But Giblin was now absorbed in his own book: The growth of a central bank: the development of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia 1924–1945.

He had been invited to write this history by the Bank, was granted full access to its archives, and paid £15 per week. Giblin declined to be paid any royalties.

Giblin embarked on this project at the age of seventy-five and in precarious health. His bronchial condition could give him 30-minute coughing fits (NLA LFG 10 July 1947). Midway through writing, he was hospitalised from a suspected heart attack (NLA LFG 8 April 1948). A few months later he was (NLA LFG 2 Sept 1948) in hospital again, with suppurating ankles, a legacy of his time in the trenches 30 years before.

There were other obstacles. The archival material was ‘very scanty’ for earlier times. And for the later decades there was too much. The 1937 Royal Commission into the Monetary and Banking Systems was – ‘a mine of information’ – but a ‘low grade ore’ (NLA LFG 27 July 1948).

A greater difficulty lay in the sharp and sometimes painful difference in the opinions with his professional peers over what had happened, and why it had happened. Even with such a kindred spirit as Roland Wilson, parts of his manuscript were unsympathetically received. Giblin at one point expressed himself ‘amazed’ at Wilson’s ‘fantastic’ comments on a draft chapter (RBA LFG 28 December 1949). ‘The difference in our impressions of various happenings is rather disturbing’ and he implied that a further exchange of the points at question would be unhelpful.

The root of the trouble here was that, if Giblin was to understand the history of the Bank, he would have to excavate past rivalries between Treasury and the Bank, and surmount the different standpoints of these institutions. Midway through preparation Wilson complained to Giblin:

It was not only Treasury who were irked. These draft chapters were read with mixed pleasure by members of the Bank of England. Raymond Kershaw (1898–1981), the Australian-born Bank of England aide of Niemeyer on his 1930 visit, protested: ‘If you will allow me to be a frank critic, I should say that it seems rather too wise after the event’ (RBA RK 15 November 1949). Melville explained to Giblin: ‘What may be irritating Kershaw is a certain levity in these pages. In your references to the Bank of England you do not “pay the deference due to a man of pedigree” … it could be argued that since in speaking of the tabernacle your tones are not sufficiently hushed there is an implication that you are in some way critical’ (RBA LGM 10 December 1949).

Not only Bank outsiders had difficulties. At the beginning of 1949 Giblin told Eilean of ‘new trouble over bank history. It has to be discussed with three or four people here [the Bank] both for accuracy on certain doubtful matters and for propriety in making public certain matters of policy and certain criticism of persons’ (NLA LFG 21 February 1949). Six months later Giblin was still not in the clear. ‘History is rather in trouble over a difficult part. I think I mentioned it as open to criticism. I thought I had fairly met this when I found the critics strongly disagreed, and the memoranda go to and fro’ (NLA LFG 8 August 1949). A revised draft appeared in October 1949. But there still one hurdle to leap: the Prime Minister. Gladly Giblin could report to Eilean: ‘Coombs talked it over with Chifley who is happy about it’.

Giblin’s Growth of a central bank is an authoritative account of the development of the Bank and major economic events experienced in Australia between 1924 and 1945. It is also an insider’s account: ‘it is with a sense of witnessing the lifting of a veil that one reads part of the narrative’ (Wilson 1952).^[31]

Its theme is one familiar to Giblin: the birth and growth of an Australian institution. Its thesis is that the development was slow, fitful, and difficult.

Giblin’s history taught that this development could not be hastened by importing a replica of the Bank of England. Giblin records the meagre fruit of the much anticipated visit to the Commonwealth Bank in 1927 of Sir Ernest Harvey, Comptroller of the Bank of England and later Deputy Governor. Commonwealth Bank members considered it ‘a compliment to us that one so high up in the Bank of England should take the trouble to come out and have a look at what we were doing … All Directors were intensely interested in Sir Ernest Harvey, and what he had to say generally’ (RBA D. B. Murdoch to LFG 8 April 1947).^[32] Twenty years later Giblin found little memory of what Sir Ernest actually did say, except for a list of 14 points purporting to be an epitome of the principles of central banking. In Growth Giblin does not sew fig leaves to cover their nakedness; he reprints them in their feeble entirety.

In truth, the Bank of England’s example was somewhat worse than useless. Giblin complains of ‘the shibboleths, promulgated too lightly from the Bank of England from a special experience and accepted too easily by other banking systems; which were a serious obstacle to any rational consideration of the central banking problem in Australia’ (Giblin 1951, p. 111). He faulted the ‘very cold’ response of the Bank of England to Australia’s request during the Depression of a loan of a ‘comparatively trifling’ sum. He scorned as a ‘fatuous inference from Bank of England experience’ the notion that private ownership of a central bank amounts to political independence of a central bank. Giblin’s estimation of the benefit of the Bank of England connection would hardly be encouraged by the hearsay, investigated by Giblin in researches, that Casey had sought advice from Niemeyer over the 1938 banking legislation.^[33]

Unable to import a ready-made central bank in kit form, neither could a central bank be ‘improvised’ from materials made for another purpose. In particular, a cadre of experts could only develop with the passage of time. This poverty of proficiency in central banking was exacerbated by legislators’ lack of any sincere concern for this proficiency. Earl Page, the author of the 1924 Commonwealth Bank Act, announced he would leave decision-making ‘to the experts’ on the Bank Board. ‘No doubt he was perfectly well aware that there were no real “experts” available, and that, if there were, he would not appoint them’. In the event, Page’s appointments to the Bank Board were wholly premised on the assumption that ‘successful businessmen and farmers were obviously competent to make all necessary decisions’ (Giblin 1951, p. 352).

The benefit that experience would slowly confer on the Bank over time was to some extent counter-weighed by the mythologisation of the Bank’s experience. The tribulations of the Bank’s Board were illustrative. The Labor Government of 1911 established the Commonwealth Bank without a board. The Board was added by a Nationalist government in 1924, and filled with friends of that government. In consequence, the Labor opposition inferred a board was obviously a bad thing. When that opposition became the government in 1941, ‘Now was clearly the time to remedy this disaster and restore the pristine knight-errantry of a single Governor with a horse and lance of Sir Denison Miller’ (p. 343). The Board was abolished. Growth closes with an entreaty that the merits of a Board not be overlooked by future legislators.

The development of the power and competency of the central bank was also stymied by the interests of the commercial banks. Genuine compacts between the Bank and the commercial banks were resisted, since commercial banks were possessed of ‘a natural longing for binding agreements which will not in fact bind’ (Giblin 1951, p. 284). A show of alarm by the commercial banks greeted Roland Wilson’s proposal that statistics on foreign currency reserves be made generally available. ‘This was heady and dangerous information for the public.’ Throughout Growth, the banks make a hypocrites’ chorus, which combined noisy professions of conventional morality with a steady-eyed devotion to their own advantage.

These theses are minutely researched. In many instances this does not make for laborious reading; Giblin’s great blocks of factual granite are gilded with his gossamer webs of irony. (‘Sir Robert [Gibson] had a clear and confident but somewhat imperfect vision of Central banking problems in Australia’ (p. 353)). But the density of the material is often excessive. Perhaps Giblin saw himself as writing an official history. The great example of Australian official history in the later 1940s was Charles Bean’s The official history of Australia in the War of 1914–1918.^[34] This was ultimately a 12-volume effort. The last of the six volumes that Bean had written himself had only appeared in 1942. The official history is a minutely crowded canvas, without broad strokes. The Australian War Memorial states that the Official history was ‘warmly acclaimed’, but ‘it is unlikely that Bean’s massive history of the war was widely read’. Something similar may be said of Growth of a central bank.^[35]