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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
In 1973, a young historian applied for permission to consult records of the Department of Postwar Reconstruction. The officer handling this request contacted Coombs, who thought it a worthy topic, replying:
I have long been convinced that the Postwar Reconstruction exercise, up to the time of the dissolution of the Department, is of profound importance, both to an understanding of the Australian war effort but also to any study of the adaptation of the machinery of government to the special administrative and executive problems created by the war. Indeed I believe the Postwar Reconstruction experience has relevance to the administrative and executive problems of any period of concentrated political and social change such as the present. Were I not currently engaged in advising the Government I would myself wish to participate in an analysis of the Postwar Reconstruction experience.
The 1940s and the Coombs approach
As director-general of Postwar Reconstruction from 1943 to the end of 1948 Coombs had developed a modus operandi. His favoured administrative niche and style were a way to link his work as a senior bureaucratic intellectual to the popular thirst for changes in society and government. In the introduction to this book I suggested that it consisted of three related elements, and that Coombs reproduced them in his work as a policy intellectual in indigenous affairs.
First, he created a senior ‘college’ of policy intellectuals. In the early years of Coombs' activism, at least up to 1976, this college comprised chiefly Dexter and Stanner and, beyond them, Rowley and Long.
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