Ian Macfarlane makes his mark as author with Ten Remarkable Australians

Author Ian Macfarlane reveals his fascination for 10 eminent but sadly forgotten Australians.

Former Reserve Bank governor Ian Macfarlane. Picture: Milan Scepanovic

For 50 years he has counselled prime ministers and treasurers, soothed company chiefs and explained the arcane tools of economic modelling to students. It’s a friendly yet commanding voice that has been heard in Oxford and Paris, in private dining rooms and the cafes surrounding Sydney’s Martin Place, and across the airwaves by the public at large.

Now at 73, Ian Macfarlane, former governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia (1996-2006), is finding his voice as a first-time author. He has entered a rarefied literary sub-genre of former RBA chiefs taking up the pen (or keyboard, in his case). Known in financial media circles as “Big Mac”, tall and solidly built, Macfarlane follows in the page proofs of HC “Nugget” Coombs, a giant in every sense except physical, who produced a memoir, histories and essay collections well into his 80s.

Macfarlane’s Ten Remarkable Australians is a revival, given the book’s subtitle is They Made Their Mark on the World But Were Forgotten. In 10 diverting and diverse biographical essays, Macfarlane takes readers aloft while distilling the lives of adventurers, artists, scholars, scientists and sportsmen from the deep past. It’s so long ago, in fact, all 10 were born in the second half of the 19th century; most had peaked or died by the 1930s.

The Australia Macfarlane re-creates — colonial, parts unexplored, class conscious, naive, intimate — is another civilisation. But throughout these sketches of empire and disorder is Macfarlane’s voice, unmistakable if not unshakeable. You can’t help but hear its timbre, crystal clear and conversational, a guide anticipating your questions or casting a flashlight beam to pick out the defining feature in the gloom.

The book had a long gestation. Macfarlane’s interest in one of the subjects — concert pianist, composer and oarsman Frederick Septimus Kelly — was piqued in 2003 when reading a biography about World War I English soldier and poet Rupert Brooke. Kelly had won the diamond sculls at the Henley Regatta three times and an Olympic gold medal in rowing.

Yet this wasn’t even Kelly’s main game; it was classical music. “What an amazing man,” Macfarlane thought, and vowed to learn more about him, possibly even write about him.

Wealthy, Oxford educated and Frankfurt’s Hoch’sche Konservatorium-trained, Kelly kept a detailed diary, providing Macfarlane an entree into decadent Edward­ian London. Kelly’s world of clubs, Downing Street and aristocratic friends (“Next day at lunch the Princess gave us some personal reminiscences of bomb throwing in Russia”) would soon vaporise in the trenches of Turkey and France.

Reading Kelly’s diary for 1916, Macfarlane has intimations of the junior infantry officer’s fate; the muddy ground at the Somme, in the last big set-piece action of that battle, will devour half the men who charge the German trenches.

As he speaks about Kelly’s sacrifice and courage, a century ago, the first-time writer laments he should have made a better fist of it. Readers will make their own quiet pilgrimages.

Macfarlane’s incessant reading about World War I is the ballast of his enterprise.

In a serendipitous way Macfarlane gathered others through the years, coming across mountain climber and scientist George Finch in a book by a Canadian author about early attempts to climb Mount Everest. Alps-trained Finch climbed higher than anyone had in 1922 but was thwarted by the British establishment.

Another flight of interest was spurred after rummaging through an antiquarian book catalogue. Macfarlane found a biography of Harry Hawker, ace pilot and aircraft designer, who in 1919 was the first person to attempt to fly across the Atlantic. Hawker made it halfway, another amazing tale in itself.

By now, the career-long gatherer of economic data and discerner of patterns was hooked on the idea of a book in the form of biographical essays. “My motive for writing the book was not altruistic, to rescue these people from obscurity, to create a memorial to their memory,” he says. “That would be a by-product. My motive was less noble. I simply believed lots of other people would find them equally interesting.”

Macfarlane got to 10 people, more than he expected when he set off. The choices reflect a taste for adventure and wild open ­spaces, coupled with talent and discipline. The “lack of competi­tion” in those days gave people the chance to excel at several things; today, we are more specialised.

“It gave you a degree of freedom, you could change your mind and could still reach the top,” says Macfarlane.

He also chose George Morrison (aka Chinese Morrison or Morrison of Peking), journalist, traveller, doctor and personal adviser to the president of China and polar explorer Hubert Wilkins. Henry Handel Richardson, writer of what some consider is the great Australian novel, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, is the only woman profiled.

As well, there’s LF Giblin, economist superstar with an attraction to boys and young men; engineer cum painter and friend of Vincent van Gogh, John Peter Russell; Gilbert Murray, a scholar of ancient Greek and champion of peace; and Reginald “Snowy” Baker, sports virtuoso, boxing promoter and Hollywood star, who Macfarlane concludes is overrated.

Macfarlane joins the dots of these rich lives, seeing common traits: born before Federation, spending most of their lives abroad (in a sense, the first expatriates), multi-talented, all famous but now forgotten.

Nudged to nominate a favourite, he opts for Kelly, who got the ball rolling. “He had one of the most idyllic lives, yet the moment war was declared the first thing he did was volunteer,” he says.

When asked to go “over the top”, to almost certain death, Kelly never wavered. “That’s horrifying, really.”

Writing comes naturally to Macfarlane. During his time at the RBA he wrote his own speeches, modulating his voice for a range of audiences, synthesising complex material, often making big decisions on partial information.

It has given him a confidence in using a range of sources to tell his story, to use his judgment about the telling detail in an event or character. “The task was not to find new things to say but to get rid of stuff that was completely wrong,” he says. “It’s amazing how much is written that is wrong. Biographers have a proprietary interest in their subject and exaggerate their importance.”

Sketching his own bio (economist, company director, writer), Macfarlane was born after World War II and grew up in East Bentleigh, then on Melbourne’s urban fringe. He won a place at Melbourne High School, a hothouse for high achievers. Winning a scholarship, he studied economics at Monash but was deemed not the right type (“a bad attitude”) for an entry-level job at the RBA.

He ventured to England and by “fluke” got a lowly job at Oxford. On a whim, with the offer of a paid weekend trip to Paris, Macfarlane applied for a job at the OECD. It was the making of him, in a frenetic, big pressure gig of long hours and huge influence.

He moved to Sydney in 1979, with the “academic” RBA the only place interested in employing the “non-monetarist”. A decade later he was head of economics research and appointed governor in 1996.

Those early years of deregulation, asset bubbles, a deep recession, the breaking of inflation and a new era of independence and policy openness will be scoured by historians. Big Mac, and other big characters such as Paul Keating, Peter Costello and John Howard, will be central.

In Lazarus Rising, Howard wrote Macfarlane was the “stand-out economic official” of the era, whose advice and sense of balance were “far superior to that of anybody else who provided economic advice to us”. Post-RBA, he was a director of ANZ Bank, Woolworths and Leighton, and an adviser to Goldman Sachs.

That equilibrium, to use an “econocrat” term, infused Macfarlane’s 2006 ABC Boyer lectures, The Search for Stability. The new book is a deeper dive by a curious and intrepid spirit into global instability, cultural and economic tumult and lives that, a century on, won’t lie still.

Ten Remarkable Australians by Ian Macfarlane (Connor Court) is out now.