3.00 pm, 2 March 1951, Hobart. The cremation of Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin. This is a ceremony without Christian rites. Instead of a priest – Giblin could not abide a ‘parson’ at his funeral – a Norwegian economist friend gives the homily. The god-fearing relatives of the Giblin clan glower from the benches. From the gramophone sounds a Bach Fugue treasured by Giblin. His brother reads from Tennyson’s Ulysses,

Thus passes the mortal frame of L. F. Giblin, one of Australia’s great originals. Warrior, sage, and peacemaker; explorer, politician and poetaster; rationalist, stoic and mystery – the strange hero of an unexpected tale.

The Australia that Giblin departed in 1951 was much changed from the one he entered on 29 November 1872. Until the end of that year all news of the outside world still came to Australia by ship. Truganini lived in Macquarie Street, Hobart. Convicts guarded by Red Coats still laboured in nearby Port Arthur. No child was required to attend school in any part of Australia. The continent was a brood of six jealous colonies. Midday was differently observed in Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney; dozens of different bank notes circulated; and six miniature colonial armies and navies kept guard against indistinct threats.

By the time of Giblin’s death a single federal government had by design, expedience and rude hammering been forged from the colonies, and now contentedly assumed all the prerogatives of sovereign power. On a rabbit-ridden, treeless plain a national capital had been raised. A national university endowed. A central bank created. And economics – which at the time of Giblin’s birth had been a matter of words (speeches, and volumes) – had now become a matter of numbers (statistics, ‘multipliers’); people (students, professors, chief economists); and institutions (departments, bureaus, treasuries). A discipline had been spawned and its senior members took an eminent place in the counsels of the newly created state. That discipline was thick with Giblin’s former students, present colleagues, and protégés. This was his bequest.

Giblin’s inheritance will help us to understand his bequest.

In 1827 Giblin’s great-grandfather, Robert Wilkins Giblin, had arrived in Hobart Town on the Sir Charles Forbes in the company of his eight children and 73 female convicts. Robert Wilkins stepped ashore a ruined man. The school he had run in England had failed in the banking crash of 1825. He was starting again, the hard way. He would do what he did his entire life: teach. Within a few weeks he had opened a school that promised ‘frequent lectures on Astronomy, the mechanical powers, hydraulics, pneumatics, electricity, chemistry, etc., etc.’. A surer means of income was found when Lt-Gov. Arthur made him principal of the new Kings Orphan School, a school created by the benevolent patronage of the Governor. Another outlet of Giblin’s energies was the new Hobart Mechanics Institute, also patronised by Arthur. Giblin taught with ‘success’.^[1]

What we see in the great-grandfather are three poles of attraction in his great grandson: science, education, and youth. A fourth pole – public service in public life – only becomes apparent in later generations. Robert Wilkins’s son, Thomas, fathered Edward Owen Giblin (1849–95), who fought in miniature the battle for sanitation undertaken by Edwin Chadwick in London in the preceding generation. When Edward Owen was appointed Health Officer to Hobart Town, the Hobart Rivulet was a sewer – both literally and officially. And the prevailing system of cesspits spelt typhoid and diphtheria. Edward Owen recommended the prohibition of cesspits to the City Council and the introduction of night soil removal and sewers. The Alderman resisted. The Alderman yielded. The Public Health (Hobart) Act of 1884 phased out cesspits. Edward Owen could later report that, in one particular row of 15 tenements where typhoid had appeared regularly, it was now ‘banished’.

Edward Owen also maintained a busy medical practice. It is presumably out of a debt to Edward Owen in some matter of life and limb that a Hobart schoolmaster decided in 1884 to christen his youngest son, Edward Owen Giblin Shann (1884-1935). Fifty years later, when Australia struggled for breath in the Depression, Edward Owen Giblin Shann and L. F. Giblin were invested with an equal trust to advise on the relief of the economy. This is how one of the most renowned economists of the 1930s Australia bore, as an unlikely middle name, the surname of the most renown.^[2]

Robert Wilkins Giblin had also fathered a William Giblin. His son William Robert Giblin (1840–87) became Attorney-general, Treasurer, Premier, Chief-justice of Tasmania – and father of Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin.^[3] This son was christened ‘Lyndhurst’, in an unexpected – even eccentric – tribute to the Lord Chancellor of the Wellington and Peel governments, Lord Lyndhurst.^[4] The ‘Falkiner’ commemorated William Robert’s mother who died shortly after William Robert’s birth.

From the beginning of his adult life William Robert had been ‘dedicated to the moral and social elevation of the underprivileged’. He was president and founder of the Hobart Working Men’s Club. He promoted football leagues to fight larrikinism and vandalism. He taught in the Sunday School. He won the goodwill of Hobart, and with that, won a seat in the House of Assembly. He became Premier for a total of 67 months in two periods between 1878–84 and provided the first spell of stable government the colony had enjoyed. As Premier he was beyond the call of any single interest and drew talent wherever he could find it (including one of the architects of Federation, Andrew Inglis Clark). A ‘liberal by conviction, in sympathy with [the] English advanced Liberal Party’ (Walker 1976, p. 8), William Robert broadened the franchise and restrained expenditure. His horizons were expansive for an introverted colony and he pressed the merit of annexing Papua on an indifferent Tasmanian public. London’s disapproval of this project prompted the formation of the Federal Council of 1883 – one landmark in the journey to Federation – and Giblin represented Tasmania. Alfred Deakin, in retrospect, judged Giblin as ‘too big for the colony’.^[5]

With his brilliant intellect, elevated character, and public standing, William Robert Giblin must have been an extraordinary – perhaps overwhelming – example to the young Lyndhurst.^[6]

But Giblin’s father and forefathers also unwittingly endowed Giblin with one pole of disapproval – formal religion. Robert Wilkins was a godly man. And he raised in his sons the same consciousness. One witness of Thomas Giblin’s household in the 1870s recalled: ‘Religious instruction was strictly observed by family prayers every morning, at which the whole family and staff attended, and regular attendance at Church twice every Sunday’ (Giblin 1945). Thomas’s brother William was a deacon in the Congregational church. William’s son, William Robert, once won £10 for a poem on the conversion of St Paul ‘in a well contested competition’, and was active in the affairs in the same faith as his father. Those were confident days in the history of Australian Congregationalism, a denomination founded in Tasmania in 1823, and by now extended to all colonies, claiming James Fairfax (of the Sydney Morning Herald) amongst its brethren. This Australian Congregationalism was robustly evangelical, scriptural and proud of its affinity with the obstinate Puritan dissidents of earlier centuries.

Befitting his upbringing, Giblin ‘knew his Bible well’ (Earp 1960);^[7] there are numerous biblical allusions in the writings of Giblin. But almost all of them are ironical. Raised a Bible-Christian, Giblin became at some point a sceptic, a scoffer, an atheist. There seems to have been no particular occasion for this drastic transition. Certainly, he was not personally made for Puritanism – enjoyment came too easily to him. Late in life he recalled from his childhood a tiny act of moral rebellion. At a public banquet held at his home and presided over by his father: ‘we [Giblin children] lurked in the background and devoured countless jellies, and after the cousins had withdrawn I shocked the virtuous cousins by draining the wine cups, some of them left half full’.^[8] He chided his sister: ‘From what little I understand of Christianity I should say that the spirit that prefers reading the bible to giving innocent enjoyment to children is not Christian’ (RBA LFG 18 June 1892).

In the larger picture, Congregationalism was to go into a general decline during Giblin’s lifetime. And Giblin found in the mainstream of Protestantism nothing more satisfactory.^[9] More generally, historians of religion have stressed that around the time of Giblin’s birth in 1872, ‘God died’. Giblin was one particle of the surge of ‘liberalism and modernism’ and fin-de-siecle ‘paganism’. His rebellion against formal religion was an important element in his anti-Victorianism.

But Giblin’s spiritual education left one deep imprint: the ethic of selflessness. It was said of him that, although ‘he hated religion’, ‘there was no one more “christian” in his outlook than he was … He was always ready to help and never asked for a reward’ (Hytten 1951). It was this ethic that prompted him once to expostulate: ‘The ego, the distempered devil of the self … There is the enemy’ (Giblin in Copland 1960, p. 129). It was the ethic that incited him to hail George Borrow – of The Bible in Spain – ‘as a kindred spirit’ (Earp 1960, p.15). It was the same ethic that left Giblin ‘happy’ when his sister announced her intention to be a missionary.^[10]

If Giblin’s spiritual education had left an imprint, Giblin’s secular education was also pressed. Colonial Tasmania – contrary to common presumption – excelled in humane inquiry, and prospered as a consequence of its official connections in that regard. Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby school fame had, at the solicitation of his friend the Governor, Sir John Franklin, taken pains from afar to nurture the seed of education in the infant society. Franklin himself founded the Scientific Society, whose journal Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science was of ‘astonishing competence’ (Serle 1973). In 1844, Franklin’s vice-regal successor founded the Royal Society of Tasmania, the oldest Royal Society outside Great Britain. The arts also prospered. John Glover experienced a reinvigorated artistic impulse upon his arrival in Tasmania and benefited from the development in Hobart of ‘an appreciative group of patrons of painting executed for the pleasure of local residents’. The Hobart Mechanics Institute, the oldest in Australia, gave lectures, entitled ‘Perception of the Beautiful’. ‘A tiny cultural elite was gathering and recognizing itself’ (Serle 1973, p. 14).

The Tasmanian cultural elite sought a worthy education for its sons and found it in one of Franklin’s posthumous but enduring bequests, the Hutchins School, which became the pre-eminent institution of education in Tasmania. Lynd was conspicuously bright – ‘far cleverer’ his father believed, than Lyndhurst’s elder brother, who was to win a scholarship to Oxford.^[11] Shortly before finally succumbing to heart disease at the age of 46, William Robert spoke of his own lack of education as his greatest regret in life. William Robert would not allow Lynd to be deprived of its benefit.

Giblin attended Hutchins between 1881 and 1889. He won all the prizes. He was Exhibitioner, Dry Scholar, and the sole ‘Associate of Arts First Class’.^[12] One other distinction won there proved of lifelong significance. In 1860 Tasmania’s Council of Education had instituted an annual examination in imitation of the new ‘local examinations’ of Cambridge and Oxford. The best two candidates were awarded £200 per annum for four years to enable their attendance at a British university. In 1889 Giblin won.

Giblin enrolled in the University of London in 1890. Science was his focus. He studied Physics, Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, Mathematics, and Applied Mathematics and Mechanics. In the battle between Classics and Moderns, Giblin was evidently on the side of the Moderns. Within the university, intellectual leadership was centred in the driven, brilliant and somewhat eccentric figure of Karl Pearson^[13] (or Carl Pearson as he was until a sojourn in Germany prompted him to germanicise his name). Pearson was just about to complete The grammar of science and coin the term ‘standard deviation’. He was also a follower of the eugenic principles of his mentor Francis Galton and was committed to the idea that procreation should utilise superior stock, and superior stock were largely determined by physique. Giblin studied under the direction of Pearson and these eugenic principles lingered in Giblin’s mind.^[14]

After three years Giblin left the University of London without a degree and entered Kings College, Cambridge. What occasioned this move is unknown. Perhaps the good offices of Pearson, a Kingsman, assisted him.

At King’s Giblin was happy. Many years later he composed an affectionate memoir: ‘A Day at Cambridge. Lent Term, King’s College, 189-’. It is a description of a busy round of simple pleasures: his favourite beer, launching a row boat on the Cam among the snow flakes, singing in a college where ‘every second man had his piano’.^[15] It is almost cosy.

He later traced his acquisition of his musical tastes back to King’s.^[16] But the life of the mind is almost absent from this memoir. He reports attending a lecture by ‘a very distinguished mathematician but the worst lecturer in the world’. The impression is that the high points are fellowship, not thought. The excellence Giblin pursued was physical. Six feet tall and weighing 14 stone (Earp 1960), Giblin was a star on the rugby football field. He played for Kings, the University XV, and then became a ‘famous International’ playing for England. But he left Cambridge with second class honours.^[17]

In considering his record at Cambridge the issue that comes to mind is the lost opportunity for the future economist. In the 1890s Cambridge was the foremost centre in the world for the theoretical study of economics. A Moral Sciences Tripos (that is, a social sciences degree) had been established since 1851, and reformed in 1889. A chair had existed since 1828 and was now filled by Alfred Marshall, who was rolling out courses on production, distribution, free trade and protection. There was a demand for students with the capacity for analytical thought. And Marshall was glad for ‘postgraduates’ (such as Giblin was) to take the Moral Sciences Tripos. J. N. Keynes, the father of J. M. Keynes, was one such postgraduate who did.

But Giblin did not take the Moral Sciences Tripos, and he did not come to the attention of Marshall.

Cambridge did, nevertheless, bestow on Giblin one prize of an intellectual character: an entrée into one of most powerful cultural coteries of the 20th century - Bloomsbury. But the initial connection was not through any acquaintances at King’s, or even Cambridge.^[18] Instead, it came through a circuitous route beginning with a London literary figure who never attended Cambridge, E. V. Lucas (1868–1938). An essayist and Punch humorist, Lucas attended the University of London in Giblin’s last year, and presumably here their lifelong friendship was formed. Lucas also presumably introduced Giblin to his collaborator Edward Garnett (1868–1937), who was to become another of Giblin’s friends. A few years older than Giblin, Garnett had already established himself in London as a thoroughly modern auteur of socialism, Fabianism, Nietzscheianism. On the lookout for any new creative spirit, Garnett and Lucas had become the ‘agents’, patrons, editors and friends of Henry Lawson, then struggling in London, and whom Garnett felt was a ‘scandalously neglected’ talent. Another neglected talent was Dostoevsky, whom Garnett, with his wife Constance, largely introduced to the English reading public.

Edward and Constance had a son, David, or ‘Bunny’, later to loom large in the lives of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Born in 1892, the infant David ‘loved’ Giblin, whose visits were encouraged by distant family connections. Garnett recalled a walking party of 1897 composed of his parents, aunts and uncles, Prince Kropotkin – Constance was a dedicated supporter of Russian revolutionaries – and Giblin. Giblin ‘sat listening silently to my mother’s exposition of Russian politics and revolutionary aims’ sipping a mug of strong Westerham ale. ‘There was a strength and repose about Giblin, even as a young man, which set one immediately at rest. Hurry of any sort and the urgent petty occupations of daily life were in his presence, revealed as unnecessary and futile. There was any amount of time for things that mattered …’ (Garnett 1953, p. 33).^[19]

Twenty years later, in 1917, it was Giblin’s friendship with the adult Bunny, oiled by the reassuring fact of Giblin’s King’s College education, that was to prise open the door to Bloomsbury. But in 1897 all Cambridge had left Giblin with were warm memories and a second class honours degree. What to do now? An excursion abroad would have been a not atypical graduate’s answer. And a typical choice in the 1890s might be Heidelberg, Athens, or even India. Giblin chose otherwise. On July 14 1897 the Excelsior docked in San Francisco, and unloaded $500 000 of gold. The rumours of a fabulous gold reef in Canada’s northern extremities had suddenly been proved true. The Klondike gold rush was on and 100 000 men from across the world rushed to Canada to fight their way to the most distant reaches of British Columbia. Giblin was among them. He told five-year-old Bunny that he would bring him back four golden chairs.

He was accompanied to Canada by an Australian-born fellow student and fellow spirit, Martin Grainger (1874–1941). Grainger, declared Giblin, ‘is one of the most remarkable people I have met’ (RBA LFG 11 April 1896). He had secured the First in mathematics at Cambridge that had eluded Giblin, but was leaving the opportunity of academic preferment for the rigours of the wilderness, and this choice remained unrevised throughout life.^[20]

The pair reached Canada on a cattle boat; ‘an experience which gives those who undergo it a fairly close acquaintance with many things not learned in books’. Once there Giblin did not find gold, and perhaps never much sought to.^[21] He did, however, seek to find survivors. In their search for wealth, many miners had been reduced to total destitution. The Canadian ‘North Country’ where they sought riches is cruel and relentless country. Devil’s Gorge, Hell’s Gate, Rapid of the Drowned: these are its features. Of the thousands who set out for the Klondike by the overland route beginning at Edmonton, only 20 per cent finished the journey. Not one of the 4000 horses they took with them did. And in winter the countryside was almost totally impassable. The sporadic supply trails of summer ceased. To survive was to kill whatever was still living: moose, wolf, porcupine, squirrel. And if you did not – by inexperience, exhaustion, or folly – you died. In early spring of 1899, in a tale worthy of King Croesus, gold miners along the banks of the Dease and Liard rivers were snowed in, trapped and starving. The government of British Columbia dispatched a rescue party, with Giblin second in command. Travelling by dog teams, the rescue party successfully negotiated frozen lakes, located the survivors and provided an ambulance for those too weak to walk. On the return journey, with Giblin now in command, their food supplies gave out. A moose hunt preserved them from dearth and disaster.

Giblin’s adventures in the Yukon bring out in bold profile several of his characteristics. It highlighted his aptitude for leadership – not an ambition for leadership – but simply a capacity for it.

His adventures also brought out his willingness to undertake selfless acts, which complemented his leadership. And they brought out the satisfaction he felt as a result of defying physical misery. Or, perhaps more truthfully, his satisfaction from defying it more better than could any other. ‘The temperature was a brisk 38° below zero but Grainger and Giblin seemed to enjoy such temperatures’. Indeed, ‘there were occasions when they deliberately went out in the coldest weather to prove to themselves that they could take the worst’ (Camsell 1960, p. 25). One morning Giblin arrived at base with the cheerful report that overnight the temperature had dropped to -52° (= -47° C).

In the Yukon Giblin also received the education provided by hardship. On one occasion later in life Giblin announced that ‘to be any good, an economist ought to have been hungry in his youth’ (Hytten 1971, p. 53). This is surely an unreliable test – most of the best economists would have failed it. But Giblin honestly passed it.

Finally, the Yukon allowed the young Giblin to boldly articulate his self-definition. He was Viking. At Cambridge he had become engrossed by the Icelandic saga, Burnt Njal. It was ‘as good as the Iliad’. He visited Iceland (Reynolds c. 1951) and appears to have learnt the language and translated parts of its literature.

The Icelandic sagas are myths without mystical mist. They are chronicles of bargains and combat. They tell of Hallgerda (‘fair of face and tall of growth’, but evil at heart) and, as her counterpart, the good, if sexless, Unna. They celebrate Gunnar: hardy, fearless, hot in battle, but ardent for peace. ‘In all the long series of quarrels that are thrust upon him’, commented Giblin in a public lecture on the sagas, ‘through all the onslaughts that are made and ambushes set, there is only one occasion where he is not ready to make peace’ (Giblin [1923] 1960). And Gunnar is wise. He was set apart from those men beholden by ‘swift certainty as to what they wanted and how to get it’. Gunnar was given to ‘care and anxious thought’, ‘a persistent struggle to see mankind through, knowing they would lose the last fight’.

Giblin’s passage of youth in the frontier country of Canada afforded a tangible fulfilment of his northman fantasy. It so happened that several of the remote outposts of the Hudson Bay Company were supplied by means of row boats. Giblin, with Grainger, successfully presented himself as an oarsman to the company. He now had his own long boat. A hollowed spruce tree was his vessel. A single spruce tree was his huge oar.

At the conclusion of several months oarsmanship, he extended his mariner fantasy even further by training as a seaman. But this disappointed him. The steamship had removed the elements of nature he so loved from seafaring.

But at the same time Giblin had decided against Canada.

He sailed from Vancouver to Port Phillip, where he piloted his vessel through dangerous waters. In Hobart he returned to his true vocation, and became a foundation master in the King’s School, a breakaway school from Hutchins. It was, perhaps, a financial crisis at the school that set him roving again. He returned to London through Java, where he fell in again with Martin Grainger, and together they pursued a new interest: Ju‑Jitsu.

The ‘gentle art’ of Ju-Jitsu had left the Japanese countryside with the dissolution of the samurai and had spread to Japanese towns in search of custom, and from there to the world beyond. Europe received its first exposure to Ju-Jitsu in 1899, when the 18-year-old Yukio Tani arrived in England to entertain musical halls audiences by challenging all comers. A minor craze ensued, with even Conan Doyle having Holmes practising his own anglicised version. Tani established a ‘Japanese School of Ju-Jitsu’ in London in association with Giblin and Grainger. ‘They had fitted up a gymnasium in the basement of a house in Gordon Square, where they gave lessons and held exhibitions. At the latter, Giblin sometimes took the part of the heavy man who could be thrown and reduced to helplessness by a Japanese half of his weight’ (Garnett 1953, p. 111).

Giblin and Grainger edited the guide, The game of Ju-Jitsu. For the use of schools and colleges. It is more than a manual: it is a piece of advocacy. Ju-Jitsu, say the authors, furnishes health – ‘not the timid health that is content to avoid sickness, but the health that is alive and rampant’. Its special merit, however, is as a sport. Cricket, football and rowing require space unavailable to the ‘town-bred boy’. Ju-Jitsu demands ‘little space and no complicated apparatus’ and is ‘possible in the middle of town, indoors or out, by gaslight or daylight’. Boxing could claim the same but, although boxing is an ‘admirable game’, the interest in Ju-Jitsu is more demanding and intense: ‘it stands to boxing as chess to draughts’. And ‘hard hitting’ knocks you about more than you like. With Ju-Jitsu, ‘Man to man as God made you (usually with the addition of a jacket), you may fight it out to the inevitable finish; defeat when it comes is absolute, and the beaten man rises without strain or bruise ready to try gain. This is the peculiar glory of it’ (Giblin in Miyaki and Tano 1906).

But however financially successful the judo partnership may have been, it could not withstand other criteria. Grainger wished to marry. And so Giblin took to sea once again.^[22] As a consequence of a treaty of the imperial powers, the Solomon Islands had recently become open to economic exploitation. Lord Stanmore of the Pacific Islands Company engaged Giblin to further the company’s coconut interests in the islands. ‘So I swotted up agriculture, and then chartering a little steamer, I spent three months in the Solomons sailing around the coast line and examining the country and its possibilities’ (Table Talk, 30 April 1931).^[23] A virulent local fever forced him to leave.

He returned to Hobart, planted an apple orchard that he was to keep all his life, and began a career. His career was to be political. He joined the newly formed Liberal Democratic League. The aim of this party was to win the balance of power in Tasmania between the two larger parties – the Anti-Socialist Party and the Labor Party – and thereby ‘force drastic financial reform’ on the state’s shaky finances. ‘We urgently need more population, more revenue and less capital expenditure’, Giblin declared. This was perhaps an electorally unpalatable nostrum by itself. But whatever modest chance Giblin had of election, he threw away with his stance on defence. At one public meeting during the 1909 election campaign it was moved that Australia should donate a Dreadnought to the Royal Navy, although at that time the Royal Australian Navy did not yet exist and Australian naval defence consisted of paying a Royal Navy squadron to base itself in Australia. Giblin moved an amendment suggesting that Australia give first priority to its own defence of its own waters. It is recorded that Giblin had some difficulty in finding a seconder amongst the ‘uproar and yells from the audience inviting him to sit down’ (Green 1960, p. 30).

The Liberal–Democrat League failed. The Anti-Socialists won a majority in the 1909 election; the League secured just one seat out of 30, and only 9.7 per cent of the overall vote. In the seat he was contesting, Giblin received just 5 per cent.

The Liberal–Democrat League vanished and its members attached themselves to either the Anti-Socialists or the Australian Labor Party. Giblin immediately chose the Labor Party.^[24] A fruitful but difficult association had begun, one that was to bring him into close contact with future leading political personalities – including J. A. Lyons and John Curtin.

Why did he join the Labor Party? To join the conservatives was impossible. There was nothing ‘Tory’ about Giblin. But joining the ALP was possible. He sympathised with the working-class movement; the Tasmanian Labor Party had been founded in the same Working Men’s Club that his father had founded. He had, of course, worked as a lumberjack, sailor, teamster, boatman and cook. On a more programmatic level he had on his return to Tasmania founded an ‘informal discussion group’ of socialists, whose activities included sports meetings, picnics, lectures on current affairs and socialist doctrine. Its members included J. A. Lyons and John Curtin’s future father-in-law, Abraham Needham, and presumably on occasions John Curtin himself, who Giblin would surely have met on Curtin’s various visits to the island at that time.

It was in these years before the First World War that Giblin sported a ‘flowing Socialist beard’ (Reynolds c. 1951),^[25] and declared himself a socialist virtually from birth. The meaning of ‘socialist’ was conveniently indefinite. His own conception of this doctrine allowed him to support private finance of infrastructure development: ‘as good labour men, even as good socialists we cannot do better than support’ it. (Green 1959. See also Robson 1983, vol. 1, p. 295). As a consequence, ‘His socialism, though never his intelligence, was always open to question’ (Davis 1975, p. 415). But this questioning did not necessarily isolate him from the most powerful elements in the party; in 1910 an attempt to incorporate a ‘socialisation objective’ into Labor’s constitution was defeated. Labor instead pledged itself to ‘the cultivation of an Australian sentiment, the maintenance of a White Australia and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community’, all issues Giblin distinctly supported.

Giblin managed to avoid a ‘probation period’ that certain Labor stalwarts wished to impose on him. A more enduring difficulty in his new political association lay in Giblin’s distance from the ‘industrial wing’ of the Labor Party.^[26] Giblin sympathised with the working-class movement. He was soon to provide advice on the 1910 Tasmanian Factories Act and the Wages Board Act, that put a minimum on some wage rates, and a maximum of 48 hours on the working week, at a time when waitresses in Hobart ‘coffee palaces’ were working up to 84 hours a week (Robson 1983, vol. 2, p. 233). But, like his father, he took a ‘missionary’ attitude to the working class. They were to be ‘raised’, not rallied to. And his aspirations were far wider, more social than economic. In 1911 Giblin declared the party did not need men only concerned with wages.

In summary, Giblin was a typical ‘left-liberal’ of the pre-1914 world. He favoured equality, and opposed hierarchy and mere convention. This made him ‘left’. But he was committed to the prerogative of the individual over the prerogative of the collective. This made him ‘liberal’. The key figure in this mindset was J. S. Mill. A representative figure was Alfred Wallace, the evolutionist and land nationaliser, who had links to founding figures in the Tasmanian labour movement (Coleman 2001a). Giblin was deciding his political affiliation during a time when Australia laboured under a strict two-party system, with no centre party savouring of Mill, and the defining political axis was simply supporting – or opposing – the new insurgent Labor Party. Giblin could only support.

He became active in Labor Party deliberations. He pressed for the staged nationalisation of land; voluntary voting; proportional representation;^[27] uniform divorce laws; an increased number of states. He also proposed a motion for the ‘prevention of the marriage of Asiatics and Europeans and the marriage of idiots’.^[28] We might see here the influence of eugenic doctrine. But his motion was also consistent with the outlook of the ALP of the time. In the same year, 1912, the Fisher Labor Government introduced the maternity allowance, but the legislation debarred ‘asiatic’ mothers from receiving it.^[29]

The Westralian Worker reported that Giblin’s ‘sabre [was] the keenest and most pointed at the conference’ (Westralian Worker 9 February 1912).^[30] In the Tasmanian election of January 1913 he successfully stood as a Labor Party candidate, topping the list of ALP candidates in the federal seat of Denison (Bennett and Bennett 1986), and became an advisor to the Treasurer J. A. Lyons in the subsequent minority Labor Government.

Giblin’s promising political trajectory was unbalanced by the arrival of the First World War. Giblin was not one of those who raced excitedly to the colours. It was, he said, a ‘bloody war’. In any case, a broken wrist from a bicycle accident had left him at the time a not very useful warrior. But with its mend, and with the maximum age for enlistment raised to 45, he volunteered in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF).

What can be said about his war experience? That he was lucky to emerge alive; that he ‘should’ have been killed; and that some his dearest friends had little expectation of his surviving.

What does his war experience reveal? Largely what the Yukon had already revealed, but in still more vivid hue. Above all a fulfilment achieved in being ‘in action’, in both the broad and narrow senses. Giblin was 43 years old when he volunteered, older than 98 per cent of the recruits to the AIF. From 1909 he had served in the Army Intelligence Corps as a ‘citizen soldier’.^[31] An honourable and useful staff position would have been available. But he enlisted in an ordinary line unit: the 40th battalion, raised under the auspices of the Tasmanian Government, and manned and officered solely by Tasmanians.

He was first severely wounded on 15 April 1917 near Armentieres (Green 1960). At the field hospital he genially entreated the authorities to send him back to the front, rather than to medical care in England. The medical officer turned out to be one of his former fellow students from Cambridge, and granted his request. A few weeks later, in the battle of Messines of June 1917, he was awarded a Military Cross for leading his men ‘with great determination to the assault, reaching his objective through intensive artillery and machine gun fire’. In the assault he was severely wounded a second time, and dispatched to England.

In this island sanctuary, Giblin pursued other areas of life. Bunny Garnett was now 25, a conscientious objector, and required by law to contribute to the war effort through agricultural labour. To conform with this requirement, he and a fellow objector (and one-time lover) Duncan Grant were now sharing the Sussex farmhouse ‘Charleston’ with Vanessa Bell in their own version of a ménage-a-trois. Giblin ‘full of warmth and friendliness’ came during his convalescence to visit Garnett ‘to reassure himself that I [Garnett] was not having too bad a time as a conscientious objector!’.

But how might these Bloomsbury lilies of the field react to the sudden appearance of this unknown bronzed warrior? ‘Confronted by Vanessa … with a sure instinct, he began to speak of his old friends at Cambridge, Lowes Dickinson, Wedd and Clapham’.^[32]

There may have been another motive for Giblin’s visit. John Maynard Keynes often frequented the Charleston household, which he had originally organised. Giblin, Garnett recalled, ‘wanted to know all that we could tell’ about Keynes whom he ‘had heard about’. Giblin and Garnett dined and parted. ‘Giblin’s future did not seem likely to be a long one’.

Giblin returned to take part in the Battle of Passchendaele, a battle that illustrates, even more sombrely than the Somme, the vision of the War as being a matter of lives being squandered for a few miles. A village by the name of Passchendaele was to be taken, and 310 000 Allied casualties obtained it. Giblin’s unit was thrown into the maelstrom, and at the end of battle he was the most senior surviving commander of the 40^th battalion’s 10th brigade. ‘Of the Battalion there were only about a hundred left out of the six hundred who went into action eight days earlier. These men with Giblin at their head had reached the lowest depths of misery by the time they had arrived at the area of sodden shell-holes allotted to them. Giblin moved about them, quietly talking to the exhausted ones, and seeing that they had hot food and drink’ (Green 1960).

The costs of battle encouraged attempts to clarify the purpose of the struggle. In October 1917 Giblin wrote to his Tasmanian Labor colleague James Ogden to argue that war aims should have no imperialistic dimension; that revolutionary Russia should receive a sympathetic treatment; and that Australia should place German New Guinea under international control (Lake 1975, p. 117). The winter and the subsequent spring of 1917, saw the nadir of morale among the Allied forces. Early in 1918 Giblin told the woman he would marry that the trial of Bertrand Russell for pacifism was ‘incredible’.^[33]

Three weeks leave in the summer of 1918 was devoted to Venus rather than Mars. Gunnar had found his Unna. On 29 July 1918 he married, in a registry office, Eilean Burton, 33 years old and 12 years his junior. They shared unorthodoxy. She had distinct artistic connections and was given to ‘unconventional dress’. She was a carpenter, who made some of her own furniture. Educated at Wycombe Abbey School – housed in a magnificent mansion in 160 acres of grounds – she had devoted several years to social work in the East End of London. She considered herself a socialist and a feminist. At the marriage ceremony there was, on her plea, no wedding ring.^[34] They are both recorded as living at Spencer Road, East Mosely, London.^[35] Two ‘eccentrics’ had found each other, and remained constant, despite the impositions their unusual personalities made on each other. One acquaintance of the pair has judged that ‘She was as likeable as he was. They were a fine couple with a narcissistic devotion to each other’.^[36]

During their honeymoon, Giblin with Eilean, visited Charleston a second time. And this time he caught Keynes.

Within days he was returned to the front to be part of the final advances of the summer of 1918. On 8 August 1943 he was to recall:

On 9 August he wrote to his bride: ‘Just back in time for this push. It has been wonderful. We are in 6 miles’ (NLA LFG 9 August 1918). He added that ‘Fritz generally appears to be clearing out’, and there had been ‘very few casualties’. One of the few was himself. In a night attack in the battle of Bapaume of August 1918 Giblin was seriously wounded for a third time.^[37] On the arrival of the Armistice he was convalescing in England.

In two years Giblin had been promoted to the rank of Major, awarded with both a Military Cross and a Distinguished Service Order (a decoration superior to the Military Cross) and had been ‘Mentioned in Dispatches’. It was an illustrious record. But this military man was anti-militarist. He opposed conscription. He was, in a loose sense, a pacifist, desolated by the waste of war and disgusted by its misrepresentation as anything other than a grim necessity. In 1934 he publicly protested at the Governor of Victoria appearing in military uniform.

To Giblin war was the colour of dust.^[38] Gunnar now put aside his helm, sword and bill and sought peaceful employment.

He was 46. His father – Treasurer, Premier, Acting Governor, and Chief Justice – had died at that age, and on the afternoon of his funeral Hobart had largely closed to show its respect (Walker 1976, p. 39). Giblin had achieved little in public life by this time. To fulfil his aspirations the obvious remedy would be to revive the career as Labor parliamentarian that had been interrupted fewer than three years earlier. But the party had changed in that short time. It had split and radicalised. The prosecution of the war had been used to drive the Labor party into opposition seats. Their adversaries had claimed the war and army for themselves and the ALP seemed ready to concede both. At their 1918 conference the party had adopted the proposition that the war had been caused by capitalism. Major Giblin DSO, MC might not have cut amongst the delegates quite the figure a ‘war hero’ might have been expected to.^[39]

Another consideration was the novel experience of the ALP’s annihilating defeat in the federal elections 1917. ‘This marked the end of the first era in labour history during which its [the ALP] support grew in leaps and bounds, when its opponents had to sink their differences, adopt its methods and match its program, and when it seemed set to become the natural party of government. In the next twenty-five years Labor would hold office at the national level once, for twenty-sixth months’ (Hirst 1999, p. 76).

Finally, might the example of Keynes have suggested a new way of advancing what Giblin thought important? Keynes the economist, public servant and ‘public intellectual’ had made a greater splash than most politicians. This kind of public life also presented itself to Giblin. Giblin had previously advised Sir Neil Lewis, Premier of Tasmania. Lewis was now Treasurer in the Nationalist Government of Tasmania, and he wanted Giblin as the new Statistician of Tasmania.^[40]