John Owen Stone AO was a legendary leader of the Commonwealth Treasury. He was secretary (departmental head) from January 1979 to September 1984 but was an intellectual driving force before then as deputy secretary from 1971 to 1978.

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Over those years he dealt with eight treasurers: Billy Snedden, Gough Whitlam, Frank Crean, Jim Cairns, Bill Hayden, Phillip Lynch, John Howard and Paul Keating.

It is a sign of his influence that those years were dubbed the "Stone Age" by South Australian Premier Don Dunstan and others.

Former Defence Department heads Arthur Tange and Tony Ayers were at various times called the "last of the mandarins" but Stone is probably truly the last.

In 1978, journalist Paul Kelly called Stone "one of the two men who ran the nation", the other being then Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser.

It is hard to think of any later public servant about whom that could be said.

Stone's entry in the Senate's biographical dictionary captures him well: "He could be charming, witty and flattering, but he is often decried as being obstinate and arrogant."

A Reserve Bank official is said to have said: "I wish I was as certain about one thing as John Stone is about everything."

This obduracy cemented the Treasury's reputation for arrogance and weakened its influence.

John was born in 1929, the elder of two sons of a farmer and a primary school teacher. His childhood was spent in the Western Australian wheat belt. But after his parents divorced when he was 12, he moved with his mother to Perth.

He attended Perth Modern School where contemporaries included Bob Hawke, Rolf Harris and Maxwell Newton.

He graduated with first-class honours from the University of Western Australia in 1950, majoring in mathematical physics, and served as president of the students' association.

While there he met Billy Snedden, who two decades later would be Prime Minister William McMahon's treasurer and with whom Stone would work as treasury deputy secretary.

In 1951 he won a Rhodes scholarship. He initially enrolled for a physics degree at Oxford, but switched to economics, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

He joined Australia's Treasury, initially in its London office,........

© Canberra Times