Interview with Emeritus Professor Noel George Butlin

From the ANU Oral History Archive
Interviews conducted 17 December 1990 and 14 January 1991
Interviewed by Stephen Foster
Edited and transferred to web media by Nik Fominas and Peter Stewart

Biographical introduction: Professor Noel Butlin was born in 1921 and was educated at Maitland Boys' High School and the University of Sydney, where he graduated with first class honours and the University Medal.

He was a Commonwealth public servant from 1942 to 1946 occupying the positions of Assistant Economic Adviser to the Australian High Commissioner in London and Assistant to the Interim Chairman of the Food and Agricultural Organisation in Washington, D.C.

It was during this period with the public service that Professor Butlin became involved with the proposed Australian National University as secretary to the committee in the Department of Post-War Reconstruction that was preparing for its establishment.

Professor Butlin resigned from the public service to take up a lectureship in economic history at Sydney University in 1946 and taught both pass and honours courses until 1949 when he was awarded an ANU travelling scholarship together with a Rockefeller Fellowship to study at Harvard University.

The university then offered him a senior research fellowship in the Department of Economics. He worked in this department until 1962 when he was appointed as Professor and Head of the newly created Department of Economic History. He held this position until his retirement in 1986.

During his period at the university, Professor Butlin held various committee positions and directed the Botany Bay Project during 1974 and 1975. During study leave periods he occupied academic positions overseas, including the Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University in 1979/80.

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Transcript: Recoring duration: 4 1/2 hours (5 tapes) Transcriber: Diana Nelson

BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE A

          Identification: an interview with Emeritus Professor Noeel Butlin on 17 December 1990. Two days before his sixty-ninth birthday. I had that in mind. I was going to bring a present. Taking place at his home in Turner. It's for the ANU Oral History Project and my name is Stephen Foster.

          Professor Butlin can you tell us something of your expectations when you graduated from the University of Sydney, with great distinctions, in 1942?

I left, of course, in the middle of the war when we didn't have much option as to what we were going to do. I was manpowered into the public service and in fact arrived in Canberra on my twenty-first birthday to take up a position in the Department of Labour and National Service, Post-War Reconstruction Division, and lasted three months when that division became the Department of Post-War Reconstruction and was jointly headed by Dedman as Minister for War in relation to industry and PWR and with Coombs as Director-General. What did I expect? We were all enthusiastic of course about what we could do for the post-war world. Preoccupied with a certain amount of gloom and doom with demobilisation of soldiers, with unemployment looming, with inflation after the war, everyone fearful of a large-scale depression following a few years after the war, but determined to try what we could in the way of new social security schemes, new welfare schemes, full employment policies, new education systems - policies, new financial procedures for the Commonwealth and the States. All these things were a part and parcel of the post-war reconstruction planning.

Now, I was there for a year, just, and I don't think I did very much. Had a very good time without any grog or cigarettes much, but we had a good time when Canberra, I think, was a total population of about two and a half thousand people. We used to ride bikes everywhere and puncture them riding between the old hospital buildings, now part of ANU, and Civic and puncture them on the - what was it - the blue things, the saltbush, which grew all the way across the hills between the ANU and Civic. At the end of the year Coombs was intending to go to London to head the Australian delegation to an Empire conference - Empire, you note - on Article 7 of the Mutual Aid Agreement which was dealing with post-war arrangements for settling debts and for organising different agreements such as the famous GATT agreement, to be held in London in January 1943 - what am I saying - '44. I've got this all wrong. Let me think again. '42 ...

          You were in Washington in '45.

Washington in '45. I left at the end of '43 - yes - Canberra. Coombs wanted me to go because it turned out that he couldn't go. He had to go off to Bretton Woods and Leslie Melville took his place. And he wanted a 'trusty' to report back to him about what was going on and I was the sucker, so I went off as secretary of the delegation. Went on an American ship across the Pacific, a captured Italian liner, and then flew from the west coast to Britain and landed in Scotland and then by train to London. Was greeted on the first night in the Savoy Hotel with a German raid and literally pieces of shrapnel crashing through the window of my room in the Savoy and skittling under my bed. Well, life in London went on rather like that for quite some time and I went through the delegation procedure which took about six weeks, from memory.

A wonderful experience with virtually a six-months continuous seminar from John Maynard Keynes telling the assembled company from the Dominions and colonies how economics should be handled. We were struggling to get the condition of full employment written into all international post-war treaties and this is where my role as a trusty was important because I find it rather amusing now to look back on it and see the difference in procedure of Coombs and Melville - Melville, who took Coombs' place, as head of the delegation.

Melville was then certainly highly suspicious of all these newfangled optimistic plans. Coombs would have undoubtedly presented the full employment proposal in a highly optimistic manner and stressing its benefits to the world at large in terms of trade and exchange stability and all the rest of it. Melville saw it, I think, more as a device for allowing Australia to escape from any international treaty that might be written because he didn't believe any other country would have full employment, so he sold it basically on that condition. And it was on that condition really that the rest of the Dominions and the colonies and particularly Britain accepted it. I don't believe it would have gone down if it had been sold by Coombs. It went down like a whiz thanks to Melville.

So in fact we had the whole Empire lined up against the United States with this proposition that forms like this should be written in to the preamble of all international conferences. The Empire was so firm confronting the American officials that the American officials agreed. They changed it from full employment to high employment but it remained as a condition of all subsequent treaties. However, it got to Harry Truman's desk and Harry Truman looked at the preamble and said the equivalent of 'bullshit', 'the buck stops here, I won't have anything to do with it' and from that point on it just disappeared. So that was the end of that. So I spent the rest of the time in London mainly dodging bombs. I spent a year there.

          What role did you play in these negotiations?

I was merely the secretary, the office work and like, of no significance whatever - delivering papers, sending Coombs reports. The main purpose of going there was in fact to stay there for a year or maybe more. My technical title was Assistant Economic Adviser to the Australian High Commissioner in London - F.L. McDougall was the Economic Adviser - but in practice that really meant turning from spying on Melville to spying on the 'Brits' for the rest of the year, and I was a sort of civilian spy going around the various departments finding out what the Brits were up to in terms of their post-war planning. And I might say this was in company with, or parallel with rather, Pat Moran who was there at the same time as the technical spy for the Australian government, spying on - 'spying' in quotation marks of course - what their plans were in terms of armaments and so on and so forth.

In my case it was post-war reconstruction plans, housing plans, details of housing design for post-war construction purposes, regional planning, international economics planning and so on and so forth. So I sent out a lot of reports to Coombs and one of the things that I did was to discover that the British response to our pressure about full employment was in fact to plan to produce a white paper on full employment. They were then calling it 'high employment', not 'full employment'. They had already half-reneged on it. I alerted Coombs to this and he responded by accelerating the production of a document that he was involved in before I left which turned out to be the white paper on full employment. He beat the British to get ours out before they got theirs out, for what that's worth.

          So there was a fair degree of competition in who would be able to reconstruct best, or that who would plan for reconstruction best.

And politically get their views down for their own government, really that was the vital question, I think. I don't think Keynes believed in full employment. He was too realistic for that. But it turned out that we got full employment for twenty-five years, regardless of what policy we adopted.

          How did you get on with Coombs and Melville?

I've always got on very well with Coombs. No one could avoid getting on well with Coombs. Melville, at first I found very aloof and more than withdrawn, totally contained within himself and apparently unconcerned about other people, but it was fortunate that I was there at the same time as Fred Wheeler and Fred and I actually roomed together in a hotel in London for six weeks. And the three of us, Melville, Fred Wheeler and I used to go out quite often to dinner and I found that when Melville had a couple of glasses of wine inside him he was a totally different person. He was a very charming man, full of jokes and good fun and I got to like him, and that hasn't changed since. Sober, he seems the most sober person you could possibly imagine. Strangely enough, I think in his old age he's turned to believe in a lot of the values we had immediately at the end of the war in terms of economic policy and become much more concerned with interventionist behaviour by governments in recent years. However, that's too late.

          What about Keynes? Did you have direct contact with Keynes and did the direct exposure to him influence your thinking?

I don't think so. I certainly didn't have direct contact with him. My contact was with the opposite number on the British delegation which was Habakkuk, who became Professor of Economic History at Oxford, and he and I hobnobbed together. But certainly I didn't have any contact with Keynes. I sat behind him, listened to him, saw him, heard and saw him perform - marvellous performance. Heard him cross swords with Robertson, although I thought that Robertson had the right logic in his arguments, Keynes always seemed to win and that's how the room felt the outcome to be. I just saw how quick and brilliant a mind he had. But no .... Afterwards, after the conference, I did get to know a few people like Lionel Robbins who was a member of the British delegation and Stone, the statistician. I've forgotten now but a few of the people - that was outside, that was in my spy role, not during the delegation.

          Just going back a little bit, you spoke of your experiences in Canberra in terms of 'we' on a number of occasions. Were there a group of economists that had come from Sydney? Or did you regard yourself as one of the 'Young Turk' economists?

Let me think. I don't think there was specifically a group of Sydney economists but the members of the Department were all really very young. After all Trevor Swan who was chief economist, was only twenty-seven when I arrived. Jack Crawford can't have been much older as Director of Rural Reconstruction. Coombs himself can't have been more than late thirties I would think. So everyone was young. Everyone was active. We had to find our own social fun and we tended to find it in groups out in the country, out in the Tidbinbillas, out fishing, so there was always a 'we' together. The groups changed all the time. My group, I guess, was Gerald Firth who was an economist in the planning division of Post-War Reconstruction. I was in that group with Arthur Tange and we had a cricket team. We played together as a cricket team around the town. We went fishing, as I say, around the Tidbinbillas and elsewhere. We went out to Queanbeyan to drink, get drunk together. We rode bikes everywhere. We entertained a lot in people's kitchens where people were married like Gerald Firth. So there was quite a cohesive group of people who got on well together, I think, in the main.

          And they were economists, for the most part?

They were.

          How did economists regard themselves? And how were they regarded by others?

Well, Trevor was already, I think, regarded as the top economist; Jack Crawford, one of the top bureaucrat economists; Coombs was also highly regarded as an economist. No, I think that PWR in fact took over most of the bright economists, with some other people like Fin Crisp in political science; Gren Rudduck in regional planning and town planning. Coombs brought in really the bright brains in Australia, leaving the war, which was virtually won once the American Army was in Australia as far as Australia was concerned, leaving the war effort to be conducted by the mouldy oldies like Ron Walker who was a very good economist but didn't want to get involved as second fiddle to Coombs. It was a band of young people who certainly were amongst the brightest in Australia, yes - so that was a great experience.

          Let's move on to the United States. You just crossed the Atlantic there or did you come back to Australia in the meantime?

No, I crossed the Atlantic, didn't get a plane that time, had to come on a tiny little ship which was full of ammunition.

          We've lit the pipe and we're pushing on in Washington.

On the way across the Atlantic .... I was stuck on to a tiny little ship full of experimental ammunition and bombs and God knows what being taken across to America for testing. I remember I was in berth 13 and cabin 13. I regarded 13 as my lucky number ever since because the Germans started their last, or engaged in their last submarine attack on convoys on that trip, and we were attacked day and night all through the Irish Sea and around southern Ireland. I remember waking up one night saying, 'I wish to God someone would stop that door banging', and finally staggered out of bed and there were destroyers screaming all round us dropping depth charges all around our little boat. But unfortunately a tremendous storm developed almost immediately after that and whereas we expected to take about seven or eight days to get across the Atlantic it took us fifteen and the convoy got scattered in all directions and our little boat just belting ahead full tilt as far as - all eight knots of it - just crashing into the waves. I remember seeing an American aircraft carrier which was going back for repairs in the middle of this storm just break in two and go down in the middle of the Atlantic, and we all just steamed on.

Anyway I arrived - I was an unimportant person of course - off Staten Island on Christmas Eve and the thing that most impressed .... I couldn't get off the boat for four days because we were flying yellow flags. We were dangerous, don't come near us, and no one would come near us over Christmas. So we sat there and sat there. There were frantic messages coming from Washington, 'Why haven't you turned up?' 'Why haven't you left New York?' but I couldn't do anything about it. The thing that impressed me most was, as the tide went out past Staten Island, the sea of French letters that swirled by the millions out of the heel around the ship - that was my most vivid impression of ....

          That's wartime.

[Laughs] So I went down to Washington eventually and supposedly my job was to be going to help the Economic Adviser to the High Commissioner - dear oh dear, I mentioned his name a little while ago. We'll come back to him. Anyway, it wasn't really˙.... His job was to be interim chairman of the Food and Agricultural Organisation - to found the Food and Agricultural Organisation. And in a manner of speaking one might say we founded it together. In fact he was a superb con man. A real backwoods diplomat, came from around Mildura, hated unionists, believed in all sorts of restrictions on agricultural production and was sold on nutrition by a job with Orr [John Boyd-Orr] from Scotland and so became one of the world's reformers to a large trade by measures to encourage the standard of nutrition and level of food consumption throughout the world. And he came to believe, totally reversing his position, but it suited him. And he sold this to S.M. Bruce who became a radical internationally on this level in much the same way as Fraser became a radical internationally, for something like the same sort of reasons, I think. It was 'do-goodism' from which you did well.

          That's a very cynical comment.

I'm a cynic all the time. McDougall, the man's name. McDougall was running away from his wife who he had not divorced and she was trying to get him divorced. He could never come back to Australia because she was there waiting for him - so he told me, anyway. She was going to skin him when he got back, so he was stuck in Britain. He died in Britain never having come back. But he was a marvellous old man really as a diplomat. He used to twist people around his little finger and get them to do all sorts. He knew everyone but everyone. And he introduced me to all sorts of people that I would have not otherwise have met.

But my primary job in fact was to again spy, if you like, on the Americans, looking into peacetime plans and what was in the legation. Various messages would come over, 'What are they doing about their tobacco industry?' 'What are they doing about something or other?' and so I'd have to career down town and find out that there were seventeen different parts of the bureacracy that dealt with the tobacco industry and they had forty-seven opinions, and I'd duly report all these back to Australia. God knows what they did with them.

But my main activity was to go down to - with J.B. Brigden, who was Financial Counsellor for the delegation - the Tennessee Valley because Australia was then very interested in regional planning. And this bore to some extent on the Snowy Mountains planning, to find out how successful the Tennessee Valley had been, what administrative set-up they had. How they funded and physically organised their dam construction, flood control, so on and so on and so on. We were only going to go down for a little while but Brigden became ill so he had to go back and I had to take over the whole job and I stayed down there for three weeks and went everywhere in the Tennessee Valley and finally wrote a, well, it must have been a small book on the Tennesse Valley and shipped it back to Australia - that was about my main activity.

          And you wrote the book for the benefit of the Australian experience?

It wasn't a book. It was - I was having a joke about that - it was a very large report for the Australian government for post-war planning purposes, for Gren Rudduck basically in Post-War Reconstruction, including lots of photographs as well as hundreds of documents that I acquired from the area, and my own views on what was going on, and about then I left. I was in the States for six months and someone said in Canberra, 'You better come back', so bad luck, I had to come back, so I came back.

          Now throughout this period you were a member of the Prime Minister's Department?

I had, until I left for Britain, I was in Post-War Reconstruction. In order to take on the job with the High Commissioner in London I had to shift to the Prime Minister's Department. I guess I was probably on some sort of loan arrangement because I certainly went straight back to Post-War Reconstruction, but for that overseas period I was in Prime Minister's but reporting all the time to Coombs.

          And you came back to Canberra, what happened then?

Well, I came back to Canberra determined that I was going to go back to the university as fast as I could.

          Why? Because you were wearying of that sort of experience. I mean, everything you've described, it must have been extraordinarily exciting and exhilarating.

Yes and no. It was exciting in many respects but on the other hand it was also, after the community of people that existed in Canberra in my first year, it was actually very lonely, particularly in London with neither girls nor boys in sight. I knew no one so it was just work and occasionally getting on a bike and riding around Britain and various parts, going to youth hostels, occasionally sleeping literally in a gaol because I couldn't find somewhere to stay. I was really solitary and that wasn't very exciting. It was nevertheless fascinating to be in both Britain and the United States.

I think actually I got the feeling that having been directly engaged in planning activity in Canberra that being in an embassy, a High Commissioner's office, or in a legation, that one was really not much more than a postman. You were collecting information and no doubt using, to some extent, evaluation on it, and sending it back and God knows what happened to it. I found after eighteen months that that was rather boring and I really wanted to get among some action. But the more I'd seen of that the less I liked the public service and I came back - I'd always wanted to be an academic - firmly announcing from the day I landed in Canberra, as soon as the war was over I would get out if I could and go back to the university.

END TAPE 1, SIDE A

BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE B

          Identification: this is tape one, side B, of the interview with Professor Butlin.

          We got you back to the University of Sydney, or you were just about to become a staff member of the University of Sydney.

Well, when I got back to Canberra I was assigned the task of - two main tasks I guess: one was to take over Fin Crisp's job as secretary of the committee establishing the ANU, and the other, the main one, was to plan for de-control after the end of the war.

The de-control job meant going through every individual regulatory device that had been established during the war and give it a priority rating to decide whether it should be dropped the day the guns stopped shooting, or a week after, or a month after, or six months after, or a year after, or maybe held and conceivably put into a referendum to be retained as federal control. I spent six months on that and an enormous dossier in due course went up to Cabinet. Cabinet looked at it for about ten minutes, said 'Bullshit. We want five controls: capital issues control, prices control' - I've forgotten what the other three were - 'Forget the rest'. And that again shows something of the public service. One really doesn't control what one's doing - not that that's sour grapes - the politicians were quite right in acting as they did.

It did have an impact on, not only me, but several people who were enthusiastic, not about controls in this case, but how far the shape of society and the economy after the war was going to change. It was made very explicit as a result of that Cabinet meeting that we were not going to have anything other than the essentially old-style capitalist society that we had known before the war with a little bit of government intervention. That really turned a lot of people off Post-War Reconstruction, certainly including me.

So anyway a job was advertised at Sydney University, lecturer in Economic History. I was then aged twenty-five. I was getting then the equivalent of what was then a professorial salary in the public service and this lectureship was offered at slightly below the basic wage and I took it with great gusto and I've never regretted it ever since. It was the first time a job had been advertised in economic history as such at a lecturer level in Sydney and so I took it.

          And you responded with enthusiasm to that advertisement. Your disillusionment was complete before that final disillusionment with the reconstruction.

Yes, but let's not stress the disillusionment too much. I always wanted to be an academic. I remember Trevor Swan wanting me to stay on, offering me all sorts of things if I did stay on, and wondering at the time whether I should really go and work for my brother. I didn't realise what that implied at the time.

          This is your brother, Syd?

My brother, Syd, yeah. But I was determined to go so I went.

          When was that pressure that you speak of? Trevor Swan urging you to remain.

That would have been the end of 1945.

          When you were in Washington?

No, at the end of 1945 I was back from Washington, I think, in mid-1945. Yes, that's right.

          You took over from Fin Crisp in a secretarial role relating to ANU, which I'd forgotten, but before we get to that, which we'll have to look into as closely as we can, can you recall earlier discussions of the university, or were you privy to discussions between Coombs and Mills and others relating to tertiary education in the post-war world?

Not at any great length until I went on to that committee. Certainly I'd read - I don't remember - but I'm sure I would have read .... We all read the papers on major policy questions so I'm sure I would have read them but I don't remember anything about them.

          And you never spoke to Coombs, for example, about such questions?

Just one general thing that I do remember, one crucial thing - one or two crucial things maybe - the sequence with which the shape of the original ANU was made. I think that emerged clearly outside the committee and prior to my becoming secretary. That the original idea was struck by Curtin who wanted to have a research school of social medicine established in Australia, established by the Commonwealth, and established in Canberra. His idea was that things that poor people were getting sick from like flu or whatever and really there was no research being done on them, and on these things, and he wanted some institute that would devote itself to that.

Now, that didn't look like much of a goer as a solitary outfit and the next thing that came on the scene was the proposition that - there was the school of, I've forgotten it's precise title, the School of Pacific Administration in Sydney - and the argument there was, well, we could advance our imperialist cause by training colonial administrators, and so the idea of a school of Pacific studies, Pacific training studies really. Both original notions were very pragmatic and practical and nothing high-falutin' about the grand research involved in them. Those two things were well advanced, to my knowledge, before I got there to the committee and were discussed around the Department. I don't know when the other ideas like bringing back the grand old scholars from overseas and Oliphant getting into the act and so on - where they started. But those were the two things.

But I do remember that once we got to the stage of seeing - this again was before I went on the committee - that we had a sort of ragbag of colonial administrative training schemes, people looking into the ill-health of the poor and the adumbrations of something to do with nuclear sciences, that there was some funny little gap there which was Australia itself in terms of social sciences so the last thing that was thought about in fact was a school of social sciences, that was always quite clear on the agenda. But they came together as four schools and then were tidied up into a more strictly academic bundle than was ever thought of at the beginning.

          And when you became secretary of the committee, the academic bundle was there?

As I recall, yes, the academic .... You see, it was within the last six months of my being back in Canberra and after all the Act, I think, for the ANU was passed at the beginning of 1946 so most of the work was done. There was still a good deal of argument and I recall some of it with Mills, whom I loved dearly, and Coombs, whom I love dearly. Mills in the chair resisting the rather optimistic and revolutionary ideas that Coombs might have had and Coombs needling Mills and making him red in the face over having to concede almost all of Coombs' arguments. There was no great love between those two, I don't think. Certainly Coombs made Mills a very unhappy chairman even though Mills really was the controller of tertiary education in Australia at the time; Coombs didn't concede an inch to him. But this was Coombs' style, he probably didn't realise what he was doing. When he became chancellor of the ANU he behaved in the same way and I think to the ANU's great benefit. I remember the couple of times I was on Council, Coombs would have a Council meeting, usually at night, and then most of us who had remained to the last dregs of the Council meeting would troop into the vice-chancellor's room - it was first Copland and then Melville. And Coombs would drag out a couple of bottles of Scotch and a few bottles of beer and we would spend then three or four hours with him for the rest of the night arguing vigorously about education but Coombs always bubbling with ideas about what should be done about Australian education - tertiary education system. I think he had tremendous influence in fact in the process.

          Well, we should come back to that later, but Mills for the moment. Mills was one of the old school, I suppose you'd describe him as an old school historian - economic historian, whatever. How did he find himself in that position? Who appointed him, do you recall?

It would have been because of his formal position in the tertiary education system. I don't know the precise details how Mills got sequentially to that point, but at the University of Sydney he was, as Professor of Economics, already also the official economic adviser to the New South Wales government, had been so for fifteen or so years, and in fact paid a supplementary sum recorded in the budget for this purpose. I don't know what he did for it. But he'd been a right-winger in his youth, an establishment man really rather than a right-winger, I guess. But he was appointed to the Royal Commission on Money and Banking in 1936 and there he met Chifley and he fell in love with Chifley [inaudible] all I could say - I don't mean physically. I mean he developed a tremendous admiration for him and certainly by the beginning of the war he was an open Labor voter and remained so for the rest of his life - Mosman notwithstanding.

          Sorry, what ...?

Mosman, where he lived, notwithstanding. During 1942-1943 the whole Faculty of Economics at Sydney University disintegrated. Walker went off to be Deputy Director-General of War Organisation of Industry. My brother, Syd, went off to be Chief Economist. Swan went off to be economist to Dedman - personal economist to Dedman. I think I was down there for three months as a student. But Mills was mixed up first of all with manpower planning and with Alf Conlan, the two of them really ran the development of a policy for manpower planning actually within the four walls of Sydney University. And from that Mills developed - we know that from writings by him and John La Nauze - an ambition that everyone in Australia who had the intellectual capability should be able to do tertiary education. He moved then from the narrow manpower planning of the war to post-war education planning. He was appointed head of the Universities Commission so he was in fact controlling the whole of the tertiary education with demobilised soldiers initially and then developing schemes for scholarships and so on and so forth. So he was in fact the 'Lord-High-Pooh-Bah' of tertiary education by the time the active plans for the ANU came to the fore, so he would be the natural person to be the chairman of the outfit.

          But his heart wasn't in it to the same extent, or in the same way that Coombs' heart was?

No, I think actually .... Well, Mills did say at one stage, he was not at all sure whether - this was in fact one debate that was still going on when I was secretary - Mills did say that he was not at all sure that we should make one central allocation of funds for one research body. He, after all, came from Sydney University, was well aware of what went on at Sydney University and equally at Melbourne University, whereas Coombs was not. Coombs had no background really in academia at all. I think Mills was probably torn between having one research university or allocating funds to perhaps Sydney and Melbourne Universities providing they make a substantial research addition to those two places. That was certainly a major policy debate and one over which they had a considerable argument - Coombs won.

          What about the other members of the committee?

I don't remember now. Goodes was one. He was a Coombs' man.

          Sorry, who was that again?

Bert Goodes from the Treasury. If I looked ...

          Was Eggleston on that committee?

I don't remember. I don't think he was. I don't remember meeting Eggleston, so I don't think he was, but it may be my bad memory. If I saw the papers again now I'd probably tell you again, remember some of the things that people thought. But Bert Goodes was certainly a Coombs' man, and a Canberra man, and he was wholly in favour of the ANU, as Coombs was.

          And had you reached a stage then when you felt you could actively contribute to the committee, or were you there more or less still as the public service note taker?

I was essentially the bureaucrat, yeah.

          And that continued - what, for a period of three months or thereabouts?

Three or four months.

          And that would have been what? Three meetings?

Three or four, yeah. I think they met about once a month. I think the thing was really decided, all washed up basically, by the time I got there. I think it was really that Fin Crisp, who'd been the acting secretary, had got bored with it and said, 'Well, a job that you can take over', that's all.

          So you applied for the job in economic history in Sydney. First off, why did you apply for the job ...? You would have applied for any job okay, but it was a job in economic history rather than economics. Was that a natural progression for you?

That's what I'd always consciously wanted. From the time I went to the university for some reason which - well, no it doesn't escape me .... I'd gone to Sydney University as a pauper, son of a pauper family, with the right to a bursary and scholarship and exhibition fees, let's say, but had to be allocated to a faculty. I'd got honours in - what was it? - Latin, chemistry and French at the Leaving Certificate so I applied for science or arts and the University of Sydney said you can come here but you can do economics. I'd never heard of economics before so it didn't interest me in the least and I just sort of went through a token period of undergraduate years, and just monkey tricks as far as I was concerned really. They were interesting monkey tricks and I guess up to that point was amusing but it had no sense of reality to me that it would have had to, say, a son of a businessman or something of the sort - in that sense it was just monkey tricks.

The only thing that had a degree of reality, and I stress the word degree, was in fact economic history. We did seem to be dealing with the real world as well as some interesting problems, but that was wholly about the English manor. That was the only course in economic history I ever did but it was enough to .... We did also have to do a final honours year essay in .... We could choose what we wanted to do and I chose to do one on Australian economic history and indeed on Edward Gibbon Wakefield which was in fact one of Mills' special interests. But that was enough to make me think that that's what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So you don't need much encouragement.

          And presumably too, you were disinclined to a subject which was purely numbers. I mean, if you were doing Latin, for example, you would have had some interest in words.

Actually, most of my life has been numbers. I think the problem and the strength of Sydney Faculty of Economics was that - well, anyway I can draw a contrast. In Melbourne University the pass course was regarded as the primary thing to cope with and honours was really - not quite a frill - but it was a sort of supplement, and it was intended to relate economics to the real world. And that gave Melbourne graduates a great strength, particularly in the public service. They dominated the public service until the second world war and Sydney people only came in during the second world war when they were moved to get people outside the Melbourne group.

But Sydney .... Well, my brother Syd used to take the line, 'Don't bother about the pass course, just make sure you get fifty per cent, or forty-nine anyway is probably good enough, but concentrate on the honours course which was a wholly separate sequence of classes. We used to have weekly seminars where the object was not really to understand anything but to criticise and the whole object was to look at the critical faculty. We used to end up all these courses being able to tear a book or a series of articles to pieces but not necessarily to be able to put anything together and to comprehend it.

I remember at the end of the fourth year Mills used to have a farewell party for the departing final year class and two or three people usually were asked to say something. We used to play games and then we'd go on to these little speeches, drink a little bit. I had to say something on one occasion and I remember saying that I was leaving the faculty, I'd enjoyed it I said - I was careful about that - but I'd learnt how to criticise everything but I didn't know how an economy was structured or how it functioned or how it changed as a whole. I think that shocked Mills a bit, but it was certainly what I wanted to do and that was really - for that one needed numbers, national income estimates, and that's what I was doing later on. But I'd got enough of that from the bit of economic history I did and one or two other things and a course in statistics to realise that you could do something quite different.

Now, I think the Sydney University honours course was a tremendously powerful course but it was really aimed at people with more maturity than kids of twenty-one where you were really totally destructive. Later on I went to Harvard and saw how they could put together both a picture and a criticism and see the two in a wholistic manner to a large extent, but Sydney wasn't able to do that.

          So when you went to Sydney as a lecturer in economic history in '46 you weren't able to vary significantly the way economics or economic history had been taught in the past?

I was given a totally free hand. Don't think there was a heavy hand laid on people. On the contrary Mills, all of them, the whole ethos was freedom of thinking and that was what the critical faculty was all about - you go where your criticism led you. Mills, of course, was really an historian lawyer, not an economist even, let alone an economic historian. He came by happenstance to Sydney. He was a Melbourne graduate and when the chair became vacant in 1924, was it, when Irvine was sacked, Mills got it because there was no one better to take the job. He turned out to be an excellent choice. He learnt economics on the job. He wrote a book on money with E.R. Walker. It came into several editions. But he had written a PhD thesis at London on Wakefield and was a highly intelligent man, certainly intelligent enough to put enough economics as well as history and law into his package on Wakefield and to convey to people that, okay, there were these monkey tricks in economics but then separate from that was economic history. That was what he promoted. He always promoted it. It wasn't just that I saw the advantages. There was Mills who then bred up Syd, my brother, imported John La Nauze, appointed Bert Madgwick, and these were the centre of the faculty which nevertheless, I repeat, were using all their influence to encourage people just to tear books on economics apart. They were working on their own research but at the same time running these courses which really had little relation to what their research was. So you got their encouragement to go in that direction but it was a sort of encouragement in the future when you joined the staff if you ever could, so I wanted to join the staff.

          So you did join the staff and you taught.

I taught. I was first given the task of giving a course which had never been given in Sydney on American economic history so I was given three months off to read some books that I then discovered, nobody knew what they should be. And so I taught a course on American economic history for three years and then took on some Australian economic history.

          Took on teaching Australian economic history at the end of that period?

At the end of that period.

END TAPE 1, SIDE B

BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A

          Identification: this is tape 2, side A of the interview with Professor Butlin.

          We were in Sydney University teaching Australian economic history.

Actually the American economic history course was just a pass course. There was no distinction offered in it, and no honours were ever offered in it. The Australian course was both pass and honours classes, and I had, for the last two years - John La Nauze didn't want to do it. He didn't regard anything worth doing in Australian economic history so he passed it over to me. I used the occasion to have the honours class .... I remember in the last year I was there I had three honours students and I got them to - I suppose it was a bit of a mix of the old criticism approach and trying to put things together again I was talking about before - take on Fitzpatrick's thesis about company ownership of pastoral estates. And got them working down at the Lands Department searching through the records of a sample - I think it was about a hundred properties in New South Wales and I think Queensland as well - looking for change in title, change in names of owners, partnerships, all the rest of it, going to the mortgage registry to find out who had lent them money and then going back to the Lands Department to find out in whose name they were held and so on. So we put together a picture of - the four of us in effect together - totally different from Fitzpatrick's where the mortgagees - I never know which that is, the lender anyway - name was automatically clapped on to a property, but it meant nothing until the problems arose when people wouldn't pay their interest bills or repay their advances, it meant nothing up to that point. That's where Fitzpatrick had it wrong. He had it right to the extent I suppose that when troubles arose in the Depression that the companies foreclosed, the lenders foreclosed. But anyway we sorted that one out as a class exercise. We did sort it out and the kids were really quite excited sorting it out, worked like beavers over it.

          That would have been quite unusual making use of primary sources. Obviously unusual if Australian economic history just wasn't taught at the time, apart from what you were doing.

Not quite. I remember when I did my essay on Wakefield as an undergraduate I certainly was encouraged to go down to the Mitchell to dig out British parliamentary papers and reports of British committees and so on, and then I read them on this essay. No, I don't think that was unusual. Mills and Syd and of course John La Nauze too were of course devoted researchers. They would have made very high demands on people, so it wasn't unusual.

          Well, we better get you on to the ANU payroll, if not to ANU.

The ANU was offering at that stage .... Well, perhaps I should say that while I was fascinated by this research activity in the classes, I remember, I think I did teach for three years, and by the end of the first year I thought how appalling students were, how dull and stupid they were when they wrote their exam papers and at the end of the second year I thought well maybe there's something I should be doing to help them more than I'm doing and they still turned in bad exam papers. And the third year the exam papers were just as bad despite all my efforts and I decided it must be me so it was time I left. The ANU was offering overseas travelling scholarships so I applied ...

          For the first time?

Well, no, not for the first time. I think it was the second year. La Nauze and Borrie, both from Sydney, got one, I think, the year before and I think I went the year after. It wasn't enough. I wanted to go to America. Most people wanted to go to Britain. I wanted to go to America because I thought that that was where the real economist-historians were, and specifically to Harvard, mainly because of Joseph Schumpeter who was a famous economist who wrote a lot of economist history. The ANU scholarship wasn't enough for that so we organised things that I would apply also for a Rockefeller Fellowship, which I did and I got. So it ended up that ANU only had to pay a supplement to the Rockefeller Fellowship for me to go to Harvard, first for one year and then renewed for a second year.

I got to Harvard and I found that .... I was really enthusiastic about doing research. I didn't want to go back into classes and hadn't really thought my way through that problem. There I was faced with doing solely course work at Harvard for two years. I did it for one semester and got reasonable results in the thing but in economics and statistics and economic history, but I was very desperate to do research so I went along to the centre that Joseph Schumpeter ran called the Centre for Entrepreneurial History, and said I'd like to come and do some research. They said, 'Well, you'll have to talk to Burbank, the chairman of the department. He won't let you off the course work. But if you can get off the course work you can come and join us'.

So I went to see Burbank and explained the problem to him. He said, 'Well, what are you going to do? You want to stay here or go back to Australia?'. 'I don't want to go back to Australia.' And he said, 'Well, you don't need a PhD in Australia, do you?', so we immediately signed a piece of paper which gave me the equivalent of a Harvard PhD which so long as I didn't claim any rights from that piece of paper anywhere except to go and join this Entrepreneurial research centre, which I did. So I worked there for eighteen months but I still had the right to attend courses at Harvard and at MIT which I did while I was there, but only on economic history from then on, and worked on stuff that emerged as colonial socialism in Australia which was in effect the interface between public and private investment and enterprise in the nineteenth century.

          And what sort of encouragement or discouragement did you have to do that? That would have been a rather odd topic for the Americans, presumably.

Actually no. There had, not long before then, been written a series of books particularly about southern - no not just southern - Georgia certainly, but also Virginia and one of the mid-Atlantic states, I've forgotten now, specifically on the state and economic growth. So it was right in the centre of attention of the time, so they were quite happy about that.

          Why were you untroubled about the PhD question? Was it a sort of a non-competitive environment? Did you share the Americans' indifference on that matter?

What I might say might sound a little bit arrogant. It's not intended to be. There was certainly at the time, in Harvard anyway, the view that the really best didn't do a PhD, or didn't get a PhD anyway. Now, I wasn't the very best but just to illustrate, David Landes who's now Professor of˙- he was Professor of History - Economic History at Harvard. He was a wealthy man, wealthy undergraduate, and was able to go off to France and wrote a piece on French entrepreneurship which ran to about 30,000 words and was picked up by the Marshall Plan people on how French entrepreneurs operated behind their Bastille walls, and how you broke down the Bastille walls to make contact with them. There were thirty or forty thousand copies bought and acquired by the Marshall Plan people and flogged around Europe, and of course David was famous overnight. He was brought back to Harvard instantaneously - he was in the same class - and told, 'My boy, you are not going to do a PhD. You're going to be a'˙- I've forgotten the - anyway there's two letters you put after your name, S J, or something [laughs]. Yeah, Society of Fellows, that's right, S F.

          Much better initials.

That was very superior to a PhD. So I mean to say Harvard itself had something of that atmosphere that a PhD wasn't the be all and end all of everything. And certainly to me I was determined I was just desperate to do research. I'd been away from .... One of the problems was that having gone through this Sydney routine of undergraduate research and torn all this bloody literature to pieces, going to Harvard classes and then being presented with the books that I'd already torn to pieces, I thought anyway, and perhaps I was a bit too smart for my own good, but it was just too bloody boring for words. Not that I knew it all but I'd been there, done that, seen it, and didn't want to go back again, that's all.

          But you had been sent off by the Australians, by ANU, to get a PhD presumably. Did somebody take an interest in the fact that you weren't in fact doing that?

Well, Ross Hohnen, at age of eighty-odd a few months ago, said he remembered me, 'Ah, the man who wouldn't get a degree', so I guess somebody was. But I was supposed to be writing and producing. Indeed, I produced several articles while I was in the - not just on Australia - while I was in the Centre, so that they were aware that I was actually producing research work. Anyway, it was enough for them to offer me a senior research fellowship to come back to ANU, so they couldn't have been that concerned. Trevor, after all, who was Head of the Department of Economics, didn't have a PhD and was never going to get one. The tradition at Sydney had always been, indeed, that people who were really good went overseas but they went overseas to do a second first degree, not to do a PhD. I happened to want to do research so bad luck. In America the only way to do that was not to get any degree.

          But ANU was established very much with the notion of PhDs in mind, and in a sort of a way you, or Harvard, were snubbing the new university, weren't you, saying that that didn't really matter?

That may be, but anyway I think I made amends.

          I'm sure you did. You came back as a senior research fellow in economics.

Economic history.

          Economic history specifically, the first appointee in economic history.

That's right.

          In the Department headed by Trevor Swan.

The Department of Economics headed by Trevor Swan, that's right.

          And he was the only economist in RSSS at the time?

He had appointed - well 'economist' query - he had appointed Mick Borrie to his Department as a demographer and he had appointed Horrie Brown as a statistician. So that was his picture of the department in fact, and this is how he applied, in a way, for his chair originally, to have a department something on that design. Now, he almost immediately after that, maybe had it in the pipeline while he was dealing with me, he also appointed Alan Hall. On this occasion, Alan to Economics, as I recall. That made up the group for some time. Then others came in, Bruce Cheek from Harvard, who was with me at Harvard on industrial economics, Des Oxnam on labour economics. They all came in the very early stage.

          So Swan did see an economic historian as being an integral part of the Department of Economics in a Research School of Social Sciences?

Swan, actually, I believe, always was actively interested in economic history. All his good work was of course in theory but his theory was always designed to explain the real world. It was a highly simplified real world but nevertheless he was largely forced like Keynes actually - very similar minds - to absorb the real world by a sort of process of osmosis by a lot of reading but not necessarily coherent reading over the past in Swan's case. Quite clearly he wanted to have an active group in economic history. Indeed, he encouraged his son, Peter, initially to take on economic history as his preferred discipline and Peter started that way. So okay, that always was the case.

          You came back to Australia and you headed straight for Canberra. Can you remember your first arrival?

I didn't head straight for Canberra because I had left Sydney on leave and I came back in August of the year and Sydney demanded its pound of flesh, so I had to sweat out a term, a final term and the exams, at Sydney for the rest of that year. Cursing and jumping up and down I had to wait to get to Canberra. So I came to Canberra in fact in late December of whatever year that was - '51, that's right.

          And you arrived there and what did you find?

Totally preoccupied with a house [laughs]. I wasn't interested in research suddenly. Well, the interesting thing is that when I - just to bring that into some sort of coherence. When I left Canberra to go to Harvard I remember being driven round the ANU site - the old Institute site at least - by Ross Hohnen and I remember him pointing to a pile of timber and someone in the paddock to declare this was what was going to be some building for chemistry or something of the sort. I don't think that pile of timber had been shifted much when I got back, certainly not much activity. All activity was concentrated around the old hospital building, and indeed a little bit of physics was underway but that's about all. There was really very little. The university was minute really and we had a single university tea room in one of the wings of the old hospital building and members of all the faculties came in. Oliphant was regularly in the tea room meeting people, often came to seminars in social sciences˙.... I've forgotten but that just illustrates, it was a tiny little group. Everyone knew everyone else and very quickly so and either got on well together or immediately became firm enemies. I think in the main we got on very well together, was my feeling.

          I've got a vision of those early years when the historians did in fact talk to the physicists, and the chemists talked to the economists and so on. Did it work in practical terms? I mean, did you derive inspiration from discussing things with people from other disciplines?

Well, I'm a cynic as you know from all this conversation so I would say I would doubt it, but what we did do was discover that all these other people were human beings, I guess, and interesting human beings. And they were able to talk about current affairs or whatever with each other in an interesting manner. Now, that's a tremendous hurdle to have leaped, and we're not leaping any more. We've got our barriers up all over the place and virtually no contact with each other, so people are just cyphers now, I think, in the main.

          No comment at all! In those early years did the university have an image of itself? I mean, did you see yourself as wanting to follow some sort of a Harvard model, or in the case of other people, did they see themselves as trying to rebuild the tea room in one of the Cambridge or Oxford colleges? Or did they see the university as something that should be entirely new and entirely for Australian circumstances and to meet Australian needs?

I'm damned if I know. I think I was probably so self-centred and preoccupied with what I was going to do - I decided almost immediately what I was going to do - I'm not too sure that I'm aware of what other people were thinking. I certainly wanted to be highly Australian oriented, and everyone around me wanted to be Australian oriented, certainly Trevor Swan, Alan Hall, Brown, Mick Borrie. Undoubtedly we were clearly recognising ourselves, I think, having the School of Pacific Studies beside us and Social Sciences undoubtedly essentially Australian oriented.

There were some qualifications, two specifically, I think. Overhanging everything was a certain, not too much constraining things, was always the question for the first few years, was Hancock going to come, or not. And I think that probably constrained behaviour a fair bit. Certainly, I think, it must have constrained Geoff Sawer's behaviour. But in addition to that we had another complication, that there were a few people, like Leicester Webb, in political science, who was anxious to get out of Australia. I mean to work on the European background. So he was very actively interested in Italian political theory as a leavening of the Australian lump.

Then quite quickly, I don't know exactly when this happened, there was stress, given Hancock's absence, as to whether Pacific Studies might or might not take over Social Sciences, or whether Social Sciences might or might not take over Pacific Studies. We had a guy named Nadel in anthropology/sociology who was a great guy I think really but nevertheless something of a Prussian in terms of his treatment of human beings. He was certainly interested in world issues, or world sociology, not an Australianist. And so there was considerable argument about who should take over who, or how we should privatise one or the other. Never got resolved of course, or maybe did by inaction. But one of the outcomes, I remember, at least according to the gossip was that Perc Partridge was brought down from Sydney to be a counterweight to Nadel, to bring a strictly intellectual content into the Australian school. That's my recollection of that particular episode. Now, obviously there's more to Perc's arrival than that, but I only mean that that was a particular issue that arose. Wanting Perc for his own sake but hoping for God's sake that he would provide some counterbalance to Nadel in the old school.

          Nadel being a formidable intellectual presence, unmatched by anyone else in the school? Nadel was older presumably, was he, than most of the people?

Not so very much older. We were all young people, that's makes it one thing - well, relatively speaking anyway. He may have been a few years older but he died young. He died of a heart attack just having finished a book. I think he was in London at the time. No, he was so firm and strong in his opinions about almost anything - not necessarily nastily - but held strong opinions, strong views and argued them vigorously, that for many people - laid-back Australians - didn't want this sort of thing on them. And they wanted either someone who would oppose him or get out of his way. Well, fortunately in a way perhaps, he died and that did solve that particular problem, but it was a great pity because I think he was a very able man.

          But Geoff Sawer, for example, was constrained in some way by his presence?

I think Geoff Sawer was frightened of him, yes. Frightened intellectually because of his vigour and because he was anxious .... Nadel, as I recall, was appointed Professor of Anthropology, strictly so described, and his ambition was to become Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, since his main interests were in sociology, and this became a question of claims which were imperia. This then, a major political issue involved which certainly would have impacted directly on Geoff Sawer and others, I guess - heads of departments. But I've forgotten .... If you take the first five years I'm trying to recall how many departments we would have had then in Social Sciences. Do you know?

          Well, we can guess, but I suppose we should go back to a bit of paper and find out precisely, but not too many ...

I'm not sure if Demography was there, Mick was there, but what I mean is this is a period in which it came .... We were a very small number of departments anyway, however many, and young people. Many of us, even Trevor, starting off our academic career almost, whereas certainly Nadel was well-established and a known scholar throughout the world. So that he was pressing his claims. Jim Davidson, who was a mischief- maker, a charming man but a mischief-maker, he was riding that issue in both directions.

          In the other school, of course.

In the other school - from Pacific Studies - and rather maliciously enjoying the joke whichever way it arose. Whether Nadel was winning or losing, was a joke to Jim. Life was a cosmic joke to Jim, I think. There were considerable tensions between the two schools, there's no doubt about that.

END TAPE 2, SIDE A

BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE B

          Identification: this is tape 2, side B, of the interview with Professor Butlin.

          We were talking about those early years, the early '50s in the Research School of Social Sciences, and you mentioned the uncertainty about whether Hancock was going to come, or not. Now, did that cast something of a shadow over the place? Hancock, at some stage - I can't recall exactly when - said something to the effect that he was pleased to see when he later arrived that the School had developed from the growing points that he'd identified early on. He says that in Professing History as well as in other places. Now was that the case? Did you see at the time this School sort of developing out of the outline, the fairly precise outlines, that Hancock had set in 1948?

I can only say that by 1955, I had to wait for another six years or something, but by 1955 I was already ambitious to have my own department of economic history. That in itself perhaps indicates a sense of flexibility about the place and I think that at a very early stage there was a high .... And I think it's true .... This is why I was interested in whether Mick Borrie was already Head of the Department of Demography because that also was important to determine the flexibility of the question - the sense of flexibility. I think that we were already being fed ample funds to allow rapid expansion and Trevor was able to acquire staff quite quickly initially in economics. And history grew up quite rapidly. Law grew up quite rapidly and so on - political science. I don't think there was any real sense of constraint. There may not have been any great sense of direction and I think that really one needs to look in quite a different direction altogether, more in an age, coeval, social, recreational direction almost.

We were all relatively young. I was twenty-nine. Trevor was probably about thirty-four and so on. We all very actively entertained. We all went to each other's seminars pretty much. We all - or not all but a lot of us - broke off in the middle of the day or even in the middle of the morning to play tennis at designated times. We had a very active cricket team. We all went to the tea room, of course, together. We all went to [inaudible]. It was a very intimate group. They knew each other very well. In the main got on very well, apart from, okay, leaving aside the tensions of Nadel and some of Jim Davidson's jokes.

My recollection is that Laurie Fitzhardinge, I think, who was then running History, was something of a constraint on history and rather a mysterious and unduly talkative person. But apart from him it was really rather like Post-War Reconstruction all over again to me, with a group of young people all rather enjoying life together. It was a totally new experiment, nobody really knew where we were going. Nobody was really very, I think, deliberately planning very much. And I think everyone was aware that almost anything could be fixed up for someone if it was really wanted. I don't mean that suggesting connivance between people or anything like that. No doubt there must have been constraints but flexibility was the name of the game rather than any really clearly fixed purpose and design, or anything like that. I think if Hancock saw it just as he wanted to see it, that was the particular spectacles he had on.

          And Geoff Sawer in particular.

Geoff Sawer's a very easygoing .... Someone who deliberately refusing to take on the title of director, deliberately making himself simply the dean of the faculty. And dean to him meant just being a titular political head, and not pushing anyone around. He didn't want to push anyone around.

          So that meant, getting back to this question of whether the people developed Australian interests or looked to other areas, that if a person like Leicester Webb did want to work on Italian matters he could just go ahead and do it?

Nobody would raise a question. I think that was one of the tremendous strengths of the place. Also because of its smallness and newness. It's hard to restore in a big, complicated outfit, but nevertheless it allowed for a higher degree of creativity and enthusiasm because it wasn't bureaucratised and wasn't highly designed. I don't believe that we really knew where we were going, except that we knew we were going and going fairly fast in the main, and that was important.

          What about the administration? Did you have much to do with Copland? He was still there when you arrived, and presumably you had something to do with Melville after that.

I didn't have a great deal to do with Copland. Copland hated Butlins quite literally. I'm surprised actually he allowed my appointment.

          Because of some ...

Mainly because Syd did over a lot of his writings in the past, I think. It was not more than .... He had nothing against me as such but ...

          Guilt by association.

Guilt by association. I had rather more to do with .... Actually I came to have a high regard for Copland in the end even though .... To some extent he's my sort of economist in the sense that he's interested in the real world and real policy. So I didn't share a lot of Syd's views of Copland. Syd's views were essentially those of a technical economist rather than the policy man. I thought that Copland, for his time - with perhaps one qualification - was an eminently desirable vice-chancellor. He was a natural entrepreneur as well as politician, and I think in terms of getting funds flowing rapidly and resources flowing rapidly at the ANU he was a vital contributor to the development of the university. Now, in the end I think that he overdid it and maybe gave Oliphant too much in the way of resources and made too many demands on the university, but you have to make some mistakes to get anywhere. And I think certainly in the case of Social Sciences and Pacific Studies anyway, he was an enormously powerful contributor to our growth and development. I was never aware of him .... I don't think I was on the Council at all in Copland's time. I was in Melville's, so I'm just expressing a general opinion about Copland, not more than that.

Melville certainly, the story was that Melville was put in to clean up the mess that Copland created. Maybe that was a story spread by Melville, I don't know. But certainly that was .... To some extent it comes back to the point I was making before about the sense of freedom of movement, freedom of access and all the rest of it. Funds were flowing under Copland, resources were flowing, and under Melville they were more constrained but not, I might say, in Social Sciences. Melville was gunning basically for Oliphant and I think that he did Oliphant in in a most disastrous manner, but I'm not sure that Oliphant didn't altogether deserve it anyway. I have a greatest admiration for Oliphant, so I don't really quite know what to say there.

          To what extent were you privy to those problems at the time, and indeed, the problems with JCSMR, the doubts about whether Florey was going to come and so on?

The university leaked like a sieve. There was no hope on earth of keeping anything secret. Now, that doesn't mean that I knew precisely what opinions were held by people. But we were all writing letters to the paper about affairs of the university and signing them - you know, one of them might be Professor of Pacific Studies, ANU, and so on, and these letters would be about yesterday's decisions by Council. Gossip was running all over the university. We were all fascinated by what was going on. It wasn't necessarily malicious or stupid or even interfering. It was just inquisitiveness, the ability to know and the inability of the administration to contain the information, so to a large extent one did know a lot of what was going on, at least a pretty good idea about what was going on in a way that, again, has been lost and perhaps it's a good thing it is lost. We were eventually constrained from ....

I remember a great debate on the various faculty boards about freedom of writing, freedom of expression, and there was - I think it came from Melville - an edict that we were not to write letters to newspapers and that was gradually whittled down and whittled down and whittled down so that eventually we were allowed to write to the newspapers provided we didn't use either our title at the university or Acton as our address, but apart from that we were free to .... The place was riddled with gossip and riddled with information or misinformation, but I think we knew pretty much of what was going on.

          So RSSS continued on more or less without direction until the arrival of Hancock in 1957. By that time you'd been appointed reader. You were appointed reader in 1954?

Yes, about that.

          And you'd continued on with your own research, just developing your own interests, working more or less on your own, or as part of the economics team?

There was never any sense of a team under Trevor except on occasions when .... He and Horrie Brown were very close friends. This didn't make them a team but whenever Trevor had some current numerical problem that he wanted something solved then Horrie would more or less drop anything to do it for him, but that was purely personal. There was no sense of a team. Trevor wouldn't have wanted one, wouldn't have known what to do with one if he had one and I don't think there was a sense of a team anywhere in either Social Sciences or Pacific Studies. Maybe there was a bit under Nadel, a little bit, but I don't think very much. No, we were all .... Everyone was starting afresh, everyone was starting in tune, everyone was too busy to manage anybody else.

I came back with the fixed intention, before I got here, that I wanted to work on Australian historical social accounts and that's the thing I started on the first day and went on with for eight or nine years, with no one interfering. Trevor, at one stage, saying he had, whatever it might be, five individualists in one flying column, because I had a couple of research assistants, but I remember I was working in my room at the old hospital building, which is where Post-War Reconstruction was of course, and I had the whole of my floor covered with statistical registers. This must have been about 1953 or thereabouts - piles and piles and piles of books. In walked a couple of gents - they weren't very well dressed gents - and they said, 'This looks a bit busy'. 'What are you doing?' and I showed them what I was doing. And this was about the total exchange and they walked out. A few months later, hey presto, from them came a grant for, I think it was, five thousand pounds which was a lot of money from the American Social Science Research Council. They were a couple of snoops coming around to hand out money. So you just took, you know - bingo.

          Thems were the days.

Those were the days.

          I want to come forward to the arrival of Hancock. How was that regarded? With some degree of trepidation, enthusiasm, or what? With reflections perhaps on the false start, I think Melville called it, that Social Sciences had at the outset?

It was really with a fair bit of trepidation by me, 'cause I didn't like anything I'd read of Hancock's.

          But you hadn't met him before?

Didn't know a thing about him. And I actively read more of what he had written and liked it even less, so first of all, when he did come I was charmed very quickly and, okay, so I was a fool. I had it all wrong. I got sucked in - happily so. I remember I was then a member of the Board of - BIAS - whatever they called BIAS then - Board of the Institute of Advanced Studies ....

          Not at this stage.

No, it was the equivalent of that, I've forgotten what it's called, so it must have been because I was a reader, I'm not sure, or maybe I was acting for Trevor at the time for one reason. I do remember vividly Melville coming to the meeting where all the assembled professors of the university were and various other oddments like me and Melville got up and announced that after all - he'd just come back from England - and Hancock had accepted. And the entire room rose automatically cheering and clapping. So I think there was undoubtedly a lot of people were hanging on Hancock coming.

          Because of the need for intellectual weight in Social Sciences?

I think it was a lot of, frankly, imperialist cringe to some extent. A lot of these people had just come from Britain, they knew Hancock very well, okay. There were quite a significant number of emigr‚s or foreigners worked in Britain and they knew Hancock and they felt that they would acquire prestige from his coming. Now, I didn't stand up and clap, but Melville certainly, for the first time in his life, I think Melville was popular - for about five minutes [laughs]. There was, I remember, quite an automatic response, everyone just cheering like mad, 'Hooray', 'Good on you'. Now as to what Trevor thought or what Sawer thought in the quiet of their own homes, I have no idea.

          Well, was that a reflection on the lack of direction that the school had in those early years? Were people yearning for some sort of a strong intellectual hand to take over?

I think it's possibly the case. I certainly didn't care because I was doing the work I wanted to do and as fast as I could do it, and it seemed to me that everyone around me was in the same position, so I'm not too sure about that. I would be fairly confident that Geoff Sawer wanted to drop the bundle. He would have that particular interest. Trevor had spent quite some time just before then in Britain and was certainly attached to the British economist establishment so he might again have seen an appropriate need for some sort of generalised purpose but I would suspect that the whole outfit operated in such an excessively democratic way, and continued to do so once Hancock ceased to be director, for a long time, and indeed did really to a large extent while Hancock was director.

Hancock wasn't able to change it much, didn't have the time. Maybe Trevor or Mick or Geoff Sawer saw that there was a need for a design, frankly I don't know. I don't think that Hancock gave much design. I think that once he left, then for another ten or twelve years, resources flowed in so fast that a design would have been a bad thing in many ways. Certainly, I wouldn't have got my own department. But I think that the Institute was able to seize on its growing points. Ideas were coming up pretty quickly in a way that they haven't for a long time and with this group that had been so convivial and cricket-playing and all the rest of it - I've described before - they were very quickly and amicably able to satisfy each other's ambitions. And I think that's how the place really worked before Hancock, worked during Hancock, and worked after Hancock for quite a long time.

          It was obviously a period of great self-confidence but at the same time the university was to an extent under challenge from various quarters. Eggleston, for example, was rather critical, about the time you arrived I guess, of the way Social Sciences was headed. Coombs, from time to time, had things to say about the two social science schools. And then, of course, there was the report of Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders, which I think was 1959.

That was one thing that Keith Hancock engineered, yes.

          Yes. Before Carr-Saunders, did you recall those comments of Eggleston and the occasional comment of Coombs, just wondering where the university was headed and if it was doing the right thing?

I'm sorry, I don't. The short answer, I do remember the antagonism that was a response to Carr-Saunders, which was again the response of a spoilt child, [inaudible] to some extent at least, but also that Carr-Saunders was looking at it from a very particular point of view, not understanding the Australian scene, and giving a guidance that we thought was rather silly.

          Did you contribute significantly to the document which bears five names, including your own? I can see Hancock's in there very strongly. Do you recall this one? That's Carr-Saunders and the response.

No recollection. Not my handwriting on the side, anyway.

          No, that's mine.

What does it say, anyway?

          Well, move on to the response.

This is Carr-Saunders report.

          Basically it says that Carr-Saunders got it all wrong.

Yes, that's what I just said. Did I have my name on this response? Heavens.

          One of the basic questions of Carr-Saunders was: could there be such a thing as a Research School of Social Sciences? Was there something wrong with the whole notion of social scientists sitting around doing nothing but research?

Not teaching, that's right. I think Keith Hancock, despite the fact that his name's on this document - it must be there by compulsion - really thought we should be doing some teaching. I think Keith always thought that one couldn't go on living without what he claimed to be the stimulus of bright minds, that's the undergraduates. I never agreed with that, I thought it was a load of crap. I've never found any stimulus from undergraduates. Interesting, I'd like to read that again some time [laughs].

          Well, I must remember not to bring along documents to interviews because they're too diverting. But you did in fact do quite a bit of teaching. You taught at the old University College, indeed, against the wishes, or there was some reluctance expressed on the part of administration. Do you recall that?

No, I don't recall that. I was a very good friend of Joe Burton and he was anxious to get economic history actually represented in CUC, and I was very happy to help him. Let's be clear, in a way it was easy in that doing the whole of Australian social accounts for nearly a century, it was really defining the whole of - in one way at least - the whole of the Australian economy. I was then able, in the main, to teach my own research - not social accounting obviously, but I did do some of that, too. I remember making a fool of myself on several occasions with different equations I got wrong on the board. But I wasn't aware that the university was against it. They were, were they?

          I think that you were teaching to excess. That's my reading of the documents anyhow, but I'd need to look at it again.

Well, I was researching to excess, too.

          Well, I want to ask you about amalgamation at some stage and the events of 1960 but I think you need a holiday now. So let's leave that until next time. We've reached about 1960. There's a long way to go.

END TAPE 2, SIDE B

BEGIN TAPE 3, SIDE A

          Identification: this is the second part of an interview with Emeritus Professor Noel Butlin. It's 14 January 1991. My name is Stephen Foster.

          Professor Butlin, in the last interview we reached around about 1960, I think, but before we leave the '50s I'd like you to reflect a little more on the research that took place during that decade. Can you tell us a little bit about what motivated research, what determined the directions of research, what were the objectives of research, specifically in relation to what you were doing?

I think that first of all it was very much influenced by the consciousness that so very little research was done on Australia of any sort - political, economic, or whatever - that we almost invariably and inevitably focused on Australia even though there were mutterings from time to time that the School of Social Sciences was not really an area school. It became rapidly an area school. And so in History and Economics and Politics essentially, apart from Leicester Webb perhaps, it was very much concerned with Australia. Individuals almost entirely chose their own research interests, certainly in Economics, and I believe to a large extent in History, in the absence of a head of department in - I think we then still had, I'm not sure, did we have an International Relations, I think we did.

          I think that was in RSPacS.

RSPacS. It was the same building - it was a room next door. So we really had not much sense in personal terms of separation. So far as I was concerned I had come back from America where I'd been working on, amongst other things, public investment in Canada and Australia, and wanting to focus on Australian research. We were in a position where we had a small group of economic historians in the Canberra University College and three people, I think at the time, interested in economic history at the old ANU. We tried to get together seminars and we found that it was virtually impossible to conduct very meaningful seminars because there was almost no written material on which to fall back, and everything had to be done in the most scruffiest method imaginable.

So for instance, to attempt to give an impression on the course of economic development in the nineteenth century in Australia I got together a paper which was composed of a dog's breakfast of statistical time series of letters carried through the post and numbers of sheep and God only knows what sort of stuff which in no sense really, or meaning, whatever. And looking back the seminars we had were just laughable, but that represented the state of research. And my object was to try and get my hands on the whole of the Australian economy and that meant, in effect, six or seven years of hard slog research on investment and national income and delineation of the structure of the economy, which had never been done before, so that filled up most of the '50s as far as I was concerned. And finished, I think, I produced a paper for the historians in 1957 on the shape of the Australian economy which laid out the importance particularly of urban activity in Australian history. And, I think, started the historians down that track of urban history but at the same time gave a conspectus of the structure of the Australian economy as I saw it by the end of the '50s that was totally new. And from that came my two books on investment and national income - published in the early '60s.

          From time to time there was some debate, not particularly explicit perhaps, in the school about the relative merits of empirical and theoretical research. Did you ever encounter, or was that ever a problem for you, balancing the two? Or did you ever find suggestions that there was too much empirical research being conducted? Or was that expected in that period?

I think I was conscious of it and I think I probably, because in a sense I suppose because I was collecting together virtually every statistic in Australia for eighty years from each colony in the State and the Commonwealth - there were mountains of statistical registers and year books and public documents of various sorts in my room all the time - I think I was probably almost par excellence the empirical research worker, but in fact I don't believe that I was. And I don't think really that Trevor Swan saw it as such.

I remember that this was the time when the so-called Harrod-Domar model ran rampant in growth arguments among economists at the theoretical level, and I certainly was applying those models which great qualification to the structures that I was developing and the way that I was thinking about them. And I remember one of the very first seminars I gave in economics attempted to show, and I think successfully did show, that the variables that were used, if you can call these variables, in the main equations in these early growth models were far from being the constants that people thought empirically they were over time the great constants of economic history so-called - the multiplier and relation and so on - which was supposed to be fixed. And I wroted a paper which I remember was just a steal from L. Susan Stebbing called 'On Being Deceived by Half and Other Fractions', which was in fact showing that these variables chosen were indeed subject to a high degree of variation and by no stretch of the imagination could be seen to be constants. So in that sense I was quite deliberately making, in a sense at least, contribution to the theoretical framework, and I think that was accepted.

          You mentioned that each researcher was able to choose his or her, almost invariably his in those days I suppose, own topic of research. Was there any challenge to the autonomy of the individual researcher that you came across?

Yes and no. One needs to bear in mind that the place was expanding very rapidly. It was really very easy to get a position to stay on at the ANU if you were any good at all so that the way of expressing disapproval was not to offer a person a tenured job. And after three years on a research fellowship or a senior research fellowship, simply to let them go. Now that's certainly a way of expressing a bit of disapproval and I know of some people to whom that method was applied. But it was really too late as a method of influencing the design of their research. And so you got someone else to replace them and hoped that they might do something that turned out interesting or exciting or appropriate to what some head of department may have wanted. But I don't think there was a clear design at all, at any stage.

          And that pressure was applied by whom? By the head of department, or was there an unstated element of peer group pressure.

Most obviously it was applied by the head of the department. And also to some extent applied by the then deans, as they were originally, with attempts to organise school seminars which had some sort of general semi-theoretical, at least, objective. But clearly when a person started to run foul of the head of the department it became reasonably clear and so we peers got together either to help or to encourage some means of adjusting to this conflict. So in that sense there was peer pressure, too. But not peer pressure in the sense of one saying to one's mates, 'Come on do something that we want done', or 'Let's get together and do something'. It was rather, 'How can we help you to cope with the antagonism that's building up?'. And I've known several cases in which this has occurred.

          How significant was the seminar in research? You've mentioned seminars in economics. You've mentioned school seminars. How did they work? Were they a successful means of exchange?

I think they were very interesting. I think at the level of˙.... We had the sort of scruffy in-house seminar which we conducted in economic history and with no-one else - maybe an odd historian came along. But I think certainly they were very helpful to us in terms of setting a timescale to produce something to find out how limited our knowledge was about things, and the need to do something about some particular area of research work.

But I think the broader seminars, and there were, in a sense, seminars that tended to attract a wider range of people right up to the level of the school seminar, and you'd have a series of school seminars as such. I think they were really very interesting. You often would get literally people like Oliphant, or whatever, coming along to social science seminar. Now, it doesn't mean that he contributed anything but the feeling that we were in some way relating ourselves to other disciplines on a rather grand scale was quite exciting. You did get people like Patty Moran turning up to seminars on, let's say, the development of the wheat industry in Australia, and slaughtering the guy who was delivering a paper on purely statistical grounds - purely a statistical technique - excellent. I think another thing which showed up was Patty Moran trying to give a lecture series strictly to instruct social sciences in statistical technique right across the board. And with the greatest of innocence and goodwill on Patty's part really trying to teach low grade social scientists how to do statistics, finding that really they were abysmally dull and social statistics, most importantly, to the techniques involved in it were abysmally dull.

And one of the consequences of those early seminars was indeed, and I know this quite literally, I know Patty Moran very well from many years ago, was to turn Patty out of the school and create essentially a scientifically oriented statistics department. That's a major impact seminars and the teaching series had. So it had a whole varied influence - awareness of communication with others, of stimulus to see broader issues, like my 'Being Deceived by Half and Other Fractions', or breaking up the school to some extent. Very interesting.

          And what sort of interest did you and your fellow economic historians or economists take in the other schools, for example, John Curtin?

We had, probably maybe getting into the very late '50s, a very special relationship with the medical school because we actually occupied - moved out of the old hospital building - and occupied part of the medical school - old Economics Department. And as a result probably of all people in the university, the economists encountered in tea room environment and direct personal encounter along the corridors and so on, the people in the 'John', and got to know them on a personal basis. We never ever attended any of their seminars as far as I know but that doesn't mean we didn't talk a great deal about the sort of work they were doing. And probably we would never have been wanted at seminars. But I think the three years, or so, we had there was really quite an interesting experience and helped to keep us in a relationship with the medicos in a way that I think probably the rest of the school didn't have at all, but that's a special locational thing.

          You mentioned when we spoke last time that Hancock's arrival was greeted with great enthusiasm, or the prospect of his arrival was greeted with great enthusiasm. When he came was there a noticeable change in research directions, or the pace of research? And did he, in the short term, have a great influence on what you were doing?

Let's be clear. I came to have a very high regard for Hancock but I was horrified by his arrival so I'm trying to trace back over the transition in attitude to him. I don't think I changed my attitude much while he was director. I think my attitude to Hancock changed when he ceased to be director. I didn't like anything Hancock had ever written to be quite frank, and I found him in some ways rather a difficult man to come to terms with because he was so, not just British but English, and I'm probably being derogatory perhaps because I'm trying to lean over backwards to recover my impressions at the time, but my impression, I think, then was that Hancock, having left Australia in the early '30s, was still wool-gathering literally and saw his directorship as a means of recovering his understanding of Australia, catching up as it were quickly, maybe with the intent of putting himself in a position where he could in fact direct research of the School. I'm not sure about that, or whether it was just a question of catching up and finding handles with which to do the catching up.

Certainly I think the wool seminar which he conducted, typical of Hancock, no ideas of his own except that there was going to be a wool seminar, but a very, very firm determination that there was indeed going to be a wool seminar. And he was indeed going to get the whole school involved in it, and not only the whole school but major institutions outside the ANU. And he did do so, simply by insisting and insisting and insisting, and when the seminar looked as though - it went on for about five years or three, or whatever, but it was a long time anyway, and it produced a book, quite a good book which Alan Barnard edited.

But he certainly dragged me into it with great reluctance on my part because I just didn't believe - my whole theme at the time was cities are the places where you look for Australian economic history not amongst the bloody gum trees and sheep - and when Hancock kept on at me to produce a seminar paper, I did indeed produce a seminar paper which was called, 'The Unimportance of Wool', and I think Hancock got a message from it. I subsequently did about two or three more papers for him just to mollify him a bit, more on my own sort of interest of investment in pastoral industry and funding of pastoral developments, which he wouldn't normally have accepted until I wrote a paper on the unimportance of wool. But in that sense he had a big influence by diverting my attention away from what I wanted to do.

But nevertheless, I was aware, and became increasingly aware, that I was encountering scientists from CSIRO, people from other universities, veterinary scientists and so on, that I wouldn't have encountered in other circumstances, and it became really quite an exciting seminar, dull as wool is. Exciting, methodologically, in the way people got together, and did indeed try to communicate with each other and understand each other's attitudes. And it included economists as well as economic historians, Fred Gruen at the time was involved in it as I recall, and we got right down to the nitty-gritty of major policy issues of grand design of research in other institutions to the level of pointing out to CSIRO people that when we had a paper on how to produce the whole wool clip of Australia on a hundred miles square in Victoria - this was the sort of ultimate objective of much of CSIRO research in pastoral industry at the time - as Fred and I took great delight to point out to the CSIRO scientists that the whole research was fundamentally mal-designed. We had plenty of land in Australia, the one thing we didn't want to economise in was land, and they were in fact basing their whole research on the assumption that you poured enormous amounts of capital and technical change into the pastoral industry and so conserved land, and it was sheer bloody nonsense. Well, they were quite heady days and we got important conclusions which, I think, in fact influenced the CSIRO quite a lot.

So I think Hancock had a very big influence and a very good influence and he did drag in a lot of the talent of the School. He did the same thing with the Dictionary of Biography and that would have floundered, I think, but for Hancock. Not necessarily because of anything that you put your finger on in terms of what Hancock did or said, but his sheer determination that it wasn't going to fail. That's, I think, the thing that has been lacking in directors, in the main, since Hancock, just the willingness on the part of the individual to back to the hilt some major project in the school, and being willing to put his own reputation on the line and pour sufficient resources anyway behind a central piece of activity. Let's not say necessarily a research project or program. And we haven't had that since.

     

          So Hancock's strength was in allocating financial resources in the right areas. Or was it also choosing the right people?

Well, he chose me as professor. Yes, obviously he chose the right people. But Hancock thought that - quite seriously - the School was far too big when he came and really he should be .... Two men and a dog was enough to run a university. And he thought in very small terms in terms of funding. He really didn't understand money or budgets or anything of that sort, and he relied on a young chap named Thomas, I recall - he unfortunately, I believe, died quite early - to be a budget man for him at the beginnings of the early Peter Grimshaw model, but on a very small scale. Hancock's notion of budgeting was, if he approved of someone he would let them have an extra typewriter, but that was big time back when we had no typewriters. So he used power financially in a very small and mean manner in a way. I don't think he thought big at all in terms of bodies or budgets. I don't think he had any idea of that whatever.

          When he arrived he was fairly contemptuous of parochialism, meaning the emphasis in some areas on Australian research, purely Australian research, and of course one of the first things he tried to do was to get the historians working more on Commonwealth matters and spreading to India and so on. Did you ever receive any flak owing to your enthusiasm for Australian topics?

On the contrary, I don't think I did at all. I very quickly found, if I may say so, Hancock making overtures to me rather than the reverse, so in fact I found - of course he did with everyone - take them for his famous walks around the lake. And I remember him telling me at an early stage, 'Well, you can call me Hancock and I will call you Butlin. Maybe some day we will be on first name terms'. But that was in fact a great gesture which I didn't realise at the time. The ability to drop the prefix was an important step in familiarity. It was an insult to me in fact. I started calling him by first names and other names quite quickly, or 'Handbags' and so on to his face. But we got on very well quite early, I think.

And no, indeed, my own feeling was, on the contrary, that while I was aware of the attitude you raised in relation to history, I think his wool seminar was indeed in some respects one of the most parochial pieces of research that he could have promoted. He did it in a way that was utterly different methodologically from the way the current historians were doing their research. And with Laurie Fitzhardinge having been foisted really, poor fellow, into the position of taking care of the Department of History. He was interested in land settlement and that was what Laurie thought Australian history was all about, the sunburnt bloody stockman in other words. But it was land settlement conducted by tiny little regions one after another. And so you studied land legislation, number of settlers and blah, blah, blah, all along the line. Now that's what Hancock was antagonistic towards. And I think we all agreed wholeheartedly that one should be antagonistic towards this. It did take quite a long time to root out that land settlement rubbish from the History Department, in fact far beyond the time Hancock ceased to be director, but it did eventually go. Hancock's wool stuff was certainly very Australian but it was on a grand scale. That's the difference.

END TAPE 3, SIDE A

BEGIN TAPE 3, SIDE B

          Identification: this is tape three, side two of the interview with Professor Butlin.

          We were talking about the wool seminar which has assumed almost legendary proportions in RSSS, and I guess in the university generally. To what extent was it an inspiration for later grand projects? I'm thinking particularly of Botany Bay, but various other largescale projects that have taken place within the school.

I think - you mentioned the Botany Bay project - that was certainly consistent with Hancock's concept of a thing on the scale of the wool seminar, involving scientists and social scientists and so on. But it had an impact in a different way, and that was the attempt to continue with school seminars and for each director, successively, to have his own school seminar. I've forgotten the titles of them now and these would now apply to the late '50s and early '60s, I think, Perc Partridge, Geoff Sawer, in turn I think had a special major seminar which they were known to be concerned with, and typically attended at the very least, and in broad terms probably conceptually framed. Perc was interested in social order, as I recall, and I think we had a major seminar series on that which didn't interest me very much because I guess it was rather more philosophical and had very little economics or history content in it. But that illustrates an attempt to continue to sustain the Hancock style.

Somewhere in the course of one of those early school seminars Trevor Swan gave his great papers - theoretical papers - on economic growth and economic stability, which illustrates the fact that every now and then something quite brilliant came into the discussion and helped us keep up the hope, I guess, that sometimes at least we could be a great school. I know I don't remember a great deal more about it than that. But my impression is that by the mid-'60s anyway, the school seminar had really lost its vogue, the director had become essentially a bureaucratic figure with very little concern for the academic affairs of the school, except when it came to the question of getting a triennial budget together and therefore having to put some - this is not intended to be derogatory - but directors having to put down some ideas against which one could put some dollar signs for the purposes of expansion and development. I think a good deal of the change stemmed from the fact that during the period from the late '50s into the mid-'60s we combined of course with the Canberra University College, we spread out physically into separate schools. The whole university became very much more complex. And whereas we had a cosy relationship throughout almost all the '50s with most people coming to the old hospital building tea room - scientists and social scientists and others together - we suddenly were ceasing to do so and meeting in a much more aloof manner with much bigger problems on our plate even though it was still an easy environment, nevertheless there were much more complex situations which we were facing. So that I think that this is what probably was a major factor at any rate in seeing the end of the school seminar.

But of course in the process it saw the directors, I think, perpetuated after that as bureaucratic figures. And for reasons that seemed to me were not good. I guess it's a question of growing up and knowing how to do a job only when you've finished it. But in this case the directors were learning by doing by adapting themselves towards bureaucracy rather than academic affairs, and they might have, I think, have set up effective support systems to support the administrative process and given themselves more time for academic affairs, but didn't do so and haven't done so and show no signs of doing so, showing less sign now of doing so. And I think the present directorship rank, I don't mean the present person, but the present mode of operating the directorship is absolutely disastrous for that reason.

          But directors were appointed then as academic leaders, were they not?

They were appointed then in theory because of their academic attainments yes, and I guess they were - particularly Hancock and Partridge got the jobs because of their academic attainments. But in fact with all respect to Perc Partridge who was a really great mind, he was not a research man and in some ways, if you like to see it in personal terms, the paths from research direction, academic direction, to bureaucratic direction probably diverged with him, to a large extent for that reason. He really wasn't - he was interested in general ideas but he wasn't in fact a research performer himself, not on the scale of Hancock or others. And I think that he wrapped himself up in bureaucracy and that then followed down the lines to people like Mick Borrie and others.

It is important to appreciate that .... It's hard to make these comments because at this level the School was really being conducted not really - after Hancock anyway, Hancock was a sort of special performer, solo performer, because he came from outside - but after Hancock the School was really run by a small group of coevals and the directorship was just a swap between people to a large extent. And it's really rather hard to say .... Partridge, Borrie, Sawer particularly, particularly those three, they understood each other's minds. They worked and talked together a lot. And it's probably rather hard to pin down just how far they did or did not think about the direction of the School because they were almost certainly talking about it a lot and a great deal of what they talked about was never ever put down on paper or never ever came out; whatever emerged rather as a product of a debate which might have seemed an individual director directing the School. I believe there was probably a lot more direction in this informal way through that coeval relationship between the trio, but that's hard for you to find - good luck to you.

          Just rather in defence of Partridge. My impression from what I've seen of the written records is that he spent more time committing thoughts about the university generally, the future direction of the university, to paper than most other people at that time. There's a few papers written by him just addressing the large questions of where the university was going and arguing that it had tended to wander up until that point - I suppose around about the mid-'60s. But I wonder - you say that Partridge was wrapping himself in bureaucracy - to what extent was he being wrapped by the outside bureaucracy - government? To what extent was government taking a closer interest in the functioning of the university and in universities generally?

I wasn't really meaning to suggest that Perc was deliberately finding himself a hole to hide in in bureaucracy. I agree with you. No, the point I was making before, the university as a whole was becoming rapidly a much more complex place and relations with the government are part of that development of complexity, and the need for delivering a great deal of detail about triennial plans and all the rest of it. All this forced the director to be a bureaucrat to a large extent. Unless, I repeat, unless, and they could have done it in those days without any difficulty because of this coeval relationship they had. It would have been possible openly for Perc and Mick and Geoff to direct the School, not necessarily as a triumvirate, but with a hierarchical relationship, or division of labour between them, and to free the director to be an academic director. And that was what was never really done - that's what I'm saying.

          What about the role of faculty and faculty board?

Frankly, I think that we've had democracy running out our ears. We've gone mad. And I think democracy is good up to a point in a university but in a very good university, frankly, I think that the - and this may sound harsh and upstage - but I think ‚litism is the correct thing to stress, not to go overboard about, and I think one needs a good deal of democracy. But we got to a stage where virtually a director had to get an overwhelming vote for everything that was done and that vote was achieved only by hours and hours and hours of discussion with the right of every individual to interfere and intervene in anything to do with academic policy or even university policy or budgetary policy and so on, until we got to the stage of separating out the financial responsibilities and the faculty board which did something at least, even though you could drag any issue back to an academic debate - the appointment of someone or whatever. And that was done over and over again. I believe it was democracy run riot and that prompted again a proliferation of a form of bureaucracy with lots of silly little committees set up derived from faculty. Not just a scholarship committee and those things that may well have an appropriate merit, but plenty of ad hoc committees so that every member of the faculty virtually was able to interfere in some way, or feel that they were interfering, or intervening, in the affairs of the university and didn't have to do so much research.

          What about faculty as a venue for proper intellectual exchanges?

I don't believe there was ever any intellectual exchange worth a damn at faculty except people pushing their own barrows, and a great deal of back-scratching going on in the whole process. And I think that one of the real problems was that people would never come out in the open very often and say what they really felt. I'm afraid I didn't follow that practice, I did tend to say what I thought to my discomfort at times, but it was very much a 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back' environment, and that in turn derived in part from the fact that until the end of the '60s anyway, or thereabouts, it was a financially expansive environment. And if you wanted to get some extra, if you in a sub-section, wanted to get some extra development in your own area then clearly you had to win friends and influence people and that meant back-scratching. I think that went on all over the place in the faculty all the time.

          Now Hancock was obviously one who gave a great deal of thought to intellectual exchanges and creating appropriate venues for intellectual exchanges, and I'm thinking particularly of his role in the design of the Coombs Building. Can you tell us something about that saga, if that's the appropriate term?

You mean the development of the Coombs Building?

          Yes.

I don't remember a great deal, I don't think. I do remember the three great plans we had presented to us by Roy Grounds and somebody else - the present architect. And we all loved the Chinese pagodas and swimming pools outside our windows in the Roy Grounds' scheme but obviously we could never have touched it. We would have been the laughing stock of Australia if we'd done so. Frankly, my only recollection is that the real choice in practical terms was between the present building and something that was made almost entirely of glass. And Hancock clearly had a thing about glass. He didn't believe in glass, didn't like the sun coming in too much, and was still huddling away in some moist English climate. And I think this is the main reason we got the Coombs Building. But that's probably all nonsense. I don't really know any of the inside story of that at all, except that Hancock appeared to have a dominant influence in the choice and that Jim Davidson found a lot of scrap metal somewhere in Melbourne he stuck on the front of the Coombs Building. I'm sorry, I don't know much about that.

          Well, let's move on to certainties. You, in the early '60s, were a reader. In 1962, I think, they decided they wanted to change the name of reader to professorial fellow and you said you couldn't bear it. Do you recall that, and if so, why?

No, because the dating's wrong. I became professor in 1962 and I think I was appointed reader in 1957 or thereabouts.

          '54, wasn't it?

Okay. Then it was perhaps around about 1957 that Trevor Swan invented the term professorial fellow and this was a bit of phoney Oxbridge stuff. He insisted there were professorial fellows in Nuffield College. The real reason was we had margins at the professorial level explicitly so between us and the State universities in salary terms and we had margins, as I recall, at the non-tenured level, but it was obscure as to what the position might be in relation to other tenured jobs. And the discussion as I remember, as I was on the Board of the Institute at the time, was whether we could provide extra career ladders for people as they developed in the university, whether we had to in effect appoint a lot more professors to satisfy the career ambitions of people, or whether we could create a great long ladder and call everyone just fellow but with an enormously long scale and stick them anywhere. And people didn't like the great long ladder, they wanted to have handles but equally the professors thought that a lot of people shouldn't have handles that threatened them. And so Trevor invented the notion of inserting the professorial fellow somewhere between the senior fellow and the professor - it was Trevor, he did it quite explicitly - so that people would be able to have something that looked like a professor hanging around their name on pieces of paper but not in fact be called professor, but get a higher salary. It was a very stupid arrangement in my opinion, and this is why when the question arose as to whether those of us who were readers - the agreement was that readers should have a clear margin over readers in the State university - and the question arose as to whether we should change our style and title. And Horrie Brown and I both agreed that we were determined we were not going to have this nonsense of a professorial fellow. It may have been laughing at Trevor, of course, who had invented the term, but it seemed to me reader was a perfectly good title and professorial fellow just stank of Oxbridge.

          Of course Trevor Swan in the early days of the university, must have been the early '50s, was arguing against the use of the term 'professor' entirely. He wanted everybody to be called 'mister', but somehow it didn't catch on.

It didn't catch on at all, no. I think Trevor may have just recently come back from Yale where everyone is called 'mister' and I think Trevor tended to pick up, quite superficially in some ways, what appeared to be the practice of the current university. But as I recall Yale, for instance, so he got professorial fellow from Nuffield College, and Yale, which I went to later on, very carefully addressed all of its letters to people round the university, 'mister', but inside very firmly it was professor or doctor or whatever. There was no nonsense when you got to the person himself.

          Well, we've reached 1962 and in that year you were invited to occupy the chair in the new Department of Economic History, right?

No.

          No, not right?

Well, I applied for the job and was appointed to it because there was proper competition. I'd gone to Cambridge and published, or got arrangements to publish, my two green books as I call them, and when I came back from Cambridge, certainly I was talking to Trevor about the desirability of having a separate Department of Economics. I found Trevor, whom I liked very much, let's be clear, but increasingly difficult then as head of department because frankly he detested administration and had lots of ideas which he would insert in the university by means of direct contact with the vice-chancellor, say, with Melville, direct contact with the chancellor in the case of Coombs or so on, but one heard about these after they got right through the administrative procedures at the high levels of the university. The fact that they impacted back on to oneself had probably never concerned Trevor in the least and I found this over and over again - budget discussions and so on where I suddenly at the end of the year I would lose the resources I had with no discussion with Trevor, so I got fed up with the whole business. I was certainly pressing for a Department of Economic History. Trevor was aware of it. Coombs was aware of it. Perc Partridge was aware of it and so on. And so they did decide to advertise the Chair of Economic History.

Now, I'll tell you a story which Perc told me which may help to indicate something of the sort of .... You might think they're just cosy relationships and to a large extent they were, but the importance of the personal relationship and sense of goodwill between people at the Institute. I did apply for this job, several people also applied for it, amongst them Max Hartwell, and Max was then Professor of Economic History at University of New South Wales, and was on the point of translating to be reader at Oxford. And he was determined that he should get the job. He was a very close friend of Perc's. And it must have been actual considerable courage on Perc's part to prefer me over Max, but at the same time also my brother was Professor of Economic History, Professor of Economics rather, at Sydney and I've no doubt he also wanted the job, and Perc told me later that he had to tell both of them that really it's Noel's job. And anyway, that's how I got it, so it was ....

          It was advertised then?

It was advertised, yes.

          Well, you'll forgive me for being blunt about it: it was a put-up job, no?

I don't know about that. It's quite likely that in the sense in which I said, 'It's Noel's job', you may think it's a put-up job but I wanted to stress there that - and be honest also, granted - that people realised mutually that they would accommodate each other in those days. But you had to be worth accommodating, but nevertheless they could. So in that sense almost everything was a put-up job at that time, that's something one must realise, that whether you're promoting someone for a research fellow to senior research fellow or whatever it might be, it was most invariably a put-up job. It's only when we had people like Lindsay breaking his leg in the university campus and falling out with everyone and trying to get a chair against someone in - Wight, I think, in America, and threatening to sue - that's what ruined the whole cosiness of the scene, and until then we all knew that provided we were all right as the Brits say, we would be taken care of. So yes, it was a put-up job in one sense. In another sense, in a legalistic sense, and I hope in a real - well, undoubtedly Max Hartwell made it a competition, there's no question whatever about that - and as I say, Perc must have been very brave to turn him down.

          Well, there's interesting papers which Professor Butlin is just seizing from me - a letter from Partridge to BIAS, the Board of the Institute of Advanced Studies, dated 22˙June 1962, that's Council Paper No. 924 1962, and as we're getting towards the end of the tape I'll let him digest it.

END TAPE 3, SIDE B

BEGIN TAPE 4, SIDE A

          Identification: this is tape four, side one, of the interview with Professor Butlin.

          We've just had an interesting discussion about Professor Butlin's appointment which suggests what we knew already that oral history never works unless it's well supported by written sources. Do you think that there would have been a Department of Economic History at ANU had there not been Butlin?

I think there would have been. I think first of all Trevor - now, that's a very interesting question. I think that Trevor was - Trevor Swan - was very interested in economic history. And I'm surprised in fact that Mills, who had such a high profile role in the formation of it wasn't already producing ideas about economic history in relation to the ANU because he in many respects is the father figure of economic history in Australia. And certainly my brother would have been an eminently appropriate person to appoint to a chair at a very early stage. The sort of person that came into economic history, at least in my day, had combined economics and a strong historical interest, is a very different animal from either an historian or an economist, and produces, I think, articles and books and so on which are really quite different, I'm not suggesting better but quite different, from those produced by historians and economists. And so you get full representation of the significance of institutions, the nature of structural change, and application of technology in an actual historical process which economists don't understand and historians can't manage - I'm now being snide of course about the historians - but I think something like this, applied economics in real time, I think would have emerged in one way or another without me, but there would have been my brother, there would have been Max Hartwell, certainly both of whom would have qualified for such a position in one way or another, and I believe both of them would have wanted it very much.

          Once the Department was established, and once you were in the chair, what did you do with it?

It was a pretty slow business to begin with. I think we started off with Alan Barnard and I'm not sure when Neville Cain came into the scene, now. In effect we had one member of staff and a research assistant and a scholar. Something like that for a couple of years. But I was caught up trying to develop a tightly-knit program. I was wanting to get the Department formed around what I would call social economic history which Alan Barnard represented very well, and more technical, quantitative economic history which I felt I represented, and in effect divide the Department in two and pursue the two directions that economic history looks towards: economics and history. And it looked for a time as though we could perhaps do that.

Unfortunately things never happen at the right time and at that time there was no one interested in institutional history which was Barnard's particular forte, but there was a group of people interested in quantitative economic history and I was lucky for a while. I think this must have taken us up through a fair bit of the '60s and perhaps into about '72 or '3 or some such date where in fact without my lifting a finger almost there suddenly appeared people all around us who were interested in quantitative economic history.

At one stage I had nine PhD students - wonderful time - nine simultaneously I mean. Meant that there was no supervision really required. They supervised themselves. And we had people like Mike Keating, Brian Haig, I've forgotten now but people who were interested in developing the numbers and analysing them, and that was the heyday of the Department for about a decade, after the formative couple of years to begin with, in which we did produce a lot of stuff on quantitative economic history of Australia, and also comparative international development for that matter. That's what we focused on.

It wasn't really what I wanted because, as I say, I would have preferred to see the Department go in two directions. We didn't succeed in doing so. Then suddenly the interest in quantitative economic history collapsed and I struggled to find a way through the other direction. In fact we were finding we were appointing political scientists and general historians and so on to the jobs, but they were not interested in the sort of institutional history that Alan Barnard wanted and went through a phase of dilapidation almost. It reflected to some extent the decline of interest in economic growth in economics, but also the rise of the private economist in the university and the training of accountants and so on, so that people interested in being scholars and that's the ultimate in being a scholar in economics, to be an economic historian I suppose, where you can't possibly do anyone any damage, that really evaporated during the '70s. And to me it was rather a sad scene for a while.

One major reason why I decided to take the directorship of the Botany Bay project. I was then determined to get out of economic history. We went through the phase of the Botany Bay project and indeed I was able to use the .... To me, the Botany Bay project I might say is just the other side of the coin of economic growth. It's dealing with the costs of economic growth, and that's how I treated the project to a large extent, although we did join scientists of various sorts into the project. But I was able to use resources of the Department, in fact to sustain the Botany Bay project for about three years.

And then the wheel had turned again, the wheel of fortune, and suddenly there was a rush of, a rash of, economists strictly now who were interested in working in economic history. And so I ended my days, the last five, six, seven years, I suppose - yes, from about 1978 through 1986 - with really the Department in many ways in its most successful form, in one sense of success, in which we were attracting Pincus and Maddock and McLean and Glenn Withers, all really economists to occupy the jobs and do work in the Department. Regretfully again, it wasn't the direction I had wanted, or hoped to go, but it was certainly a successful way to go.

          You explained the earlier decline, how about the later rise?

The later rise is to some extent due to the fact that the so-called new economic history, which is said to have been invented in the United States but wasn't really, but nevertheless proliferated in the United States, meant an almost total merger of economics and economic history in the United States. That's one point. The second point is that whereas up to, say, 1960 or so a high proportion of economists would have gone to Britain to do their second degree or further training or whatever, after 1960 almost everyone went to the United States. And so economists came back, certainly Pincus came back, Maddock came back, explicit of their awareness of the close linkage, virtual no distinction, between economics and economic history as practised in the United States.

And the way the Department had developed prior to the Botany Bay project had made it .... Well, there's always a time lag in reputations and the reputation of the Department fortunately sustained the older and the original objectives at the time they were looking for jobs so we got them. As a result the Department ended - the Department as I had it - filling a whole series of chairs in economics around Australia. When I left, the Department disintegrated again.

          We'll come to that later. That of course would have been quite consistent with the early objectives of the university - filling chairs all around Australia and so on. Was that something that you were aiming for explicitly?

I don't think so. See, once again things never happen at the right time. We had our heyday in the Department - let's say we reached our peak in PhDs people around about 1970 I would think. Now, at that point all the new universities, virtually, had been established, the jobs had been filled up in economic history and when we were getting lots of PhD students there suddenly were no jobs for them. And some - Mike Keating becomes Secretary of the Department of Finance and Waterman becomes Bursar of the Church of England and Canada. You know, they go all over the place. John Bailey becomes Bursar of All Souls and so on. They don't go into academia. We did get a series of Gus Sinclair, Colin Forster, people like that filling jobs. Certainly we were all conscious at the very beginning that one of our roles was to fill academic positions and that was an incentive to develop the PhD program. But as I say, in this case and I think in quite a few others, as the PhD program got rolling and reached its peak the jobs evaporated and it was a pointless exercise to go on with to a large extent.

          Just taking up one of your points earlier. You said something to the effect that the economic historian was safe from doing anyone any damage, was more or less remote from the concerns of real economists, if you like, and yet all your work and the work of many people in your Department has, I would have thought, the great sense of immediacy about it. Is that not the case?

I think that's fairly true. I think that economic history is about the future, not about the past. But what I really meant was that - and I mean that. I mean that I think that we're not studying the past, we're trying to understand the present and the future but from a perspective in the past and see how the past crowds on to the present and affects the future and constrains the future. And I think that's quite different from much of ordinary history. And that's the way that I've treated economic history and encouraged other people to do so. But nevertheless what we write, I think, is dispassionate, can have any policy implication, and we leave it for policy makers to tease out such policies as they want in that sense. We're not prescribing any policy for anyone and therefore not doing anyone any damage. We're only doing people damage by producing the wrong information, or the wrong interpretation of something; that's a separate question.

          The 1985 review near the end of your headship of the Department was of course exceptionally - I was going to say generous. That is the word? - exceptionally generous in its comments about the Department and about you in particular. It referred to the Department functioning very much as the 'captain and his team'. Could you try to interpret what the committee meant by that? It's something I might say was fairly evident to me for a time there, looking from upstairs from another Department, but you didn't see that yourself.

I didn't see that myself. Well, in some respects in the sense in which I did try, and I'd always put stress on the word try, to get people to cooperate together to some extent in some design research. And Alan Barnard and Pincus and I did in the government capitalism project. But I found it impossible. I used to lean over backwards, well essentially I suppose, doing the Hancock sort of design unintentionally of trying to encourage people to produce an idea themselves that they would be happy to accommodate to and to join forces rather than me saying, 'Come on, bear right or bear left or hard astern' or something. In that sense I had no view of myself whatever as a captain of any damn thing. I don't think anyone in the Department did. They might have been frightened of me trying to be a captain but I certainly had no notion of being a captain.

Now, I was a captain, certainly, in the Botany Bay project and that might have affected people's judgment of affairs. But there I was engaged in a policy project with outside money and all the rest of it, and not doing economic history, working in an interdisciplinary team in a position where it was essential that the contributions of different people should be moulded together into a given framework. And that was the deal that was presented to everyone and they accepted it in the Botany Bay project. It wasn't the design that I wanted for the Department.

I would have liked to have seen the Department concerning itself with one or two or three major research areas, labels if you like, with a great long menu attached to those labels from which people could select more or less at will without any direction whatever. To that extent I wanted to see some design in the Department without people just choosing to do any particular bit of work they wanted to do. But captain no, no one saluted me.

          Did you notice when people failed to pull their weight?

Yes, I sacked two people.

          Under what circumstances?

Well, one was a fellow and one was a - there were three people˙- one was a fellow, one was a non-tenured fellow and one was a scholar. The scholar was hopeless and I took .... I sacked four people, that's right, but one wasn't in my Department. I also sacked the chairman of the computer centre. Let's say, I didn't sack him, I spent four days solid negotiation with the director of the computer centre, not the chairman. When I knew that the deputy vice-chancellor was waiting for him to pass by the chancelry and sack him I spent four days full-time, nine o'clock in the morning till about seven o'clock at night, finally persuading him to write out his resignation. Now, if you call that a captain's job then I was a captain. Anyway, so I went through a lot of agony to dispose of a man respectably, and when I say 'safely' I did that in every case I think. But when I determined that a person should stop being where he is and exposing himself to more and more difficulty, or more and more inaction, whatever it might be, that I was quite willing to put in a lot of time and emotional energy to, let's say, re-arranging his life. And that could mean at times being quite unpleasant, and I was on one occasion I must confess when a fellow was so thick-skinned that it was necessary to be so. But he went off to a much better job, and that was fine.

In another case, the scholar, again I spent days and days and days persuading him to resign from his scholarship rather than his scholarship terminated when I knew perfectly well that it would be terminated. Not necessarily just by me but by a committee within the school for non-performance. But it was better to stop the pretence. And he got a job in the Reserve Bank so he was all right.

          Did you ever regret the amount of effort that you did have to put into removing people, particularly tenured people?

No.

          In other words, you would have defended at all stages of your career the degree of security that tenured people enjoyed?

Entirely so. You can get rid of tenured people when you want to. That doesn't mean you sack them in the literal sense, but you can re-arrange their lives and I think that the notion that we should give up tenure is just absolutely ridiculous, and it's the quickest way to get rid of the Institute. If you want to sack the Institute then have all predominantly non-tenured people. The problem with tenure is the gutlessness of heads of departments, that's all.

          Weak captains. Can we move on to another compliment of the 1985 Review Committee?

I want to get back to weak captains for just a minute. Your old History Department, or whatever, it has a number of weak sisters and I have no doubt that any of the rapidly rotating heads of departments in the History Department could quite generously and without being invidious at all make those jobs vacant without any great deep discomfort. There might be disappointment but deep discomfort in the long term to the individuals concerned. I've no doubt whatever about that, and I think it should have been done long ago. That's not a question of being captain. It's a question of being honest in your commitment to the task you've taken on in being head of department. You've got a responsibility to the School, to the university, the taxpayer. If you call it being a captain, well, good luck to you, I'm not a captain, I salute you.

          That other complimentary comment of the 1985 committee, it said something to the effect that the Department placed Australian research in an international context. Was that something that you and your colleagues were conscious of doing? To what extent did the international environment bear upon the research that you did? And to what extent were you keen to influence that environment?

I was quite conscious of the objective quite literally that rather than influence the international discussion, or whatever, what I wanted to do, and I was quite conscious in my own mind about this all the time, was to make Australia a fit topic for discussion in the leading centres of economics and economic history in the world, particularly the United States and Britain, and we did it. But that was my intention from the beginning.

          Just another very broad question: to what extent do you think economic history fitted happily, not into this specific Research School of Social Sciences but to what extent were you happy about the classification of economic history as a social science? Was it something that you pondered upon? I'm thinking about very early discussions about the nature of social sciences.

I don't think I pondered on it at all. I just accepted that if Perc Partridge wanted to give me a chair I'd take it. It happened to be in Social Sciences. No seriously, I think that there certainly always would be the question of how much more widely we should have conducted research in terms of work outside Australia. And I have interested myself in American and to some extent American and British economic history and in international economic history, but more importantly perhaps, this is a question always of Asia, Japan, so on, who's on our back door, and I was urging this for quite some time that someone should develop an interest in this.

For quite some time we were met with the stand-off position that Asian economic history was Pacific Studies domain. I tried to counter that by saying we had demography which spread wherever it wanted to, but that didn't get much support. I wasn't really discontented with the essential limitations of Australia. In a way I was lucky, in a way I was unlucky. I was lucky in that there was a great big hole, mainly virtually the whole of Australian economic history, to be filled when I started, at least from one perspective we filled it. But in filling it you've got to come to - there's always an opportunity cost. And that meant in filling it we really couldn't do anything else much. By the time I finished we were in a position where we could have branched and extended vastly out, and that was indeed the recommendation which we made from the Department, that it should go above all into comparative economic history, and leave a great deal of Australian economic history out.

          You retired in 1986 and in your letter of resignation you said something to the effect that you were retiring - I'm paraphrasing here, and probably distorting - in order that you could write two books on the economic history of Australia. That was a rather odd way of putting it that you should want to retire from the Institute in order to get on with writing books.

I was fairly ill at the time but that isn't the main reason. There is an enormous, inordinate amount of time that has to be given up by a head of department to very silly little things, that at any rate if you've got a conscience about what you're doing, maybe some people can avoid it, but on the whole - I've seen Bob Gregory and others in the same boat - you become a professor and head of a department and for three-quarters of your time you cease to be an academic. And this is something the university really has to address. It can be done in a variety of ways, I think, but it does mean that a better administrative support system within the departments and less commitment of professors to university administration. But certainly I have done in the whatever it is now, four and a half years since I ...

END TAPE 4, SIDE A

BEGIN TAPE 4, SIDE B

          Identification: this is tape four, side B, of the interview with Professor Butlin.

          We were cut off at the end of the last tape but let's go on with other matters anyhow. We've got Professor Butlin retired but we'll go back with a series of non sequiturs about various other aspects of the university, beginning with the time of amalgamation with CUC. What was your perspective on amalgamation, Noel, and your reflections on it?

As I recall I was strongly against any of the specific proposals for amalgamation for a variety of quite different reasons. I have never believed in the view that is often expressed that people can't do good research without teaching or can't sustain good research without teaching. I think that's a load of rubbish. Teaching PhD students is teaching, teaching new recruits to non-tenured jobs is teaching, teaching oneself, most importantly, is teaching, so it seems to me that anyone who was alive in research and interested in research will go on without teaching. Anyone who has the opportunity to teach who isn't alive will simply use teaching as a means of escape from research, and I think that very often happens. So that was one of the factors that influenced my attitude.

I also saw, this was maybe an ‚litist attitude, the amalgamation with the CUC as diluting the national function of the old ANU, in the same way as many people see the recent, and I think immediately prospective, proposals for merger with the University of Canberra as diluting the national role and standard of the present ANU. But there was another factor with me and that was that I felt, and somehow you may think this isn't consistent with some of the earlier points I made, that the effective proposals in front of us were really to create a Berlin Wall between the two institutions. There was so much fear on both sides that the division would be set in concrete, that people couldn't teach if they wanted to teach and couldn't transfer to teaching, more importantly, if they wanted to transfer to teaching and out of research, and vice versa, and that indeed is to a large extent what happened, that there was indeed very much a wall, a wall of suspicion, a wall of criticism, a wall of envy, still from the undergraduate side, and I was certainly conscious of that in my own area, and more broadly.

I personally would have been quite happy, I think and thought, if we could have in effect made an 'Ivy League' American-style university at the time, where there would have been total fusion but total fusion in which there would have been a very large amount of money allotted and specified for research, for research chairs, and all the rest of it, but a fusion, just as exists in Harvard, or Yale, or other places of this sort, there seemed to be no notion that that was a feasible idea in Australia, particularly in the ANU, CUC, and so I went totally in opposition to the amalgamation. But it was, as I say, for two in some senses contradictory reasons.

          And you expressed yourself this way on faculty?

Faculty, BIAS, around the university, writing to the university newspaper, I think, writing to the Canberra Times, talking at length, and in fact to a substantial degree I think I was regarded, at least in the Social Science areas and Social Science/Pacific Studies area, as the leader of the opposition. I was invited - the job wasn't advertised in this case - by Melville, the Vice-Chancellor, to represent at least part of the staff in the meetings that the two academic sides had with Bob Menzies in Parliament House to discuss amalgamation. Melville, I remember, called me up the night before we were due to go over to Parliament House and said to me, 'Butlin, if you open your mouth tomorrow I'll make sure you'll never get anywhere in this university ever again'; that was what he thought of me and my opposition. We had a fine old day. It was obvious everything was signed and sealed before we started. It was people on all sides expressing their fixed views already well known to everyone. Menzies declaring at the end of the day he had never had such a wonderful day in the whole of his political career, and for all practical purposes the next day we were amalgamated.

          So can I just get the timetable straight. This is immediately before Menzies made the announcement about amalgamation.

Yes.

          So the bolt from the blue that people talk about happened after these meetings.

Yes, certainly so. There was opposition clearly on both sides and Menzies in many respects saw himself as the arbiter and someone intervening to help the marriage to be sanctified if not consummated, and so that was what the meetings were for. It was not in any real sense a discussion as to whether there would or would not be amalgamation. People expressed their views for and against and Menzies said what a wonderful day, in effect. Well, okay, the next day he said, 'You're amalgamated'.

          And did you get any sense of Menzies' motivation? Did it relate for example to circumstances within Canberra, or his concern about the precedent that might be set for other parts of Australia?

My impression is that academics, see this was really just at about the beginning of the big explosion of universities in Australia, tertiary institutions in Australia, and an academic then in 1960, or thereabouts, was generally a person with a higher status, a higher profile than many academics have today. I'm not being derogatory but in fact you've got many more people as academics, relative incomes are lower to other people in society than they were then, and an academic was a much more important person. They wrote actively, they expressed themselves vigorously on lots of issues and I think Menzies had a feeling that he could appeal to the academic community in support of his politics, and I think this was a very important factor in his deciding to promote tertiary institutions around about 1960, and this was really just part of it. But I think that this is why he said he had such a wonderful day. Sure, by comparison with talking to politicians all the time, he probably did have a wonderful day, but nevertheless they were - most of the people at the meeting he held - people of a calibre which was significantly higher on average than we would have if we had the same meeting today, because universities have sunk in quality a great deal. That's because they've been democratised. That's okay, that's fine. It's an inevitable consequence. They are therefore less powerful than the people that Menzies saw.

          Who else was at the meeting with Menzies?

I don't remember. I was so frightened of Melville.

          And were you obedient?

Inevitably, yes, no comments.

          This I can't imagine. How many people in all attended the meeting, can you recall?

I remember it was a big meeting. Certainly Joe Burton and Melville were there but I really don't remember, but it was a big meeting. I would think about thirty or forty people all told. And we had a lunch together and it went through, it was a ten-hour session or something. It was a very long session. But it was just people expressing their established positions, it was no more than that.

          What about the later history of the relationship between the Institute and what was then the School of General Studies, and subsequently, the Faculties? Did that confirm your worst fears?

I think that my own particular little bit of the neck of the woods was in a somewhat special position and it might have looked worse than it was in many other cases. Between the CUC and the old ANU we had had a good working relations with an active joint seminar program and teaching to some extent across the boundaries. But Graham Tucker became very ill with brain tumor and lingered on still as professor for several years after this, but he became increasingly distraught and tense and difficult, almost inevitably so, and he grew actually, I believe, to hate us. I think that was just his illness, but there it was and so we were conscious in our area .... For instance, our joint seminars ceased until he died and immediately then Colin Forster and I restored them, and they've been active ever since. So once Graham went then relationships improved enormously, but now this is also special, that it really has very little bearing on the rest of the university.

I think that my worst fears in the main have been confirmed. I think the Faculties have acted as an effective critic, effective in the sense of conveying political influence - effective critic of the Institute - and has had an impact on the Institute's own self-esteem. I think the exclusions in the main have remained and have been divergent policies. We've in many respects at the level of administration had the Faculties represented at the highest level but not the Institute. That is to say, for instance, Ross is from the Faculties but let's say Melville or whatever from nowhere, and that's been unfortunate. I think that this has been a major reason why the Faculties have turned out to be quote over-funded unquote, in Australian terms, because they have had a much easier running to the detriment of the Institute. And I think the Institute's budget has suffered because they've been able to transfer funds across the Berlin Wall mainly through the deputy vice-chancellorship.

On the other hand, I don't think there's any doubt that the fusion of the CUC and the old ANU attracted people of much higher quality to the Faculties than would otherwise have been the case, and kept them there. And I think separation now would almost certainly mean a rapid degradation of the present faculties, if for instance, the faculties were separated and joined up with the University of Canberra, I think could be a rapid brain drain away from the University of Canberra to somewhere else, and that would be a very substantial net loss to the academia as a whole in the ACT. What that means for any relationships between the University of Canberra and the ANU is another matter but if that particular solution were adopted I think it would be disaster for academia as a whole.

          Amalgamation is perhaps the area of most obvious government involvement in the affairs of ANU. Were there other ways in which government directly impinged on your activities?

On my activities in economic history?

          Yes.

Not as far as I know except through the triennial budgeting of course, that was inevitable, and eventually fortunately in restraining the expansion of the Department. Yes, there was one other circumstance of some substance when we started the business archives and I first of all got the records of the Australian Agricultural Company from Newcastle and then embarked on a larger collecting program, and the National Librarian, Harold White, came to see first of all Hancock and then Melville as Vice-Chancellor, and ultimately demanding that I be got rid of because of my interference in the affairs of the National Library.

          We'll be interviewing Sir Harold White shortly.

So he can confirm that. Well, maybe he could be asked the question rising out of a meeting I had with his daughter many years ago when I sat down at lunchtime with his black-haired daughter ...

          This is Kathy West.

Kathy - she was not then West. She was Kathy White, and I knew her by sight at least. Anyway we sat down at a lunch in University House and we chit-chatted for a minute or so about nothing in particular and then she said something like, 'I don't think we know each other', and I said, 'Oh yes. You're Kathy White, aren't you?'. And she said, 'Yes', 'Well, I'm Noel Butlin', and her jaw literally dropped a foot and before she could stop herself she said, 'But my father told me you were an awful bastard'. So you can ask him. Anyway, I think that's the only circumstance. We have been helped enormously and have helped the bureaucracy in other ways.

The establishment of the Horrie Brown Library, for instance, which in some respects paralleled the business archives; the set-up in effect the second best collection of Australian statistics, second only to the ABS library. We had quite a number of things that the ABS library didn't have. We've jointly supported each other and transferred material across until recently when this idiocy of libertarianism and commercialisation has meant that the ABS can no longer help people, they have to charge people, and then find some service that the people can provide and pay them something - double entry book-keeping. The ABS has been an enormous help to us in the past in all sorts of ways. We haven't found really, apart from the Harold White episode and apart from the inevitable intervention arising out of the budgetary process, we haven't found any intervention whatever.

          And there's never been any suggestion that you were adopting a course which was politically improper. I'm just thinking of some of the difficulties that other departments had in the '50s, particularly Jim Davidson in RSPacS.

You'll probably fish out a piece of paper as soon as I say anything, but the short answer is 'no', but when Jim Davidson goes and chops down flagpoles at Gungahlin you expect someone to say something to him. But seriously, Jim was certainly much more active in writing politically to the newspaper and expressing his views. Most of us didn't agree with most of his views, even though we might have agreed with his politics, and I'm not surprised that Jim ran into trouble, but maybe I wasn't an activist, I don't know. But I know I've not had any problem at all.

          What about the relationship of the university and the School and your Department, specifically, with private organisations? Has there been much of a relationship that you've been directly concerned with?

Yes, a fair bit. I suppose possibly the first one was in respect of the trade unions when that was just a minor operation but illustrative of what you can do fiscally if you want to, perhaps. A guy named Buckley produced a history of the Amalgamated Engineering Union and then he couldn't find anyone to publish it, and the union didn't have the gumption to publish it itself, so I proposed that we should - and in the Department - and we did and made a deal with the union that they would meet the expenses. They in fact offered to pay me for it and I retreated in horror and said, 'No, we don't want two thousand pounds to pay for the cost. We want a donation of two thousand pounds so we can keep the donation' which we did. They invited me down to the launching and I had to give the actual launching speech, so that was the first one, trade union's one.

We've had a series of associations with business, none of these are very profound or great, with Goldsbrough Mort, as it was before it became Elders Smith, before it became IXL and so on. We first of all got their records and then Alan Barnard was intending to write their history and indeed wrote quite a lot on them and in fact through business archives we did get a number of contacts. A former librarian of the Horrie Brown library wrote a little book on one company frankly whose name I've forgotten - Coopers, I think. And as a result we got to know a number of sort of middle-range executives in business. But as I said earlier because we really couldn't get the institutional side of the Department going we never ever got anywhere beyond that level of sort of limited contact with outside institutions. I've no doubt that if you could get a group interested in institutions in the Department then you could rapidly build up a very effective and profitable and valuable association.

          So really you were into entrepreneurial economic history, or entrepreneurial activities on behalf of the university long before it became the fashion.

Perhaps, I don't know.

          And achieved a significant return to the Department.

I think we got quite a bit of money in various ways from these businesses. Not necessarily just for the Department, some of it came to business archives from .... For instance, Goldsbrough Mort gave a donation to the business archive.

          And were there any suggestions that this was improper, this sort of relationship?

Certainly when the Department made proposals to keep the money for its own purposes, yes, it was very firmly improper. It's always amazed me that academics behave in this manner. Perhaps it might have been appropriate to give a tithe to the church, to central administration or something, but if one can display entrepreneurship still within the limits of good scholarship then the benefits ought to flow to the people who make the initiative, in my opinion.

          Can you tell us a little bit about the origins of the Archives of Business and Labour?

It arose immediately out of my own research. I had worked on public investment in Australia, estimating public investment, and there one had all the records of the public sector laid out in vast profusion. What we didn't have, incidentally, was a vast profusion in the university and I had more trouble, more difficulty, persuading the university to collect systematically public documents than any other activity I've engaged in. But in fact I did persuade McDonald to establish a specific section in the Menzies for public documents, and that remains now.

When I moved out of public investment into private investment, trying to estimate that, then it was glaringly obvious that there were really very few sources of information, and I figured, particularly from my experience in the Centre for Entrepreneurial Studies in Harvard, that the place to go was to business, and the big gap was in fact in rural investment, and so the natural tendency was to .... We had a fair bit of information on industrial investment, housing investment, the big gap was rural, and this is why we headed into rural firms.

I happened to have come from Maitland, only twenty miles away from the headquarters of the AA Company, and decided on one of my visits up there to see my parents that I would go and check up on the company. And made contact with them and from then on we slowly wheedled and wrangled the documents, bit by bit, out of the AA Company. And having got those then we .... I had to drive those literally, physically myself down from Newcastle in a truck, and mount the books on shelves in an old cottage near the old hospital building, and make some sort of listing of them - mountains of stuff.

And then the same thing happened with the next one was Goldsbrough Mort which was much bigger. This time we were in fact a big step forward. We were allowed to hire a couple of pantechnicons to bring that stuff up from Melbourne. But I had to go down with two or three others to actually load the stuff on to the trucks. So we had very little help. We were always happy to do this sort of work. But it came out, as I say, the initiative came immediately out of the lack of information, particularly data on rural investment. But I was aware that there was much greater opportunity for writing business history once we had this information, and also that there was the scope for writing labour history as long as we had trade union records. Again it derived from my experience at Harvard, so there was a general purpose behind it all.

          And your object was just to get the papers and then worry about where they would go afterwards, or did you have specifically in mind the creation of an archive of that nature?

I think it probably took a little while before that got clarified. I don't think I was conscious of any very highly organised concept but once Harold White got into the act then it was quite clear that we had very little option but to establish a separate organisation of our own. And certainly once he agreed that ...

END TAPE 4, SIDE B

BEGIN TAPE 5, SIDE A

          Identification: this is tape five, side A of the interview with Professor Butlin.

          We were talking about the agreement with the National Library in relation to the Archives of Business and Labour, but I don't think you'd made exactly clear what the agreement was.

The agreement was that we would go on collecting and we would use the material freely and the National Archives would not itself collect so there wouldn't be any confusion with clients as to who they were transferring the material to originally. And any debate as to the final custodial arrangements we were to keep the documents as long as we chose for as long as we wanted until we'd completed the research on them, but at any stage we could ask the National Library to relieve us of some chosen bulk of material, either because we had no immediate use for the stuff or because we saw that we would not ever be likely to use it to any significant degree, or because we'd finished with it. We did in fact ask the National Library to take over certain material at some stage, after several years, and they said they didn't have the space.

          A sorry story.

A sorry story. In the meantime, fortunately, both Sydney University was antagonised by our depredations in New South Wales and Melbourne University was equally antagonised by our coming into Melbourne, so they set up business archive organisations. Melbourne in particular has a very flourishing business archive. So if the inquiry into the Institute wanted to have some indication of our performing a national function, that was one.

          Can you tell us something about the origins of the ANU Press?

The origins of the ANU Press? No, I can't tell you much about the origins of the ANU Press. I can tell you something about its early history maybe, and its demise. I'm moderately angry about its demise, though there were options which could have meant a sort of half-demise and amalgamation with other groups. The Press started I guess, as far as I understand it, when we had a funny machine which was run by the woman who eventually became the secretary of the Department, Aino Guenot.

          Sorry.

Aino Guenot.

          Would you spell it?

A-I-N-0 G-U-E-N-O-T. She operated a machine called a verifier I think it was. And what it did in effect was, she punched characters in and something operated beside her or something. Anyway, I never ever understood it. It was very slow and very tedious but on this we produced the original monograph series of Social Sciences. Norma McArthur produced the first one on twinning, and I produced the second one on public investment in Australian economic development. I think about the fifth one on private investment. They were very crude pieces of work, quite ugly really in almost every respect. As to what prompted the formalisation of a press I really don't remember. Clearly we were moving to a point where material of this type was being produced which I guess was regarded as valuable up to a point and people were producing more reputable looking books, and I think the university probably thought little more than that any reputable university had a press. Certainly that argument became common around the university later on. I suspect it was probably part of the original story. But it wasn't very easy to get material published then in conventional book form, and that presumably prompted part of the thing.

One of the factors that probably helped formalise it was the fact that there were a lot of sort of 'new chum' academics. Research after all in social sciences wasn't all that common and widespread, and people didn't know how to put footnotes in properly and so on, and so you needed some sort of editor who would make sure that material was properly prepared and presented before it went to press, and certainly that role was performed very effectively and very courageously for many years by Pat Croft who was really the mainstay of the Press as it developed for probably a decade and a half, or more, of its early existence, until it became a larger organisation under a director.

Now, it produced quite a lot of good things, but quite a lot of humdrum things, and that was the problem. That many people tended to say, 'Well, we'll go to an ordinary publisher if we've got a good book. If we've got a bad book, we'll go to the University Press, ANU Press', and so it did to some extent become a press of second resort, anyway, if not last resort. And that, I think, did its reputation a lot of damage. That's true even in the case of, say, having the option of Melbourne University Press and ANU Press, people I think preferred Melbourne University Press because it was better known and had really a sales, more readily reviewed, and so on. There were quite a number of obstacles to the continuation of the ANU Press and its establishment of a high reputation. I think looking at the ....

Alan Barnard was chairman of the ANU Press for many years so I sort of vaguely saw the publications emerging as he stacked each one on a book case in his room. I must confess it was rather a dog's breakfast and not on the whole terribly exciting, but it was to a large extent because people - academics - chose to go elsewhere when they could, and the Press itself didn't really make much in the way of effort to alert itself to what was being done around the university, and to try and tie people up with, if only provisional, contracts.

I used to argue with Pat Croft and others that really they should be able almost every morning and afternoon tea in the Coombs Building, and the Faculty of Arts particularly, making contact with people, making known their interest. But on the whole they seemed to sit back and want to wait for people to hand them a manuscript which they then went through with a fine toothcomb and often insulted people by making myriad detailed revisions, many of which had no real purpose, I don't think.

          Did you see a conflict, as Pat Croft did, between the academic purpose and the commercial purpose in the Press? And if so, was that a conflict that was reflected in management?

Well, I was chairman of the committee that reviewed the Press towards its end, and I must say I supported its continuation but with some major alterations. I was probably the first to propose that it should be commercialised in the sense that its subsidy should be whittled away and gradually diminish, and it should be self-sustaining and that its material should be chosen with that in mind but that didn't prevent it getting subsidies to sustain its existence, and those subsidies could come by all sorts of routes. So that it wasn't a very clear cut commercialisation; I didn't mean it to be.

I think that one of the big problems with the Press was, and there were many problems with the Press but eventually some critical ones, personal ones. But one of the big general problems with the Press was really the Schools' and Faculty of Arts' own perception of their own role in publication, I believe. We had a lot of material from many departments which appeared as departmental publications. And there was a second level, a little bit better - not necessarily better, sorry, but more general appeal, sometimes the stuff was not nearly as good - which then went to the Press and then a third tier which was even better and then went to some commercial publisher. Again the individuals who produced these things were left to make their own arrangements without any sort of attempt at a degree of coherence by the Schools or Faculty. And it seemed to me, and this is what I recommended, in fact, in the report on the Press that first of all the Schools and Faculty ought, or could sensibly, consider setting up a series which might be the Social Science series in economics and economic history and Social Science series in sociology and demography, and things like this. Where, instead of having just one-off jobs like our Buckley's history of the ANU or Mike Keating's estimates of the Australian workforce, we actually have a formal series, numbered, and they much more readily go into libraries, they're bought by libraries around the world and so on. They could be handled, managed, if once they were made coherent, standardised in format could be handled by the Press and that could be a valuable source of revenue to the Press as well as activity by the Press.

It seemed to me that the Schools never ever encouraged people, academics who had respectable books, to go to the Press and publish through the Press, that again ought to be done, just as the Press itself ought to come and find academics who were producing interesting stuff and try and nab them before they realised there were better alternatives. I think these were some of the institutional and managerial difficulties that the Press had.

The Schools themselves have never really thought about how they sell the product. They've thought about how they produce the product but they've never been willing to spend more than a tiny fraction of their budget on selling the product, and that's one of the most amazing things to me in the whole of the Institute; that we do so little in fact in selling the product. Now, a little bit more selling of the product by the Schools would have made the Press, I think, a going concern. This doesn't mean I'm attached to the Press or was attached to the Press as such. I think a far better alternative almost certainly would have been some fusion of university presses in Australia. And that was discussed and up to a point attempted, never ever came to anything, and one by one the university presses have been disappearing, and I think we're down pretty well to Queensland and Melbourne, having got up to quite a number. Sydney's gone, ANU's gone. It would have been much more sensible if we'd had a common governing body, common management body conducting a joint universities' presses of Australia.

          I guess this though is just one aspect of the incapacity of academics in Australia, and probably elsewhere as well too, to market their own products, to market the results of their labours, not just through publishing but in other ways as well.

The institution needs to think about these things. I mean, academics are interested in marketing the product, as individuals, and they'll work their butts off getting a good publisher if they can find one, but the institution .... Just as every piece of paper that's written on in the ANU is the property of the university, every book really is the property of the university, and we don't insist on that and we shouldn't insist on that. But nevertheless people who own property usually have an interest in protecting it, and the institution has to worry about what it should be doing as an institution and setting down not too harsh, but some guidelines, some positive encouragement. And some of that encouragement could well be the provision of a little bit of money which would help to achieve a better publication procedure and a more organised publication. When something comes out by Oskar Spate, or whatever, on a three-volumed history of the Pacific, okay, we all know Oskar Spate's at the ANU when we're in Canberra, and probably most people in Australia know that Oskar Spate was at some time at the ANU, but to the rest of the world, basically, this is Oskar Spate published by who? Now, it happens to have changed from the ANU Press - now, Oskar's special - to be this outfit in Britain that's in the process of going out of business.

I publish in Cambridge University Press, nobody knows I'm at ANU, and it's really associated with Cambridge University. Certainly it's associated with me, and that's probably the prime association, but there's not a prime association with the ANU. The ANU ought to get its pound of flesh out of its employees to the extent of - and that could be achieved, obviously nationally it's best achieved and I think now a national press, Melbourne's got such a clear running really with the demise of the other presses it's difficult to talk about this any more, probably too late, but I think that's what should have been done.

Now in fact what we had was a whole set of personal difficulties between the vice-chancellor and the director, Clouston, which prompted the demise of the Press and that really typifies a sort of .... Clouston was an excellent publisher in terms of Jacaranda Press, a little press which he sort of ran in his own back pocket, and his misfortune was he tried to run the ANU Press in the same way without keeping clear records. He himself knew what was going on but he could never at any moment list for other people precisely what contracts had been written and what books were to be published, and he could always be trapped by anyone. And as soon as the vice-chancellor found out that he couldn't be given absolute categorical guarantees of precisely and unambiguously what was being done then Clouston was done, and the Press was done, and Tony Low didn't give a damn beyond that. I was really rather angry about that. But with Linge's role in the demise of the Press ....

          What was that?

Well, Linge was .... Tony wanted me to chair the committee of inquiry and manage the Press and I refused him. It was just too hard, too many other things to do, I refused to manage the Press, so Linge was given the job of managing the Press over Clouston's head, and Linge was frightened stiff of any dirt that might stick on him from any mistake he made. So any disturbance that arose that could have been settled by a wave of the hand he rushed for cover, usually to the vice-chancellor or vice-chancellor's staff, and the result was that all the opprobrium was heaped on Clouston's head when some of it ought to have been [inaudible], but they could easily have been coped with.

I was very angry because I went into a sub-committee of the finance committee to consider this. I was supposed to report on the Press - at night this happened. I'd been working a lot on the Press, for several weeks, and I had my report all prepared. And I went in and presented it and what I discovered when I finished the report and after people asked me a series of questions about what should be done and so on, Tony Low said he had about ten hours before accepted the resignation of the director. Now, why didn't he tell me? I couldn't speak to Tony Low ever again after that. I just walked out of the room. I finished with Tony Low forever. Utterly inexcusable behaviour. Not the behaviour of a captain.

          And you were a loyal team member. Can I ask two last questions and then I'll definitely stop? It's just something led on by your answers, obviously. Totally unrelated questions, either to what's gone before or to one another. Computers are obviously of enormous importance now in economic history, I mean, specifically in the Department and its successor, in the division of historical studies. Can you recall if there was a moment when you recognised the potential that computers had, and seized that?

Three a.m. in 1985, about the middle of the year. I know it was then because I woke up one morning and said, 'I'll be retired next year, and all those lovely ladies won't be around any more. There's no alternative, I've got to buy a computer. Has to be a Macintosh'. I'm not joking. It was in about the middle of 1985.

          Now, that makes you a real latecomer though. I mean you were using computers before then?

No, we weren't. Sorry, I'm thinking about PCs. Computers don't matter, it's only PCs that matter. Computers matter for people who want to worry about the universe and black holes and things like that, perhaps, or the surface of crystals. But I found computers irritating until PCs were developed. One was really wholly dependent on programmers, and we had to have specialised programmers to do most of the work, and all my work on Aborigines, on traffic accidents, were all done really by way of a programmer, right down so I became a sort of hand-maiden in this situation.

I remember when Pat Troy and I did the traffic accident inquiry, we got from the Motor Registry the entire punch card index of motor licences and motor registrations, and they let us have it for two nights on the back of a truck. And we had access to the computer outside the Physics School for those two nights and Mary Rose had to turn up as the programmer, we couldn't do a thing without her. And Pat Troy took the things up in the lift, I carried the stuff from the truck to the lift and then went up to the Staff Centre from time to time and bought a jug of beer to keep Mary Rose going. Now, quite seriously, that's the way in which computers affected me. It was a degenerative process. Now, that was because it was an IBM machine, specialised to business operations, and using these punch card nonsense, very crude and clumsy. Now, I was instrumental in getting for the School its first - what was the name of the computer?

          DEC-10?

DEC-10. Its first DEC-10 and its second DEC-10 and really the problem then was, and I discovered some of my earlier antagonism to the computer was due to the fact that the whole thing was geared to science with number crunching, and we could never .... So we had the thing centralised and centralised machines set up with just terminal access - centralised and organised for the purposes of number crunching rather than assembly and array and sorting and analysing data which is what we do, and it was extremely difficult to convince the scientists that this was a different mode of operation and that they made our work extremely inefficient, and we had quite a long altercation about this which ended up with me confronting, in a committee, with the then acting chairman of the computer centre, Anderssen, over how you should organise for different purposes, and the only way to do that was to have a machine that was adapted to the assembly and analysis of the data, which was in fact the DEC-10 - the then best machine.

Well, it took some considerable rudeness of a very distinguished and elderly and grouchy captain to convince him but I did, and we got the allocation, I think $200,000 or something, which was then an enormous sum of money for Social Sciences. And then subsequently there was the question of replacing the machine and this time it was confrontation with Ross who was Deputy V-C, and again we got the up-grade specifically for Social Sciences but this time on condition that it should be part of the network of the university.

Already I was aware then, and that was getting on close to 1984, or about '5, that the PCs were looking to be the future. And first of all I'd run up against a Macintosh and had heard the Macintosh and the way it was presented it looked like a child's toy and I turned my back on it. But as I say, I woke up at three o'clock one morning six months before I retired saying I had to get one. So I got one and then discovered it was totally different and it was an absolutely wonderful machine, even thought it was just the first generation.

And so I got into the Department, the first PC at the university, which then led down the tracks to Macintoshes in the School on a fairly wide scale. And I've now got my fourth generation Macintosh with 200 megabytes of storage, which is bigger than the first DEC-10 we got.

          We're nearing the end of this side of the tape and I think I better spare you my last question. I hate to end on a commercial for Macintosh or anything else for that matter, but thanks very much for a very valuable interview.

END OF INTERVIEW