Description:
J.M. ‘Pete’ Garland was an outstanding Australian economist sometimes much overlooked. Despite a promising academic career, as evidenced by his work on land tax, he was lost to Australian universities when the Commonwealth Bank snapped him up on his return to Australia from Cambridge. He became a key figure in the development of Australian central banking practices, establishing a longstanding liquidity convention that the private trading banks upheld for many years. He was also instrumental in building up the economic research department at the Bank. He maintained his links with academe and was considered the man most likely to write the biography of L.F. Giblin.
Description:
With the recently released biography of A. W. H. Phillips by Alan Bollard (2016), this article focuses upon his time in Australia over two separate periods. This includes his sabbatical spent in Melbourne and Sydney in 1959 when he worked on an Australian version of his famous curve taking into account the different institutional background and then when he took up a professorial chair in economics at the Australian National University. Using new archival material the paper delves into both episodes and how Phillips career at the ANU was cut short by a major illness.
Description:
Colin Clark was a rather quixotic figure. Much of his complex character is captured not only in his varied career choices but also the comments made of him by various referees over the years. While Clark spent half of his career in England and half in Australia it was to the latter that he was drawn. He was happy to be identified as an Australian economist. Despite his eminent academic record he was never to occupy a professorial chair in Australia. This was largely attributable to his own choices in career and his penchant for a doctrinaire brand of economics.