Given the pervasive and restrictive nature of these controls, it is perhaps not surprising that the banking system was very stable. In the almost five decades from the early 1930s until the problems of the Bank of Adelaide in 1979 no Australian bank failed or even faced serious financial problems.
19 This was in a very real sense a result of the terrible 1890s depression which had been so influential on the young Shann. As Selwyn Cornish points out, that episode had a significant effect on the nature and form of much of Australian economic policy throughout most of the twentieth century, including financial regulation and central banking.