Introductory Remarks at Parliamentary Library Lecture
– Puzzles of a Prime Minister: Alfred Deakin Revealed
Date: Monday 14 October
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: Main Committee Room
(E&OE)
Good afternoon,
When he retired from Parliament in 1913, Deakin was, as Prime Minister Hughes put it, ‘broken with the great strain of public duty’. The strain was all too evident when, looking back towards the end of his political career, Deakin wrote that he was ‘saddened … with the sense of opportunities missed, neglected or ignored—with the ‘might-have-been’ of a marvelously fortunate and favoured man’.
This was emphatically not the assessment of Deakin’s contemporaries, or of history.
Deakin spent almost his entire adult life in politics, first entering the Legislative Assembly just short of his 23rd birthday. As the Speaker just pointed out, on a principled basis he quickly exited, then re-entered.
In the Victorian Parliament, he introduced legislation to curb ‘sweated’ labour and improve conditions in factories, compensation for injured workers and the limitation of hours of work for women and children.
He chaired an 1884 royal commission on irrigation, and subsequently introduced the first legislation in Australia to promote a system of irrigation, a cause which he continued to champion. This remarkably productive period would have alone been a successful career, but it was only the beginning.
A leading Federalist, he was instrumental in garnering agreement for key elements of the draft Constitution among convention delegates and colonial premiers. Indeed it is questionable whether the Federation we sometimes take for granted would have happened without him being there.
After the draft Constitution had been ratified by referenda in Australia, he travelled to London as part of a delegation to smooth the passage of the Constitution Bill through Westminster. Their mission accomplished although not without hurdles, Deakin records perhaps apocryphally, that the delegation ‘seized each other’s hands and danced hand in hand in a ring around the centre of the room to express their jubilation.’ Acutely aware of the fleeting nature of political opportunity, he would later declare that:
To those who watched its inner workings, followed its fortunes as if their own, and lived the life of devotion to it day by day, [the] actual accomplishment [of Federation] must always appear to have been secured by a series of miracles.
Once Federation was attained, Deakin was key to ensuring that Edmund Barton became Australia’s first Prime Minister. And, after the heady inauguration celebrations in January 1901, Deakin and his colleagues set about the work of putting in place a Commonwealth administration and of building a new, democratic nation. The new nation bore his stamp , in not only its creation, but in its active formation and operation in the decade following.
And throughout his time in the Federal Parliament, he also found time to serve as the anonymous Australian Correspondent for the London Morning Post, writing some 600 letters, amounting to what I consider to be an extraordinary one million words of commentary on contemporary Australian life and politics.
Like all politicians he was by no means without flaw, and he never claimed otherwise. His was, by any reckoning, an extraordinary career.
He was an enigma in many ways. A defiant liberal, who argued for an active role for the state. A proud Australian Britain, who famously refused a peerage. He was a defining Australian character at the beginning of our new national life, at the start of the 20th Century.
And to talk to us today about Deakin’s extraordinary life and complex personality, I would like to welcome Dr David Headon.
David Headon is a cultural consultant and historian. He was formerly Director of the Centre for Australian Cultural Studies, Cultural Adviser to the National Capital Authority and History and Heritage Adviser for the Centenary of Canberra. He is now a Foundation Fellow at the Australian Studies Institute (ANU), a Parliamentary Library Associate and I understand also the Canberra Raiders club historian—so from the weekend before last I can’t that he’ll be getting too many pages out of it. But I imagine that given this, he will focus all his work on Deakin, and I congratulate him on his work thus far.
Thank you.