On the afternoon of 18 November 1974, a small group of us joined Bill and Valda Phillips in their New Zealand home in Auckland for a joint celebration. It was the occasion of Bill's sixtieth birthday. It was also the occasion when a collection of essays by former colleagues and students - a festschrift - was presented to Professor Phillips.

The idea for a festschrift appears to have occurred to several New Zealand economists on both sides of the world. My involvement began in 1972 when I was a young staff member in the Economics Department at the University of Waikato. A colleague from the Politics Department told me that Professor Phillips was living in Auckland, having moved there from Australia following a serious stroke. My colleague had had a meeting with Professor Phillips to discuss Bill's then major interest, Chinese studies. By coincidence, I had just been given a set of issues of the Economic Journal covering the decade from 1950 to 1960. One article stood out for me as being truly special. It was Professor Phillips' 1954 paper ‘Stabilisation Policy in a Closed Economy’ (chapter 16). I asked the politics lecturer if he thought Professor Phillips would be willing to see me to talk about the stabilisation paper. He assured me that Bill would be only too willing and undertook to ask. The reply was positive.

Although I was aware of Professor Phillips' academic contributions, and brief biography from the expatriates section of An Encyclopedia of New Zealand (McLintock 1966), I knew nothing about his personality.