The interested reader can do no better than to consult a number of biographical essays written by Selwyn Cornish, 1 Ian Macfarlane’s Inaugural Melville Lecture in 2002, and the first hand, and rather poignant, reminiscences in Ross Garnaut’s 2004 Lecture.
My topic today is one that I think Melville would have been interested in, namely, the role of central banks as providers of liquidity and as lenders of last resort in times of crisis. I say “would”, because there is nothing about it in his writings that I have been able to uncover.