Wilson did not pursue his own ideas. Viner had expected Wilson to undertake an academic career in North America. With an Oxford DPhil and Chicago PhD he had formidable qualifications. His Tasmanian peer Arthur Smithies was to show what path Wilson could have taken. Smithies (1907–81) had attended the University of Tasmania shortly after Wilson; had won a Rhodes Scholarship shortly after Wilson; had studied PPE at Oxford shortly after Wilson; and then, like Wilson, transferred to an American university, Harvard. There he was supervised by Schumpeter, who had by then left Bonn, and had ended up with an Australian doctoral student after all. (Schumpeter took it upon himself to write to Giblin about his ‘Tasmanian’ whom he had ‘got know so intimately’. ‘He has a remarkable aptitude for clever and efficient handling of statistics’, and possessed ‘quite unusual merit on a theoretical subject’). After completing his doctorate, Smithies joined Wilson at the Bureau of Census and Statistics in Canberra. But there the two careers diverge. After a stint at Michigan, Smithies wound up at Harvard, published prolifically in Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, did important work on the ‘inflationary gap’ (Smithies 1942), and became editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Economic Abstracts.

A career like Smithies was possible for Wilson. Toronto offered him a first job. But a life in learning was not the most important thing to Wilson. He always wore his doctoral robes very lightly, even when such a distinction was a rarity.^[21] Much later, in a graduation address to the University of Tasmania in 1969, he disowned any vocation for academic life, saying that: ‘… I myself can lay no claim to scholarship in the deeper sense of the term. I never felt deeply attracted to scholarship for its own sake’ (Address to University of Tasmania 2 April 1969).^[22]

He would begin as a Lecturer at the University of Tasmania from 1 August 1930. Wilson evidently felt a tug of something other than purely professional calling.