspicious of any very considerable and direct involvement of the university with public affairs because ...

          Rather like your role in Radio Australia with that broadcast you were talking about?

Yes, yes, exactly. Yes, because they had to take long views and knew that they certainly wouldn't be in government for ever and that the other side would come to power. And it was a part of their general effort, which was successful, to involve Menzies in it, and to see that the university got floated on a general acceptance of the proposition that it ought, in principle, not to have any direct involvement with the politics of anyone in particular.

Now that didn't, in the slightest degree, suggest that individual scholars should not have their own political beliefs and endeavour to forward them in one way and another provided that that didn't affect either their teaching or their research methods.

          Menzies, before 1949, now obviously the tension between himself and Chifley is building up enormously, but I'm just thinking the two of you are lawyers out of Victoria: did you have any contact with him at all? What sort of involvement did he have in the early days of the ANU that you know of?

He was kept informed most meticulously at all stages and himself expressed, I can't say whether he did this publicly because I can't remember now, but it was quite likely that he did, but certainly on a personal basis - because he quite liked Chifley - he did so and was aware of the general direction of events and was generally speaking supportive of it.

          Did you have contact with Menzies?

Yes I did. I knew Menzies quite well, more or less through an accident. Back in my days at Scotch College then at the university I was friendly with a Scotch College boy, Jack Leckie who was an exact contemporary of mine who was related to Menzies. His father was Senator Leckie and his mother was either Menzies' sister or the sister of Menzies' wife. I think the sister of Menzies' wife. Any rate they were related and at the Leckies I met Menzies. And then when I went to the bar ...

          This is what? He was a Victorian state member at this stage, or even earlier?

Yes, he was a Victorian state member at that time. Then when I went to the bar I saw him every now and again and did a couple of bits of devilling for him and quite liked him, and got on well with him, thought he was a witty bloke. And indeed, after I went to Canberra he meticulously invited me to any do that was currently on that was of particular interest to lawyers, like gatherings of Commonwealth Attorneys-General and things of that sort. Yes, so that I knew Menzies reasonably well and was on social terms with him.

          Just thinking of that, before he came to power in '49, would you have discussed the ANU with him before that time?

I should doubt it. I think it's unlikely, I think I saw less of Menzies through those four years before the ANU got afloat than I had seen in previous years because he spent so much time in Canberra and so little time in Melbourne through those periods, although it's quite possible that he was at some social function that I was at in Canberra when I was up there in connection with the bank case, but necessarily, I had to be fairly circumspect in those sort of things because of the fact that I was working for the other side.

          We'll come back to Menzies and a number of other things that you've mentioned so far, but I'd just like to, before we go any further get your initial impressions, your memories of your initial experiences on arriving in Canberra, arriving at the ANU for the first time. Well, not for the first time but to take up your post.

Well, I arrived in a very happy frame of mind. Actually I drove up from Melbourne with myself and my wife and two children in two cars, one of them pulling a trailer and the other pulling a caravan, so it was a real trek, and landing in Canberra and being shown where we were to be put up.

          Where was that?

A house on the university site. They'd acquired letters for a series of houses of various designs and these were known as the F houses. And I'm sorry to say that they had sufficient defects in their design and construction that it had to be a very topical and appropriate name, the F houses. I immediately got to work and bought myself a block of land and had a building put up with help from the university.

But we were sufficiently, of course, acquainted with both - Mamie and myself - acquainted with Canberra and with some Canberra people to not feel at all, as some of the people who came from overseas did, lost and bewildered because of this very small place. Population at that time, what? 20 000 or something like that.

          What was the university population?

Oh, crikey, it was very, very small indeed, I should say that when we first arrived there weren't more than about a dozen, comprising the whole of the two social science schools, actually on the campus at that time.

          When you say a dozen, you don't mean a dozen professors? That includes right down to lab assistants ...

No, no, not lab assistants, no. A dozen people in academic positions, professors, readers. Laurie Fitzhardinge for example was a reader; or research fellow, Mick Borrie was a research fellow. Their ranks varied. But there couldn't have been many more than a dozen or so; that's at the beginning of 1951.

The numbers increased fairly rapidly through 1951 and 1952 but at first it was a rather odd sort of feeling that one got because the campus site was extensive and very bushy, there were a large number of beautiful eucalypts and things of this sort, and the chief building on it was the Canberra Cottage Hospital which had fairly recently been vacated because the new General Hospital had been built on the site that it still occupies, and the Cottage Hospital had been turned over to the social science research schools as their habitations.

          You were a very small group, much smaller than say Melbourne University.

Oh, very much smaller.

          And so to what degree were you mixing socially? In other words that community of scholars that people keep aiming for and not getting a lot of the time.

Well, we certainly got it there, right from the jump. Quite a lot of us, of course, were mutually acquainted in any event from earlier years because so many of us came from one or other state university. And the ones who didn't, like Oskar Spate for example, who was one of the few who'd come directly from England, he very readily made friends with all of us. For one thing he was found to have a talent which I also had for writing somewhat improper verses on proper occasions. And Alec Hope was another of the members.

You see, there was an existing little niche of scholars already at the site because of the existence of the Canberra University College as it then was, a branch of the University of Melbourne, of which there were several people who .... And we automatically took them into, or they took us into their circles of academic and social.

          Talking about the Canberra University College, how large was that at the time?

Well, I really couldn't say now just how many teachers they had on ...

          No, in a sense psychologically as this is the core of the ...

Well, it was a pretty small operation. I was only conscious of the existence there of people in Law, in English and in History, and there weren't a great many of them. But their lawyer for example, John Fleming, became a very eminent Australian law teacher.

Indeed he wrote the standard book on one very important branch of Australian law, the law of torts, and ultimately went off to a senior professorship at Berkeley and, indeed, is still there at Berkeley, retired now for some years but the way in which the Americans do this, having part-time jobs and so forth. So that John Fleming and myself immediately established a close camaraderie and I was very sorry when ultimately he decided to go to America.

          I mean, there are some very famous names, of course, associated with the College, but initially was there an element of prejudice, social prejudice, academic prejudice against the College?

I wasn't even faintly conscious of anything as far as any activity in which I was concerned might have effected this. As I've remarked, Alec Hope, who was the Senior Lecturer in English, he'd taught me English at Melbourne University before he went to Canberra. And he and his wife and kids, and me and my wife and kids we were intimate, close friends. And I can't remember now at all closely who else there was besides Alec and John Fleming who I knew well personally.

But there were certainly others concerned in history and geography and things like that and, as I've said, I don't think that one can talk in terms of any kind of organisational link between the two bodies at that time.

          Didn't you teach there initially?

No, oh no, no. We had nothing .... The people who were appointed to the ANU had nothing whatever to do with the activities of the College.

          You weren't allowed to? Or discouraged? Or ...?

Well, it just wasn't a part of the organisational set up. We didn't have positions in the College and the people in the College didn't have positions with us. They were an existing organisation that had been brought into existence with something of an aim on enabling civil servants to carry on with their education or to take higher degrees and things like that, a rather specialised reason, and it was only gradually that the College blossomed into a more considerable undergraduate type of university.

And of course eventually in 1960, '61, or something like that, Menzies decided to merge the two institutions, against the will of a majority in both institutions, not a large majority. It was a very, very close run thing as far as the opinions of the staff were concerned.

I, myself, was strongly in favour of the merger because I suppose I had such a knowledge of, acquaintance with, and respect for the senior blokes in the College with whom I'd dealt and who were my friends, that I saw no difficulty whatever in simply treating this as the undergraduate part of the total Australian National University.

          Before Menzies came in and made that decision, there'd been discussions on and off about merger hadn't there?

Oh yes, oh yes, it wasn't a sudden decision. Menzies was not a man who ever made sudden decisions. He had been prodding away at it for nearly a year before it finally took place.

          But hadn't there been discussions early in the                     '50s?

I was never, myself, a party to any such discussions. I wasn't aware of any very definite move to bring this about until very shortly before it in fact happened. So that ...

          Sir Leslie Melville made the comment to me that he in public and in discussions represented the ANU view of being opposed to it, but in private was in favour of it. And so I was wondering, you presumably weren't feeling sort of bound or limited in any way by your role, you were publicly in favour of it?

Oh yes, yes, certainly. Oh yes, we discussed it in general meetings from departmental level right up to Council level; it kept coming up. But how long that lasted, how long that procedure lasted, that I can't remember at all. When it did happen it struck me as happening rather suddenly, more or less out of the blue.

          This was the result of the Murray Report, was it not?

Yes, yes.

          The sorts of opposition to it. What were the main features that you remember of the arguments against amalgamation?

The chief one, I think, was a fear that the vision of the ANU as a wholly research oriented university institution and claiming to be working towards, if not immediately achieving, the sort of reputation which, for example, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in New Jersey, that famous place where Einstein finished his life, and such like places, and comparable institutions in England and in Germany particularly that this would inevitably be downgraded to some extent if the university took over the responsibility for undergraduate courses and matters of that sort.

There were even more immediately practical objections, such as that inevitably you would get demands from this, at that time still not very highly developed institution, the College, for more money to be spent on it. And once it was thought of as a single institution the government and the treasurer would inevitably think of the whole of this, and would see to it that the research institutes, which had by that time had been pretty well equipped with their new buildings and all the rest of it, for example, us social scientists had had the Coombs Building built for us and no longer had to put up with the labour ward at the old hospital, but the result would be something of a freezing of institute funds in order to make money available to expand and diversify and get better library equipment and all of this sort of thing for the Canberra University College.

I think that that practical sort of consideration was the most important amongst my social science colleagues who were against it.

          There was quite a bit of discussion about the benefit or non-benefit of teaching, for people involved in research. I mean, some people .... I've got a feeling of Eggleston in my mind being quoted as saying that teaching helps people define what they're doing. Other people felt that it was a major distraction.

Yes, this is true, there were considerable differences of opinion on matters of that sort. Though I should say that generally speaking the social scientists, and I'm now speaking of the social scientists in the narrower sense, that is in the Research School of Social Sciences, I can't speak for the Pacific Studies people.

But as far as the Research School of Social Sciences was concerned, I think that we had a majority, a fairly considerable majority favouring the merger and that one of the reasons why we had that feeling was that because we felt that there was a ...

          Hancock was a bit doubtful about it, wasn't he?

Not to my knowledge, not to my knowledge, he certainly never expressed any doubts about it to me, and that may have been simply because of his position as Director, that he felt that he had to maintain a fairly objective view of matters and not to be seen to be actively propaganding one side or the other. I don't know what his personal view was at all.

But amongst a number of us, this is in the social scientists, I felt that there was a sort of reservoir of teaching talent amongst us and that it was in the nature of the social sciences as distinct from the physical sciences and the medical sciences and so forth that the same people [interruption].

It was in the nature of the social sciences that a considerable number of the professors and lecturers and fellows had no difficulty, which natural scientists often do have, in combining research work with teaching, but on the contrary they rather value the opportunity for expounding the more general and, in a sense, simpler levels of study in matters of this sort.

And of course it was a simple fact that a number of us had in fact occupied teaching positions in state universities, probably a majority of the professors by this time, and several of us had reputations, taken from our days in those universities which were big institutions in which standards were very high and so forth, as being particularly good teachers. And if I may say so, I myself had that reputation. I was supposed to be able to, you know, charm the most backward collection of backwoodsmen and introduce them to the general notions of law and enquire whether Justinian was justified in his very vainglorious claim for law as being the best of all the sciences.

So that it came certainly much easier to social scientists in general I think to contemplate life in a place that included an undergraduate wing.

And when we reproached our natural science chaps who we knew were opposed to it with ignoring such propositions as: that after all Cambridge, where the atom had been split and all the rest of it, had a very large undergraduate population and that its most famous philosophers and physicists and so forth made no bones about giving an occasional lecture to the undergraduates, some of whom were of the most appalling standard; look at Clive James, for example [laughs]. Yes, so that I would say that generally the opposition to the merger was less among the social scientists.

          Menzies, in a sense, forced it on the university.

Oh yes, he did, there's no question about that. Indeed, Bunting told me afterwards, Sir John Bunting as he became, that Menzies had had .... This thing had been hanging around and finally, and this was the way in which he decided many things, he demanded that a paper outlining all the arguments for and against shortly should be prepared and delivered to him on a Friday and he'd take it home and read it on the weekend. And he read it on the weekend and came back on the Monday morning and said, 'It's on, they're going to be married'.

END TAPE 1, 2ND INTERVIEW SIDE B

 

BEGIN TAPE 2, 2ND INTERVIEW, SIDE A

          Identification: This is the second tape of the second interview with Professor Geoffrey Sawer. This is side 1. End of identification.

          Yes, just continuing on the theme of Menzies. You were saying before that you had quite a bit of contact with him during the '50s.

Yes, and '60s too. Every time there was a gathering in Canberra, and these happened at irregular intervals, of lawyers for one reason and another, Menzies would have either a lunch or a dinner for them and every time that happened he invited me to it. And of course, while Ken Bailey was the Solicitor-General he, too, was a personal friend and, indeed, had been my boss in earlier days at the University of Melbourne and he similarly used to invite me to shows of one kind or another, at which very often Menzies ....

Of course, Menzies didn't seem to us to be permanent [laughs], and on social occasions like that he was an excellent host and used to tell a very good story. I can't say that I ever had any conversations with him that went to the root of the epistemological problem or anything of that sort. It was a pretty social, casual sort of friendship.

It had been added to by the fact that I had coached his son, Frank, when I'd been in Melbourne, and got him through a couple of subjects in the law course, but Frank eventually gave it away and became an estate agent I think, or something like that. Yes, so I had these sort of contacts with him and I knew Frank's sister, Heather Menzies, too.

          Did you discuss the ANU with him?

I don't think so, no. We tended to continue what had been an entirely legal friendship. We told each other stories bearing on legal matters, and of course, he had a marvellous fund of stories that were relevant to the history and character of high court judges and supreme court judges and whatnot.

          I suppose there's quite a strong pressure not to talk shop, not to talk about your mutual sort of work interests when you're dealing with someone like a prime minister who doesn't want to talk shop all the time.

Yes, exactly. This is quite true, that Menzies much preferred something more of the men's club kind of atmosphere on the occasions when I was hobnobbing with him and he tended to hold the floor and he did it, too, so amusingly and to such good effect.

          What about other politicians? Did you have discussions with other politicians that were relevant to the ANU at all?

I don't think so. The few other political contacts that I had were of a rather different sort. Billy Kent Hughes, for example, was a person that I'd got to know through a Victorian connection, a relative of his who became a friend of ours, and my only discussions with him were from time to time ....

He was engaged in writing a memoir or a personal life, observation of men and events and so forth, and he had a good deal of trouble with this because he found in case after case that his recollections of things weren't quite right. The difficulty that I now suffer from. And so from time to time he asked me to read a passage in something that he'd written, and so sometimes it was quite okay, he'd had it right, in other cases I thought that he may not have got it quite right and told him where he might go and look this up. I don't know what ultimately happened about that. Did Kent Hughes publish a personal life?

          I haven't read it.

No, I've never come across it either. I have an uneasy feeling that he eventually gave up because he found in so many instances that he hadn't - although the substance of the matter was okay, but when it came to writing it in a way which would be acceptable to a fussy sort of historian: now, would Laurie Fitzhardinge approve of this sort of test? Then he gave it away.

          Perhaps he should have, if you found that many errors in it. And through this period, contact with Evatt, did that continue?

Oh yes, yes, I continued to have contact with Evatt until shortly before that disastrous episode of his appearing before the Petrov Commission. We'd been on very friendly terms in earlier years and, indeed, I regard him almost as a father figure in my earliest days, both as a law student, because it was in 1931 that I was first introduced to him by Guido Baracchi who is now dead, and every time when Evatt was on the high court bench, every time he and Mary Alice came to Melbourne they used to have me over partying with them and I often had lunch with him in his chambers and gossiped about cases in which he was concerned.

So that when I came to live in Canberra, and of course I'd in a sense had worked for Evatt as running the shortwave division through the later war years because the Department of External Affairs had to give us our general policy for that purpose. And then when I came to Canberra and he was there, now as Leader of the Opposition, again we met at various parties; sometimes these parties of Menzies for example. And we were, generally speaking, on friendly terms, and I admired the man in many ways.

But from the time that he started the bust up in the Labor Party, from the time when he suddenly shifted his general approach to political affairs from a fairly conservative Labor point of view which he certainly had in ...

          [Inaudible].

That's right. Which he certainly had in the late '40s. I remember very vividly a talk that I had to him in the late '40s shortly after the Chifley government had taken that very tough line with the striking coalminers. And Bert went on with me about what terrible bastards the communists were and how much trouble they'd been caused in all sorts of ways and would continue to do so, and that they had no choice but to stand up to them and so forth. Then when he suddenly switched from that to the anti-grouper sort of policy ....

          The defence of, or appearing for the Waterside Workers against the - I forget the name of the bill˙...

The Anti-Communist Bill.

          The Anti-Communist Bill, that hadn't been part of this switch left, that had been for other reasons?

I don't think so. That had been for other reasons. No, he really was deeply committed on that matter and I respected him for it and entirely agreed with the view that he took on civil liberties grounds; this was not the way to do it. And so I had no difference of opinion with him whatever over that.

But then when he started that business of deciding that the Roman Catholic element in the party was determined to remove him and regarded him as dangerous and so forth, that it seemed to me that this was bound to cause such a division within the Labor Party that it would keep them out of government for a long time, and in point of fact it did of course. And from that time onwards our relations were quite cool.

There was a specific element in this. Bert amongst other things, when he was still rather in favour of the groups and their work, especially in the trade unions, told me that it would be a good idea to join the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and to get Quadrant which I proceeded to do. And while being far from going all the way with the Congress for Cultural Freedom people, I did feel a certain sympathy for their view, and of course, history has turned out to justify all this. And then when Bert suddenly turned against that too, he sent a message to me and said, 'I hope that you are going to resign from the Congress for Cultural Freedom'.

Well, I was just personally affronted by that. I didn't feel any very strong feelings as to whether or not I should belong to the bloody Congress for Cultural Freedom but I wasn't going to be told by Bert Evatt what to do about it, especially since this was so contrary to his initial praise for the organisation.

So from then onwards, when of course, it wasn't very long after that that he started to disintegrate altogether, and ultimately, of course, very tragically died after that terrible business of their appointing him Chief Justice of New South Wales; a job which he was totally incapable of performing.

          Did you detect, this is getting away from the ANU a bit, but, when did you feel that that mental instability that became so manifest, when did you first begin to feel that that was around?

There is great danger in matters like this in looking back in probably trying to read things that weren't there at the time. I'd heard things about Evatt, about his bad tempers and his sudden swings of opinion on matters of this and that sort, through the late 1940s, mainly because of a personal friendship with Sam Atyeo who in a very odd sort of a way was a combined dogsbody and friend and carrier of luggage and all of this sort of business for the Evatts.

You know about Sam Atyeo, you've heard of him and his place in these affairs? I think he died only quite recently in France where he'd settled down. He was an engaging character, quite a good artist, he was, and of course, it was Mary Alice who picked him up in the first place because she too was quite a competent artist. Sam was better than she was. And Sam also was a witty bloke and he had the capacity for judging what Bert's mood was and getting on with him.

But in odd conversations that I had with Sam Atyeo I certainly got the impression that right through the period of the maximum strain on the Chifley government over the bank nationalisation and so forth that Bert was getting more and more testy and difficult to deal with. I must say that I didn't personally have any difficulties of this sort in connection with the sort of work that I did for him: devilling for the bank case and so forth.

In fact I have a memory of an occasion in London when Bert might have been expected to fly into one of his tantrums. It was just before Easter when the Privy Council appeal was in its course and Bert gathered us all together and started to tell us the sort of homework he was expecting us to do over the Easter break. So I said, 'Well, as a matter of fact, Bert, I've arranged to go to Canterbury and to visit the cathedral over two days', of this four-day break it was, 'so that I would very much dislike giving that up now'. And there was a shocked silence for a few minutes and everybody expected Bert to blow up. Instead of blowing up he proceeded to recite the opening of The Canterbury Tales, 'When that Aprill with his shoures soote, the droghte of March hath perced to the roote' [version, edited by Daniel Cook] et cetera, a tremendous piece of memory on his part, it was probably as much as thirty or forty years before this, since he'd had occasion to read The Canterbury Tales.

But that was an example, you see, that the good side of Bert coming uppermost when one might have expected a blow up. But during the hearing of the bank case he was quite difficult.

          Through this period, what sort of involvement from what you could observe, not just from what you were talking about in direct contact, was there bipartisan support for the ANU through this early '50s period, 'cause there's a suggestion that Menzies got a little bit impatient with the ANU in the '50s.

Well, for all I know he may have disliked some aspects of it, or perhaps was disappointed at the slowness with getting the sort of people they wanted and what not, but my contacts with him certainly suggested that he was strongly in favour of the general proposal and that if we had got our four great men as originally planned, I don't think we would have had a single word of criticism or of opposition from him.

          This is Menzies?

Menzies, that's right. There may well have been other politicians in the Liberal Party who were more sceptical about the whole thing. There were certainly states people who were, not so much sceptical about it, as simply opposed to it because they thought that the government would be better advised to spend its money on increasing the post-graduate possibilities and research facilities and so forth in the existing state universities, and that it was a maniacal thing to do to try to set up a first-rate institution of this sort starting from scratch in this godforsaken place, Canberra.

So that one could well understand there being a very considerable ground swell of state rightish, stop, opposition generally to the proposal, and in particular opposition amongst Liberals because it was a Labor Party proposal and there were all sorts of views, so theories floated around to the effect that they just wanted to bring up a breed of academics who would support them.

But I wasn't, myself, conscious of any specific opposition of this sort at the University of Melbourne. On the contrary, the various ...

          The university of ...?

Melbourne, where I was, you see, at this time. Many of the leading professors and coming characters like myself there were in favour of the general notion of it, and we certainly weren't disposed to quarrel too much with the Chifley government as to the exact form that it took.

          You wouldn't say that Melbourne was stronger in its support in the early days of the ANU than Sydney?

I should think it probably was a bit stronger. I think that Sydney was a bit more conscious than we were, and justifiably so, of the element of competition that there might well be between the Sydney University, the oldest and the biggest Australian university, and this university in Canberra which, after all, insofar as it was close to anybody was close to Sydney.

Certainly Melbourne's more abstract sort of approach to it could be understood in the circumstances. Nevertheless, as far as individuals were concerned, Julius Stone was certainly very strongly in favour of the Australian National University proposal, and supported it and assisted it in various ways.

          Just coming back to the politicians. You were just saying that you felt that there was bipartisan support. How about budgets? Were you conscious of any sort of budgetary limitations? For example, you mentioned buildings, there's also the business of positions, were there delays in getting positions set up and financed?

No, not in getting finance. The difficulties that we had, the initial difficulties that we had were all in terms of trying to get people to accept the jobs. The money was there all right, there was no problem about the money, at any rate, in the first five or six years of the university. And when difficulties did arise with money they certainly weren't at the level of staffing problems.

I don't recollect any case in which a department failed to get the sort of level of funding which it had originally contemplated and at the speed at which it had originally envisaged. The difficulties didn't lie there at all, the difficulties lay almost entirely in the peculiar capital equipment problems of the School of Physics; that was the bottomless pit into which so much money had to be poured because of the heavy engineering style of the thing that Oliphant in particular was concerned with.

Titterton, of course, too, was quite an expensive gent but in his case because he was a very much better economist and money manager than Mark Oliphant was, his predictions as to what he would want turned out to be right, and the thing was put up - the great Philips tower, with its sort of atom smashing was put up very quickly and within budget. But Mark's heavy engineering proposal sort of things, enormous flywheel with sodium jet making contact with it, that was in all sorts of troubles as to the building in which it had to be put and getting the thing itself moulded.

And then in the finish, of course, that dreadful business of the stuff flying off it and blinding a new Australian lab assistant. So that I think that as far as adding on a research assistant or a senior fellow or whatever it might be, in due course of development of a department, we had surprisingly few budget difficulties with the government.

          Talking about recruitment and the general conduct of the university, this period, the early '50s, is a notorious period politically, now how did that have an impact from your perception on life at the ANU?

I don't think it had any impact at all. This was largely because of the bipartisan support for the notion of the institution as a whole, and partly because, at that stage of the game, apart from these difficulties with the Phsyics School, and it was only that school which had such difficulties, the program which we proceeded to follow, first under Copland and then under Melville, was itself taken on in a quite conscious feeling and policy of restraint, but not going grossly beyond any of the kind of financial anticipations.

          I wasn't thinking so much of the financial interaction and the politics related to it, I was thinking of left-wing politics.

Oh yes, that was another matter. Of course, there were these flips and blips caused by the activities of particular individuals, but I think that was a bit later on, wasn't it? The worst of those problems arose out of our participation in Vietnam.

          Well, certainly, and we want to talk about that.

Yes.

          But I'm just thinking of, well, at one stage Menzies apparently said to Oliphant about the appointment of one of his people who'd been a member of the CP and things like that ....

That was a laboratory technician of some sort, wasn't it? Yes, it wasn't an academic appointment. It was a technical appointment.

          You weren't conscious of a general atmosphere of political repression, interfering with serious intellectual discussion?

No, none at all, none at all. It was the case certainly that there were a few individuals, such as Jim Davidson, who was probably the most senior bloke involved in any such thing, whose general ideology was certainly a bit further to the left than most of us, but a considerable number of us were a bit to the left, and a considerable number of us were a bit to the right.

And on the whole these sort of considerations hardly arose, nor was there much occasion, remotely comparable to the Vietnam affair, to engage the attention of such people. Now, a typical thing with Jim Davidson, you see: he was a bachelor and in his private life a bit of a tearaway, and he got himself a lodging because he didn't want to have a flat of his own to have to look after and what not with the place called Gungahlin where diplomatic cadets were put up during their training period.

And there was a chap who was the - I think, had been an academic or he might even have been a part-time academic still - any rate, he was in charge of this place and he was a very conservative, old-fashioned kind of a bloke who ran the Union Jack up, or the Australian flag up the mast in the morning and lowered it again at night and things like that. And Jim proceeded to influence the cadets along lines in opposition to the sort of stance that this, the master or whatever he was called, of the place took.

And this reached its extreme expression when during the night someone cut down the mast on which the flag was raised. There was a hell of a row about this and ...

          Jim Davidson was suggested ...

Oh, he confessed that, yes, he had in fact been concerned with this, that's right, so he was duly tossed out of residing at that place. There were a couple of little things like this in my period there, and Jim was not by any means the only bloke who was so involved; there were a couple of others, too.

There was a student of Trevor Swan, the economist, whose name I forget now, who turned out a tragic case, he became a hopeless alcoholic, but he was a very bright student, very good indeed, but he too, was a very left-wing bloke. He may well have been a member of the Communist Party for all I know. I can't think of anybody else who could conceivably have been a member of the Communist Party at this time, but there certainly were numerous people, including myself, who were on the whole, Labor Party supporters rather than Liberal Party supporters.

          Talking of politics, just continuing to for a moment, and now on a more legal matter - something like the very interesting constitutional developments surrounding the election of 1951 where Menzies got very interesting advice from Barwick. Now, were you involved in that at all?

Now, what? I can't for the minute place what you're talking about?

          I was talking about the double dissolution that occurred and Menzies requesting advice from Barwick with regard to the powers of the Governor-General, and I don't know to what degree this was a public discussion or whether it was just between the two of them, or˙...?

I don't recall anything of this sort at all. As far as I know the series of political steps that happened through the early 1950s were all of them perfectly within obvious powers of dissolution and all the rest. It wasn't remotely like what happened between Whitlam and the Governor-General. Nothing remotely like that happened during that period at all.

          No, sorry, I'm not meaning to suggest that it did. It's just that there was around that, there was constitutional discussions and I was just wondering whether you were brought into them in any way at all, or ...?

No, no, I wasn't, no. There were odd jobs that I did for Ken Bailey but they were all of a highly technical character and they had nothing, no political implications in them at all.

          Just going back a little bit - we've been jumping right through this '50s period - but going back to the way the School worked. You arrived as a Professor of Law ...

Yes.

          Then fairly soon after that you became Dean. Could you describe the circumstances?

Yes, the circumstances of that were quite simple. I think that by that time there were five heads of departments, four of them professors and one, Laurie Fitzhardinge, a reader; we had missed out on Hancock and hadn't yet got the chap I mentioned before, who wrote the history of the constitution and so forth, John La Nauze, this is before John La Nauze arrived and Laurie Fitzhardinge was the senior historian.

And these, the five of us got together and it now being definite that Hancock was not going to come and there was no way in which he could be persuaded to come, and both of the social science schools were then starting to think, 'Well, what are we going to do instead? What kind of alternative arrangement might we have?'

          Because the RSPacS was also at this stage, they'd lost their potential director?

They'd lost their potential director, Firth, that's right, so they were in the same difficulties. Any rate we didn't pursue joint consultations. To begin with each school mapped its own path and it was only later on that we came to sharing sorts of agreements on all sorts of things.

But at this stage here were the five of us sitting around, scratching our heads and wondering what to do, and finally - I was the youngest of those present, all the rest of them were older blokes than me - their beady eyes all fastened on me and so: 'How about this spare part lawyer? Supposing we have him as a sort of chairman?' Somebody piped up and said, 'Or Dean' [laughs]. So I said, 'Well, okay, righto'. I knew by ....

          The word Dean hadn't come out of the Cice-Chancellor's office?

Not to my knowledge, no, it came out of this group of people. So, that's right.

          What's the significance of, I can guess but I'm asking you to spell it out, the significance of going for, 'No, let's not have chairman, let's have Dean' as opposed to, well, Director?

Director, that's right, yes. I would say there's no doubt about it, that this was to some extent due to a feeling of resistance to the notion of a Director, that ...

          Even Hancock as Director?

Even Hancock, well, yes, and with some of our people certainly, even Hancock as a Director, though they certainly would have accepted him because they'd have been so glad to have him as a man, and what the Council chose to call him for purposes of organisation and so forth was of minor importance.

Of course, this wouldn't have been so with other possible appointees, there might well have been objections to calling them Directors. Any rate, that's how it happened. I already knew that I was going to have difficulty building up a staff at all quickly. It had just been illustrated by the circumstances in which I was appointed as a professor when there were at least three people in Australia much senior to me in terms of general experience and knowledge of research work in the law, eminent academics and known overseas and so forth, such as George Paton in Melbourne, the chap in Perth, Beasley, Frank Beasley in Perth, and of course Julius Stone in Sydney.

END OF TAPE 2, 2ND INTERVIEW, SIDE A

BEGIN TAPE 2, 2ND INTERVIEW, SIDE B

          Identification: This is side 2, 2nd tape of the 2nd interview, Professor Geoffrey Sawer. End of identification.

At that stage when they said, 'Okay, you be Dean and be chairman of our meetings and so forth', I think this was partly because already we'd got on pretty friendly terms and they were aware of the fact that I was having more difficulty than they were having in recruiting anybody at all to come to Canberra of respectable academic credentials and so forth.

Because the short answer of all of the eminent lawyers with whom I got in touch, and then I went round all of the state universities making enquiries was quite simple: they were in places where there was a huge, very active legal profession with courts and so forth, churning out the law; they were all of them, whatever theoretical interests they might have, convinced that your theory must be tied in in some way with the way in which the law works. How ...?

          The law is so state based in so many areas.

Yes, yes, exactly, it's state based and the High Court never sat in Canberra, even the Federal High Court only sat in the state capitals, it wandered around from one capital to another, most of the time in Melbourne and Sydney. So that the practical difficulties of getting good appointees from Australia at any rate were so great and the chances of getting first-rate people from ....

We were even reluctant to try to get people at that stage from either England or America because of an uneasy feeling that we couldn't hope to get anybody but second-raters. Otherwise, for even more pressing reasons, who was going to remove themselves from the glow of the House of Lords, the Court of Appeal and Lord Denning and all that kind of thing, or from the United States with the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren revolutionising the constitution and so forth, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and all of that jazz. Yes, it really was ....

It was not a terribly good lookout in any of the branches of the social sciences at that time, but for law it was more difficult than any of them so I was therefore expecting that it would take me another couple of years at any rate to accumulate a staff of any sort, and it was therefore perfectly logical that I ...

          But you had your own research work, didn't you?

Oh yes, indeed, I had my own research work and I immediately plunged into it and was making very satisfactory progress with it. But it was research work which did not require any technical assistance. It was wholly personal sort of stuff which, of course, is characteristic of legal research in general. Most of it is fairly individual in its nature and the way it's carried on. So that's how I came to be Dean.

          And you mentioned that you were the youngest.

Yes, I was the youngest there present.

          Why do you think that was a factor?

Because it was, you know, the sort of general attitude of here's this bright young chap, it'll be no trouble to him to take this on in addition to his, whatever departmental ...

          The suggestion that as the youngest, you'd have less authority over them.

Maybe, yes, maybe, maybe, that I'd be less willing to throw my weight around, yes.

          Just going back to your comments about Hancock. Now Hancock, I think, made it fairly clear that, while he was a very strong personality and valued excellence supremely, he also felt opposed to the idea of a Director establishing, I think this is fair to say, strong directions about what other people should do.

I quite agree. You're quite right about that. The position of the social sciences, once again in matters of this sort are so different from those, especially the physical sciences, even from the medical sciences, because you take a bloke like Florey for example, if he becomes the chief chap in a concatenation of medical researchers inevitably they'll pretty well all get turned into the sort of lines that he wants to follow. And it's even more so in physics.

We saw this at once ourselves because of the two different lines which Oliphant and Titterton pursued in their two different spheres, with relatively little interactio between them.

          Was there not some sort of suggestion that perhaps when they set that structure up at the very beginning and appointed a Director that perhaps the outside people who were setting up the ANU did think of the Director as a person who would give fairly - would direct.

Indeed.

          It was fighting the original intentions though.

Yes, that's true. I think that perhaps that's not quite fair on the founders to put it as simply as that. The point was that the people who they wanted to get were of such eminence, had such an already established record in their particular field that nobody would want to do anything excepting come and work for, and along with those people. It was thought in terms of a research centred activity with the picture taken especially from the natural sciences, and in particular from physics and from medicine, in both of which cases, even in the state universities in Australia we have seen as in the case of Panzee Wright in Melbourne, this tendency of an outstandingly effective and successful research scientist automatically building up around him a series of colleagues and so forth who, whatever other odd jobs they might have, were tied into his set of researchers.

And there was the further factor, of course, that in any event in order to attract such very eminent people at all, the founders assumed that you would have to offer to them an outstandingly effective control of the whole of the activities of their particular school.

It may well be that they were mistaken, at least in the case of Oliphant, that he was the sort of bloke who on the whole didn't want to establish so important an individual position, but certainly the expectations in Canberra that such a bloke would.

          Just talking about Hancock for the moment there, the fact that he didn't come and you've talked about how so many people didn't come, is there a feeling of getting underway with a rather depleted force?

Oh yes, there's no question about that. This sort of feeling grew on us fairly slowly, I think, because individually all of us had some conceit of ourselves, some record in our past, and were very happy to settle down there and continue more or less the lines of work on which we had been operating. It was certainly so in my case and in Laurie Fitzhardinge's case.

And it was only by gradual stages that we came to be aware of the fact that in a sense we were differently situated from either the medicos or the physics people, even although the medical people hadn't been able to attract Florey permanently. Florey was a frequent visitor, he took a very active part in the shaping and pursuit of the John Curtin School's program, and almost personally architected the building, the special building that was put up for them.

I remember talking to him on various occasions from which it was obvious that he was still uncertain in his mind as to whether he'd come and settle down or not. It wasn't until years afterwards that I found out that probably the thing which finally decided his mind on these questions was his having a row with his first wife and proceeding to marry the girl who had been his secretary, which seems to be par for the course for quite a number of people of his sort.

It happened later on to our other prize medico, a chap who had been a Roman Catholic and had a large family. You know the chap I mean who eventually went off to America who got the Nobel Prize.

          Eccles?

Eccles. That's right, Eccles, Eccles. He was another case of a scientist who fell out with his wife late in the marriage and went off with his secretary.

          That was a key part in leaving town?

Yes, quite, yes, that's right, exactly. Yes, so the decision of these people ...

          So how did the ...? In some ways in Florey's case you might say that the change would make it easier to go to a new town. How did that actually come together into making it quite clear that he wouldn't come to Canberra?

Because his second wife wouldn't dream of leaving England.

          He told you that?

No, he never told me that. This is what I picked up as gossip. Certainly this is what actually occurred at the time, this break up of his marriage and then this business, and it was certainly after that that he finally cut the painter and just took no further part in matters at all.

But unlike the two, unlike Hancock and Firth he actively concerned himself with the running of the John Curtin School until its business was completed and it had a pretty complete set of professors in the various branches of the medical research profession that had been planned and it was all set to go. So that if he went off they could choose a new Director amongst themselves or get another bloke for a Director if they so pleased.

Whereas nothing like that, of course, happened with the social science lot. We had much greater difficulty than the medical school did.

          So are you suggesting that a feeling grew that philosophically there was a lack of a binding factor?

Yes, that's right, yes. Maybe it was chimerical to think that operating mainly against an English rather than an American background, you could ever get going in Australia a social science school with its various special subjects under a towering figure; towering to the extent that Florey towered in medicine and Oliphant towered in physics.

But the notion of the Director was itself, I think, substantially the product of the non-social scientists who were concerned with the initial planning of the institution. They didn't realise, or they didn't take sufficient notice of the fact that it's much more difficult in the social sciences to hold people together in pursuit of a more or less common set of inter-related subjects that lead to a ultimate goal: finding out everything about the atom, and things of that sort.

          How did people talk about, you said this feeling grew, how did people talk about it?

Oh, it came up from time to time because from time to time somebody would raise the question, 'Well, is anything being done about getting someone else as a Director? And who conceivably could we get and what kind of man or woman should we look for?' Not much mention of women at this time.

And we had, of course, right through those years because of Florey's active participation in the John Curtin School, we had this picture, perhaps a rather romantic picture, of the medicos and the physics blokes having pursued the pattern of the founders and in their case it seemed to be working moderately well, notwithstanding Oliphant's difficulties with his machine.

          How were you thinking of your role as Dean?

Oh, very much as I would have thought of my role in a state university in being Dean of a faculty which was in those days usually a job that was associated with a chair and a particular bloke remained Dean for a long time, but was never thought of as anything more than the chairman of a divergent group of people whose only common interest really was in fighting out budget questions and keeping an eye on each other's standards, and the appointments of junior staff and matters of that kind.

          Through this '50s period that you were the Dean, what were the major things that actually you had to arbitrate as chairman, that you had to deal with?

I very much doubt whether in the time that I was Dean there were any difficulties of the sort that I knew did occur in the Research School of Social Sciences at a slightly later date because we did acquire through that period people in whom we had a reasonable degree of confidence in all of the major disciplines.

There was me in law and Trevor Swan in economics, and with his research fellow Noel Butlin who went on to become in effect to branch off from pure economics into economic history, and Laurie Fitzhardinge who was some ways less satisfactory because he was a rather lazy sort of a bloke and it seemed to take him year after year to write his life of Billy Hughes, but he'd attracted some research fellows and so forth.

And the filling up of these spaces and then their getting quite good quality research fellows from state universities mainly, but to some extent from overseas, too. Laurie, for example, attracted some good Americans in what was for Australia a pretty new subject: demography, as an individual separate subject. So that we didn't for example have a single episode similar to the difficulties that the Pacific people had because of ...

          Lord Lindsay?

Yes, that's right, that's right. We had nothing remotely like the Lord Lindsay business. And we didn't either, have the other sorts of occasions on which Jim Davidson got himself into minor trouble because of left-wing views on some current government policy.

          What about the balance between tenured and untenured positions, short term fellowships, and all those sorts of questions? How were they being discussed in the '50s?

Well, the general feeling was that we should try to get along satisfactorily and maintain continuous research programs on a basis of non-tenured as far as possible. Tenured positions you needed to be very careful about making them, to be sure that you really got a bloke who was very good and who you particularly wanted to get and there was no hope of getting him excepting for a tenured position.

So that, for example, we took it for granted that when we approached Lester Webb who had been a very eminent academic and ....

          In charge of the War Crimes Commission?

No, no, no, no, that's a lawyer. No Lester Webb is a New Zealand political scientist who had been at Oxford and then had gone back to New Zealand and through the war had been the Director of Rationing and all of that sort of business; the chief bureaucrat on the civil side of the war effort.

And so he had had an ideal combination of very good theoretical background in politics in New Zealand and at Oxford and then this marvellous experience of what it was like to run a series of government departments under wartime conditions. So that we took it for granted that we wouldn't get him for anything less than a readership. And so we appointed him as a reader and then very shortly afterwards, when we'd got to know the man and so forth, promoted him to being a professor. And of course he tragically got himself and his wife killed in a motor car accident in Tasmania. Yep.

So that we certainly didn't, I think, ever make the sort of mistake that was really made by the founders when they gave Laurie Fitzhardinge a tenured position. He was an angelic bloke in all sorts of ways and his combination of classical scholarship with historical scholarship was quite unusual in Australia, certainly unusual in Canberra, but he just didn't have the kind of drive which the job needed. And we all heaved great sighs of relief when Hancock finally came, not so much because of his becoming as Director but because of his becoming as Professor of History and putting the department on track.

          How did the Hancock candidature arise again after it had suddenly - it had faded for so many years?

It had indeed, that's right. I think, myself, that - I've never known quite what were the set of arrangements under which that was decided because through the period when it was being handled I was considerable personal difficulties because my wife had a cerebral haemorrhage and was partly paralysed. Oh God, it was, you know ....

We had to remake our lives around this terrible fact. So that I was by this time had ceased to be Dean; my term of office of five years, I think it was, as Dean had come to a natural end.

          You'd been appointed for, not an indefinite acting, but for a finite period?

No, that's right, yes. I think it was three years to begin with and then they extended it. And I decided that I had to give this up in any event because of my domestic circumstances which also cast a considerable financial burden on me. Had to have nurses and housekeeper and things like this. Yes, so that my mind is a bit fuzzy as to exactly what and how it happened in relation to the appointment of Hancock.

All I can say is that I was extremely relieved and very glad indeed, to have him.

          You were continuing to act until he came?

Yes, I was, yes, yes.

          Just before we get onto the Hancock period. I'd just like to talk a little bit more about the early V-Cs, your relationship .... I mean the relationship between the two offices and also the personalities involved?

Yes, well, Copland I had known on and off for many years and had no difficulty whatever in getting along with him quite well, and liked the man and thought that he was doing a reasonably good job. And of course, I wasn't intimately concerned with difficulties that had arisen between him and Oliphant which were largely financial in nature because Oliphant's exercise turned out to be more and more expensive as time went on because this, that and the other attempt at doing what he wanted to do failed and he had to start again.

          He obviously got a bit impatient with Hancock,  too.

Yes, that's right, he did, that's right, yep.

          Does that suggest he was a fairly tough  individual?

Yes, he was, mm. Yes, indeed. You're going back now to the initial appointments business, too. Well, in that case Copland had no option really because the government had made it so plain that this Pacific Studies thing must be separate and must have this concentration on Australia's interests in the Pacific and mark the coming of age of the Pacific as a region, deserving of its own handling and so forth.

And Hancock just refused to accept all that sort of business, so Copland really had no option but to say, 'Well, in that case we can't carry on with you'.

          Was there a suggestion, a certain degree of impatience with this sort of rather British gentleman going ...?

Yes, a bit shilly-shallying, yeah. I dare say there was. Copland was a masterful sort of a bloke. He'd been in positions through the war and in his job in China and so forth in which that was very much required, and indeed, went back to the days of his part in the Premiers Plan, the great depression, the handling of that. But I never found him anything but extremely pleasant and easy to get on with; listened to you, he was intelligent, he'd argue about it and so forth.

I never knew him to lose his temper or appear to be on terms of lacking anything but the closest friendship and help.

          Did he sometimes lose his temper with others?

He never did with me and I didn't see him do it in any milieu in which I was active or observing. I don't know why it was, whether perhaps I was easier to get on with than some of these other characters. I certainly had less of a vested interest.

My own particular interests were so easily attended to, even in Canberra. The National Library had an excellent law library and the Attorney-General's Department had an excellent law library. In each case not available to students but available to research workers, available to a limited number of people, so that there was nothing between me and doing precisely the sort of thing that I wanted. And I suppose I was therefore a particularly easy subject to handle.

          What sort of things would you have dealings about? I mean, obviously the budget, I mean the budget's the key thing. So what sort of interactions would you have had about the budget?

Well, our particular problem was very largely handled, very largely dealt with by the Registrar rather than by Copland directly. And once again this was because there was few of us and our ambitions weren't anything like as expensive as the ambitions of both the medicos and the physics people, so that the only kind of difficulties that we ever had were not getting people appointed at as fast a rate as Copland would have liked, simply because of the difficulties of attracting people to Canberra in our line of country.

          What about the building? Was that a subject that, presumably there was a lot of discussions about it, but was there something that was a controversial thing, or not?

Well, this matter, of course, was after Copland had gone. We were still in the old hospital at the time that Copland was with us. I remember well the occasion at which he announced to us that he ad decided to go because I think he had been still half-hoping that they would offer him a renewal of term and I certainly had nothing whatever to do with, was not present at any meetings of the Council at which these things were discussed.

So that it came as something of a shock to me when at this meeting in one of the bigger rooms of the old hospital at which he told us about this, that he had finally decided to go. And he looked around like this, and I think he was half expecting that someone would leap to their feet and say, 'No, no, don't go', you know, 'We want you'. Well, nobody did. I didn't for the simple reason that I felt far too junior and uninfluential and unimportant a person around at that stage to take any such line.

          I mean, why didn't they? Just thinking of the main people who might have been in a position to influence the situation, just going through, can you attach reasons?

I think that the main reason why he went was because Oliphant and Florey favoured his going because they thought that he wasn't sufficiently persona grata with the Menzies government to get the money that they needed to push on with their particular plans, and that nobody cared a stuff about whether or not he got on well with the social scientists.

We were of such minor importance in the relative scale of things, the financial scale of things, and I have no memory of there being any particular attitude on this matter in the social science schools.

          The role of the Vice-Chancellor is to get the money. If he doesn't get it, change him.

That's right, exactly, change it, that's right. Even if we wouldn't have actually advocated it, or put it in those terms, we certainly weren't inclined to oppose him. And also, of course, there was this specific problem of the Auditor-General being bothered by the Oliphant accounts and therefore a call for a Vice-Chancellor who was particularly good in a way in which Copland didn't claim to be good on what you might call the accountancy side of the university's activities.

And of course, Leslie Melville was superbly equipped with that. He'd been a whiz kid in accountancy mathematics. What's this very high level thing that the accountants have that only a very, very small number of them ever manage to qualify for, and which you have to be practically a world-class pure mathematician? And he was one of them.

          I remember him talking about problems that he had with Oliphant and his accounts.

Yes, indeed, and then he leaped into it straight away and he straightened out the accounts and [inaudible] gone passed and all the rest of it. And from then on put something of a lid on the, not the total amount over time, but the rate of expenditure in the Physics School in particular.

          What did you know about the appointment of Melville? I mean, did you know ...? His name had been mentioned as a possible Director of RSSS at the very beginning.

That's right, yes, it had, yes.

          Had he been on the edge of the academic scene?

Not to my knowledge, no.

          He'd been a professor in Adelaide.

Oh yes, yes.

          He'd been in the Commonwealth Bank.

Yes, that's right, he'd been in the Commonwealth Bank. No. I had no personal acquaintance with him before he became Vice-Chancellor and was simply accepting the word of, in particular, Nugget Coombs, who was very influential in matters of this sort that he would be a particularly good chap to have because he would certainly have the confidence of the Menzies government in the handling of these financial questions.

And since Oliphant had in effect resigned, is really what it amounted to, technically he'd resigned, he wasn't sacked in any way, he hadn't come quite to the end of his term of appointment, he just resigned because he was not going to be re-appointed. And there was now some urgency in getting a bloke who had these particular qualifications.

          So you mean Oliphant or Copland?

No. Copland had, in effect, resigned.

          Right.

Yep. And the word that we got from the personal friendship that so many of us had with Nugget Coombs, in particular, was that because of his position in the Commonwealth Bank and as an adviser to the Treasury, the word was that we really needed to get a chap who knew his way about those sorts of questions, and that Melville was the bloke. I had never heard of Melville before that, never had any contact with him at all. But I must say that I very soon ....

END OF TAPE 2, 2ND INTERVIEW, SIDE B

 

BEGIN TAPE 3, 2ND INTERVIEW, SIDE A

          Identifcation: This is the third tape of the second interview, side 1. The interview with Professor Sawer. End of identification.

          Actually be ore we go onto Coombs, let's talk a bit more about Melville. You were just saying that very soon after he was appointed ...

Yes. We became quite close friends because his wife was so helpful to me and my wife in her illness. And I found Melville the sort of chap that you could talk to. He was patient and careful and in some ways preferable to Copland, I could see in retrospect because I thought that he came to a particular decision on a matter with surprising speed and on thinking it over you usually saw that whatever his decision was on the matter in question, it was at any rate defensible, and often obviously the right way of going about it.

Copland, I thought, was a little bit more lacking in decisiveness in quite that same strain.

          Forceful but not decisive.

That's right, forceful but not decisive, exactly, that's right, yep. And knowing as we did that this financial problem was a serious one we were certainly inclined to rely very much on the advice of Nugget Coombs with whom all of us were intimately friendly.

And our own Professor Trevor Swan of course, had worked with Melville when Trevor was a member of the Commonwealth Bank or the Treasury, I forget which, or both. So that in effect Melville looked to us like a fellow social scientist because of the starting off with this university background of lecturing and so forth.

He understood the general teaching and research problems of the social sciences, in some ways better than Copland did, because Copland had got more early directly involved in governmental jobs of all sorts.

          This earlier period, there's a feeling of people being able to go between government and academia to a greater extent than later.

That's perfectly true, and that was partly because so many of the people in the then government had had some eminence in academia before they got to their particular positions. This was particularly so in Foreign Affairs and in the Treasury, but less so, of course, in the general public service where most of them started from the bottom and worked up.

But the top blokes at that time in those particular services did tend to be people who'd come in sideways, often from academics or sometimes from big business. And in any event were fairly well known faces and their record and the kind of decisions they were likely to take was widely known. So it wasn't surprising that a chap like Melville should ...

          Crawford was also ...

Yes, exactly. You see, Crawford was another example, and both of them were outstandingly successful in different ways but in ways that were particularly relevant and important at the time. Melville was on the whole not much liked by the scientists, the physical scientists and the medicos because of the fact that he had something of the figure of a dried up accountant who only thought in money terms.

And certainly Jack Crawford got on with the physical scientists better than Melville did. But this was partly the misfortune of the physical scientists, that one of their schools, namely the Physics School had had its accounts deferred [laughs]. It was just a fact of life. And somebody had to be got who was capable of sorting out why this had happened and where exactly changes had to be made which Melville proceeded to do very smartly.

          Did Melville get involved at all in, sort of, the intellectual direction of the university?

Certainly none, very little, in our line of country. He did take an interest in Trevor Swan and Trevor Swan's Department of Economics and from time to time turned up at seminars and things like that. But as far as I know he didn't embark upon any individual research activities of his own at the time. He was quite fully occupied with the vice-chancellorial job.

I can't even remember now what happened to him after he ceased to be vice-chancellor, do you know what direction he took thereafter? [Pause] That's the social science building.

          Yes. And talking of Melville what sort of dealings did you have with regard to the building. Was that an easy system? Buildings rarely seem to be that.

Yes. I think the answer to that is that as far as the Research School of Social Sciences was concerned, we had no problems whatever, because we didn't have the particular sorts of laboratory problems that certain branches of the Pacificos had, the ones who were physical geographers and needed to have machines which smashed up rocks or irradiated them, or got into their guts and found out what they were, and do the mapping kind of activities too.

The nearest approach to a technological problem which the social scientists had was the early beginnings of the dread spectre of the computers and their consequences. And even that was really of major concern only to the Department of Economics, and it was Noel Butlin who fortunately turned out to have quite a flair for that sort of thing, which certainly Trevor Swan didn't, that Noel became particularly important in what happened in order to provide for those facilities.

But even with them, of course, in those days the total amount of space that this added was relatively small and nobody thought of having anything remotely like what is now described as a mainframe outfit, it just didn't exist.

          Well, just talking about the building. There was quite a bit of discussion, was there not, between Davidson and Hancock about ...?

Yes, that's right, yes. I think that Jim Davidson certainly, amongst us, was the one who took the greatest personal interest in this whole business and who, I believe from what I was told that had some background in it and knew what he was talking about; a practical interest in it. And he, in particular, was responsible for the rather bright idea of getting young Mervyn Skipper in Melbourne, a chap who worked in metals and all the rest to make that screen which runs across the front of the entrance to the Research School of Social Sciences.

There was some difference of opinion about this thing, as there always is of course, anything which has an unusual aesthetic structure but we were quite glad to, in effect, leave it mainly to Jim to worry about that because, as I say, the housing problems and the laboratory problems of the Pacificos were very much greater than existed with respect to the Research School of Social Sciences.

          The distinctive shape of the building. Do you remember where that came from?

No, I haven't the faintest idea who thought of that in the first place. In fact I can't even now remember who exactly was the architect. Do you know who was the architect? It doesn't ring any bell with me. I don't think it was the chap who had been employed by the university.

          Lewis.

Lewis, that's right. Brian Lewis. No, I don't think it was Brian Lewis. I think they'd gone off Brian Lewis by this time. The F houses were his undoing [laughs]. Yes. No, I think that University House had been put up some time before this, hadn't it, and Brian Lewis was the architect of the .... In fact the University House was built in accordance with the general scheme that Brian Lewis had originated.

          People like University House, don't they?

Oh yes, yes, that was considered, at least from its appearance˙- there were various objections to it again on grounds of convenience and where dining halls were placed and things of that sort - but yeah, the general structure of it was regarded as quite acceptable. And it was then intended that all of the buildings of the university should be put up more or less in that same style.

And of course, a couple of store buildings out the back of University House were so built, but they were the only ones that were, and after that the rest of the university has been built in a huge medley of styles in which the Social Science and Pacificos building, the Coombs Building, as it quite appropriately came to be called, is totally different from the Brian Lewis designed buildings.

          Just talking about Melville for a little bit longer. Hancock didn't get on very well with Melville, did he?

I was never aware of anything like the tension between Melville and Hancock that there was between Melville and Oliphant, partly I should think because once again in the nature of the social science activities there was so little to cause any kind of dispute and they did have the linking factor of Trevor Swan who was both friendly with Melville and of interest to Melville because they were fellow mathematically disposed economists and Trevor, of course, was very learned in the mathematical implications of economics and the kind of abstract calculus systems that are required for it.

I should think that the degree to which they didn't altogether get on well with each other was simply that Hancock was by nature a somewhat dilatory sort of a character. No, dilatory is not quite the right word. You weren't quite sure what his opinion was on a particular thing. He would look all around the situation and see this for it and that against it and so forth, and he didn't readily guide a meeting towards a pre-determined decision.

He really was, he conscientiously was, the sort of director who thinks that on the whole things should be determined by the voice of the majority and that the director should do nothing to plant a decision on them, or to deter in any way anybody who wants to speak up and object to what the majority seem to be doing. That I think was the point on which ....

Whereas Melville, of course, was the sort of chap who in the handling of the Board of the Institute, was inclined to start off with a fair degree of - determined as to what the decision should be and therefore was going to be. He might, at times, be a bit delicate and diplomatic in the way in which he went about this, particularly if it concerned Oliphant, he was aware of the sort of people who had to be handled with tact as distinct from just told what to do.

But Hancock was a chap who, in dealing with him in all sorts of things, you'd get to a certain point and think, 'Oh well, okay, we're going to have it so and so', and then he suddenly says, 'We've got to go through that again, I'm not happy with that'. That I think was the only reason for any difference between them.

And certainly their wives got on quite well. Mary Melville was the first of the lady vice-chancellors who was herself of some importance in the life of the enterprise because Lady Copland had been a very retiring and wistful sort of creature and not at all inclined to play any part in the life of the university, whereas Mary did.

          What did she do?

Well, she helped the wives. She saw to it that when a new appointment was made that there was a little party no matter what the grade of the appointment in question. People were introduced to each other, they got to know each other and the facilities of the place were explained to them. She was an admirable vice-chancellor's wife from all these points of view. Threw herself into it, obviously enjoyed doing it, with the result that some of the ladies complained a bit, saying that she was a bit bossy [laughs].

You can't avoid having something of a reputation of that sort if you ostensibly and design, make yourself prominent in making sure that the ladies are settling down happily in their various homes and that they participate to some extent in the life of the university by attending tea parties and what not.

          The Lindsay affair.

I, of course, was not directly involved in that because it was in the Research School of Pacific Studies that all this arose, but I got rather unwillingly drawn into it because the root of the trouble had been with the position of Crocker who later became Deputy Governor of South Australia and so forth.

Russell Crocker had been appointed as the first Professor of International Relations in the Research School of Pacific Studies, and for some reason or other he and I struck up a good deal of a personal friendship notwithstanding that he was in a different school and, indeed, working in a topic with which I had only a not very up to date familiarity because of the direction my studies had taken.

And it was Crocker who made some sort of a half-promise to Lindsay, that if he, Crocker, retired from that chair which he was thinking of doing that Lindsay would be given preference at any rate, or it'd be something of a presumption that Lindsay would succeed him in that chair. Now, no writing was ever produced.

          Even if it had, I mean, is one individual in a position to make such a promise?

No, not at all, of course he's not in a position to make such a promise. He couldn't possibly make a promise which is in any way binding on the institution. As I say, I rather unwillingly got involved in this because it became known that I was particularly friendly with Crocker and got friendly with him in this way.

Crocker came to us as professor, I finally decided, very largely for one purpose only and that was to get off his chest a book which he wanted to write exposing all of the terrible machinations by which it had been decided to plant the United Nations in America and in particular to plant it in New York city, in that area of land, a great deal of which was owned by the Rockefeller family.

And Crocker said that he had all sorts of evidence that this was the case and he'd written this up already and had got a first draft of it, and brought it along to ...

          What was the allegation? What was the actual conspiracy?

The conspiracy was that members of the Rockefeller family, I can't remember now whether any particular Rockefellers were mentioned, but it was either Rockefeller people or people acting on behalf of the Rockefellers had bribed people in the League's set up - management. And had bribed some ambassadors or ministers or something from various countries in various improper ways.

          Evatt's name wasn't mentioned?

No, Evatt's name was never mentioned. No Australian name was mentioned. They were all very second-rate sorts of people, countries and what not were involved in it so far as there was anybody outside of the Americans themselves, and it was more particularly the American themselves as to whom these allegations were made.

And this was how the United Nations, as he thought, made this disastrous decision. Disastrous even to set up in America at all, but certainly to set up in New York and above all to set up in circumstances which greatly enriched the Rockefeller family, or so he said, because of their holdings of land in that area.

Well, I read this and this was many years before the American Supreme Court had totally revised the American law of defamation. Nowadays it's almost impossible for a public figure to complain about defamatory statements in America no matter how false the statement might be. Of course, it's different if it's a purely private person. At that time the American defamation law was substantially the same as ours and I was quite familiar with it because I'd written on this subject at some length because of my interest in the law affecting journalism.

And so having read the thing carefully and been duly shocked and horrified at its contents I then said to him, 'I couldn't possibly advise our University Press which had just been formed to publish this because it's taking an awful risk with the law of defamation. And the fact that the Rockefellers were away across the ocean and all the rest of it doesn't matter a damn, they could come and sue on us here in Australia.' In fact I said, 'I should think it extremely unlikely that you'd get any publisher either in Australia or in America to handle this. It's so hot that .... You know, the allegations are so specific and the people named and what not'.

Well, Crocker was very disappointed at this but he didn't hold it against me at all. He said, 'Yes, I realise that I'm taking risks with this sort. I'll have to go away and think about this.' Well, it wasn't very long after that that he accepted this offer from the government to go and be our High Commissioner in India and the university agreed to hold his position open for a short time, I can't remember now how long but quite a short time, and in the meantime Lindsay would be the acting head of the department and in due course there would be a successor appointed if Crocker decided not to come back which, of course, is what he actually decided.

Now, Lindsay's complaint, I have always thought was almost certain to have been justified, because Lindsay himself was such a transparently honest sort of a man. You know, he's not the sort of chap that you'd ever suspect remotely of telling lies or trying to advance himself by fraudulent methods. So I think it's almost certainly must have been the case that Crocker had very inadvisedly given Lindsay the impression that Lindsay was quite likely to succeed him as the Professor of International Relations.

Though actually, of course, Lindsay wasn't terribly well qualified for that particular job. He was very learned indeed about the international relations of the Far East, probably as well as anybody then alive. He'd been through it. He'd fought with Mao's army. He'd been there with their wireless operations, I think, in charge of their wireless communications. And before that he'd been a British diplomat because he came from the famous Lindsay academic family, the Master of the Balliol was a Lindsay, his father. And he was, himself, a very likeable bloke, too, and his Chinese wife was very likable.

Another bee that Lindsay got in his bonnet was that the failure of the university to appoint him was because he was married to a Chinese girl, and that people held this in some way against him. And of course, this was complete nonsense, complete and utter self-deception. We liked the lady, I forget now what her Chinese name was, but we habitually addressed her by the equivalent of a Chinese Christian name and liked her and admired the couple and thought that they really were an ornament to the university, but not in his case a first-rate qualification for International Relations in general. Some job particularly concerned with the national and diplomatic and political history of the Far East certainly very well justified.

If there'd been for example a chair of Pacific History that was vacant at the time he would have been perfectly tenable to appoint him to that but that was Jim Davidson's job. So the row wound on and on and Lindsay tried to get me ...

          It has been suggested to me that .... Sorry.

No, no, no. You go on.

          I was just going to say that his wife tended to play a rather aggravating influence.

Yep. I think she probably did. Once again, this is more a matter of gossip than of anything else but that was certainly the impression that I had that she, at any rate, encouraged him in his follies and fantasies, both as to the definiteness or the authority of Crocker to do what he said Crocker had done.

And I think it very unlikely that Crocker would have done any such thing. He was an extremely experienced bureaucrat. He'd gone through all the hoops that you could possibly go through in national and international civil service types of jobs. And the likelihood that he would give Lindsay any more encouragement than saying, 'I will strongly recommend you. You'll have my undiluted support in an application for this job.' But that he would have said in a pally sort of fashion, 'I'll get you appointed'. No, I can't imagine Crocker doing such a thing. So there it was and of course ultimately Lindsay went off to America.

          I cut you off at one stage. You were going to say that you did something or other, and I mentioned his wife.

No, I didn't have anything in particular in mind, anything more than I've just said. That is to say, that sofar as I was brought into the thing to give some sort of information about it. I said, 'Well, all I can say is that Crocker never in the slightest degree suggested to me that he would expect Lindsay to be his successor'.

          Sir Leslie Melville suggested to me that Oliphant and Hancock said that a special readership should be created and Lindsay should be offered that.

Yes, that's true. I wasn't aware that Oliphant was involved in that, I know that Hancock had had such an idea.

          That's a fairly unusual way to ...

Yes, indeed, it is.

          ... to set up a position and fill it.

That's right. There would have been some justification for that because of Lindsay's quite exceptional degree of familiarity with the whole background of the extraordinary Chinese history and situation; the way in which Chiang KaiÄshek was ultimately pushed out by Mao Tse-tung.

          But wouldn't it be normal to advertise the                          position?

Not necessarily, no not necessarily. This again is a thing that's .... There's a grey area in these purportedly high level research kind of institutions. If you saw a Fleming on the horizon who was discovering penicillin you wouldn't advertise the post for him, you'd grab him, you see. And those situations can arise, and universities always reserve the right to do such things in exceptional circumstances. And I think that provided it was done at that level and not any higher than that level it would have been fully justified in this case.

However, my understanding is that he, himself, rejected it. He obviously wasn't interested in such a thing, he wanted to be the Professor of International Relations. And off he went to America and got a university job there and did a tolerably good job, as I understand, and published books about the Chinese situation and so forth. I don't know even now whether he's still alive. Do you know?

          No.

No, I don't know what ultimately happened to him.

          One of the things that I found very intriguing, I guess it's fair enough to use such a cold-blooded word from this distance, about the whole affair is that it resulted in that chair remaining vacant for a very long time.

Yes, it did, that's right.

          Which suggested to me a sort of a breakdown in the university processes.

Yes, that's quite true, yes. Or else a view in the School itself, and as to this I can't speak, that possibly that the subject wasn't any longer of that great importance to them because they were really covering so much of what it had been expected that Crocker would cover as incidental to their more regionalised experience and views.

Certainly there was nobody around who any longer wished to write a detailed and scandalous history of the early days of the United Nations organisation. This was not on at all.

          International relations would seem to be a very important area discarded.

Oh yes, the international relations of the Pacific basin, quite so, yes. No, I quite agree with that observation. The subject itself was in a sense a borderline one. There was as good a case for putting International Relations in the social studies school as there was in the Pacificos.

          It was moved over at one stage, wasn't it?

No, no, it was never moved over, no it was never moved. At least it wasn't while I was there.

          In the period after, before it was occupied, wasn't there sort of an interregnum period of .... No, okay.

There were several of us who were interested in aspects of international relations, in particular, Lester Webb had a considerable interest in it. But there was nothing, well, there was nothing to move because Crocker hadn't got around to the business of appointing a big junior staff or anything of that kind, it was still very early days.

          Talking about the relationship between the schools: going back to the period when you were dean, well, when you were first appointed dean, how would you have described the connection between the schools?

Quite close because we were geographically all in the one building and by this time knew each other pretty well and without any great argument or debate set up joint faculty meetings.

We had separate faculty meetings for each school and they were particularly necessary in matters of appointment of staff. And we had joint faculty meetings for a more general discussion of topics of research, the extent to which somebody or other who happened to be in my school would be of interest to somebody or other in Jim Davidson's school when he was the dean of that school.

And you could say that the informal relationship was a very close one. But after the Coombs Building was built and there was a much sharper, so to speak, geographical division between the part of the building that me and my mob occupied and the one that Jim and his mob occupied, the separation between us began to grow more and more evident.

For example, geography when it was first introduced with Oskar Spate as the professor, was a subject which was potentially relevant to both schools, but in point of fact it ultimately took shape under Oskar in which there was a very strong emphasis on the particular demography and, what's the word for the rocks and the metals: the geology, the demography and the geology of the Pacific basin of Australia in particular and of the islands off Australia and of China and that sort of business, taking a surprisingly natural science bent considering that Oskar, himself, of course was a very typical sort of political and social historian.

END OF TAPE 3, 2ND INTERVIEW, SIDE A

 

BEGIN TAPE 3, 2ND INTERVIEW, SIDE B

          Identification: This is the 2nd side of the 3rd tape in the 2nd interview with Professor Sawer. End of identification.

Yes. It's characteristic you see of the way in which the school went that Oskar, himself, went with it. And his great work has now been this three volume history of the Pacific Ocean; everything to do with it, everybody who colonised it or were original livers in those parts and so forth; eminently the sort of work which you would expect for a research school of Pacific studies to be engaged in. And this coming from an Englishman who, to begin with, was simply a general geographer.

          In the early days you and Davidson, when either of you were absent, used to act in each other's ....

That's right, we did, yes.

          Did that cause ...? Was that regarded as a perfectly natural thing?

Yes.

          I mean, someone from outside of their school or outside of your school.

Yes, perfectly natural. We were perfectly happy about that. The theory was that ...

          The staff were happy, too?

Yes, well at any rate, I never heard of any dissension from it. The number of things that had to be done was relatively small and we still had these joint meetings at which things could be raised if there were any complaints arising from the actions of the dean in question at the particular time. But I was never aware of any difficulty of that sort myself. The personal relations between all of us were pretty good. This episode of Lord Lindsay was the sole really upsetting personal disputation that developed through those years.

          In the joint meetings that you would have, did you ever find cases of overlap where there was some sort of feeling that perhaps there needed to be a rationalisation of effort?

I don't think so. It may have been more good luck than anything else, but it certainly was the case that the geographical demarcation of what the one lot was doing and the other lot was doing so early became immediately apparent.

See, Jim Davidson, once again, although he was originally a New Zealander, had in England in his scholarship courses there become a general historian and was as much interested in the world scene as he was in any particular local scene. But without any problem whatever, and partly because of his New Zealand background, he immersed himself in the island peoples and their history. And, as I've said before, produced the first, very big book about Samoa and then went on to do similar work in New Guinea and, indeed, tragically died while driving a car full of young New Guinea students with whom he was befriending along the main street of Port Moresby, from a heart attack.

          Could you describe the way in which those joint meetings ended? I understand when Hancock had come.

Yes. No, I haven't any lively memory at all, of just how and why they ended. You see it was round about that time, or shortly after that time that I became involved in these personal family difficulties and I pushed on with my own particular work; I'd already brought out one significant book on Australian Federal history and law and was now engaged in the second volume and duly finished that.

And I would say that until Hancock came we regarded these joint meetings as more or less a matter of course because in both schools we regarded ourselves as, in a sense, provisional; working away and building departments up. But as the ultimate structure was still open to discussion and argument and what not, and as it happened, the Research School of Social Sciences was the first to solve its problem by getting the very bloke that we had wanted to get and hoped to get in the first place. And I should think that it would, from then onwards, would probably have been regarded by the Pacificos as a bit difficult for them to carry on with a joint thing because it would be collaboration between unequal parties.

That is, to the extent that, the head or the person who had an equivalent position in the school in question inevitably had a good deal of the carrying on of their mutual relations, which were mainly of a matter of the housing of these departments and the fitting in of necessary equipment like computers and so on. And a mere dean from the Pacificos would have been in a weaker position than this powerful director with all of the sort of powers which the university actually bestowed on a director, and not on deans.

          Davidson had also been a student of Hancock's. Was that significant?

It may have been. Yes, I know that he was a student of Hancock's, yes. It may have been, though as far as I know their personal relations were always quite friendly. I wouldn't say that they were close buddies, not at all, because Hancock, although he had his liberal leftish leanings of one sort and another was certainly no tearaway, the way that Jim Davidson was.

          You mentioned earlier, when we were talking about problems that you didn't have to face when you were dean, you made reference to problems that arose later that you didn't have to face. What were they?

You mean, in the Research School of Social Sciences?

          I think you were referring to those.

I wonder what I had in mind. Switch it off a minute will you while ....

          So, if you could just go back on that.

Yes. While I was still Dean of the Research School of Social Sciences there was a dispute in the Economics Department between Noel Butlin and a senior research fellow whose name I forget - Hall. Hall, his surname was. They had both more or less independently and at different times hit upon the notion that Australia had become an urbanised country, much earlier than most people had realised; that the percentage of people who lived in cities in Australia, in fact in the five major cities was somewhere round about seventy or eighty per cent of the total population and this had never been appreciated.

Nor, of course, the thing which followed from it that the rural population was so small, in a sense, the kind of thing that the celebrated poet, Lawson, started off by trying to boost up and so forth; bush ballads and all of that kind of business, that there was a certain falsity about it all because they were not in fact either the great bulk of the people, and certainly not the most important economically, in the face of all sorts of contrary views, including views of Hancock's, that had been held up till that time.

Well, Noel Butlin claimed that he had hit on this first and that he was entitled to be regarded as the founder of this school of thought. This other chap, Hall, published a paper or something in which he made somewhat similar claims. And, oh, you know, there was a great barney between them and I was called in to try to arbitrate on this dispute.

Well, I resolutely refused to express any opinion as to who was correct and who was incorrect as to the scale of the discovery or its importance or when in particular it had been reached. And it seemed to me that there was quite a long way to go before either of them had this embodied in book form in a way which would make it demonstrable to the world at large. And I happened to know that in fact Noel was very much further advanced with his publication plans than this other chap was. And that's in effect how it ultimately worked out.

The other bloke, I think, subsequently abated his claims and said that he'd had an idea along these lines but hadn't got around to establishing it to the extent that Noel did. But that was the sole kind of personal dispute row that I was ever involved with.

          Coombs. A major figure in the history of the university.

Oh indeed, indeed. Well, for one thing of course he was an almost perpetual chairman of the Council. I can't remember now just how his membership of Council went, and no doubt there were times when he was off it because he was on other jobs. But I certainly have a sort of picture of Nugget as presiding over the Council meetings for as long as I was - no, not quite as long as I was at the university - but for many years after its foundation.

          But just going back to the beginnings of your meetings with him and just coming through and talking about him in as much detail as we can.

Yep. Well, I took to Nugget straight away. I liked and admired him because ...

          When did you meet him?

Oh, I met him in the course of these consultations about ...

          '48?

Yes, I'm pretty sure that Nugget must have been at that 1948 meeting that we've mentioned. Though, whether or not he sat in on that particular thing that's photographed I don't recognise him amongst .... But there are a number of people whose backs are towards you and so I wouldn't be too sure about that. But he certainly was being very active in the affairs of the university and it was certainly taken for granted in my group of academic friends that, and this was personally to the knowledge of Trevor Swan in particular, that Nugget had been, at any rate, the second most influential voice in getting the university going.

This was on the theory that Panzee Wright, largely because of his personality, had played the major role. I always thought that Panzee had played the major role but it was not much to choose between them. So that we regarded him as, in a sense, more of our founding father than Panzee because Panzee was a busy research scientist in Melbourne; became head of the Eliza Hall Institute and things like this and only turned up occasionally.

Whereas Nugget, whenever he was in Canberra, he'd come around and attend seminars and be chairman at Council meetings and things of that sort. We got to know Nugget extremely well and to like him.

          How did he operate?

Well, he had a rather flat, reserved sort of style of talking. He was no classy orator at all. He seemed to exude wisdom. We'd be discussing some question and Nugget would listen quietly to it and then make a suggestion, say, 'Oh, I'd be inclined to do so-and-so, Trevor, in these circumstances'.

And Trevor Swan who wasn't a terribly easy chap to persuade would almost immediately accept this as a matter of course. He really was an intellectual eminence.

I'll never forget the occasion when Nugget had just been appointed for the third, or something like that, successive appointment as Chairman of the Commonwealth Bank, and this had been done by the Menzies-Fadden government and Arty Fadden it was who'd actually made the appointment. And I was in the habit of going along, from time to time, to the old Hotel Canberra, the place which is now the Hyatt I think, for a drink in their back bar where eminent public servants and eminent members of the university often foregathered on a Friday evening, and some of the politicians.

And Arty came in amongst us and he was rather quiet and one of us jollied Arty and said, 'What's the matter, Arty? You seem a bit withdrawn'. 'Yes', he said, 'I should think I would feel withdrawn. We had a meeting today, a meeting with that bastard who's the chairman of your council, Coombs, a meeting with Nugget Coombs. And I went in there to that meeting determined at last we were going to get rid of him, and do you know in the finish I'd appointed him for another five years!'. Yes.

          You said that he was an intellectual eminence.

Yes.

          He was presumably also an organiser, I mean, a pre-eminent organiser.

Oh yes, indeed, that's right. Yes, indeed, he was. Yes. He had been, I should say, probably the most effective organiser of the wartime economy; the most effective and influential voice in the very great problems of that time. And he rather ranked with some of the English Labour Party blokes at that time, and of course it was well known that he was Labor in his sympathies and what not: Dalton, and those characters in England who played - and Ernie Bevan - such a part in establishing the social democratic type of social services and what not that was got going there.

Nugget knew all about this, the background to it, the political history of it, the economic history of it, in what respects the Australian situation was different partly because of its constitutional structure. And he played a part in persuading the Chifley government to put forward that constitutional amendment about social service powers which was central to the sort of interest that he wanted to pursue.

          Did he take part in intellectual discussions? I mean, that is what you were saying in addition to all these organising tasks?

Oh yes, sure, indeed. Oh yes, he was up with current economic theories and current views on the sociology of this, that and the other type of social structure. He, I think, was always a bit shy on law. I think he had some of his own opinions about it but on the whole he regarded it as a sort of black art which he'd never forgiven the voters for turning down so many of the constitutional amendments that were put forward in the High Court and the Privy Council for putting a veto on the Bank Nationalisation scheme which Nugget, of course, strongly supported. He was one of the architects of it.

But I should say that in almost anything to do with social structure, including its strict economics, and its mathematical economics, he was well read, up to the minute in Keynes and all the rest of it, and a very effective lecturer on such topics, although with no flourishes of any sort; clear and to the point.

          You mentioned his involvement in the end of the Copland era and the beginning of the Melville era. Can you think of other, sort of, major episodes that he might have been involved with? For example, the Lindsay episode, was he ...?

I don't recall him having anything to do with that. I think that that was a matter that was totally dealt with by Melville and by the professors in the Pacifico Research School.

          How did he relate to the Vice-Chancellor? I mean, it must have been a bit oppressive for the Vice-Chancellor to have this very powerful figure hovering in the background all the time?

Well, it's possible that there was something of that between him and Copland because Copland certainly had a different ideological background from Nugget, but no such difficulty arose in relation to Melville because although Melville was even more conservative in his own personal political views than Copland had been, he had been a close confidant of, and co-worker with, Nugget Coombs all through that period of the Chifley government, the wartime problems, the post-war problems. They had complete confidence in each other.

          Well, talking of a later period, what about Crawford?

Yes. I don't know about Nugget and Crawford. It's possible that by that time the Vice-Chancellor was becoming a little bit wary of seeming to be too much in the pocket, so to speak, of Coombs.

But, of course, Coombs' own position had changed too, with the years, because as a consequence of his agreeing to remain on as Chairman of the Bank for such a long period under these conservative governments, I think that Nugget himself tended to lose his immediate contact with, so to speak, the left-wing Labor ideas and politics in Australia as a forceful system that ought to be supported. He tended to push off rather into these newer sorts of interests like environmentalism and all this kind of business, and to be regarded as a 'guru' rather than as the superbly successful and effective administrator which is how he came to us in the first place.

So I should think it's quite likely that he played a lesser part in the actual affairs of the university as time went on.

          Well, coming to Crawford. What's your description of Crawford?

Well, he was an extremely likeable bloke and I was on good terms with him and with his wife, and he certainly did some extremely good work for the university in various ways. And I strongly supported some of the initiatives that he took which some of my colleagues were dubious about.

          Which ones?

Crawford was much more willing than any of his predecessors had been or than any of the people who successively ran the research schools had been to the idea of lessening the distance between what had by now become the faculties and the research schools. He didn't presume to push any of this on down the throats of the medicos or the physicists or the earth scientists and he confined his attentions in this matter to the research schools because he of course, before he became Vice-Chancellor, had been the Director of the Research School of Pacific Studies.

And his notion was that the research schools should simply accept the position that while they had, in some ways, a better funded and a better equipped set of research facilities than most of the Australian universities individually had, they also had a considerable number of people whose talents lay at least as much in teaching as in research, and quite a number of them had come from a teaching background - I myself was an example - and that therefore they should be more willing to consider participating in or even conducting courses for the degree of Master.

And he confined himself to that really particular point. And he had this idea of a Master in Business Administration. These notions of course were derived largely from his knowledge of and experience with Harvard and MIT, a neighbour of Harvard, which had evolved quite naturally from initially simply teaching universities into teaching cum research universities and then with this sort of idea of a linkage between the two.

So that the Royal Professor of Law at Harvard only had a very small teaching load and only with Honours students in the straight law degree, and apart from that was in charge of a larger mob of research lawyers who went in for legal research of one kind and another. But this was the sort of picture that Crawford had, and which he established in a small way.

He did, in fact, get some Masters courses going which affected in particular the Departments of Economics and of Economic History in the Research School of Social Sciences. He never even tried to do anything similar with Law, though I would have, myself, been perfectly happy to go along with precisely such a thing.

It had come to be my general notion that it would be better for the university if there was a continuum of the Law School which was, by this time, quite a distinguished teaching law school under Jack Richardson, and the Law Department in the Research School of Social Sciences. But my colleagues were very shy of any particular department doing this because it might be the beginning of a headlong Gadarene rush, you know, into unholy alliances.

          And what? They thought that Masters' students were basically a diversion of efforts?

Yes, that's it exactly.

          Undesirable diversion.

That's right, exactly, an undesirable diversion of effort. So that by the time I left the university in 1975 this had never really been resolved, but as far as I know at least that degree of cooperation between Institute and what is now called .... Was it now that they called The Faculties, or is it what they used to be? Still called The Faculties. Yes. And in particular the economists in that school.

          Setting up of some of these units and ...

Yes, demography and so on.

          Yes, was that an attack on the departmental system? Or is that too simple, or not?

No, I think it initiated from a desire to give certain subsections of a subject a degree of managerial autonomy, and it would be expected that they would be headed, not by a professor, but by a reader or even a senior fellow, and it was to some extent a financial question, to some extent it was a matter of getting particular sort of equipment and making sure that it was looked after and dealt with by people who were particularly skilled in that kind of thing. And of course, that nowadays tends to become important for all sorts of social science type of work. It may be that to some extent it was simply an effort to get more people working in the area in general and would look respectable if it just took the form of adding staff to the existing department, because nothing like this ever emerged from the Department of Law although at the time that he was our Reader in International Law, the chap who now edits the Australian Law Journal, oh crikey, what's his name? Yes, my Reader in International Law, Joe Starke, certainly would have liked to have had himself appointed as a little sub-department dealing with international law and get some appointments in that field as a result. There was an awkwardness there because a fair amount of the sort of work that he wanted was work that was being carried on in the Research School of Pacific Studies, because international relations around amongst the Pacific countries had become particularly important.

          The departmental system hadn't really been part of the original plan, but it had become a very powerful part of the structure, hadn't it?

Yes, and I think that this was mainly because so much of our staff was taken either from England or from Australia. And in both countries this is what they had been accustomed to, this is what they were used to. The picture of the department headed normally by one professor and with three or four senior jobs, readers and such like underneath him and a string of research fellows and what not underneath him, rather like those pictures that they now present to you in this theory of Chaos [laughs].

          In reading your comments on collaborative research, I think you make a comment, well, one that it's very difficult to set up, but in those areas where it does work it tends to be a fairly hierarchial structure. Now, why wasn't that particular model tried?

Again I certainly can't say that I remember any very deliberate decision being taken on the subject. It was very much more a matter of the influence of particular individuals as to what did happen. You see, there were two people in particular who by their achievements and their publication record and so forth were chafing a bit at being only readers and nothing more. Mick Borrie whose special subject of demography was certainly a very specialised and highly mathematical branch of work and one which didn't fit neatly into any of the established social science general disciplines, and on the other hand certainly wasn't confined to the Pacific basin so as to fit neatly in with the Pacificos, so that to some extent creating a sub-department of demography and putting Mick in charge of it as Reader answered both these difficulties. It was easier for him to collaborate with the Pacificos to the extent that they wanted that sort of expertise, but on the other hand he could keep his foot well and truly in the general world development of the mathematics of demography and the classification types and so forth.

And the other was Robert Parker, though in Robert Parker's case things .... He was inclined to develop towards a specialisation in public administration and that had not originally been contemplated as of central importance in the Department of Politicial Science, even although Lester Webb who was the first head of that department had himself had a considerable war career in public administration, his academic career had been in general political science and it was now his wish to become once again a general political scientist, so that he fitted neatly into the Research School of Social Sciences. And Robert Parker who wanted to specialise in public administration and had very special qualifications in that subject, he too would have probably got a unit under his own control for that set of reasons. But what actually happened of course was that poor old Lester got himself killed in a motor-car accident in Tasmania and Robert became Professor of Political Science and in charge of the whole of that department; in control of what it principally took under its wing.

END TAPE 3, 2ND INTERVIEW, SIDE B

BEGIN TAPE 4, 2ND INTERVIEW, SIDE A

          Identification: This is the 4th tape of the 2nd interview, side 1. It's the interview with Professor Sawer. End of identification.

          Yes, could you just tell me about your responsibilities as Deputy Vice-Chancellor?

Yes, certainly. We had a Deputy Vice-Chancellor and a Deputy Chancellor and we had adjoining rooms with a common waiting room and the Deputy Chancellor at this time was Tony Mason who was, at the time, Solicitor-General of the Commonwealth. This is before he ultimately became a judge of the High Court and indeed now is the Chief Justice of the High Court. So that I formed a close friendship with Tony as a result of our acting jobs at that time, and in various ways liked being Deputy Vice-Chancellor because of this wide set of connections with various people all over the university which it involved. But as a matter of fact the main job that I did and the main reason why I was appointed to this job was to revise very thoroughly the university's statutes and regulations, because they'd grown up in a fairly haphazard fashion over a long period of time. And numbers of people had brought up problems to be dealt with at this level of administration on questions arising under scholarships and the grant of degrees and things of that sort. And it had become apparent that the regulations were either lacking or lacking in detail in various ways. So I set to work and .... Mind you I was concerned only with the Institute, I wasn't concerned at all with the undergraduate part of the system which was handled through a quite separate command system. Indeed, this is one of the ways in which we defeated the intentions of Menzies: that the two institutions really remained so completely separate from each other although on the same campus. Yes, so I was only concerned with the Institute and with the higher degrees which included by now these degrees in business administration, these MAs in economics and so forth. And that's very largely what I did through that period.

          Why did you have to be appointed to a special position to do that?

Partly because they wanted somebody who was versed in the history of the place and knew what had happened in the past and what was the background to all this, and I obviously fitted that. And partly because at that particular time I wasn't very busily occupied on other things. I was moving towards the handing over the responsibility for the Law Department and its two or three research fellows and very small number of students to Sam Stoljar because of my˙....

          Was it a way of giving you recognition for the work that you were doing?

That's right, and also because it was convenient that I should do this before retiring altogether from the university which I had to do at the end of 1975 because of the seventy year old retirement rule which had been enforced on us rather against the will of the old Council because it was the rule in the public service. And apart from these general demands for this I also had a special knowledge of the interpretation of the university's documents because for many years I had been the chairman of a drafting committee which originally consisted of me and an officer from the Attorney-General's Department and in fact three of the officers of the Attorney-General's Department who worked with me in this respect have subsequently become academics. Geoffrey Lindell and Dennis Pearce who's now the ombudsman, and a chap, I forget his name now, he went off to a job at the University of New South Wales, actually. So that as a result of being the expert on the interpretation of these things of course I was well placed to know where they were deficient and in what respects they could be improved and so forth. So that the choice of me for that particular job was a natural one and it just happened to fit in with my own departmental situation as well. I was very happy to leave it to Sam Stoljar to in effect run the Department and I went along occasionally to seminars on subjects in which I was particularly interested, or else to which I had special information. But that wasn't the only job that I did because there were odd things that came up every now and again; questions that for some reason or other the vice-chancellor couldn't deal with, he was away or the topic bothered him for some reason. The only specific thing that sticks in my memory was the very sad case of the librarian, the librarian of the Menzies Library, who started to go slightly round the bend and behave in a rather peculiar fashion, but not so much so as that you could in an obvious and brutal way simply sack him and put on someone else. So that that did involve some very delicate negotiations and talking to this chap and saying to him, you know, that he'd probably do better if he was in such-and-such a position. And he was at first very resistant to the ideas but I did eventually persuade him, and indeed it was his wife too, his wife certainly played a bigger part in it than I did. Between us we persuaded him to leave and ....

          Did you talk to his wife about the situation?

Yes, yes, indeed. And off he went. I think he went to a job at the University of Melbourne.

          That would have been a bit of a Dutch gift.

Yes, sure, that's right.

          Well, talking about Vice-Chancellors .... Sorry.

Greek gift is the proper expression.

          Greek gift.

That's right. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, yes.

          Vice-Chancellors and how they exert power.

Yep.

          Now, obviously the budget, they can do lots of things through the budget, and they're the chairman of committees and they can sum up and they can steer and have got control of the agenda et cetera. But you were in a position, both because of your knowledge and closeness to the subject to observe a lot of them in action. The skills, how would you describe them?

I think that probably the chap who handled all of these problems, the meetings of Council and the meetings of the boards of the Institute and the School and so forth. I was on the Board of the School for one period as representative of the Institute on the Board and they had one on our Board. What's his name? Turn that off for a minute, will you? That Crawford was the most effective of them, the one who had the best combination of true depreciation and summing up of a problem with a very easy pleasant sort of personality in handling it. I would say that Leslie Melville was the next best and he was only inferior to Crawford because he didn't have the same ease of manner. You had the same confidence in his intelligence and in his judgement on things but he wasn't able to sell it in the way that Crawford did. And Crawford, he had an unerring habit of, which rather reminds me of Arty Fadden's observation on Nugget Coombs: 'The bastard somehow or other gets his way'. That's right, yes, that was Crawford all right. In some ways Crawford got me down a bit because he was a bit verbose and you sometimes felt that he let an argument about a thing go too far before intervening, that was a thing which Melville never did. Melville had very good ...

          He was personally verbose, or he allowed other people to be verbose?

Well, yes, more the latter. He let other people go, that's right, yes. Whereas Melville knew when to cut in and force the matter to a conclusion.

          While we're talking of eminent figures in the university, there's a poem that I was reading that you wrote, obviously early in your time about the Vice-Chancellor who didn't come, Bruce.

Bruce, that's right.

          Could you tell me ...?

Chancellor.

          Oh, sorry, the Chancellor.

The Chancellor, that's right. Yes, of course, Lord what's-his-name, who was - Lord Bruce. Lord Bruce, that's right. He had been appointed Chancellor of the university because of a desire on the part of our eminent founders and what not, largely inspired I think by Nugget, perhaps with some input from Panzee Wright, because of the desire to make a sort of gesture to the past history of people who had supported the general notion of a university education in Australia and who were a part of our history so distant that this would be a fairly non-controversial appointment.

          He was also, in a sense, representing the conservative side of politics, straining for the bipartisan.

He was indeed and that may well have entered into it. So at any rate they got Lord Bruce appointed as Chancellor. And my only couple of very small contacts with Lord Bruce on occasions when I was in England led me to heartily dislike the man. And I thought he was a snob and certainly he had very abrupt manners with a casual visitor like myself just, you know, paying my respects to the man and so forth. However, he was appointed and then it was said, 'Well, surely the Chancellor should pay a visit and be here, say, each year for conferring of degrees or some such formal occasion when he could properly participate in the thing and wear his official robes and everbody could see that we had a Chancellor. And they tried again and again and again to get Bruce to come out to such an occasion and again and again and again it became not possible for some reason. And so finally I wrote those verses that you've seen. He never did come, he never did come.

          Just thinking over your period in the university, you've mentioned a number of possible candidates that I can think of, but opinion-makers, who would you nominate as the most significant opinion-makers of your time?

Difficult question. Yes, I certainly can't really figure Oliphant as important in this respect in any technical sense at all in the Social Science schools, though of the various people engaged in physics, of course, he was the most widely known and the best liked because he was such a nice sort of a bloke himself; he was excellent company and always welcome at any dinner and affairs of this sort. But I would say that probably Nugget Coombs was the chap who I would pick as having had the most widespread influence and input, and provided the greatest assistance to the university in various difficulties. Crawford would come a close second because Crawford was operating in a fairly difficult milieu and although Melville inherited a problem, the physics problem, he solved it so promptly and got the whole thing under control that he never really had any great difficulties with the government in his day. He was working along the lines that they wanted, that is, lines of economy and seeing to it that people got on with their particular jobs. Yeah, I think that because of the fact that Crawford had two bites at it, first as Director of the Research School of Social Studies [sic] and then as Vice-Chancellor that he probably had the most continuous and obvious influence on the way in which the university developed, including this de facto solution which has continued to this day of the problem of merging the College with the Institute.

The fact that that's been so completely accepted in the finish by governments which you might have expected to demand something more in the nature of fusion.

          You're saying it's a fairly nominal fusion?

Yes, it is, yes, yes. To this day, as far as I know, nobody in the Institute research schools regularly teaches in the undergraduate schools. I taught regularly in the undergraduate school of the Faculty of Law after I retired in 1975.

I was an acting lecturer for the next three years. Enjoyed it too, I quite liked it. And indeed, while I was still Head of the Department of Law, from time to time, I gave an odd talk to lawyers in the undergraduate wing and I was personally very friendly with the successive teachers there. But I think I was probably the only person in the Research School of Social Sciences who did establish those sorts of connections regularly, and maintained them.

          Why did you do that?

I suppose partly because of the fact that law is by its nature so clearly separable from, and separated in, its history, teaching, and practising background, that there is no equivalent in relation to any other social science discipline of the legal profession and the body of the courts and the people who run the law. Of course, that kind of ...

          So you're suggesting that perhaps among lawyers, academic lawyers, there's a stronger feeling of esprit de corps than there would be, say, among historians or geographers?

Yes, exactly, that's right, yes, a stronger feeling .... Yes, that's right. And not surprisingly so because of the fact that it all really is hinged ultimately in .... The application of law is really what matters about it. And it's impossible even at the most airy-fairy and rarified realms of theory about legal systems to escape entirely from the problems of law as applied.

          What about the role of University House? The original founder saw it as having a very key role in creating that intellectual community.

Yes. It's played no such part, or it's played it in a very minor degree. There was a little more of it in the very early days of University House, simply because at that time there was no real competitor with it so far as a considerable number, then, of the university teachers were concerned, particularly of course the university teachers who were young and unmarried, and many of whom lived in University House. My first student was Bob Hawke and he lived in University House until rather inadvisedly he attempted to climb up over the transom. Do you know what a transom is? It's the sort of thing on the top of a door to get at the lady, the student who was in bed on the other side of the door. He was drunk of course, and he was quite frequently drunk. He was an admirable student in all sorts of ways: worked like hell at his subject, and knew a great deal about it, and would undoubtedly eventually have turned in a quite satisfactory thesis if he'd persisted with it.

But he was also, he went on these frequent benders and, as he himself has subsequently admitted, in those days drank habitually to excess. I got on with him very well because we had a common interest in the subject he was doing. He was concerned with the history of the basic wage, which in those days was more important than it is nowadays.

And the only reason why ultimately I strongly advised him to leave without taking a degree when he was only about eighteen months into his course and take this job with the Trades Hall which had been offered to him was because he'd run into an impasse in the further writing of his thesis because he wanted to try to produce an economic explanation, an explanation in terms of economic theory of the basic wage. And we tried every blooming economist in the country and none of them would come to this party. They all said, 'It's all complete nonsense. There is no economic explanation for it'.

          It's a political decision.

'It's a political decision which is come to by politicos dressed up as judges.' So I think we probably would eventually have got around this in some way and produced the thesis that would have got him his higher degree. And if that had happened he might well have gone in for an academic career. I think he was rather attracted to an academic career. But I strongly advised him to take this Trades Hall job because that was the family-dictated alternative, and as I hoped at the time it would straighten him up and result in his going on drunken benders less frequently.

          Talking of students. Now, the character of students, how did they change over your time? Those students that you were dealing with in that immediate post-war period, well, it's four or five years after the post-war period?

Yes. The early students that we got were for the most part people who were already pretty far advanced in their studies in particular and the only reason why they came to the ANU was because it offered a favourable scholarship and they were pretty certain of getting the degree because they'd already made such progress with the topic in question. It was thus that I got three successive students.

You see, Bob Hawke had done a second degree at Oxford in which he'd worked on other aspects of the basic wage system, the Australian wage-fixing system under Kenny Wheare as his supervisor. And they were initially so good that really all that they wanted was to be sitting and reading away and working away and from time to time consulting a supervisor, in this case myself, where they ran into a question that bothered them, and almost as a matter of course they sailed through these courses and took off their degree.

No student that I had ever failed, but the number of them was very small and the most that I ever had at one time was two, and normally I only had one at a time. Sam would have one, and when Joe Starke came on the staff later, he would have one; three, there might occasionally be four at the most.

          To what degree were you involved in the dealings with students during the early '70s at a time when they were questioning the system in various ways?

Yes. The students that we had, leaving aside Hawke, and in his day of course that wasn't the problem. It wasn't because he was rebelling against society that these troubles arose at all; it was entirely his personal life style. And the other students that we had were without exception, I can't remember one of them who cared a stuff about the war in Vietnam or anything of these great issues, largely because of what I've just mentioned, that they were people who were already so well advanced in the subject matter and so determined on the particular thing that they now wanted to write a book about.

And in many cases what they did, their theses were ultimately turned into books, that they just didn't fit what had come to be through those turbulent years the model picture of a student.

The model picture of a student was a model picture of an undergraduate student and to the extent that that sort of thing went on at the ANU it was pretty well confined to the undergraduate wing of the institution; this of course was after the merger, to some extent aided and abetted by some of the junior members of staff.

My son took part in a demonstration march outside the Lodge in connection with conscription for the Vietnam business - Michael, and he was at that time doing his thesis in Mandarin, the history of the Mandarin Chinese language under Patrick Fitzgerald. This was an isolated occasion on his part, otherwise he wasn't faintly interested in anything generally political or inclined to rebel against the university in particular. On the contrary he was on terms of close personal friendship with his professor, Patrick Fitzgerald.

          Coming back to your Department, the Department of Law, there was a review, I think in 1974.

Of the Department of Law?

          I think so.

I don't remember this but you may well be right. This, you see, was when I was Deputy Vice-Chancellor, yeah. Yes, indeed, I do remember now, of course there was a review of it. The whole point of the review was the first stage of deciding whether or not to fill the vacancy when I retired in the following year. Of course, that was the whole point of it and they ....

I think at the same time they were concerned with the possibility of appointing a new Director for the school, and that they ran these two things more or less in combination because one of the things that had been suggested in view of the difficulty of filling my position, of getting someone who had this particular sort of combination of interests that I had had, the interfusion of law with sociological disciplines, it might turn out that it would be convenient to get a Vice-Chancellor, I beg your pardon, no, not a Vice-Chancellor, a director of the school, that was the point, a director of the school. A director of the school who was a lawyer.

          Instead of having your position filled?

That's right, yes.

          I see. Why did they think of having the director of the school as a lawyer?

Well, because one of the ideas was, whilst to promote Sam Stoljar, you see, to the position of the professor in the Department, who was at that point still a reader .... In point of fact he was later appointed a professor, and there would have been less difficulty about this if the director of the school was a lawyer because up to that point the director had always been something or other else than a lawyer, that's right, yes.

The outcome of this, I think, was that they didn't succeed in locating anywhere, around either in Australia or in England or in America where they made some enquiries, somebody who was appropriate in their view and was willing to come to Australia.

Whether they circulated the Australian faculties I don't know because I kept ostentatiously aloof from those whole proceedings. It would have been quite improper for me to interfere with them at all.

          After you left the school reduced in number; not the school, your department reduced in number.

Yes, it did indeed, that's right, it did, yes.

          Why was that?

Because of this difficulty in getting the sort of people that they would have liked to have got in order to carry on with it. As the vice-chancellor at the time, or was it the new director, Youngson? That's right, it was that nice Scottish bloke, Youngson, who became the Director of the Research School of Social Sciences. Yes, he remarked to me on one .... 'The whole bloody trouble, Geoff, is that you were a hard act to follow'.

Yes, and I think that really was literally the problem, that the sort of Australians who they certainly would have very much liked to have had, such as Zelman Cowen for example, weren't available because they were already in very senior positions. George Paton was the Vice-Chancellor at the University of Melbourne and Zelman Cowen was the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Queensland.

And another bloke who they would have considered, who was a bit junior to me and would have been entirely appropriate, I forget his name now. He had just, yes, he was on the point of becoming Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne; he succeeded George Paton as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne.

Yes, it was a problem of .... Sam Stoljar not being particularly anxious to increase the size of his department. He was perfectly happy with a research assistant and a secretary to push on with his studies in the law of contract and so forth, not at all inclined to push this business.

And the people who were interested in doing, which was mainly the director of the school, had no favourable responses from anybody that they tried.

          Professor Sawer, I'd like to thank you very much for taking part in this oral history of the ANU. Thank you.

Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

 

END OF INTERVIEW