Copland arrived in Tasmania to find a university existing in painful miniature. The University of Tasmania had been born of a conflict between the visionary aspirations of Tasmania’s cultural elite and the colony’s slender material resources. A youthful Giblin had once witnessed his father’s friend Inglis Clarke holding forth John Henry Newman’s Idea of university as the appropriate model for the island university. The Idea of the university, Tasmania’s institution could not be. Nevertheless, in the face of significant opposition, the friends of higher learning successfully founded the University of Tasmania in 1890.^[4]

In keeping with the straitened economic circumstances of the times, the University’s entire academic staff initially consisted of three people. And to pursue the economy further, all three were appointed at the lecturer level: this was a university without professors. And the three were not ‘fellows’; the University deemed them to be ‘servants’ in status, and the University chose to use that language to describe its scholars for the next 30 years. There was some growth over that period, but when Copland arrived it could still be described as minuscule. In 1918 the total number of students in the university was 85. The total teaching staff in 1925 was 19.

Economics had been examined since 1893. The very first reading list for ‘political economy’ was solid and modern: Mill, Jevons, and Marshall’s utterly up-to-the minute text, the Principles of economics. But this vigorous start was followed by 25 years of drift until the arrival of Copland in 1917. The newly appointed Lecturer in History and Economics was disappointed to find ‘… an extensive course in history but in economics there was only … one subject, political economy as it was called’ (Copland 1968, p. 7). Copland decided that this situation could not be tolerated, and he set about changing it with the enormous drive that was to characterise his subsequent professional career.

Within months of his arrival in Tasmania in 1917 Copland had arranged a conference between the University’s Extension Board, professional accounting bodies and the Registrar of the University, and in August 1917, Copland proposed the establishment of a four-year Bachelor of Commerce degree. The parliament promised £500; the Hobart Chamber of Commerce promised another £500. After more than a year’s delay the University Council finally agreed in December 1918 to establish Copland’s commerce degree. The fee for the new degree was to be about £25 and 4s – about four months of average earnings, and inexpensive in the values of the day.^[5] The subjects were to include: Economic Geography; Economics I and II; Currency and Banking; and Statistical Method. Graduates duly followed, with Myrtle Reid-McIlvrey admitted to the BCom in 1924.

Copland’s attention then turned to the establishment of a new faculty – the Faculty of Commerce – to administer the new qualification. This took very little time: the Faculty became a legal entity in April 1919 with Copland as its first Dean.

In creating a degree with no almost staff, Copland assumed an enormous load. It appears that he was, incredibly, responsible for 20 courses over a single year. This was incredible, and slightly crazy. Something had been set incorrectly in Copland’s mental mechanism. He was a cauldron in which fires burnt too fiercely. This uncontrolled furnace eventually produced calamity. He collapsed in Melbourne during an academic visit.^[6] He spent three months recuperating. There were to be more collapses.

But it was this same heat that shattered walls, and forced a path for him through almost all obstacles. He was propelled; he would never rest and never be entirely content. In 1920 the Council offered to pay him £500 per annum at a time when lecturers were sometimes rewarded with £200 per annum. But this flattering offer did not bring any self-satisfaction. ‘I am prepared to accept the proposal of the Council’, he coolly replied.^[7] He was painfully jealous of any preferment his colleagues might enjoy;^[8] and was spurred by a well-developed sense of his own worth. All four university colleges in New Zealand had professors of economics. Why should he not be a professor of economics? The day after his 26th birthday he wrote to Council proposing that a Chair in Economics be created.

It is at this point Copland’s career intersects with Giblin’s.

In December 1919 Giblin had been appointed to the post of Statistician to the Government of Tasmania. This appointment was more than it seemed. It carried the duty of advising the Tasmanian Government on financial and economic matters – perhaps the first such position in Australia.^[9] Giblin was also taking the place of an eminent preceding occupant: R. M. Johnston (1844-1918) who, as Statistician between 1882 and 1918, had made a significant contribution to the techniques for national income accounting, and had pioneered the argument that Tasmania suffered from ‘disabilities’ imposed by Federation. Johnston had also been a political economist: mathematical in his method, and conservative in his conclusions. Thus with this appointment Giblin was well positioned to speak with some weight of the worthiness of Copland’s proposal for the Chair of Economics.

At about the same time Giblin was elected to the University Council and soon became a member of the faction that wielded power in the University – ‘The Block’. Giblin was the person to have on side for any decision, especially of a financial nature. Giblin quickly decided that Copland’s case for his appointment was worthy.

Thus an alliance between Copland and Giblin formed that was to stay fast until death. It was not, however, a symmetrical, or equal, alliance. Copland was twenty-six years old; Giblin was forty-seven. Copland’s relationship with Giblin has been described by Tom Fitzgerald as ‘ungrudgingly, filial’.^[10] Copland said as much himself. ‘Perhaps I know better than any of the economists of that day what it meant to come under his parental care’ (Copland 1960, p. 4).

Copland revered Giblin. But Giblin did not revere Copland. Copland recorded, accurately, that he was ‘young and inexperienced in academic affairs’ when he first met Giblin, and that the older man was ‘never failing to deliver a reproof’ to the younger one ‘where he thought it was needed’ (Copland 1960, p. 4). There was also a wider, more psychological gulf. Copland was restless, Giblin calm. Copland was obvious; Giblin was, in his own description, ‘reticent’. Giblin had a sense of life’s ironies that the literal Copland never possessed.^[11] Copland was in the words of one warm admirer, ‘a simple man’ (Downing 1971). Giblin was mysterious.

Yet Giblin was ‘a man of great sympathy and understanding’. And Giblin was quick to recognise an ample talent and keen to ‘kick it along’ (Wilson 1984). Giblin piloted the fragile raft of Copland’s reform through the extensive reefs of the University. It was Giblin who, within a few weeks of the proposal, submitted to the University Council on March 1920 a memorandum supporting Copland’s case. It was Giblin who successfully moved at Council that a Chair (combined with the Workers’ Education Association [WEA] position of Director of Tutorial Classes) should be established. It was, undoubtedly, Giblin who, as a member of the Standing Committee considering applications, persuaded the Committee to recommend Copland to Council. The Council offered him the appointment on 21 December 1920, and Copland became the first Professor of Economics in the University of Tasmania, still not yet twenty-seven years old.^[12]

The alliance between Giblin and Copland continued during their dealings with the WEA responsibilities associated with the new Chair. Copland was firmly committed to the Association. The WEA expressed the predominant spirit of early post-war years. As he later recalled, his fellow movement members ‘were greatly influenced by the rising school of progressive thought on social problems … we read The New Statesman, The New Age and the Manchester Guardian Weekly rather more than the Economist’ (Copland 1952, p. 31). And by allying itself with ‘progressive thought’ the Association promised to capture for economics rising members of the labour movement ‘who might, and often did, become ministers in State cabinets’.

Under Copland’s stewardship the WEA in Tasmania had grown from two branches in 1917 to nine branches in 1920. Staffing this expansion was a challenge, and there existed a vacancy in the West Coast branch. At the Council meeting of March 1921 Giblin reported that the British WEA had recommended one of their staff, J. B. Brigden, for the appointment.