The Second World War did not bring the four the culmination of their careers that might have been hoped or expected. At the war’s close three were over 50 years old, and perhaps none would have been buoyed by any marked sense of the completeness of their accomplishments. Brigden had been dismissed from the inner counsels of government not long after he reached them. Copland’s ambition for a preeminent place in academia had been crushed in 1938, and he had spent the war in a government position more imposing than powerful. In 1946 Wilson was returned to the position he had first been awarded 10 years before – Treasury ‘adviser’ and Commonwealth Statistician – to endure, heavy with expectation, a ‘seat of government’ that brought him to despair. And Giblin? Now an old man, in bad health – where was his monument? He had produced a profusion of reports, pamphlets, lectures, reviews, columns. But nothing more.

For Giblin it was, obviously, the last act, the last stage of the ascent. But it was an ascent which he was to climb until the last moment, and make his most memorable. In the same years, Copland’s academic aspirations were to be handsomely consummated, and Wilson was to achieve his own acme of ambition.

These accomplishments were realised amidst, and coloured by, the contradictions of post-war Australia: an unexpected prosperity co-existent with vexatious shortages and accelerating inflation; and full-employment concurrent with bitter economic tensions. But it was a third incongruity that most specifically absorbed the four: the restoration of fundamental military security coincident with a renewed anxiety about Australia’s ‘independence’. This incongruity was seen sharpest in the controversies over Australia’s place in the post-war international economic order, and it was there that the four for the last time as a group offered their guidance.