called 'a National University at Canberra' ", which would be primarily for specialist research and postgraduate study, in areas particularly relating to Australia, such as foreign relations with Asia and the Pacific region. This vision was evidently influential on the establishment of the Australian National University (ANU) in 1946, the only research-only university in the country (although in 1960 it amalgamated with Canberra University College to offer undergraduate courses). Garran retired from his governmental positions on 9 February 1932, a fixed retirement date on the day before his sixty-fifth birthday. He soon returned to practise as a barrister, and within a month he was made a King's Counsel. However, he occasionally carried out more prominent work. In 1932, he was selected on the advice of the then Attorney-General John Latham to chair the Indian Defence Expenditure Tribunal, to advise on the dispute between India and the United Kingdom regarding the costs of the military defence of India. In 1934, along with John Keating, William Somerville and David John Gilbert, he formed a committee which prepared The Case for Union, the Government of Australia's official reply to the secessionist movement in the state of Western Australia. Garran served on ANU's council from 1946 until 1951. Garran was also involved with the arts; he was a founding member of the Australian Institute of Arts and Literature and its president 1922-1927. He was the vice-president of the Canberra Musical Society, where he sang and played the clarinet, and in 1946 won a national song competition run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Garran also published translations of Heinrich Heine's 1827 work Buch der Lieder ("Book of Songs") in 1924, and of the works of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann in 1946. Garran died in 1957 in Canberra. He was granted a state funeral, the first given to a public servant of the Government of Australia. He was survived by his four sons; his wife Hilda had died in 1936. His memoirs, Prosper the Commonwealth, were published posthumously in 1958, having been completed shortly before his death. Legacy Garran's "personality, like his prose, was devoid of pedantry and pomposity and, though dignified, was laced with a quizzical turn of humour." His death "marked the end of a generation of public men for whom the cultural and the political were natural extensions of each other and who had the skills and talents to make such connections