About

Edward Dyason, mining engineer and investor, stockbroker and man about town, was widely known for his financial acumen and his self-taught economic expertise. He achieved this position in the highly conservative Australia of the interwar years, as an adventurer in ideas, in business and sexuality.

He shared the rationalism of many of his peers and, as a young man, was confident that knowledge and organisation were the keys to progress. His rationalism led him to support the peace movement during World War I and adopt monetary economics, then in its infancy, as a fruitful approach to business and public policy. Rationalism underpinned his significant public service as an adviser to government regardless of party, he collaborated with Australia’s early economists and was a driving force amongst Melbourne’s publicists in the 1920s in the establishment of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. In the economic and political chaos of the 1930s when his faith in Liberalism and science was shaken and others in the same position looked for a return to religious values, he proposed a focus on the social sciences. In the 1940s his reading led him to think, as did others at the time, that a solution could be found in an investigation of the nature of human consciousness.

A vital and energetic man, his love for Victoria’s high country led him to explore the mountains on horseback, on skis and on foot. In town, he was a competitive participant in Royal Tennis and squash. His other great love, women, led him into the pursuit of variety in sexual relations. If Dyason’s exceptional energy and ability, his openly liberal views on sexual relations, and his manifold personal and public interests did not mark him out as exceptional at the time, his personal presentation would have done so. He was of average height with very dark eyes, and as a young man he chose to have his mass of black hair and beard cut in a style suggestive of the third Napoleon.

He was probably quite pleased, if he knew of it, to be occasionally taken for ‘a foreign gentleman’.