Biography|Donald Neil Sanders — He Became Deputy Governor in This Tower on Martin Place

People assume a Reserve Bank deputy is a placeholder waiting for the governor's chair.

On 23 July 1975 that was not how the chairs moved in this building.

Sir John Phillips retired as Governor that day.

H. M. Knight took the governorship.

Donald Neil Sanders became Deputy Governor and Deputy Chairman of the Reserve Bank Board, working from 65 Martin Place.

The Reserve Bank itself was still young. It had been a separate institution only since 14 January 1960, when central banking was split from the old Commonwealth Bank.

Sanders had joined the new Bank in that first year, after a Treasury posting in Canberra and a year at the Bank of England, under the first Governor, H. C. Coombs.

He stayed on this board until 10 March 1987.

The last twelve of his twenty-seven Reserve Bank years were as deputy.

In 1982, when Knight retired, the governorship went to Bob Johnston, then the Bank's secretary, not to the sitting deputy.

Sanders remained in this tower for five more years.

In March 1987 the Commonwealth Bank called him across Martin Place to run the commercial bank he had entered as a teller in 1943.

The tower still occupies the south-east corner of Martin Place and Macquarie Street.

It was designed in 1959 by the Commonwealth Department of Works and finished in 1964 as the public face of the new central bank.

An RBA archive photograph from 27 February 1976 shows Sanders in this building at a lunch for Coombs's seventieth birthday, seated with Coombs and Governor Knight.

Photo: Danausi, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons