Nugget Coombs: A Reforming Life

By Tim Rowse, Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 419 pages, hardback, $59.95. Reviewed by Rick Rutjens in the December 2002 issue.

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On 24 February 1906 in Kalamunda, a small station outpost 200 kilometres east of Perth, one Herbert Cole Coombs was born to the stationmaster and his wife. None could have envisaged the impact that this boy would grow to have on Australian political and cultural life throughout the twentieth century.

H C 'Nugget' Coombs became a household name through his service to different public institutions over seventy years. Even now, five years after his death, people are immediately able to link Coombs with one or more of the facets of his public achievements. There are few career public servants who can claim such. Coombs was the beneficiary of a scholarship that enabled him to attend the Perth Modern School from 1919, and it may well have been this opportunity that was the difference between him being just another bright country lad and the influential and thoughtful man he became. Training first as a teacher (at Claremont Teachers College) and later as an economist (at University of Western Australia), Coombs had an obvious thirst for learning and equally obvious talent for understanding economic policies and principles. Finishing as an undergraduate in 1930 and with an MA in 1931, Coombs was one of the first graduates of the emerging discipline of economics. His talent in the field was so pronounced that by the end of his Masters year Coombs had received an offer of a fellowship to travel to London to complete a Doctorate. On the same day in December 1931 Coombs married and embarked for London. He was, remarkably, to complete a full research thesis at London School of Economics in just two years.

Coombs returned to Western Australia in January 1934 and took up part-time teaching -- at both secondary and tertiary levels -- while he searched for a full-time position in academia. Before he found such a role, Coombs became assistant to the economist of the Commonwealth Bank, the equivalent institution to the modern Reserve Bank. By 1942 he was Director of Rationing, by the next year Director-General of Post War Reconstruction. In 1949 Coombs became the governor of the Commonwealth Bank, a role in which he remained until 1968. In the almost fifty years between his appointment to the governorship and his death Coombs added Chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs (for ten years), Pro-Chancellor and Chancellor of ANU (eighteen years), Chair of the Australian Council for the Arts/Australia Council (eight years) and Chair of the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration to his remarkable Curriculum Vitae.

There is no doubt that Coombs' was indeed a Reforming Life. He advised prime ministers and had a hand in negotiating this country through some difficult and profound changes. It is a pity that Rowse does not capture the essence of this remarkable man in his 400-plus pages. Instead what he offers up is an amalgam of records, short snippets of facts trawled from the vast trove of Coombs' papers, departmental archives and other records. There is no sense of narrative, little exploration of the wider social and political environment in which Coombs lived, worked and thought. In the Auream Particulam, Rowse proffers this disclaimer: 'I can offer the reader little insight into that inward Coombs that lay beyond his self-effacing ways of writing and talking. Some biographies tell the reader what made the subject tick. This one does not'. As a reader on the ninth page of a solid tome, this made my heart sink. What was this to be if not an insight into the man? The answer is that it is a dry account of Coombs' work and policies, an academic take on the history of a remarkable Australian. In creating a textbook on Coombs' life, Rowse has perhaps achieved what he set out to do, but it surely could have been so much more.

Citation

• Rick Rutjens. 'Review: Nugget Coombs: A Reforming Life by Tim Rowse' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), December 2002. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Born in 1906 and trained as an economist, HC Coombs was Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia from 1949 to 1968. However, the breadth of his activities and his commitment to public affairs over seven decades makes his life story a cameo of Australia's many-sided quest for a better life. Coombs spent his childhood and youth in Western Australia. As Director-General of Post War Reconstruction he advised Labor governements of the 1940s. In the Menzies years, he added performing arts and tertiary education to his duties in banking. Upon retirement in 1968 he continued to shape arts policy and took up a new reform interest as chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. Particularly interested in Coombs as an economist, Tim Rowse shows that Coombs understood 'economic rationality' as the socially integrative mission of private and public sector elites. When his Keynesian confidence faltered in the early 1970s, Coombs reformulated his ideas of economy and governance to meet the challenges of environmental degradation and indigenous renaissance. Ceaselessly testing the adaptability of twentieth-century liberalism, and straddling the gap between public servant and public intellectual, Coombs made his career a 'reforming life'.

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