ON THE morning of 12 August 1937, former prime minister Billy Hughes and his wife Mary arrived by train at the small town of Red Cliffs, ten miles up-river from Mildura, in the far northwest corner of Victoria. Just days earlier their daughter Helen had died in London at the age of twenty-one, but not even the untimely death of a beloved child would prevent Hughes – then minister for health and repatriation – from fulfilling this commitment.
A brass band greeted Hughes and Mary at the station and escorted them to a park, where 2000 citizens and schoolchildren were waiting. Alongside local dignitaries, Hughes stood before an ugly brick plinth rising to a height of about seven feet. After a long speech in the winter sun, he pulled a cord on the Australian flag draped over the plinth to reveal a bronze plate, on which was engraved in bas-relief the image of a stern-looking man and the epigram “Fearless in public service. In sincerity unexcelled.” The formalities were over.
Six years earlier, the Victorian Country Party had launched a fundraising drive to pay for a permanent monument to the man portrayed on the bronze plaque, Percy Gerald Stewart, the federal member for the Wimmera. Stewart had died young, too, at the age of forty-six, after representing the area for more than twenty years. Despite his chronic poor health, his death shocked both his party colleagues and – because he was respected on both sides of parliament – his political opponents. If his peers valued him, his constituents loved him, and through the local party branches they slowly gathered money to ensure that a copy of his portrait hung in meeting halls across the Wimmera and to erect that unusual phenomenon in Australia, a memorial to a politician. This mark of respect, even love, still stands in the centre of Red Cliffs.
Born in Melbourne in 1884, Percy Stewart worked as a newspaper seller in Victoria, and then as a sailor and farmhand in the United States and Canada, before returning to Australia in 1909. He settled in northwestern Victoria in 1913, purchasing a small plot of land at Carwarp, south of Mildura. There he took up the local preoccupation: trying to grow wheat in unsuitable conditions. Light soil and regular drought made this a precarious way of earning a living, and so Stewart, looking around at his struggling neighbours and the harsh realities of subsistence living, embarked on two distinct but interrelated enterprises. He began experimenting with ways of developing strains of wheat and oats hardy enough to flourish in the area, and he decided to help his fellow wheat growers organise to strengthen their political power. In 1916 he helped form the Victorian Farmers’ Union, and he became one of its four representatives in the Victorian Legislative Assembly the following year. He represented the seat of Swan Hill until 1919, when he resigned to contest the federal seat of Wimmera. He won it, and held it until his death.
Stewart was revered for his sincerity. When he said that he had the best interests of his constituents at heart, they believed him. They believed him because he was a farmer before he was a politician, because he was “one of them,” and because his commitment to their interests never wavered. No one felt that Stewart entered politics because he lacked alternative means of earning a living; he had a vision of his ideal society and wanted to do what he could to realise it.
Above all, Stewart’s supporters praised his independence. He was best-known – and widely admired – for his refusal to “toe the party line.” He voted with Labor whenever he agreed with them, getting himself into trouble with his colleagues in the Victorian Country Party on numerous occasions. He refused to attend joint party meetings of the party and its coalition partner, the Nationalist Party (an early forerunner of today’s Liberal Party), and, in a move popular with other MPs, spoke against the practice at the Country Party’s annual conference in 1919. He was also instrumental in abolishing the practice of pre-endorsing candidates to contest seats for the Country Party, believing that electors should have “the widest possible scope in the selection of their parliamentary representatives.”
Stewart served as works and railways minister from February 1923 to August 1924, when he resigned over the so-called Bruce–Page pact, which aimed to protect sitting MPs. He subsequently resigned from the Victorian Farmers’ Union, then the Country Party in July 1926, in protest at the coalition between the state Nationalist and Country parties, arguing that it would restrict the Country Party’s opportunities for expansion. With others who felt the same, he formed the Country Progressive Party, which enjoyed some electoral success across the southeastern states. In the 1928 federal elections, he stood as an independent and won handsomely. The following year he supported Labor against Bruce’s proposed changes to the Arbitration Act and voted for the increase in the entertainment tax. Shortly before his death he rejoined the Country Party, and during the subsequent push for unity and the formation of the United Country Party, he became, somewhat ironically given his bent for independence, a symbol for country political unity.
Stewart was by no means the only popular politician in this period. Other MPs who were held in high esteem because of their understanding of their constituents’ concerns and their independent approach to party politics included Charles Hawker, the former army captain and Liberal member for Wakefield in South Australia, and Sir Littleton Groom, the Nationalist member for Darling Downs, both of whom resigned because they were unable to accept their party’s dictates. One correspondent sent Hawker a newspaper cutting that claimed he was the best representative South Australia had had for many years. Another spelled out the assets Hawker brought to the job: “Your ability, your sincerity, the interest you take in people, the assistance you are always prepared to render together with the absolute absence of self interest has completely won the respect and confidence of the community.” Another wrote: “I wish we could find more men of your ability and energy to enter politics.” Hawker had a long friendship with the historian Keith Hancock, who praised his qualities in Country and Calling.
Littleton Groom represented the federal seat of Darling Downs for thirty years, having “inherited” it from his father. His popularity with his constituents had a lot to do with his being so well-known – constituents had had years to judge his competence and character. But like Stewart and Hawker, it was Groom’s independence that won him the admiration of so many. This independence – exemplified by his behaviour during the arbitration debates of August 1929 – demonstrated the same levels of honesty and integrity that voters so admired in Stewart. When the Bruce–Page coalition tried to pass legislation that would dismantle the federal Arbitration Court and give its powers back to the states, Groom – the Speaker of the House of Representatives – abstained from the vote, aiding the bill’s defeat.
Unfortunately for Groom, admiration for his integrity did not translate into electoral support in the ensuing campaign. The Nationalists mounted a tricky campaign against him in retribution for his abstention, and to everyone’s surprise he lost his seat. He received numerous letters from constituents and friends: they praised him for his independent stance, commiserated on his electoral loss, and later congratulated him on his triumphant return to parliament in 1931.
THE parliamentarian who acts independently of the party machine has always been revered in Australian politics, and this reverence has its roots in the idea of the Independent Man in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. As the historian Matthew McCormack has shown, “independence” was the key requirement for the English politician at that time, and the formulation was used to exclude others from political participation. Emerging from the eighteenth century’s reverence for classical and renaissance political philosophy, this particular notion of “independence” encompassed many principles besides the obvious, property ownership, including ideas of adulthood, respectability, intellectual capacity and, especially, manliness. Its meaning could shift over time to exclude particular groups when it suited the purposes of those in power. Children, the indigent, the non-English, the disabled and women were all cast as “disempowered dependents” and excluded from political life.
For McCormack, England’s 1832 Reform Act was a “pivotal moment” when “the Independent Man became the preferred unit of political inclusion” and the model citizen came to be cast as a male property owner. Non-propertied English workers, meanwhile, were organising around the Chartist movement, and could only base their claim for suffrage on their “manly independence.” It was that claim which transposed to the goldfields of Australia in the 1850s – only to shift, later in the century, as workers organised their own political party, the Australian Labor Party, and demanded a new kind of commitment from party members.
This led to a new paradigm for the Independent Man in politics: the politician who eschewed the dictates of the party machine. The conservative side of politics found it easy to criticise their political opponents because Labor required its members to sign a solidarity pledge – seen by conservatives as the epitome of “machine politics” – and was committed to use of the caucus. Conservatives believed these institutions turned parliamentary representatives into delegates, robbing them of their freedom to use their judgement, and thus also of their integrity.
But the conservative side had also recognised that it needed to organise itself against Labor. The Nationalist leader Stanley Bruce pushed for “unity” throughout the period, attempting to position the Nationalists as the “natural” party of government and resisting attempts to revive the Liberal identity of the party and drive out those who, like Billy Hughes, had moved across from Labor. He also pursued coalition with the recently formed farmers’ party, the Country Party. But the acrimonious splits between the Nationalists and the Country Party over candidate selection and votes in the House of Representatives throughout the 1920s (including Stewart’s resignation from the ministry in 1924) indicate the tensions that arise when a modern party struggles to emerge from a loose coalition of conservative interests.
Supporters of the labour movement had a rather different view of representation. In the lead-up to the 1930 NSW elections, “Once Bitten”’ wrote to the Labor Daily warning the labour movement to be careful about the type of individual it preselected, a warning that is heard as often now as it was then. It should watch out for “the silvertongued individual” who wanted to ride into power on the backs of the workers and then desert the cause of labour, following in the footsteps of “Hughes, Holman, Hall, Meagher, etc.” – the infamous Labor rats.
Nevertheless, a parliamentarian’s understanding of the lives of his constituents was just as important to those in the labour movement as it was to Country Party supporters. “Once Bitten” argued that it “was the duty of every [party] member to see that only those who have borne the heat and burden of the day shall be chosen,” and on his pre-endorsement form for the election, Joseph Clark, the future member for the federal seat of Darling, emphasised that he had made it his “particular duty to attend to the personal needs of the people who placed me in Parliament.” Correspondents to politicians repeatedly insisted that MPs were elected to represent the interests of their constituencies, not their parties. But as one of them wrote to Scullin when he was under pressure from the unions to resolve the mining dispute in January 1930, “This section of the party seem [sic] to forget that a PM has to be just to the whole of the community.”
The increasing organisation of political parties, the growing sophistication of the machinery that ran them and the professionalisation of politicians caused considerable disquiet in the broader community, as it continues to do. Sections of the press worried about these issues endlessly. The Age, for example, opposed Bruce’s Nationalist “unity” call and the increasing conservatism of the Nationalist Party, demanding it return to the values of Alfred Deakin’s Liberal Party. The paper’s commitment to what it considered the true liberal values of independence, and to the return of liberalism as the alternative to Labor, both reflected and helped shape strong anxieties in parts of the community about the state of Australian democracy.
MEN like Percy Stewart, Charles Hawker and Littleton Groom provided ideal models of the respected MP. The passage of time was a factor: voters’ familiarity with a politician was an important requirement for a positive assessment, although not everyone valued this familiarity. Country Party member Edwin Reseigh considered the “parish pump politician,” who was known personally by all his constituents, to be the greatest hindrance to sound legislation because he secured favours for individuals at the expense of the community. (Reseigh claimed never to have asked his own parliamentarian for a personal favour but had often asked him to oppose legislation that was not in the best interests of the state.) Also valued was a manifest understanding of the problems faced by the electorate. But the most admired quality was independence, the assurance that the politician was playing straight with voters and putting their interests ahead of the party’s.
Pledged to solidarity, the Labor MP represented the antithesis of this independent ideal, and if he did take an individual stance, he was likely to be labelled a rat. But many Labor politicians were admired and beloved for their individual qualities and, sometimes, for their independent stances. Some electors saw NSW premier Jack Lang, for example, as a politician who always delivered on his election promises, and many others admired Labor’s deputy leader – and federal treasurer – Ted Theodore for his intellectual and organisational abilities. The Labor Daily praised the qualities possessed by the new Labor government of James Scullin, which were, it wrote, the types of attributes admired by those on the left of politics. The new government was “a galaxy of talent” with “brilliant speakers.” Its members were “more virile men from a more virile party” and “old dogs for a hard road.” All were “tried and trusted men” and wouldn’t be “caught napping.” Edward Holloway was singled out for special praise, being “logical, sincere, fair, tactful and friendly,” and the Labor member for Hunter, Rowley James, was known as “the miners’ champion” for his independent attitude towards the Scullin government’s failure to reopen the mines.
Newspapers also speculated on the attributes of the ideal politician. Smith’s Weekly framed the new Nationalist federal member Richard Casey – a silvertail and a protégé of Bruce – as “very nearly” the ideal politician. “Frank and reserved as the situation demanded,” Casey was “a whale for work,” “well groomed,” “an alert listener” and “thoughtful.” His only weakness seemed to be nervousness when speaking in public, but the paper expected this would disappear as he gained experience. Smith’s Weekly offered Casey to its readers as evidence that those “who deplore the calibre of the average politician” need not despair. An example to other ambitious younger men, Casey proved that the man who “tackles politics earnestly and purposefully can, given brains and industry, make the grade.”
The same paper marked Theodore as an example of the worst type of politician. “I thought Theodore could bring into Federal Labor the fire and vitality it lacked,” wrote Joynston Smith, the paper’s proprietor, himself a maverick. Smith judged that it had all gone wrong for Theodore when he left Queensland for New South Wales and tried “to keep everyone happy rather than going his own way.” He had become “an example of swift degeneration, of failure to live up to his tasks, of a witless opportunism so unsteady in principle that no man knows where to have him.” The Rich Red of Kirribilli, as Smith dubbed Theodore, had chosen “the wrong camp.” He and his chief rival, that other maverick Lang, were “insincere... men of property who have become richer by commercial efforts during their political careers.”
Smith summed up the yearning for an ideal politician in this period. His earlier support for Theodore, despite the latter’s murky record as Queensland premier, was based on Theodore’s difference from other politicians. He was a risk-taker (hence the great reforms he achieved as Queensland treasurer), and to those longing for the extraordinary as opposed to the mundane he seemed a risk worth taking, both imaginative and exciting. The reality proved more frightening, and the rapid retreat to the safety of the mundane was palpable.
Independence had always meant freedom from obligation to others; in this era, and in this context, it meant specifically independence from the dictates of the party machinery. That supporting your party and being regarded as a good MP were – or are – antithetical is too strong a dichotomy. But these stories do highlight the difficulties inherent in party politics for the representative, and serve as a warning to those very few who are so captured by Canberra that they forget about the needs of their electorate. •
