Daniel Gleeson: Good afternoon, everyone. Great to see a large number of people here, and also I'm sure there's people watching us online. Welcome to the National Library of Australia. My name is Daniel Gleeson and I'm the Director of Community Engagement here.

I'd like to begin by acknowledging Australia's First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this land, and I pay my respects to their elders both past and present, and through them to all aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Thank you for attending today's event, which is on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land.

This afternoon's presentation, Australia's Journey with the World Bank, will be delivered by Dr Nicholas Ferns, a 2024 National Library of Australia fellow. The Library's fellowship programme supports researchers to make intensive use of the National Library's rich collections. I know that Dr Ferns has been making intensive use of our collection because I walk past him in the morning and he's looking very intensely at his documents and papers.

National Library of Australia Fellowships are made possible by generous philanthropic support. Dr Ferns' fellowship has been supported by the Stokes family, and we're grateful to them.

Dr Nicholas Ferns is an Australian Research Council DECRA Research Fellow in History at Monash University. He is a historian of development, empire, and decolonization with a particular focus on Australia's colonial administration in Papua New Guinea. His first book, 'Australia in the Age of International Development 1945 to 1975', was published in 2020, and it examined Australia's colonial rule in Papua New Guinea and foreign aid policy in South East Asia and the Pacific. He's currently developing new research that explores the historical relationship between Australia and the World Bank.

I was really pleased to let Nicholas know that in the Library's collection is a research report written by my grandfather, Leonard Gleeson, in 1948 about the cost of living in Papua New Guinea. Nicholas was kind enough to indulge me by letting me know that he'd probably read that report.

In his presentation today, Nicholas will share his research findings from undertaking the first detailed history of the relationship between Australia and the World Bank. Nicholas has brought a particular focus to the connections between international finance and national development and an enhanced understanding of the international significance of Australia's post-war development. Please join me in welcoming Dr Nicholas Ferns.

Dr Nicholas Ferns: Thank you, Dan, for that very generous welcome. I'd also like to just start by acknowledging that we're meeting on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, and I'd also like to acknowledge that work for this project was also done where I live in in Melbourne, on the lands of the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri people. I'd also like to acknowledge any First Nations people in the room.

I'd also like to start by thanking the Stokes family for their generous funding for the fellowship, and also a big thanks to the fellowships team, particularly Sharyn and Simone, who I've been in contact with over the past nine months or so, and to everyone in the Library for their help with access to sources and resources and all sorts of things. I've repeatedly told friends and colleagues of the wonderful job that the NLA does making me feel very welcome and feel very special as a fellow.

So when one thinks of the World Bank in 2024, if one is inclined to think of the World Bank in 2024, the images that come to mind are like the one on the screen. Over the past three quarters of a century, the World Bank has presented itself as the preeminent international organisation in the field of international development.

While its policy brief has evolved over time since at least the late-1960s, the bank has sought to alleviate poverty throughout the world with its current mission being, and this is on its home page, to create a world free of poverty on a livable planet. In keeping with that mission, the World Bank provides funds to promote development throughout the global south in the fields of health, social protection, and, as you can see on the screen, education.
While there is ongoing debate over how effective the World Bank is in achieving those goals, and I'm not going to get into that debate today, it's clear that the bank is most active in its engagement with the poorer parts of the world.

This was not always the case. If we go back to the years immediately following the establishment of the World Bank in 1944, we're more likely to see images like this one, full of white dudes sitting at a table, which shows Australian representative Percy Spender, who is second from the left, and World Bank President Eugene Black, who is second from the right, get my little cursor there, that's Black,signing the paperwork for a bank loan in 1952.
Whereas, nowadays, the bank does most of its lending to countries in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Latin America, in the decade and a half leading up to 1960, it was actually Australia that was the largest borrower from the World Bank. This is a fact that usually surprises many people and indeed was surprising to me when I first commenced my research into the World Bank. My own interest in the bank was sparked by its work in Papua New Guinea, as Dan mentioned, from my PhD research.

While that's something I'm still interested in, that's going to be a part of the bigger project, I spent most of my time on this fellowship trying to better understand the loans received by Australia in the 1950s. The loans provided by the World Bank to Australia form the basis of my lecture today.

As I just mentioned, throughout the 1950s, Australia was one of the largest recipients of bank loans, receiving over $400 million between 1950 and 1962. With inflation, this figure is roughly $4.7 billion today.

This money was used to promote Australia's post-war economic development program, which largely revolved around improvements in agricultural machinery, infrastructure such as roads and transport, as well as electricity production. Later loans were also directed towards specific projects such as the first jet aircraft for Qantas, and, in 1962, funds for the Snowy Hydroelectric Scheme. The World Bank provided vital US dollars that were necessary to pay for equipment and personnel to assist with these development projects.

Throughout my three months here at the National Library, I've gone through copious amounts of correspondence, obviously pulling very serious faces while I do it, draughts of policy material and speeches, all of which have helped me to better understand this period. And so, my goal in this lecture today is to tell the story of Australia's engagement with the World Bank in the 1940s and 1950s, while also providing what I think are interesting examples from my fellowship research.

So over the course of my fellowship, my time in the Special Collections Reading Room has been divided looking at two different kinds of people. The first have been some of the key politicians who were responsible for deciding Australia's relations with the World Bank and economic policy in the 1940s and '50s. I've looked at material from both sides of politics, with some of the key figures being Labour politicians like Eddie Ward and Jack Dedman, alongside other politicians such as Robert Menzies, Percy Spender on the screen there, and John McEwen. The papers of these individuals have been essential in going beyond the official sources on government policy housed in the National Archives down the road.

The other group of people have been some of the key economic thinkers in Australia in the mid-20th century, many of whom left behind huge collections of material. Many of them are the floating heads in this newspaper clipping from the papers of Douglas Copland, who was another prominent economist that I'll mention quite often in this lecture.

These experts drifted between government service and university research, but were always closely connected between the two worlds. They frequently gossiped with each other about the state of the world economy and Australian economic policy alongside making many public addresses, providing me with crucial context in which to place my analysis of the World Bank loans and Australian development. Combining the sources produced by these two groups is crucial to further my understanding of the workings of Australia's economy in the middle of the 20th century.

But before getting into the discussion of the loans, it's first necessary for me to discuss the establishment of the World Bank, and Australia's debate over whether it should join the organisation. In the US summer of 1944, while the Second World War was still being fought, Bretton Woods, which is a pleasant resort town in New Hampshire, hosted representatives of 44 countries, including Australia. The objective of the Bretton Woods Conference was to create an institutional basis for reconfiguration of the global economy, the collapse of which during the 1930s was seen by most observers as a major cause of the Second World War.

This reconfiguration was directed by British and American experts, most notably John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, whose proposals form the basis of the Bretton Woods Agreement signed on July 22 1944.

The International Monetary Fund or IMF, which was and still is responsible for maintaining international monetary stability, and it's twin, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, more commonly known as the World Bank, I won't get into the minutiae of the World Bank group, but the IBRD, which was created to provide funds to countries in need of assistance in post-war reconstruction or development programmes were the key products of the conference.

Each of these organisations were to be funded by a national quota, which was agreed at the conference and which also informed voting power in the IMF and IBRD. The US as the wealthiest and largest contributor of the system had around 30% of the vote while Australia had just over 2%. So the dominance of the US is built into the system. This is a key moment of the US emerging as the dominant power in the global economy.
Australia was an active participant at Bretton Woods, working alongside New Zealand and other Asian countries such as India and China, to ensure that concerns surrounding development were addressed. For Australia is intersected with the Curtin Labour government's position that a commitment to full employment be made part of the Bretton Woods system.

Leslie Melville, who was the Australian representative of the conference, was cautious in his recommendation that Australia join the system, stating, "In view of the modifications made to the proposals after negotiations, I now believe that, on balance, it would be to Australia's advantage to participate in the proposed fund."

As an aside to early discussions over the initial reaction to the Bretton Woods Agreement, it was largely accepted that Australia's interest in the World Bank was indirect as there was little prospect of Australia becoming a borrower.

Given this lukewarm approval from the Australian representatives of Bretton Woods, it's perhaps unsurprising that ratification would attract debate back home. While the World Bank was fairly uncontroversial, the future IMF was a much more divisive topic. The most outspoken opponent of Bretton Woods actually came from within the Chifley government, with Chifley having succeeded Curtin following his death in 1945, in the shape of Eddie Ward, Minister for Transport and External Territories.

Anxious about the supposed dominance of American financial interests, which was undoubtedly partly shaped by the lingering impacts of the Great Depression, Ward was staunchly opposed to Australia joining the Bretton Woods institutions. In a 1946 ABC broadcast, Ward proclaimed that the Bretton Woods institutions, by which he mainly meant the IMF, would, "Enthrone a world dictatorship of private finance, more complete and terrible than any Hitlerite dream." Strong words. He accompanied this evocative point with claims that Bretton Woods meant to return to the gold standard and that signing would mean Australia relinquished its economic sovereignty.

Just for interest, the image on the right is a small notebook of Ward's handwritten notes on the Bretton Woods agreement, which I found in the collections a couple of weeks ago actually, which was really interesting to see him drawing on what Melville has to say about the agreements and so on.

These concerns about Bretton Woods were shared by other Australians who came from a variety of backgrounds and political positions. The New World Reconstruction Movement who were adherents of the Douglas Social Credit idea that rejected many of the principles associated with the international finance system employed Ward's rhetoric to oppose Bretton Woods, and that's the image on the top left.

On the far right, Eric Butler's Australian League of Rights were also opposed to Bretton Woods, and they invoked some rather unpleasant anti-Semitic imagery to express their opposition, tapping into those rather unpleasant tropes to do with international finance and so on. That is the cartoon on the right there.

But both of these admittedly fringe positions rested upon an assumption the Bretton Woods was a device of international financiers, and here is where that anti-Semitic coding comes in, used to threaten Australians.
Aside from these somewhat extreme organisations, concern over Bretton Woods was also expressed by Australians in letters to newspaper editors, as seen in the comments from Mrs V. Corey of East Brighton, Victoria, who worried about what would happen to Australia's "sovereign economic rights if we joined". All of these groups worked to convince Australian politicians to vote against joining the World Bank and the IMF.

In response to these concerns, Labour politicians in favour of the Bretton Woods system mobilised to ensure that their efforts would not be defeated. Chief amongst the pro-Bretton Woods faction was Minister for Post-War Reconstruction, John Dedman. Alongside public statements in support of Bretton Woods, Dedman released the pamphlet The Case for Bretton Woods, which mostly sought to refute Ward's criticism. He goes through them one-by-one.

Ultimately, Dedman's position rested on the idea that it was more important to be part of the new system than to be a pariah on the outside. For context, in early 1947, when the pamphlet was written, of the 44 countries that signed the Bretton Woods Agreement, only Australia, New Zealand, and the Soviet Union had not accepted the invitation.

As can be seen from the quote on the screen at the top, Dedman invoked the prospect of a Third World War to snap Australia out of its hesitation. After intense conflict within the ALP in late 1946 and early 1947, it required the political intervention of Prime Minister Chifley to end the debate on the side of Australia's entry into the IMF and IBRD, which was formalised in August of 1947. The quote down the bottom is Chifley trying to take some of the sting out of the debate within the party.

But, interestingly, from my perspective anyway, the hesitation over joining the Bretton Woods system offers an interesting contrast to Australia's eagerness in the UN, as exemplified by Doc Evatt, who's president of the Security Council, and that interest there.

So once Australia was part of the Bretton Woods system, it became a question of whether Australia would be able to benefit from membership. The immediate post-war period was a time when the international economy was undergoing a process of recalibration.

One of the major crises in the capitalist world at this time was a chronic shortage of US dollars, which posed significant difficulties given the dominance of US industrial and manufacturing capacity throughout the late '40s and 1950s.

I just want to contextualise, I've talked about this with a few people that this is not a time where you could just venture to an ATM and get US dollars out, that there was not convertibility between the currencies. So Australian needed to build an account filled with US dollars, which it was not able to do because it tended to buy more things from the US than sell.

The World Bank was partly established to enable countries' access to reconstruction funds. This is the R in the IBRD. However, American and European officials quickly realised that the scale of the problem was too big for the bank. It's in this context that the Marshall Plan or European Recovery Programme was born. Just as an aside, between 1948 and 1952, the US provided over US$13 billion in aid to the countries of Western Europe to overcome that dollar shortage for them.

Aside from perhaps some indirect relief as a result of British access to Marshall Plan funds, Australia didn't benefit from this scheme. Thus, a dollar shortage persisted in the years following the Second World War. This was a major problem as the Labour government had initiated a policy of national development and reconstruction, which largely revolved around a massive programme of immigration, perhaps best encapsulated in Labour Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell's call for Australia to "populate or perish".

In order to keep up with the significant rise in population, and it's around about 3% per year by the end of the 1940s. That's a historically high figure, only really matched by the last few years. Australia's population has been going up. To keep up with this rise, there'd need to be a corresponding rise in investment, which would also include imports from the US.

And so, the shortage of US dollars not only threatened to derail these plans for the expansion of the Australian economy, but it also led to ongoing shortages that challenged the Labour government. Perhaps the most prominent of these shortages was petrol, which continued to be rationed well into the late-1940s.

The inability of the Labour government to rectify these shortages, aside from constant calls to increase Australian exports to the US, was a frequent source of attack from the federal opposition led by Robert Menzies.

One possible solution to help pay for the American goods and maintain the development programme was the borrowing of US dollars. The Chifley government was opposed to this idea, not wanting to increase Australia's external indebtedness. That's the quote on the slide there.

This is linked to the legacies of the Great Depression, which had begun under a Labour government and where Australia's foreign debt had exacerbated the economic crisis. There's lingering trauma in the Labour Party about overseas borrowing.

Australian economists, on the other hand, most prominently Douglas Copland, who had served as Prime Minister John Curtin's economic consultant during the war and was by the late-1940s vice-chancellor of the ANU, were critical of this policy. Throughout 1948 and 1949, Copland was frequently quoted in the press advocating a large dollar loan as he was convinced that Australia's development programme could not proceed under the constrained policies being implemented by the Chifley government. When it came to a choice between development and stability, Copland chose the former.

These recommendations largely went ignored by the Labour government, and aside from a small $20 million drawing from Australia's IMF reserves, the Chifley government made no attempt to borrow in the American market or from the World Bank.

In contrast, the liberal Country Party opposition were much more friendly towards the idea of borrowing. In correspondence with Richard Casey, who at the time was the federal president of the Liberal Party, Copland found a receptive audience for his dollar loan suggestions. Similarly, Country Party leader Arthur Fadden, whose constituency were very closely aware of the fluctuations of the international economy, also advocated for a dollar loan.

At the heart of this political divide was the idea that Australia's development required significant investment, especially from the United States. For non-Labour politicians, the policy line taken by Chifley was unimaginative and holding back Australia's economic potential. This was a major line of criticism presented throughout the 1949 election campaign, and it was clearly effective as the coalition government led by Robert Menzies was victorious, taking power in December of 1949.

Menzies' election victory did not bring about considerable change in the pattern of Australia's development, or at least not immediately. While there was a ramping up of anti-communist rhetoric, the general trajectory of Australia's economic growth didn't really change. For the new coalition government, the development meant continuing and even ramping up the massive immigration programme, investing in improvements in agriculture and industry, and finding new ways to "exploit" Australia's natural resources.

One way of understanding the new government's attitude towards development can be seen in the image on the slide there, which are found in the papers of Menzies' first minister for external affairs, Percy Spender, who was the person on the cover photo. This kind of map, which was fairly typical of the time, gives an insight into how the government, alongside economic experts, perceived Australia's wealth. Agricultural and mineral resources were expected to provide export income that could then pay for the development programme that was envisioned for the 1950s.
I quite like this map, A, because of the cute icons of cattle and sheep and so on, but it also gives a sense how Australia was perceived as this kind of source of exports that came from the ground somehow, whether it was wheat or mineral resources and so on. There's no people in this image, let alone Indigenous people that live in most of the parts of the country that are there. I think it's a telling image of how Australians perceived then, maybe in some ways still perceive, Australia's economy and so on.

So as I pointed out before, the new government accepted that overseas borrowing would be necessary to enable these development plans. It's here that the World Bank becomes a major part of our story.
In June and July of 1950, around about six months after his election, Menzies visited the United States with one of his major objectives to secure a dollar loan. Indeed, the fact that the prime minister was tasked with this role indicates the significance of the World Bank negotiations.

The Australians had several options when it came to obtaining American loans, the most prominent of which were the commercial market, the US Export-Import Bank, and of course the World Bank. After a series of departmental discussions, the World Bank was identified as the most attractive option, and informal negotiations were initiated.

In Washington, Menzies discussed Australia's predicament with American leaders, including Secretary of State Dean Acheson and President Harry Truman, who according to Menzies pledged "to do all in their power to help us in the problem of dollars for development".

Menzies also, quite cleverly, I think, indicated to World Bank officials that it was actually most keen to get funds from the Export-Import Bank. He played the institutions off against one another to get the best deal.
After some brief discussions, however, Menzies managed to develop a close relationship with World Bank President Eugene Black and was able to secure an immediate loan of $100 million as part of a four-year $250 million series of loans to support Australia's development programme. These funds were mostly used to buy American machinery and plant to be used in agricultural and industrial projects.

NLA collection provide a fascinating insight into this episode, as Menzies was able to leverage his relationships with powerful Americans to achieve his goals. Upon his return to Australia, Menzies wrote to prominent businessman Clive Baillieu, which is the image on the left, to mention the "remarkable" reception that he received in Washington.
The prime minister also wrote to Acheson and Truman, thanking them for their help in securing the loan. Truman replied expressing friendship, that's the letter on the right, expressing friendship for Menzies in Australia and also acknowledging the economic value of the trip.

It must also be mentioned that Menzies' visit to the US coincided with the beginning of the Korean War, which Australia quickly committed troops for. And so, Truman's appreciation of Menzies can also be seen through a cold war lens as well.

Aside from the high-level correspondence of prime ministers and presidents, the NLA collections also offer insight into the workings of the officials involved in negotiations between Australia and the World Bank. So, for example, in this letter from Australian official Colin Moodie to Douglas Copland, which is on the right, and there's an excerpt quoted on this screen because it's hard to read, Moodie reflected on the hard work done by the Australian delegation in Washington.

The comments about the bank needing to "provide themselves with enough material to distinguish the Australian loan from other countries" speaks to the ease with which Australians were able to navigate the American-led international finance system. The Australian representative leveraged their membership of anglophone business circles to arrange a loan in 22 days when it took other countries significantly longer to obtain a large loan from the bank. I can't explain how uncommon it was for a World Bank loan to be negotiated in roughly three weeks. That was unheard of at the time. We'd all like to go to the bank and arrange a loan in three weeks, I think.

Indeed, while in the World Bank archives in Washington, DC earlier this year, I found a letter between bank official Sydney Cope and Australian Treasury official Frederick Wheeler, referring to "the Australian loan legend", which emerged out of this event.

According to Cope, so according to the World Bank official, after the announcement of the Australian loan, Brazilian officials rushed to the bank asking for an Australian-style $100 million loan, but were quickly rebuffed, with Cope indicating "that less fortunately situated borrowers" read into that what you will. I'm sure there's a racial element to that. There's also questions about Latin American ability to pay back debts and so on, that they were wasting their time in trying to emulate Australia.

This kind of interaction reveals the role of personal relationships and pre-existing perceptions in shaping the work of the World Bank. I think it also points to some of the prejudices that operated within the World Bank, which Australian officials were pretty capable of exploiting in dealing with the American and European officials at the time.
So in the decade following the first $100 million loan from the World Bank, Australia obtained another six loans, as I said before, reaching a grand total of $417 million. The products obtained with these funds range from items that were used to further Australia's agricultural development, but also were used to assist various businesses in building their manufacturing capacity.

Two of the earliest examples of companies that benefited from World Bank assistance were Heinz and General Motors Holding, whose Victorian and South Australian factories contained equipment paid for by the World Bank. In the Menzies papers, I found correspondence between the prime minister and Heinz executive, which raises some interesting questions about how decisions were made of where the funding would go.
Two of the later loans, so the 1956 loan, that $9.2 million loan, was used to buy the first Qantas, the first jet aircraft. So the World Bank helped to pay for that. The $100 million loan in 1962 helped to pay for the Murray 1 station of the Snowy Mountain Scheme.

I'll just briefly make sense of these numbers on the table here. That the agriculture line for the most part is tractors that we use to modernise Australia's agriculture. This isn't the government buying tractors and doling them out to farmers. What the process was was that Australia was given access to these US dollars and farmers or businesses would apply for licences to be able to buy goods from the United States that they wouldn't otherwise be able to do.

So the railways funding is for new locomotives, diesel locomotives, that were built in the United States. The mining equipment was largely earth-moving equipment. The industrial development one is the interesting one from my perspective because that is where you get GMH. Ford, also in Geelong, had some machinery that was bought from the United States that enabled them to manufacture cars. Similarly with road transport, it's equipment to be able to build roads and so on. The air transport, the bigger loan, is another series of aeroplane, not jets, but aeroplanes for Qantas.

And so, I guess the point there, I'm not going to dwell on the numbers for too long, but while the numbers are relatively small in the grand scheme of Australia's general wealth and so on, these purchases were fundamental to be able to enable Australia to maintain the process of its development. I'm going to unpack that shortly.

So as I've just hinted at, these loans formed a necessary part of the rapid development of the Australian economy in the 1950s. This was recognised by Australian economists such as John Crawford who in 1958 stated that, "Our loans from the International Bank have been vital in post-war development, especially rural development.

I found an interesting, this is an article or an advertisement from 1951 where the Menzies government or the Liberal Party used the dollar loans in campaign advertising to show the effectiveness of the policies of the government. So these are not hidden on the middle pages of the newspapers. These are important parts of the political life of the 1950s.

But I do want to acknowledge that Australia's post-war development was not just a result of these loans. The war boom associated with the Korean War fueled significant expansion in the Australian economy, and the ongoing effect of post-war migration was decisive. Nevertheless, I think these loans helped to break bottlenecks that enabled that ongoing process of development.

One other part of the process of obtaining loans from the World Bank involved visits from World Bank officials to Australia. The first one was in 1952, where World Bank President Eugene Black visited Australia, rekindled, if you will, his friendship with Menzies. They visited one another. He also met with government officials, visited a New South Wales sheep station to see some of the machinery at work, and he left Australia "anxious" to help Australia and keep financing development.

This visit also, as I said, furthered the personal connections. I think it's not going too far to suggest that there was a friendship between Black and Menzies. In his papers, Menzies's papers, I found an interesting letter from 1950, or an interesting piece of correspondence, when in 1958, Menzies enlisted the support of Black to help get former Australian open tennis champion Victor Seixas a job at Goldman Sachs. Pretty good references there.

And so, I think this is just a really interesting part of the role of personal relationships that I think in, and this is a comment on certain kinds of scholarship, but this is not just a nation state and an organisation. These are individuals engaging in a relationship.

Australia's economy, more broadly, society underwent considerable change throughout the 1950s. Few people were more involved in this process than John McEwen, who was Minister for Commerce and Agriculture and then trade throughout the decade. McEwen's papers are full of reflections and comments on Australia's development. Here's just one example where he, after 10 years of coalition government, he reflected on the achievements, and one of the big achievements was by breaking the bottlenecks in supplies by getting loans from the International Bank and so on.

There's an interesting dimension here that people like McEwen frequently talk about Australia as a developing country at this time, and I think the fact that Australia's borrowing from the World Bank can be seen as a point supporting that claim. But again this is one of those points that flies in the face of how we perceive who borrows from the World Bank, to go back to the opening point that I made that Australia was a prominent borrower.

This is just some little asides that I've worked through. So while the NLA's materials provide considerable evidence of the economic impacts of the relationship between Australia and the bank, I found some interesting sources that highlight the relationship's cultural and political dimensions. One of the more amusing, at least from my perspective I found it amusing, impacts that I found while looking through the newspaper collections on Trove was in the greyhound results in 1953 in race two at Wollombi, which I learned on Monday, I Googled it, is in the Hunter Region. I'm from Victoria, I don't know New South Wales geography very well. A dog named Dollar Lone got the win. I'm not sure I can think of a better way to describe the cultural impact of a World Bank loan than a greyhound. If this wasn't enough, there was also a horse that raced in the late 1940s named Bretton Woods. But my brief search of results suggested it didn't really win many races. There's a historical lesson in there somewhere about Dollar Loan being more successful than Bretton Woods, but I won't get into that. That's about as nerdy a joke as I've ever told.

Politically, I've already mentioned the high-level relationships that have been revealed in my research, but there've also been other interesting finds. So, for instance, Douglas Copland, who was constantly beating the drum even after the first loans, he thought Australia needed to borrow more, wrote a letter in 1955 that made an interesting connection between borrowing US dollars and Australia's participation in major post-war events such as the Japanese Peace Treaty.

Interestingly, Copland wrote this while he was high commissioner to Canada. So he wasn't exactly isolated from political affairs. He'd also been representing Australia in the UN. His comments, in my opinion, raised fascinating insights into whether Australia could have extracted more from the US for its support in the early Cold War period. Indeed, I think we can think of this as part of a longer history all the way through to today about whether or not the Australia-US relationship is sort of whose interest is it in and so on.

I've also found some other interesting discoveries. There's just a few little bits and pieces before I get to my conclusion. One example is John Crawford, who was an economist. I think he was vice-chancellor at the ANU, but he also consulted for the World Bank in India and Iran. He was a major international agricultural expert. Just there was an interesting, there were several boxes on his consulting in Iran in the 1970s, which involved him meeting the Shah, where the Shah had very, very clear opinions on how Crawford and the World Bank could assist Iran in becoming a world leader in agricultural production. But in what I found to be a thoroughly unsurprising outcome, nothing really came of the Shah's grand plans and he was deposed several years later in the famous 1979 revolution.

Furthermore, while it hasn't been part of the brief of my fellowship, I've also been able to find some really interesting material relating to the World Bank's work in Papua New Guinea, which really kicks into gear in the early 1960s. And so, the papers of people like Crawford and Copland, but also long-time minister Paul Hasluck have some important material on the role of the World Bank in PNG, and I'll be using that for my book, I think. It's going. Well, I'll come back.

All right, so now I'm just mindful of the time. I'll just present some concluding thoughts.
For Australia, World Bank assistance was vital to maintaining its high standard of living after the Second World War. In government circles, the press, and amongst Australian academics, there was broad consensus that the World Bank loans facilitated the ongoing success of Australia's ambitious post-war development programme. The comments made by people like Copland and McEwen throughout the 1950s suggest in a way a degree of anxiety over the maintenance of the post-war development program.

I find this interesting because it's commonly held that the decades after the Second World War are the economic boom that helped to establish Australia's status as a wealthy developed country. Indeed, Ian McLean in his book 'Why Australia Prospered' presents the 1950s as a "golden age" of Australian growth. What I've found over the course of my fellowship and research more broadly is that while growth certainly occurred, it's only in hindsight that we can see it as a time of optimism and confidence. There was always concerns about balance of payments issues, inflation, all these sorts of things.

It's also clear that the relationship between Australia and the World Bank was a productive one. The fact that Australia sought further World Bank loans at the end of its first $250 million series is further evidence of the importance of the bank to Australia's economy.

While other factors may have influenced the post-war economic boom more, the World Bank loans are a crucial part of this story. I think there's also an element in this aspect of the project that speaks about Australia moving more closely into the American financial orbit and away from Great Britain, the reliance on dollars rather than sterling as this major currency.

Finally, I think that the early World Bank loans to Australia also allow us to understand the early work of the World Bank. In its first few years of operation, the bank was most concerned about ensuring that its loans were financially sound. That's a very loaded phrase of who is a sound borrower. A lot of racial cultural assumptions go into that concept.

I think the World Bank can be described as a fairly conservative institution. Indeed, in the official history of the World Bank written, one of the official histories written in the 1970s, they present the $100 million Australian loan as a sign that the new president, Eugene Black, was more willing to be expansive with regard to lending. While this is certainly true, it's also clear that Australia fit clearly in that sound borrower category. The inability of other countries such as Brazil, as I suggested before, to access such loans suggests that Australia was a privileged customer for whom bank officials were willing to bend their own rules.

And so, I think the Australian case study opens up new ways of understanding the World Bank, which I think contrasts with the image and description that I started the talk with of how the bank sells itself today. I'll end the talk there. Thank you for coming.

Daniel Gleeson: Thank you so much, Nicholas. That was really fascinating, really interesting. I didn't want it to end. Has anyone got any questions? Because we have some time for questions now. If you do have one, put your hand up and wait until the microphone gets to you, because, of course, we're streaming this online and we'd like people to hear your question.

Dr Nicholas Ferns: In the middle.

Daniel Gleeson: In the middle.

Dr Nicholas Ferns: There was one in the middle. Yeah.

Audience member 1: Hello. They're described as loans, so I assume they're paid back.

Dr Nicholas Ferns: Yes.

Audience member 1: Over what period were they paid back and how could they be paid back?

Dr Nicholas Ferns: So the interest rate, at least of the first loan, and this is off the top of my head, was 4.5%. It was 20 or 25 years was the payment period. I actually, while I was up in Canberra in June for one of the months of my fellowship, had coffee with someone who had been involved in paying back the final payment of the Snowy Mountains loan, so the last 1962 loan. That was in either the late '80s or early '90s that the final payment was returned.

And so, yeah, there was annual payments and so on, but the interest rate was cheaper than what would be obtained from Wall Street or what have you. So, yes, they were repaid and Australia is no longer in debt to the World Bank in that regard. Yeah.

Audience member 2: Hi, thanks for that talk. That was really, really interesting. One of the things you talked about was. Well, two questions. First one is was everything from the World Bank that we borrowed spent on American goods? So were we always purchasing American goods? The second one was you said that the Bank was willing to bend their rules to allow Australia to borrow. I was wondering what you meant by that.

Dr Nicholas Ferns: Yeah, cool. So the first one is a fairly easy one, the vast majority, some Canadian goods as well, which was US dollars as well. But the rules of the World Bank state that generally goods need to be purchased in the currency in which the loan is made, which of course is US dollars. So 90-plus percent was from the US, some from Canada as well.

In terms of bending the rules, it's really that that first loan in 1950 where the rules are very much being bent in that Black basically went to the board and said that, "We should encourage this $100 million loan." Part of it was because the bank was trying to establish its own credit rating in Wall Street, so it wanted safe borrowers, and Australia definitely was one of those.

And so, normally loans would require a process whereby there would often be a visit by the World Bank to the country to say, "What are you going to spend? What projects are going to be using the money to build?" Those rules were bypassed. Black went to the board and, like I said, three weeks later, the documents were signed.

Interestingly, over the course of the next several loans, so they were in $50 million lots between 1952 and '55 or thereabouts. Some of the World Bank officials started to chafe at this special status that Australia had, and they tried to impose project lending, which was the go-to World Bank style of lending well into the '70s. The Australian officials constantly said, "No, no, no, we've been promised this type of loan."

So basically Australia was given the first loan of $100 million. It was up to them what the money would be spent on, which is generally not how the World Bank, and definitely not how it does it today. It was only in the early '50s that there started to be negotiations, and Australia went through the motions and said, "Okay. We will allocate $5 million to industrial development projects, but we get to decide what they look like and so on."

It's only really the Qantas loan and the Snowy Mountains loan in the '50s and '60s that correspond more neatly to a conventional World Bank loan, that you are giving money for this hydroelectric scheme, it will generate development in this way. Before that, it was just almost balanced payment loans that were being issued. Yeah.

Audience member 3: Thanks for such an interesting paper. I'm just wondering, were there any Australians working inside the World Bank during the period to cover? I mean decades later, of course we produced James Wolfensohn, the president, but I'm just wondering about your own period of research.

Dr Nicholas Ferns: I'm glad you asked that question. So one of the things, and it's impossible to directly look for it in the research, in the papers, but one of the things I have come up often in correspondence between some of the economists and just their colleagues and so on are people who are getting jobs at the World Bank. So it's not a high number, but there are some often trained by these economists. They go to Washington and get work there.

So there's at least a couple that I came up in my research up here where they were there. Not a huge number, but another interesting point is the consulting for the World Bank. So Crawford, I mentioned, Trevor Swan, who was another ANU economist, consulted for the World Bank.

But there's also the board of governors and board of directors, that there's that relationship there with the IMF and the World Bank. So Leslie Melville has that position for some time, I think. Then there's various other individuals.
So in terms of employees, there are some. I'd love to find more. I got in touch with the World Bank to see if they could help me out with that, but they don't keep records of that. But it's something I'm very much, it's hovering at the bottom of the project to find more. Yeah, it's a good question.

Audience member 4: Thanks very much, a really interesting talk. I've got a couple of questions. One is to do with the World Bank's loans or lending in support of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. My question is, and I think you hinted that you would be looking at that, will you be looking at the overall impact and effectiveness of that? That's one question.

The other, which is a little bit from left field. Australia shared a constituency at the World Bank, particularly with New Zealand and then with some other countries later on. Will you be looking at this question of essentially the viability of the Australian constituency? Because in order to maintain a viable constituency at the World Bank where you share essentially representation with other countries, you have to have a certain percentage overall in order to justify having a seat.

So along the way, we acquired Korea, which was pretty interesting. Then we also acquired Papua New Guinea and a few, but not all of the countries of the South Pacific, and latterly Mongolia. So it's a very mixed bag as a constituency. So if you were actually representing Australia in the constituency, you had to take into account also other things. So a couple of questions.

Dr Nicholas Ferns: Yeah. So I'll start with the first. Actually, no, I'll start with the second one. That point about constituencies is, it's not necessarily something I've focused on writing about necessarily, but it has come up quite a few times. Two points come up to mind. First is that South Africa is part of Australia's constituency, at least in the '50s. And even I think the Netherlands might be as well. I think there's a Europe and Australia. So, again, there's a sense of how Australia is perceived as European and so on. So that's part , I find that an interesting dynamic because, of course, South Africa gets some loans, but South Africa is a major producer of gold, which is a big part of the Bretton Wood system.

The other point about constituencies that it comes up in the debates about whether or not Australia should join. Part of the critique is that the US has overwhelming voting rights. Where it does come up is there is a kind of assumption, or at least it comes up, of there being a commonwealth or empire voting bloc. Even if they're not in the same constituency, if you add them together, they equal the American bloc.

As time goes on, that bloc is not very unified, and so that idea doesn't really come to mind. So I think that's an interesting dynamic, that Australia doesn't have a huge amount of power in that voting system particularly. So I think, yeah, it's a good point. I think there might be more to make of that.

Going back to the Snowy, there's a couple of points to make to that. One, the Snowy gets brought up in all of the loan conversation going back to the late '40s and early '50s. There's always this element, the Snowy is the archetypical development project that Australia is undergoing in the middle part of the 20th century.

Part of the point about these loans is that while. The earliest loans before the $100 million dollars isn't necessarily going directly to the Snowy Mountain scheme. It frees up US dollars to be able to buy. These loans are fungible. You can use the money. It frees up imports to build that.

So I think there's that aspect to think about. But I'm very much interested in that economic impact of the Snowy Mountain scheme. I haven't quite gone up to looking at it too closely, because as a historian, I mean the Snowy Mountain Scheme is always, well, predominantly seen through the prism of migration and culture, and that is a major important story. 

But I think the economic, the development story there could be unpacked, and I think this is a way in to that story. It's a good question. Yeah, thanks.

Audience member 5: Hi. Thank you. A fair amount of effort in our contemporary engagement with the World Bank is to ensure that its institutional centre of gravity does not leave average and behind. To what extent at time of joining was the consideration of, say, post-war New Guinea, and are broader regional considerations part of that calculus, or was it purely domestic?

Dr Nicholas Ferns: Very domestic. So, again, there's a couple of ways into that. First is in the discussions after the first loan in 1950, the territories department, which had responsibility for administering PNG, the secretary of the territories department wrote to the secretary of Treasury and saying, "Is any of this money going to come to assist us in developing PNG?" and Treasury almost laughed them out of the room, "No, this money's for Australia," that comes into it, which, from my perspective, I found that fascinating because, of course, I come at this project from. In the early 1960s, the World Bank is invited to write a report on the economic development of PNG. That's the first moment where it comes in.

But what complicates the story with the World Bank and PNG in particular is, and this is a story really into the '60s and '70s, is that just as the Australian officials, ministers responsible for policy in regard to PNG, just as they start to think, "Well, maybe the World Bank can assist us in that," there are some loans given to PNG while Australia is responsible. So there's hydroelectric scheme in the upper Ramer Region. There are some communications projects. There's also the building of the copper mine in Bougainville. That is seen as crucial, and that's going to bring in the export funding that PNG is going to need to develop. And so, it may not be as dependent on World Bank funding. Of course, that changes over time.

But joining in the moment when thinking about development and so on in the '40s and '50s, PNG is seen separate to the World Bank discussions, which I was surprised by, to be completely honest. But, yeah, that's what I found. Yeah.

Daniel Gleeson: Well, thank you very much for those questions. As we draw to a close, I've got a couple of plugs. So of course if you enjoyed that, we have fellowship presentations running all year, and they'll kick off again in 2025. Can't believe it's that time of year already. Keep an eye on our website, look at the events page if you want to see what topics we have coming up. Of course, if you want to check out any of our previous fellowship presentations, you can see those on the Library's YouTube channel.

Thank you so much for coming today. Please join with me in congratulating Dr Nicholas Ferns for today's fascinating presentation.

Dr Nicholas Ferns: Thank you.