Coombs is rightly regarded as a father of modern Australia

Coombs is rightly regarded as a father of modern Australia.Although some conservatives regarded him as a socialist, Coombs’s great professional achievement was to retain the respect of the prime ministers from both sides of politics who called on his advice and skills. The wartime Labor government made him head of post-war reconstruction, a role in which he helped to shape the policies of mass immigration and public spending on tertiary education and infrastructure that were features of the economic prosperity of the Fifties.At the age of 42, he was appointed Governor of the Commonwealth Bank, then the central bank, and became the first governor of its successor, the Reserve Bank, 12 years later. Coombs was a singular bridge between the old, predominantly Anglo-Celtic Australia and the multicultural post-war society that has opened its eyes, prompted partly by his efforts, to the plight of its indigenous people.His father’s itinerant job as a station master took him as a child around the vast state of Western Australia, where he was born near Perth, the capital, in 1906. Later, as a young teacher in outback schools, Coombs saw the problems of Aborigines at first hand and turned their correction into a lifelong crusade. The Depression of the Thirties provided the other abiding influence in his life: economics. He was more widely known as “Nugget” Coombs because of his short stature and determined gait (he was 5ft 3in tall).

I don’t think there was any white Australian who gave a more continuing, practical commitment to the Aboriginal people.”One of the most prominent public figures over four decades, he was always referred to formally as Dr H.C. He made westerns (The Baron of Arizona, 1950, Forty Guns, 1957, Run of the Arrow, also 1957), war movies (Fixed Bayonets and The Steel Helmet, both shot in 1951, China Gate, 1957, Merrill’s Marauders, 1962), thrillers (the viciously anti-Communist Pickup on South Street, 1953, House of Bamboo, 1955, The Naked Kiss, 1964, and Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, 1972, the last not likely to be forgotten by anybody who has seen it for its extra- ordinarily violent shootout in a maternity hospital). By contrast, he never, wisely, attempted a comedy, a romantic melodrama or a musical.In his later years he settled in Paris, where he had long been the object of a cult. There he directed a couple of forgettable French-language thrillers and made personal appearances in the works of those younger film-makers who had regularly championed him, Godard, Dennis Hopper, Luc Moullet and, on four separate occasions, Wim Wenders.

For Wenders he acted in The American Friend (1977), Hammett (1982), The State of Things (also 1982) and, this year, The End of Violence, a film in which, alas, his own approaching end – and equally the end of the cinema that he personified, the cinema of what might be called “purple imagery” (as we say “purple prose”) – is all too visible.-. Herbert Cole Coombs, economist and public servant: born Kalamunda, Western Australia 24 February 1906; married 1931 Mary Ross (three sons, one daughter); died Sydney 29 October 1997

H C. Coombs was probably the most outstanding civil servant Australia has produced, but he will be remembered for being more than a civil servant. His influence touched almost every aspect of Australian life since the Second World War: the economy, banking, education, the arts and, most profoundly, the advancement of Aborigines.
Coombs served seven prime ministers, from John Curtin during the Second World War to Gough Whitlam in the 1970s. I thought there would be no end to the good times.
For style and entertainment Spurs were unassailable, with the Argentine World Cup pair Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa showing off their exotic flicks and skills.Via a fruitful youth system and some shrewd acquisitions the team, in a five-year period, won two FA Cups, reached a League Cup final when it was respectable to do so, challenged for the Championship, competed in Europe – including a Uefa Cup triumph – and it should have been more.In the sombre atmosphere of White Hart Lane, 1997, I frequently recall the goals of Steve Archibald, Mark Falco, Garth Crooks and the under-used talent of Micky Hazard to help me endure today’s shoddy impostors. This was I Shot Jesse James, a low-budget version of the ultrafamiliar western legend narrated – with the perversity which would soon be recognised as Fuller’s trademark – from the killer’s point of view.Thereafter, as writer, producer and director of most of his movies – their auteur complet, as his French admirers would define him – he brought his controversial, pugnacious “touch” to all of Hollywood’s more overtly virile genres. (It is actually not too bad.)There was a brief screenwriting stint, mostly of B-movies, in the Hollywood of the inter-war years, followed by quite exceptionally distinguished service in the Second World War, during which he fought in North Africa and Europe and received the Bronze Star, the Silver Star and a Purple Heart, then a return to Hollywood in 1949 to write and direct the first of his 22 films.

Simultaneously, he entered the temple of the arts by the tradesman’s entrance, writing and publishing short stories for magazines and, in 1935, the first of several pulpy novels, Burn Baby Burn. As an anaesthetic to painful trips to White Hart Lane these days, I consciously slip into day-dream and reminisce about the early 80s rather than get despairingly upset about a club and stadium ravaged of its soul and honour I am sick of moaning and need consoling I survive thanks to my very own fantasy football. Notwithstanding the uncompromisingly tough-guy, cigar-chomping posture he affected to adopt, there were many scenes in his work that punctured the myth that a Fuller movie could be everything but moving. A case in point is a celebrated sequence in his late, semi- autobiographical war movie The Big Red One (1979) in which Lee Marvin endeavours to comfort a dying child, an inmate of the concentration camp that he and his unit have just helped to liberate. Melodramatic yet utterly unmanipulative, it is guaranteed to bring tears to the eyes of spectators even as tough as the director himself.Fuller was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1911. He once admitted, for example, that he plotted his movies on a blackboard with several different colours of chalk to ensure that the components of action (red), exposition (white) and romance (blue) were all evenly balanced.Yet there could also be detected in his work an ambiguity that belied this slightly reductive even if self-cultivated image as the poet of potboilers or, as the auteurist critic Andrew Sarris once (approvingly) categorised him, “American primitive” That ambiguity was, to begin with, of an ideological nature.