Honorary Associate Professor Selwyn Cornish

He is the Reserve Bank of Australia’s Official Historian, former Dean of Students at ANU and former Chairman of the ACT Board of Senior Secondary Students. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia for his services to education in the ACT.

Associate Professor Cornish’s special fields of interest are Australian economic history, monetary and central banking history, the history of economic thought (especially the economics of John Maynard Keynes), full employment policy in Australia, and the war and immediate post-war Australian economists known as the Seven Dwarfs, principally Dr H C Coombs, Sir Roland Wilson, Sir John Crawford and Sir Leslie Melville.

He is the author of a history of central banking in Australia for the Reserve Bank and currently writing a history of the Reserve Bank. Associate Professor Cornish has been interviewed for radio, TV, and newspapers, and contributed articles to The Australian and the Australian Financial Review. He was recently invited to undertake a podcast for the Sir Robert Menzies Institution at the University of Melbourne on the history of central banking in Australia.