By July 1921 Brigden had arrived in Tasmania to take up duty in what was surely the hardest of hardship posts in academia: an evening class teacher in Queenstown, a lonely mining settlement 260 kilometres west of Hobart, nestled in a mountainous wilderness rising to 4000 feet.
Queenstown was not then 30 years old. It was spawned at the time Giblin was in the Klondike, when a ‘Copper Rush’ in western Tasmania sent thousands to Mount Lyell, and the Hobart stock exchange remained opened throughout the night to cope with the excitement.
In its subsequent history, 1.3 million tons of copper ore was torn from the ‘peaks of Lyell’, and crushed and incinerated in the smelters at its foot. In the valley below grew Queenstown ‘hewn out of dark-swamp forest’ (Blainey 1954, p. 92). The town stood in the path of the Roaring 40s. It was visited by tornadoes, and it rained 300 days a year.
The natural climate was further despoiled by man. The extraction of the copper required sulphur; the ‘brimstone’ of the Bible.
Sulphur was the curse of Mt Lyell. When the big company smelted its pyrite in ten or eleven furnaces Queenstown found its climate changing. In still weather sulphers from the smelters thickened into pea soupers, choked Queenstown, and blanketed the valley. For days on end men working in the flux quarries on the hills above the town basked in winter sun, and looked down on the creamy waste of cotton wool in the valley. Men who set out with hurricane lamps for the smelters in the morning were sometimes found miles away in the evening. Sulphur was in every breath of air; even tobacco lost its taste. (Blainey 1954, p. 99).
Sulphur deadened the sense of smell, and thereby dulled the sense of taste. It corroded buildings and power lines. It washed into the Queen River, and reportedly left it the most polluted waterway in the Southern Hemisphere. It acidified the vapour borne by the clouds, and the poisoned rain burnt away the vegetation in torrential downpours.
Whatever wood was left was felled to feed the furnaces. Perhaps three million tons of wood were cut between 1896 and 1926. At its peak, 20 acres of forest per week were consumed to stoke the fires. By 1900 Mt Owen – once carpeted in forest – had been stripped totally bare of leaf, blade and stem. It was now a looming presence of red and black rock, variously compared with a cemetery, a desert, a battlefield, hell with the fires gone out.
And for such an existence, there were only meagre material compensations. The end of the First World War spelt a slide in the price of copper. By 1921 it stood at only $US279 per ton compared with $US644 at the 1917 peak. The company proposed a 20 per cent cut in pay. Half the workforce were dismissed. Closure loomed. So did an all-out strike.
Into this environment Brigden arrived, resolved to spread the sweetness and light of economic reason. One result was The economics of Lyell, published in May 1922 under Copland’s patronage, and intended to provide his West Coast WEA students with a ‘textbook’. The issue that this publication grapples with was the creation of wealth and its distribution – both acute matters in Queenstown. In order to engage with the issue of distribution Brigden produced, in appendices, an estimate of Australia’s national income, the first since those of Timothy Coghlan of 1886. Brigden’s method was simple if not crude: he extrapolated across the entire workforce the per capita value added through industry that had been recorded by a 1915 census. He thereby obtained a figure £377m for Australia’s total income in 1915, an estimate that compares decently with the later ‘authoritative’ estimate of £377m (Butlin 1962). Brigden then sought to break this total down into profit and wage shares. He made a rough estimate of the annual rate of return which the owners of this wealth might have achieved, then applied his rate-of-return estimate to a figure for the stock of wealth produced by the Census of Wealth carried out for 1915. In this way he arrived at a figure of £130m for aggregate income from ownership of property in 1915, and so (residually) £247m for income from work (the second component).
‘This was no great beginning after Coghlan’s achievements’: so writes the historian of Australian national income accounting of Brigden’s effort (Butlin 1962, p. 38). Perhaps beginnings are frequently ‘not great’. Brigden’s simple exercise is nevertheless important because it represents the first attempt to educate the public in the concept of national income, and the relative size of the wage and profit shares into which it is divided.[13] This was an educational exercise that Brigden, Copland and Giblin were to deploy repeatedly, especially during the Great Depression.
The appointment at Queenstown, therefore, brought Brigden his first publication in economics. But would Dorothy Brigden have been adequately consoled? The contrast with Ide Hill would have been fierce. Possibilities of escape must have been steadily pondered. They may have seemed frighteningly narrow.
But in 1922 there arrived an opportune death. William Pitt Cobbett was the eminent and irascible foundation Professor of Law at the University of Sydney and renowned scholar of international law. On his retirement he moved to Hobart, where he died in 1919. In his will he directed that a trust fund of £5000 be established to advance economic inquiry. How came this strange gratuity to economic research? It appears that William Pitt Cobbett was a kinsman to another, much better-known Cobbett: William Cobbett (1763–1835) journalist, stirrer, reactionary, radical and hammer of political economy. It is tempting to ask if William Pitt Cobbett’s difficult brilliance may have owed something – by either inheritance or example – to William Cobbett. These are speculations. What is fact is that, in 1883, William Pitt Cobbett’s father published a new edition of William Cobbett’s enduring piece of reportage, Rural rides during the years 1821–1832: with economical and political observations, spiced with rants against Ricardo and ‘Scotch feelosofers’.
It is through Pitt Cobbett’s esteem for the economist-hating William Cobbett that Brigden managed to join the University proper, and transfer to Hobart as the new Pitt Cobbet Lecturer in Economics.