On 12 October 1950, Brigden, aged 63 years, died from a heart attack. Wilson wrote to Giblin a few weeks later: ‘I am sure he would have enjoyed a yarn about the old days. This was about the only thing he was hanging on for’ (RBA RW to LFG 2 November 1950).

A haphazard and unnoticed assortment of memorials was instituted. His widow, ‘being desirous of perpetuating his memory’, endowed the University of Tasmania with the J. B. Brigden Memorial Prize of £1000. The Brigden gate, that he had left the University of Tasmania on his departure, was respectfully transferred to the University’s new campus at Sandy Bay. In 1987 a circling street in a new Canberra locality was christened Brigden Crescent. It nestles in the suburb of Theodore, a neighbourhood named in memory of the Treasurer whose policies he abhorred.^[39]

Immediately upon Brigden’s death, Giblin took upon himself the task of writing Brigden’s obituary. But he never finished it. Giblin was dying. A cancer of the bowel had spread to his liver, and he would be dead in just over four months.^[40]

In these last months he forced himself to complete his labour on the still unfinished Growth of a central bank. Late in October he obtained a large file of papers from Wilson ‘which I must now tackle’. But, ‘I’m so slow in getting about and getting things done’ (NLA LFG 25 October 1950). In February 1951 he wrote to his sister, Edith: ‘energy gone very low in the last few weeks, and I cannot keep up even with the most urgent business, writing or reading or thinking … I doubt if you can read this, though it leaves me knocked out with the effort’. Gladly, on 22 February, in the last full week of his life, he was able to tell Coombs that the ‘printer started on Monday to print, cuff and bind’.

In that last week he managed to pen notes to those to whom he was closest. One, written on 24 February read: