Australian Dictionary of Biography

Sir Henry Bland, 1966

National Archives of Australia, A1200, L58484

Sir Henry Armand Bland (1909–1997), public servant, was born at Randwick, Sydney, on 28 December 1909, only child of locally born parents Francis Armand Bland, civil servant, and his wife Elizabeth Bates, née Jacobs, who died of septicaemia three weeks after giving birth. Henry was raised for the first five years of his life by his paternal grandmother, Eva Emily, née Strehz. Francis married Sydney-born Lillian Victoria, née Orr, on 7 September 1912 at St Philips Anglican Church, Sydney. The Blands attended a mission hall associated with St Martin’s Church of England, Kensington, and Henry began his schooling at St John’s Church of England School, Darlinghurst. In 1916–17 the family lived in Britain while his father studied at the London School of Economics, and took up an appointment at Balliol College, Oxford. Back in Sydney by 1918, Henry attended public schools at Lilyville, Randwick, and Cleveland Street, Surry Hills. After the family moved to Glenbrook, he commuted to Sydney Boy’s High School (1925–26), then located at Ultimo, where he played tennis, and made the honours list (Leaving certificate) in his final year.

The family could not afford to finance Bland’s ambition to become a civil engineer, so in 1927 he joined the New South Wales Crown Solicitor’s Office. Concurrently, he pursued part-time arts and legal studies at the University of Sydney (LLB, 1932), were he won the Pitt Cobbett prize for constitutional law and public international law (1929) and the Morven K. Nolan prize for political science (1930). On 30 September 1933, at St Anne’s Church of England, Strathfield, he married English-born Rosamund, née Nickal, a stenographer in the Crown Solicitor’s Office. He was admitted as a solicitor in October 1935. In December 1937 he was elected to the Ryde Municipal Council (1937–39) as a progressive candidate, later confessing that he ‘… had to find some outlet from the aridity of the law’ (Juddery 1968, 24). In 1939 he was appointed official secretary to the New South Wales agent-general in London, Clifford Hay. Bland arrived there in early September, a week after the outbreak of World War II, and became acting agent-general in January 1940. Having completed a comprehensive study of Britain’s civil defence, he was recalled to Sydney in mid-June 1941 to advise the New South Wales government on the measures required. In that role he also advised the Federal government’s new Department of Home Security.

In 1942, after a stint as an acting inspector with the New South Wales Public Service Board, Bland became principal assistant to Wallace Wurth, the newly appointed director of manpower priorities and chairman of the manpower priorities board, in the Federal Department of Labour and National Service (DLNS). He had been promoted to assistant secretary by August 1947, and when he led Australia’s delegation to the 31st session of the International Labour Conference of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in San Francisco (June–July 1948), United States officials praised his work as rapporteur to the Committee on Employment Service Organization and Vocational Guidance.

Bland was promoted to first assistant secretary in September 1950, and in January 1952 was appointed secretary of the DLNS. For the next sixteen years he expanded and refined the department’s operations, and was the main architect of the Commonwealth Employment Service while continuing to manage industrial relations and conscription. He established a close working relationship with Harold Holt, then minister for labour and national service (1949–58), which enhanced his own influence within the Menzies government. Bland felt strongly that the public service should remain sensitive to the problems and aspirations of industry, commerce, and the broader community, and so insisted that the DLNS remain in Melbourne where it could sustain close working relationships with the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (CAC) and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). He also encouraged exchanges of people and ideas between government, industry, and universities.

In all aspects of his portfolio Bland had a reputation for being an interventionist, particularly in industrial relations. Considering the waterfront to be the epicentre of communist agitation, he collaborated with the press, the National Civic Council, the ACTU president Albert Monk, and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, to intervene in industrial disputes on behalf of employers’ interests. In 1965 he challenged Qantas Empire Airways Ltd’s approach to dealing with pilot disputes, arguing that disputes between the pilots’ union and the government-owned airline should be addressed through private mediation rather than formally in the CAC. His assertive, hands-on approach drew the ire of senior Qantas executives, including the board member and Treasury secretary Sir Roland Wilson, who went on to become Qantas chairman in 1966.

On the international stage Bland was in demand as a witness, adviser, and delegation leader to foreign commissions, governments, and international organisations. He led seven delegations to the ILO between 1953 and 1966, and to its Asian regional conference in 1962, as well as being Australia’s representative on the ILO’s governing body (1963–66). In 1959 he advised the government of Singapore on the establishment of industrial relations machinery, before leading a mission to the Territory of Papua and New Guinea (TPNG) in 1960 to investigate pay rates.

Bland maintained largely conservative social policy positions throughout his stewardship of DLNS. In the 1950s he urged the government to delay Australia’s ratification of the ILO’s Convention 100 on equal pay for women. But he was sympathetic towards proposals to lift the ban on married women working in the Commonwealth Public Service, which he described in 1961 as a ‘barbaric anachronism’ (Sheridan and Stretton 2004, 91). He supported payment of unemployment benefits to Aboriginal people only in circumstances where individuals were, in his words, ‘accustomed … to want to work,’ and ‘relatively settled’ (1975). Also, he remained one of the high-level Australian government officials who diminished the contribution of First Nations people to national defence, on the presumption that they would struggle to accommodate to military culture.

By the mid-1960s, Bland’s pre-eminence in public administration was widely acknowledged. He was appointed CBE in 1957, and in 1961 the Institution of Production Engineers awarded him the James N. Kirby medal for achieving distinction in his field. In 1965 he was appointed KBE. On 6 December 1967 he became secretary of the Department of Defence at a time when Australia’s defence organisation had become excessively complex and unwieldy. The Menzies government had shelved the advice of the committee on the organisation of the defence group of departments (the ‘Morshead reports’) of 1957 and 1958 when the army, navy and air force leadership rejected the committee’s recommendation that the departments be integrated. Bland started the reform process, and established the Joint Services Staff College and the Joint Intelligence Organisation. But faced with an unfamiliar culture, in his relatively short tenure he struggled to win over the armed forces establishment. Bland’s views, as chairman of the high-level defence committee, were often at odds with those of foreign affairs and defence officials, including the secretary to the Department of External Affairs, Sir James Plimsoll, and the chairman of the chiefs of staff committee, General Sir John Wilton. More extensive reforms to defence were left to Bland’s successor, Sir Arthur Tange.

Nevertheless, Bland made some notable contributions. After visiting service installations in TPNG in March 1969, having questioned the continuation of the Australian defence presence there, he reported that ‘in all our thinking about the Territory, we must see it not as part of Australia nor anything resembling an extension of Australia. For our purposes the territory is a country of South East Asia’ (NAA A1838). Instead, he considered continued close bilateral ties across the widest possible range of interests to be the most appropriate bases for long-term defence relationships, a view that eventually became widely accepted, most notably by his successor. In September 1969, with continuing delays and technical problems hindering delivery of the F-111C fighter-bomber aircraft, Bland headed a mission of Royal Australian Air Force and Department of Defence officials to the United States of America, where they were able to extract assurances from their American counterparts that responded to the problems. Then in November he led Australia’s delegation to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, of officials from five Commonwealth countries to discuss defence; they made marked progress on issues of air defence and naval cooperation.

With over forty years’ experience in the public service, including eighteen as a Commonwealth departmental secretary, Bland announced his retirement on 13 November 1969, but stayed on as secretary until 27 February 1970. The defence minister Malcolm Fraser said of the secretary on his departure that ‘his dynamic energy, industry and ability to achieve his aims were by-words in the public service and Australia’ (Fraser 1970). The Blands returned to Melbourne, but he remained in demand. In the early 1970s he was appointed to the boards of a number of companies, including Australian Mining & Smelting Co. Ltd, and Westinghouse Brake & Signal Co. (Australia) Pty Ltd. Concurrently he was engaged to oversee various reviews of Federal and State bureaucracies, including as chairman of the board of inquiry into the Victorian land transport system (1970–71), which recommended the closure of many railway branch lines and passenger services, and the Commonwealth Committee on Administrative Discretions (1972–73), which led to the design of a new system of administrative law. He was also the sole member of the board of inquiry into the Victorian public service (1973–75). As chairman of the Federal government’s Administrative Review Committee (1975–76), charged with scrutinising expenditure and eliminating government waste and duplication, he gained a reputation as ‘Fraser’s economic axeman’ (Hollingsworth 1976, 1).

In July 1976 Bland was appointed chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, but resigned in December after clashing with both staff―who accused him of being sent in to undermine the commission’s independence―and with the Fraser government itself, when it failed to honour a promise to reconstitute the commission’s membership and remove the ABC from the Public Service Board’s purview. Before retiring for a second and final time, in 1978 Bland was appointed arbitrator of a dispute between the Tasmanian government and the Australian National Railways.

Balding, of short stature, and renowned for speaking slowly with a ‘gravelly basso’ (Hawkins 1967, 26), Bland used his deep knowledge of the public service, a rigorous work ethic, and a reputation as a smart, tough negotiator, to become one of the preeminent public administrators of his era. Some, though, considered him overly combative and liable to intrigue. Eschewing publicity, he regarded discrete, strategic conversation as the most effective means of conducting business, an approach he considered at odds with the showy, rhetorical style he associated with Canberra. His beliefs were much influenced by his father, to whom he credited his views on government accountability, and that public servants should be ‘seen and not heard’ (Juddery 1968, 24). Towards the end of his career he became critical of ministers’ lack of understanding and respect for the worth and integrity of the public service. He disdained the national capital, which he argued was breeding generations of insular public administrators. Considering himself politically neutral, while he was a public servant he secured a chief electoral officer’s approval to abstain from voting in Federal elections.

In their retirement, the Blands moved to Bowral, New South Wales, where he continued to enjoy theatre, orchestral music, gardening, and golf. A moderate drinker, he rarely watched television, preferring to listen to records, collect stamps, and work on carpentry and building projects. He died on 8 November 1997 in the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Camperdown, and was cremated at the Forest Lawn crematorium, Leppington. Rosamund predeceased him in 1995; their daughter Hilary had died in 1942. He was survived by their daughters Meredith and Lesley.