The political thought of F.A. Bland

Abstract

If the discipline of public administration has a forgotten man in Australia, that man must surely be Francis Armand Bland. Professor of Public Administration at the University of Sydney from 1935 until his retirement in 1948, Bland was a prolific writer and a well-known commentator on public policy and affairs, as the bibliography of his writings published in the June 1948 edition of Public Administration (Sydney) clearly attests .(1) Yet with the exception of a short article by E.N.Gladden published in 1975 (2), little has been written about Bland since the obituary in Public Administration (Sydney) in September 1967, noting his death in April of that year. (3 ) Volume 7 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, that in which Bland's life and work could appropriately have been recorded, contains no article about him; and such scattered references to him as one does encounter relate most often not to his scholarly work, but to his activities as Chairman from 1952 to 1960 of the Joint Committee of Public Accounts of the Commonwealth Parliament. As a personality in Australian intellectual life in the 1930s, Bland has recently received some attention in an unpublished doctoral dissertation (4), but his political thought has been subjected to virtually no sustained critical attention .(5)