William Angus Sinclair (1929–2023)

Abstract

William Angus (Gus) Sinclair, former president of the Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand (EHSANZ) and editor of Australian Economic History Review, has passed away, aged 94. Gus was among the last surviving scholars from the group who, alongside Noel Butlin, transformed the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s.

Born in Edinburgh in 1929, Gus was an infant when his parents migrated to Australia. He completed his master's thesis ‘Economic Recovery in Victoria 1884-1899’ in 1956 at the University of Melbourne under the supervision of John La Nauze (Sinclair, 1956) and his doctoral thesis ‘The British Economy and the Trade Cycle 1886-1896’ in 1958 at Oxford University under the supervision of John Habukkuk. After completing his doctoral training, Gus returned to Australia and took positions successively at Melbourne, Monash and La Trobe. In 1973, he received a chair in economic history at Flinders University.

Gus was an important contributor to what Claire E.F. Wright has referred to as ‘the big bang’ in Australian economic history—the Noel Butlin-led transformation of the discipline. He was an active member of the group that constructed the widely used data set on capital formation and developed an empirical approach to understanding the sources of capital investment and its role in shaping Australian economic development in the second half of the nineteenth century (Butlin, 1962). Alongside Butlin, Gus actively engaged with persuading corporate leaders to allow scholars to have access to their records. The long tradition of Australian business history owes much to these efforts.

Gus's research was seminal to the understanding of Australian development. Alongside Butlin, he produced a still widely used GDP series covering 1788–1860 (Butlin & Sinclair, 1986). He contributed ‘Capital formation’ for Colin Forster's edited volume, Australian Economic Development in the Twentieth Century, extending Butlin's criticism of investment criteria beyond housing and railway construction (Sinclair, 1970). Gus's work tested and extended many of the Butlin's conclusions about the nature of Australian economic development. Following Butlin's (1964) challenge to provide a ‘general process of growth’, Gus developed a simple model of unevenly evolving economic development in The Process of Economic Development in Australia (Sinclair, 1976). Following initial European settlement, the Australia colonies had a relative abundance of land, but faced other factor shortages. Large-scale projects in the primary sector were inhibited by the lack of capital for fixed investment and by high internal transport costs. From the 1820s, capital inflows from the UK corrected this large initial disequilibrium and promoted technological change in the wool industry and the construction of railways. Although critical of many aspects of this approach, Boris Schedvin observed that ‘The book contains the most explicit framework in the writing of Australian economic history; it is highly organised, clearly written, and incorporates with exemplary fairness the work of other historians (Schedvin, 1979, pp. 549–50).

Gus remained an active scholar until the early 1980s, publishing innovative papers on Australian urbanisation and city-building (Sinclair, 1982a) and female labour markets (Sinclair, 1982b). David Merrett, who wrote his Master's thesis under Gus's supervision, recalls the scope and range of questions raised in ‘Growth and wellbeing’ (Sinclair, 1975): Do growth and wellbeing necessarily move together? What role did social capital play in advancing living standards? Can wellbeing be improved by either or both market and government action? Merrett (1977) challenged Gus's calculations of the costs of introducing sewerage in Melbourne, and the costs that voters were prepared to accept to reduce the incidence of typhoid. The debate was productive, providing a secure database that has informed subsequent studies of Australian urbanisation. As Merrett recalls, ‘It was a case of civil and respectful scholarship at work’.

In 1983 Gus returned to Monash, as Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Politics. At the time of the Hawke government reforms to tertiary education, he was given the difficult task of administering the merger of the Faculty, which had primarily served as a training ground for economists, and Chisholm Institute's David Syme School of Business, which focussed on the rising demand for graduates in accounting, management, and marketing.

Gus was appointed Emeritus Professor at Monash after his retirement in 1992. Although his active research role and direct involvement with EHSANZ came to a temporary halt when he took on the role of Dean, after retirement he returned to his work on GDP. In Sinclair (1996) he made the case for regional disaggregation in the analysis of Australian economic growth using annual estimates of GDP for Victoria from 1861 to 1976/1977. In his last major work, completed well into his 80s, Gus constructed a data set covering all colonies and states (Sinclair, 2009).

Gus was predeceased by his wife, Jean Sinclair, a senior political advisor to Bob Hawke, who passed away, of cancer in 1991. Colleagues across multiple disciplines, many of whom kept in touch with Gus well beyond his retirement, invariably found him to be a generous, gentleman. Graeme Davison, who first met Gus as a viva voce PhD examiner, recalls his ‘very encouraging’ feedback and continuing pleasant company. Dick Blandy recalls weekend tennis matches with Gus and other Flinders staff members, and lunches at the Staff Club with colleagues across the young university's discipline boundaries. Gus was a lover of cricket and Australian Rules football (in particular, the Collingwood Football Club).

Gus Sinclair was elected Jubilee fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 2015 and was the initial recipient of the EHSANZ's E.O. Shann Award in 2018 (jointly with Boris Schedvin). Both are fitting recognitions for a life of service to the discipline.