Born in 1906 and trained as an economist, H.C. Coombs was Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia from 1949 to 1968. However, the breadth of his activities and his commitment to public affairs over seven decades makes his life story a cameo of Australians' many-sided quest for a better life. Coombs spent his childhood and youth in Western Australia. As director-General of Post War Reconstruction he advised the Labor governments of the 1940s. In the Menzies years, he added performing arts and tertiary education to his duties in banking. Upon retirement in 1968 he continued to shape arts policy and took up a new reform interest as chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. Particularly interested in Coombs as an economist, Tim Rowse shows that Coombs understood 'economic rationality' as the socially integrative mission of private and public sector elites. When his Keynesian confidence faltered in the early 1970s, Coombs reformulated his ideas of economy and governnance to meet the challenges of environmental degradation and indigenous renaissance. Ceaselessly testing the adaptability of twentieth-century liberalism, and straddling the gap between public servant and public intellectual, Coombs made his career a 'reforming life'.