There’s a telegram for you – fashioning Australia’s unique model of public administration

Abstract

In January 1975 my wife Margaret and I stepped off a plane after backpacking around Europe in the months since we finished university the year before. We were handed two telegrams (they still had telegrams then). The first offered Margaret a job as a teacher in Hoxton Park in the western suburbs of Sydney. The second offered me a job with the Department of Defence in the Australian Public Service in Canberra. Frankly, I could not remember having applied for a job with the Department of Defence. Indeed I had spent the last few years at university 'railing against the machine' and protesting against what Rolling Stone magazine called the 'military-industrial complex'. To this day I suspect there had been a mix-up in the Defence recruitment mail room. My fit with Defence was, on the face of it, so poor that one of my startled friends asked which side I would be fighting for.