Peter Karmel: A Tribute

(1967), that had been written by the three of us, and which had just been reissued by Cambridge University Press. It was my first book and Peter’s third. 2 We had a very happy hour and a half. Sadly, it was the last time we were to see our much-admired and highly valued friend and colleague, who subsequently passed away at the age of 86 on 30 December 2008. When I came to Adelaide in March 1958 to my first lecturing post, Peter was the still very young Professor of Economics at Adelaide (aged 28 when appointed in 1950). I had heard him as an undergraduate give the G. L. Wood Memorial Lecture, and he had interviewed me in early 1958 for the Adelaide post while I was doing a PhD at Cambridge. It was at Adelaide that I came to know him well before, to our great collective chagrin, he went to Flinders as its first Vice-Chancellor in 1962. When he called us into the tearoom to tell us the news, we all moaned about our lot at losing him. It was almost only as an afterthought that Frank Jarrett congratulated him on his new post! Peter was a wonderful head. He was democratic and approachable; he also created the fiction that each one of us was his most trusted confidant so that when decisions were taken, they were almost always approved of because he had found out what the dogs were barking beforehand. He created an atmosphere of exciting intellectual teamwork, with all of us joining in, often in the tearoom, in discussions of economic and other issues, which fed into the creation of our and his papers. It was an extraordinarily happy and productive period wit