Biography|Donald Neil Sanders — He Took a Teller's Job in Wollongong While the Bank Still Printed Australia's Notes

People who meet Donald Neil Sanders as a Reserve Bank deputy tend to skip the first counter.

In 1943 he joined the Commonwealth Bank as a teller in Wollongong.

He was sixteen. The war was still on.

The Commonwealth Bank was not only a retail bank. It still performed Australia's central-banking work, a dual role that would last until the Reserve Bank was split out in 1960.

The present Commonwealth Bank branch at 141-145 Crown Street stands on the old Crown Street banking strip, on the site later writers identified with the vanished Cottage of Content.

The 1943 counter is gone. The street is not.

After the war he read economics at the University of Sydney while working, then went to Treasury in Canberra and spent a year at the Bank of England.

In 1960 he joined the new Reserve Bank under H. C. Coombs.

The Wollongong posting is the start of a fifty-two-year line that never really left one institution.

He finished that line as managing director and then chief executive of the Commonwealth Bank, the same name that had hired the teenager.

Photo: Wpcpey, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons