Douglas Copland

Marjorie Harper

• Publisher: MUP Custom Digital
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780522862843
• eBook ISBN: 9780522864281
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

'In Australia the name Copland is one to be conjured with.' The Canadian ambassador to China was addressing the diplomatic corps gathered to farewell Professor Douglas Copland, Australia's second Minister to China. It was early 1948, and Copland was leaving China to become founding Vice-Chancellor of the new Australian National University in Canberra. The compliment was a reference to Copland's outstanding career in Australia as an academic, applied economist, administrator and public intellectual. His academic writings were numerous and timely, his newspaper articles were widely syndicated and he was constantly in demand as a public speaker and broadcaster.
Copland's name is perpetuated by a lecture theatre at the University of Melbourne, a building at ANU, a secondary college in the Canberra suburb of Melba and by a series of lectures sponsored by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia.

1

New Zealand roots

Douglas Copland believed that he had a special perspective on Australian and world affairs because he was a New Zealander. As his career expanded and his work took him to live in Hobart, Melbourne, Canberra, London, New York, Nanking, Ottawa and Geneva, it might seem inevitable that New Zealand would seem increasingly remote. It was not so. When he left New Zealand for the first time as a young man of twenty-three his practical view of the world had been formed, his moral values crystallised and his intellectual mindset largely acquired. Throughout his life he preserved strong ties with his family, with his early friends in New Zealand and with New Zealand academic colleagues, public officials, politicians and expatriates. He claimed that his New Zealand background ‘kept his feet on the solid earth’.

Douglas Copland was born at home at Otaio, in the Esk Valley of the South Island of New Zealand, on 24 February 1894. As the thirteenth child of Alexander and Annie Copland, his arrival did little to alter the rhythm of the family’s ways. It was summertime, the busy time of shearing and of wheat harvesting, and in that household the birth of a child was a common occurrence. It was also a time of economic depression in New Zealand and in the wider world. Prices of agricultural products were falling, and had not yet bottomed; expansionary public works in New Zealand had been discontinued, and unemployment was rising. Although anxiety was widespread, the Coplands were in a good position to weather the depression and to take advantage of improving conditions after 1896. Alexander had always been ready to seize opportunities as they occurred, and Douglas was born into a financially secure family.

From his parents he was to inherit a pioneering spirit and to learn the habit and the pleasure of hard physical work. In 1894 his father Alexander was fifty-three, an experienced farmer who had been in New Zealand for almost thirty years. He and his brother James had been born in Scotland, near Balmoral, the twin sons of Jane Robertson, whose parents were tenant farmers. He had not known his father, Alexander Copland, who had been a tenant of Lord Samphill of Craigevar, but was killed by the kick of a horse before the boys were born. The twins were brought up by their mother and their stepfather, Richard Davie, at Lumphanon on the Dee, as part of a large and fairly comfortable small farming family. They worked from childhood and were encouraged to become independent, responsible and skilled agricultural labourers, particularly skilled ploughmen. At night they learned to read and write at classes conducted by a retired schoolmaster. In view of the long stagnation of the Scottish economy, however, as they grew older the boys saw little opportunity for advancement in Scotland. The country was considered to be overpopulated and, like many Scots, they turned their thoughts towards emigration.1

In the early 1860s South Canterbury in New Zealand was considered a highly suitable destination for those of a pioneering spirit. In 1864 Alexander Copland, then aged twenty-three, left Aberdeen on the Tudor and disembarked at Lyttelton, the port of Christchurch. He had no difficulty in finding work, for there was a shortage of labour in the colony. Land was being cleared, wheat and wool had to be carted from the backcountry, and the New Zealand Government was pushing ahead with railway construction. Having decided to work on large estates, within five years Alexander was working for the Canterbury and Otago Association, a land and pastoral company with great holdings in those two provinces. He had moved to Pareora, the association’s estate in South Canterbury, bordered by the Esk Valley. Pareora was to become an exciting development project where the managers of the Canterbury and Otago Association were experimenting in breeding the sheep that were to become the Corriedales. Here the association decided to break thousands of acres a year out of the tough, brown tussocks, to clear and reclaim the flax- and scrub-covered swamplands, preparing to plant the land with English grasses. They also decided to develop wheat-growing. During the 1870s South Canterbury became the granary of the colony, with a substantial part of Pareora’s 42 000 acres contributing to the burgeoning wheat boom. Such was the fame of the estate that, despite a general shortage of labour, the sons of farmers and pastoralists paid to become cadet trainees there.2

At Pareora Alexander became accustomed to learning new methods of production, and by the end of the 1870s he was driving eight- and ten-horse teams to power ploughs of various types and innovative machinery. He also began to trade in land. Beginning with swampland, he bought 200–400 acre blocks of land for improvement and sale. Then, in the true tradition of pioneer farmers everywhere, he bought good land; cleared, fenced and cropped it, making it ready for new settlers. These blocks were sometimes within the area of the pastoral runs, both in neighbouring Otaio and on the Pareora estate. On two occasions he bought the freehold in conjunction with wealthy pastoralists and supplied the labour. Then, in 1878, he seized the opportunity to buy for his own use a well-developed farm when the leaseholder of Blue Cliffs, a large station that had been carved out of Pareora, was bankrupted by the failure of the Glasgow City Bank.3 Two years later he bought a second farm, Brookfield, which then became the ‘home’ farm, as well as a third farm some four miles up from Otaio, thus extending his property holdings to 2000 acres. He farmed these properties intensively, the core production being the harvesting of 600 acres of crop and the shearing of some 2000 sheep, mostly Corriedales. Alexander was an intelligent farmer, varying his output between wool, meat (sheep and cattle), wheat, dairy products, poultry and bee products, according to market signals. He also established a very successful Clydesdale stud, exporting horses to Victoria and particularly to the Carlton Brewery in Melbourne.

In 1878 Alexander had felt sufficiently established to get married. Those were days when marriages most often took place between neighbours. Alexander, then thirty-seven, married 21-year-old Annie Morton Loudon, the stepdaughter of a neighbouring freeholder living on the edge of the Pareora estate. Annie was used to coping with pioneer life. She had been born in the Loudon Valley of New Lanarkshire and Ayrshire, the fifth child of John and Janet Loudon. When she was still a small child her father had gone to the United States to seek opportunities for the family to emigrate, but they never heard of him again and presumed he was dead. Janet then married a widower, James Agnew, and, when Annie was seven, the couple, with the five Loudon children and two Agnew children, left Glasgow on the British Empire, bound for New Zealand. They settled in the Esk Valley, where they were already established when Alexander Copland arrived.4

Annie was a big, strong woman, possessed of great fortitude and ever ready to carry her share in the burden of work. It was a quality that she passed on to her children. James, the first Copland child, was born in 1879 and was followed at not much more than annual intervals by Jessie, Jane, John, Alexander, Annie, William, Helen, Arthur, Margaret, Andrew, George (who died at six weeks), Douglas and Robert. After Robert’s birth in 1895 there was a gap until the birth of twins, Marjorie and May, in 1900. That completed the Copland family. It formed a small community within itself, often swelled by workmen at shearing and harvesting times and by many cousins from both sides of the family. (Alexander Copland’s twin brother James had also come to New Zealand, married, settled at nearby Chertsey and become the father of twelve children.) Douglas’s most vivid memory of his mother was her serenity in the face of all the problems of a large family and a still larger community of workmen and family on the farm. She was generous in extending the hospitality of the house to neighbours and to workmen and their families. Hard work on the properties was punctuated by social activities at the home farm of Brookfield—regular Friday night dances in the woolshed, community singing around the piano after church, and social activities to raise money for the school. The local tennis club was based at the tennis court on the Copland property. In childhood Douglas developed a strong need, which never left him, for warm and congenial companionship at work and for convivial relaxation at the end of the day. Without it he felt emotionally starved and his work became less effective.

Church and school were natural extensions of the family community.5 The Copland children were brought up on strict Christian principles, with Alexander conducting daily prayers and Bible readings. They attended the Chertsey Presbyterian church when they could, otherwise the small Anglican church nearby. The primary school of Upper Otaio in the Esk Valley, opened in 1878 and consisting of one large hall, was next door to Brookfield. Because it was small, it was classified by the Board of Education as ‘aided’; that is, a school that needed to be aided financially by its own community. If Alexander and James Agnew (whose stepdaughter Alexander had just married) had not worked strenuously for the one-teacher school, it would have closed the same year it opened. The two men had been supported by the small farmers of the valley—the children of the big pastoralists tended to be schooled in Christchurch or at a public school in Britain.

While Douglas was attending, the number of pupils rose from thirty-four when he began school, to fifty-three when he was eight, dropping back to twenty-two in his last year. These numbers included some of his brothers, sisters and cousins. For most of the time the teacher was a young local woman who began with the minimum qualifications for registration as a teacher, but continued to upgrade them. She had of necessity to delegate some of the teaching to monitors, a practice that developed a sense of responsibility in the children. Instruction was offered to the level of Standard 6, examined externally, usually after nine or ten years of schooling. This was the minimum academic qualification for registered primary school teachers. The proportion of New Zealand children passing Standard 6 was quite small—usually less than 5 per cent before World War I. Esk Valley children who wished to proceed further could travel to the nearby towns of Waimate or Timaru to take Standard 7 and Matriculation levels. Most of the Copland children went on to further education, eventually becoming farmers, teachers or nurses.6

As Douglas progressed through the school, he had plenty of examples of achievement and certainly received much help and encouragement. As he had a severe allergy to the horse hair the family recognised that he would never be a farmer, and that special care should be given to his education and training. Not that the matter of his education weighed heavily with young Doug; his schoolwork caused him few difficulties and presented little challenge—after all, he had seen and heard so many of his family study the same books, absorb the same information and solve the same arithmetical, algebraic and geometric problems. He was gregarious and energetic, and his greatest interest was in sport. ‘I lived for the games I played and worked between times.’ Perhaps because of his allergy and because he was a younger child, he was given great freedom to climb the hills, cycle and play cricket and rugby. His heroes were men of action and adventure. His mind was excited by the exploits of the engineers who constructed the pipeline to carry water from the Darling Range to Coolgardie in Western Australia and by the Antarctic explorers Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen. Newspapers formed the principal source of his reading. Not until the age of twelve did he read a book of fiction from cover to cover, and then it was Captain Starlight of the Australian classic Robbery under Arms who captured his imagination. He had no heroes in scholarship, the arts or the theatre—those things were remote to him, as indeed they were to most New Zealand children.7

Living so near the ocean, he was naturally a strong swimmer. Indeed, he was always conscious of the sea, which also opened his mind to the spirit of adventure. His school geography books taught that for the Pacific Islands, which included New Zealand, the oceans were not barriers but great highways to the world. Living in a British colony he was taught that he belonged to a secure world, that the sun never set on the British Empire and that it was possible to circumnavigate the globe on an all-red route. ‘None of us was aware of any stigma attached to the word “colonial” though a few of us entertained doubts that an Empire on which the sun never set presented a different picture to others less fortunate,’ he wrote.8 Douglas was also fascinated by the idea of America. His part of the shore faced east to the United States, from whence had come many of the settlers in South Canterbury and the miners of Otago. Annie’s brother John had emigrated to Florida, where he had opened an ice-cream parlour. Great excitement was generated in New Zealand by the visit of Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet in 1908.

Douglas’s primary education was supplemented by family discussions. Although the Coplands were argumentative, the atmosphere of the house was ‘free and easy, with much ragging and little artificiality’. Alexander and Annie were very civic-minded and encouraged their children to take an active interest in affairs of local and national importance, to form their own opinions and to express them with little reserve. From an early age Douglas was trained to regard provocative argument almost as a sport and, as a younger member of the family, he liked to win. He could be forthright in manner and blunt in verbal attack. Years later, Sir Frederic Eggleston was to remark that Copland’s defensive arguments were ‘prompt and strong’,9 and Herbert Brookes referred to ‘the rough angles and edges’10 of Copland’s personality. Arguments were often about politics. For the whole of Douglas’s youth a Liberal government was in power (1891–1912). After a short flourish of ideological debate it became a government of consensus, concentrating on issues of development and local interests. So, within the Copland family, discussions of political matters tended to be about the specifics of policy rather than about ideological thrusts. Nevertheless, the opinions of the various members represented a range of ‘leftist’ views, and the arguments could be substantial.

In 1905, the year in which Douglas studied for Standard 5, his carefree progress was interrupted by the sudden death of his mother from a heart attack. In 1906, at the young age of twelve and a half, he passed Standard 6 at the proficiency level but not sufficiently well to earn a scholarship to take him on to secondary education. The family decided that he should attend Waimate Primary and District High School, which was a primary school with a small secondary division. Here he could repeat Standard 6. A few years earlier his brother Alex and his sister Helen had travelled daily to the school at Waimate by train, but it was thought better that Douglas should stay in the town. Obtaining one of the Waimate District Board scholarships awarded to pupils obliged to become boarders, the boy left Brookfield at the age of thirteen. He was not to live there again on a permanent basis, as the marriage of his father in 1908 to Isabella Pringle, a rather domineering woman, hastened the natural scattering of the family about the district. They all came together again at harvest and shearing times, which coincided with school and college vacations. At such times, scything the hay, lumping the bags, loading the wagons and feeling the sweat run, Douglas drew strength from the family community. It was always a painful experience to leave Brookfield.

Waimate became home to Douglas for six years. He was homesick and often hungry, but kept very busy with work and sport. He became a member of the school rugby and cricket teams and received coaching as a left-hand bowler from Charles Goldstone, head of staff of the primary school and one of New Zealand’s premier bowlers. He played tennis, qualified as an instructor of the Royal Life Saving Society, participated in athletics and joined the school Cadet Corps. The Presbyterian Church offered a host of activities, caring for its young people spiritually and socially, and he was drawn into other community groups by his friendship with schoolmate Ruth Jones, a shy, pretty girl of the Presbyterian denominatio...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Map
• Introduction
• 1 New Zealand roots
• 2 Time in Tasmania
• 3 New beginnings in Melbourne
• 4 Representative of the Rockefeller Foundation of New York
• 5 The Copland–Giblin years
• 6 Shock-trooper for change: the vice-chancellorship
• 7 Adviser on immigration and tariff policies
• 8 The Great Depression
• 9 An international reputation
• 10 Transition: academic to bureaucrat
• 11 Wartime bureaucrat
• 12 Australian Minister to China
• 13 Exploring new options
• 14 Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University
• 15 Political involvement while Vice-Chancellor
• 16 High Commissioner to Canada
• 17 The Australian Administrative Staff College
• 18 Founder of CEDA
• 19 Closing years
• 20 Reflections
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index