A long and valuable association: Sir Frank Holmes reflects on the importance of the NZIIA to his early career.

• Position: New Zealand Institute of International Affairs

Sir Frank Holmes's involvement with the NZIIA spans more than a half-century. He was the President from 1998 to 2000, and in 2009 was elected by the National Council as one of three inaugural life members. As an NZIIA delegate to the unofficial Commonwealth relations conference in Lahore in 1954, he was fortunate not to have travelled with his fellow delegates, who were killed in an air crash in Singapore. A productive interlude as a British Commonwealth fellow at the RIIA's Chatham House in 1957 set the stage for a distinguished academic and business career in his homeland, during which the NZIIA provided valuable opportunities for learning and networks of collaboration.

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I was surprised and delighted to be selected by the National Council of the NZIIA to be one of three inaugural life members, in the distinguished company of Ken Keith and Bruce Brown, to celebrate the NZIIA's 75th anniversary.

In his citation, the President, Russell Marshall, referred back to events of the 1950s in which I was involved. Outliving others who were more worthy of the award is a useful qualification on the occasion of such an anniversary. The citation provoked me to reflect on the significance of fate or chance or luck in life and work. It also reminded me how important the NZIIA had been in my career, especially in opening up opportunities for learning and networks of collaboration. These helped me greatly in laying good foundations for my academic life and for my participation in public discussion of domestic and international policy issues.

Frank Milner, the Rector at Waitaki, where I attended junior high school, stimulated my interest in international affairs early in my life. He was a very active participant in discussions about British Commonwealth and Pacific affairs and a spellbinding orator on such matters even at school assemblies. This interest carried over into my secondary school education. It was stimulated further by my involvement in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a pilot in the Pacific during the Second World War. Before I joined the air force at the age of eighteen, I managed to get in one year of university study, of English, Latin, French and Greek. Returning after three years away, I took advantage of a generous government rehabilitation scheme to resume my university studies fulltime on a different track.

During the war I had given a lot of thought to what needed to be done to promote more satisfactory ways of settling disputes between nations and to avoid a recurrence of the depression that had blighted the lives of many New Zealanders in the years before the war, as well as aggravating the disputes between major nations. I was fortunate to be able to undertake full-time study in a totally different direction. I majored in economics and political science, accompanied by units in history, anthropology and psychology.

In 1946 I joined the United Nations Association--according to a reference he gave me later, I apparently impressed Geoff Billing, the Professor of Economics at Otago and also a keen member of the UN Association, with a speech I gave in 1946 on the importance of the United Nations. He was not so impressed with my performance in exams in the early stages of economics--courting Nola and student politics had higher priority until we married after the 1947 exams and moved to Auckland.

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Employment possibilities

In thinking about what I might do for employment after I finished my degree, I had seriously considered the possibility of joining the Colonial Service or some other international agency. However, when Nola became pregnant early in 1949, I applied for two positions--unsuccessfully for a junior lectureship at Victoria University, and successfully for a diplomatic traineeship in the Prime Minister's and External Affairs Department.

Working there with Lloyd White for almost three years was a great learning experience. It also gave me the opportunity to be involved in networks with public servants, particularly in departments such as the Treasury and Industries and Commerce, which were of enduring importance to me.

I had managed to complete a masters degree part-time with first-class honours in economics in my first-year at the department. Now deemed suitably qualified for academic appointments at that time, I decided, after much agonising, to apply for a lectureship that was becoming available at Victoria in 1952. In doing so, I was greatly influenced by the discussions I had with Horace Belshaw, who had only recently taken up appointment as Macarthy Professor of Economics there. Belshaw had been very active in the NZIIA and the Institute of Pacific Relations when he was a professor at Auckland University from the late 1920s through to the...