The Bulletin truthfully noted that ‘Giblin died bravely, as he lived’. More widely registered ‘was a general feeling that the country had lost a fabulous old man’ (Palmer 1954, p. 221).
Over the next 10 years his former colleagues and friends took pains to give a permanent record to his feats.[42] ‘Certain friends of the late Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin’ endowed a prize in Sociology. Giblin Libraries appeared at the University of Melbourne and the University of Tasmania. An annual Giblin Memorial Lecture was commenced in 1958: Copland was the inaugural speaker, and Giblin was his subject.[43]
Rex Ingamells expressed an interest in writing Giblin’s biography, but his sudden and premature death in 1955 extinguished that interesting possibility. A committee that gathered to devise appropriate memorials did consider a volume of essays in Giblin’s memory. But it dismissed such a book as likely to have only a very small readership, and concerned itself instead with erecting buildings named in Giblin’s honour. Ironically, the buildings never appeared but the volume of essays did, and has weathered the years very well. It was published in 1960 under Copland’s editorship: Giblin: The scholar and the man: papers in memory of Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin.[44] This volume furnished a deep fund of fact, research and appreciation about the man. But it has defects. One is its omnibus character (18 authors and 35 segments). Giblin’s tale is fragmented almost beyond recognition to the casual reader. Another defect is that it misses out on the sheer strangeness of Giblin; it implicitly presents Giblin as a normal person who did extraordinary things; as a person of ordinary silhouette who was uniformly expanded in all directions.[45] But Giblin was not a normal person.
Perhaps the most general way of expressing this was that his pleasures were different. Giblin greatly enjoyed life – if he did not he could not have achieved what he did. But he enjoyed different things.[46] Giblin took pleasure, for example, in physical toil. After his death Hytten observed that Giblin ‘had deliberately chosen a hard life’ (Hytten 1951). It was certainly hard, but the point is it was chosen. The passive, comforting entertainment that pleases the millions was insipid to him. One evening he recalled to Eilean: ‘I had arranged to see [Chairman] Boyer (ABC) on Tuesday at 3 pm when the [Melbourne] Cup is run. He had the wireless on and said “Do you want to hear this?” I said “No”’.[47]
Giblin enjoyed a terrain of human relations different from the ordinary adult. His values were so exclusively masculine – ‘mental stamina, endurance … fortitude, self-reliance, stability, courage’ as Wilson summarised them – that he had little toleration for the purely womanly. For all his formidable maturity, his mental landscape remained a pre-adolescent one, of boyish of adventure and comradeship. As Sibyl Giblin told Edith: ‘His 78 years made no difference – he was a boy at heart … I don’t know what religious beliefs he held, but I am sure he saw the kingdom of heaven in children’.[48] One journalist, interviewing Eilean after Giblin’s death, recorded the ‘extraordinary number of children’s books’ that Giblin owned, the most numerous being titles by Arthur Ransome, the author of school-holiday adventures that were first published when Giblin was aged fifty-eight.[49]
Giblin’s longing for comradeship was sustained in adult life by a suite of fatherly relations with those a generation younger. The soldiers he commanded on the Western Front knew him as ‘Dad’. He very plainly took a paternal care of Wilson. Copland frankly accepted him as a father figure, defender and guide.[50]
Giblin’s dedication to guiding youth induced Hytten in his funeral oration to shoot much higher, and invoke Socrates.[51] Peter Pan or Socrates? Whatever the answer, there was in Giblin some differentness that left him amongst but apart; amidst but above; that gave him a holiness without saintliness; that made him a Puck and a pilgrim in our foolish, unhallowed times.