Australian Dictionary of Biography

Sir Allen Brown, 1965

National Archives of Australia, A1200:L51206

Sir Allen Stanley Brown (1911-1999), solicitor and public servant, was born on 5 July 1911 at Brunswick North, Melbourne, only son and eldest of three children of Victorian-born parents Robert Stanley Brown, clerk, and his wife Harriet May, née Allen. He was educated at Caulfield Grammar School, Wesley College, and Queen’s College, University of Melbourne (LLB, 1933; LLM, MA, 1935). While studying, he briefly served in the Melbourne University Rifles, Australian Military Forces, enlisting on 5 May 1930, and was discharged on 1 July 1932. After graduating he was admitted to practice as a solicitor in the Western District of Victoria. On 27 June 1936 in Queen’s College chapel, University of Melbourne, he married Hilda May Wilke, a clerk whose father had founded the then-named Wilke, Mitchell & Co. printing firm.

According to family folklore, in the early 1940s Brown returned to Melbourne intending to enlist in the Royal Australian Air Force for service in World War II. He instead became one of several emerging barristers and solicitors recruited by Sir Frederick Shedden, secretary of the Department of Defence, to his departmental staff. Brown transferred to the Rationing Commission in 1942 first as its executive officer and later as assistant deputy director and principal investigations officer for the director, H. C. Coombs. In December 1944 he followed Coombs to the Department of Post-War Reconstruction (PWR) where, as one of their young colleagues Peter Lawler later remarked, Brown became ‘Nugget Coombs’ Vicar-General … just the man to get the machinery of Coombs’ ad hoc enterprise up and running’ (Lawler 2015, 183).

Appointed first as director of Coombs’s General and Policy Division, Brown soon became director of both the Policy and Research Division (from 1946 the Division of Economic Policy) and by 1947 the Regional Planning Division, acting as assistant director general during Coombs’s absences on overseas assignments. His administrative and organisational efficiency became central to the department’s operations. Particularly important was his guidance in implementing the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme. It won him Prime Minister Ben Chifley’s regard, and later persuaded (Sir) Robert Menzies—an opponent of the scheme while leader of the Opposition—to proceed with the scheme when he became prime minister.

In 1948 Brown was appointed assistant director-general of the department and then director-general in January the following year, before becoming secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department (PMD) in August. Chifley intended that Brown would revitalise the relationship between the prime minister’s office and cabinet. Within six months, however, the Labor government had been defeated at the Federal election of 1949, and Menzies returned as prime minister.

Some in Menzies’s cabinet thought Brown too close to Chifley and Labor, prompting Menzies to ask if he was a member of the Labor Party. Brown replied that he ‘wouldn’t be seen dead in the Labor Party,’ but quickly added, ‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in your party either.’ Menzies said, ‘Wonderfully put … that evens things up nicely,’ and Brown was retained (Macintyre 2015, 466). With the prime minister’s encouragement, he revitalized the department to create a more activist, policy-oriented structure than the predominantly administrative role that preceded his tenure. Several economists from PWR joined PMD; Brown aimed to gain a more central role in economic advice to the prime minister. He was responsible for introducing a more efficient cabinet secretariat with better record-keeping, systematic cabinet notebooks, and a consistent pattern of cabinet committees. The department, he advocated, should be the eyes and ears of the prime minister in the bureaucracy.

Brown’s efforts were initially resisted by the Public Service Board and senior line departments, especially Treasury, but he had the prime minister’s confidence. He steered the restive elements of the 1940s bureaucratic ‘experiment’ into the steadier consolidation needed in the 1950s. Always the level-headed adviser, he helped Menzies to manage the policy battles between (Sir) Roland Wilson at Treasury, (Sir) John Crawford at the Department of Trade, and Coombs at the Commonwealth Bank and then the Reserve Bank of Australia. As one of the few senior public servants frequently chosen by Menzies to join him on trips abroad, he significantly influenced the prime minister’s negotiating strategies in foreign affairs. He was once delegated in 1955 to undertake a familiarisation tour of South-East Asia in Menzies’s stead.

One of Menzies’s most trusted advisers, Brown was among the several Commonwealth public servants with whom the prime minister developed ‘a personal though not undue official friendship’ and with whom he could relax ‘off duty’ (Bunting 1988, 97). He appreciated Brown’s facility in the wordplay in which Menzies indulged, having a ‘caustic lawyer’s wit’ (Edwards 2006, 127). The close relationship was evident both in Menzies’s affectionate references to him as ‘Bruno’ or ‘le brun,’ and in the personal tenor of Brown’s briefing notes. In one of these, he implored Menzies not to attend a Commonwealth Economic Conference in 1952 as the prime minister was too ‘run down physically and very tired’ (Martin 1999, 17).

With his deputy and chosen successor, John Bunting, Brown ‘developed the networks and processes that positioned the department at the centre of the public service’ (Weller, Scott, and Stevens 2011, 278). Menzies accepted Brown’s insistence that PMD should be an independent source of advice, with policy responsibilities traversing the public service, thus allowing a fundamental redirection of the department. While Bunting gained credit for consolidating Brown’s vision, he noted that ‘nothing happened except by way of … due process … I did no more than pick it up from my predecessor, Allen Brown’ (Bunting 1988, 109). The Brown-Bunting system, based on ‘the cerebral questioning of the policy proposals of others’ (Weller, Scott and Stevens 2011, 88), continued when Geoffrey Yeend—a former executive assistant to Brown and private secretary to Menzies—was appointed secretary to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in 1978, but the changing demands of the 1970s and 1980s led to the rise of a more proactive policy implementation approach. Yet this too depended on the centrality of the structure Brown had established.

Appointed CBE in 1953 and knighted three years later, Brown left PMD in 1959 to become deputy high commissioner in London. Various motivations for this move have been suggested, ranging from health considerations to a feeling that he had done all he could in the public service. A cross-posting as ambassador to Japan followed in 1965. In both offices, he continued to serve with distinction. He returned to Australia in 1970 and took up a part-time appointment as Australian commissioner of the British and Christmas Island Phosphate commissions before retiring finally in 1976. Throughout his retirement years, he resided in Maroochydore, Queensland, and later in the Melbourne suburbs of Toorak and Kew.

Various personal qualities helped make Brown the effective public servant he became. His probity was unquestioned, and he was a consummate team builder. Although he could be acerbic, colleagues appreciated his unassuming style and wry humour. He never lost his temper and seemed at ease with people regardless of rank or status. His senior PWR and PMD colleagues appreciated his support and the career opportunities, such as secondments to London and Washington, that he helped arrange for them. Lawler observed that he ‘studied deeply, gave advice freely, and accepted responsibility cheerfully’ (Lawler 2015, 188). Humble in demeanour, he was proud of his achievements in the public service but did not trumpet them, feeling it inappropriate for someone in his position to write memoirs. Like some of his senior public service contemporaries, he was short of stature, a characteristic that led some observers to number him among a group dubbed the ‘seven dwarfs.’ He remained a very private person, who preferred—when not working—to be at home with his wife and children. Predeceased by his wife (d. 1997), he died on 2 August 1999 at Canterbury, Melbourne, and was cremated at Springvale Crematorium, leaving behind their son, Roger, and two daughters, Helen and Joan.