Andrew Fisher: Prime Minister of Australia
by David Day
(Imprint, 2008, 512 pages)
Given the fate of those who have previously started on the task of writing an Andrew Fisher biography, David Day could be considered brave to have taken on the task. Both Dennis Murphy in the 1980s and Clem Lloyd in the 1990s died while still in the midst of research; fortunately, Day has survived long enough to complete the long overdue story of the three-time Labor Prime Minister.
The lack of a Fisher biography has, in Day's view, benefitted Fisher's contemporaries, Alfred Deakin and Billy Hughes. Day comments that "historians have largely formed their view of Fisher based upon the biographies of Hughes and Deakin, which have tended to downplay Fisher's role during these years and enhance the role of their subjects".
Having served as a minister in the short-lived Watson administration in 1904, the first government Fisher headed was in office in 1908-09. All governments, until the Fusion of the non-Labor parties in 1909 created a two-party system, were minority ones. Fusion was expected to blunt the prospects of Labor forming government.
Instead, the first post-Fusion election in 1910 delivered Fisher's Labor a landslide victory. The result was not only significant for Australia, but "it was important also in the history of the world, with Fisher's victory being the first time anywhere that an avowedly socialist government had been elected to power".
Narrow defeat for Labor in 1913, when the election was accompanied by referenda to increase Commonwealth powers, was followed by victory in 1914. However, between the calling and the holding of that election the First World War had begun, placing Fisher in the role of wartime leader to which he was clearly not suited. His last spell of 14 months in the top job was not a happy time for Fisher as he found "his optimism eroded by the war, the machinations of his colleagues and the increasing frailty of his body". He quit, became High Commissioner in London, and left the far more bellicose Hughes in charge.
For an Australian Prime Minister, it is actually remarkable how little of his life Fisher spent down under. He was an Australian resident from 1885 to 1915 (from the age of 23 to 53), and was a member of either the Queensland or Federal Parliaments for more than two thirds of that time. He had grown up near Kilmarnock in Scotland, before emigrating to the mining fields of Queensland and then spent his later years, as both High Commissioner and retiree in north London. While an Australian resident, he had lengthy visits to Britain in both 1902 and 1911. After his permanent shift back, he returned just once to Australia, for a few months in 1921.
Labor like to mythologise that they have always been the party of the Australian nationalists, but Fisher made it very clear that when he returned to Britain he was going "home".
Also challenging Labor's self image is the striking degree that support for the White Australia Policy was the most important campaigning message for their early MPs. Fisher was always unequivocal on the racial point, saying in 1909 that "he would not be content 'until the last coloured man had disappeared'." One strategy to achieve this end that he pursued as opposition leader was to block a Deakin Government measure to allow Asian Australians to be eligible for the old age pension.
It might surprise some readers to learn that Fisher's Labor was more averse to government debt than some other parties at that time. Fisher objected when the Deakin Government wanted to borrow £3.5 million to fund some naval boats. Day comments that the Deakin proposal "would squander the healthy financial condition of the Treasury, which had been restored under Fisher's careful administration" and that, "on principle, Fisher opposed non-productive expenditure being paid for with loans".
Later, when back in government, Fisher had to confront the problem of where the money would come from for nation-building schemes. His Treasurer Hughes put it nicely when he said that if the funds were to come from revenue then "God help the people" and if from debt then "God help us!"
The common historical narrative of the first federal decade also tends to overlook the fact that "on the contentious issue of the tariff ... the Labor Party was divided between protectionists and free traders". In the first Labor Government in 1904 Fisher was given the ministry of trade and customs where he showed himself to be "a free trader in principle but a protectionist in practice".
A fascinating aspect of this book is its demonstration of how different the lifestyles of politicians and Prime Ministers were a century ago. Prime Ministers could be absent from the country for months attending overseas conferences, or undertaking trips of a semi-leisure nature and in 1910-11 there was a ten month period without a parliamentary sitting.
Despite representing Wide Bay in Queensland, Fisher resided in Melbourne and, for much of his time as Prime Minister, Fisher, his wife, his growing brood of children, his mother-in-law and three unmarried sisters-in-law lived in a three bedroom house in South Melbourne, from which Fisher walked, or caught public transport, to his city office. The press also adopted different methods, with Day noting that "he lived in a gentler age, with the journalists deciding not to confront him on the wharf but to cable him a list of questions that he could consider".
However, not every aspect of politics was gentler in that era. Day describes the gruelling schedules that were part of election campaigns, visiting town after town, receiving deputations and delivering a speech in every one. He records that "on one day alone, Fisher, spoke fourteen times, while he travelled on everything from a train to a coach and buggy, and even on a railway tricycle and on horseback".
Certainly, a striking number of politicians of the era succumbed to early deaths. One final feature of elections of the era is worth mentioning. In 1910, Deakin, keen to learn results on election night, heads to the Melbourne GPO to await the arrival of telegrams.
Fisher had a number of impressive personal views, objecting to the conferring of honours and to dressing up in ridiculous traditional outfits. Day captures well the conflict that can often befall someone where sticking to one's personal principles can cause offence to others. In the end, Fisher accepted the position on the Privy Council and the need to wear fancy clothes for the coronation of George V.
There are also humanising elements of Fisher such as his "tendency to defer work until some deadline made its completion imperative". His private secretary, Malcolm Shepherd, had to adopt a variety of strategies to get Fisher to focus on the drafts of speeches or to sign correspondence. Shepherd's memoir is an important source for Fisher's Prime Ministership, although Day notes that while it provides "the best close-up view ... it suffers from the common predilection of private secretaries to portray themselves as the real lord of the manor". Even at the time, there were articles that "portrayed Shepherd as the brains behind Fisher".
Fisher had an interesting mix of hobbies including chess, art and golf. The last of these he only took up around 1912, the same year he purchased a much larger home in East St Kilda. Included in Fisher's papers is a scoring card of a round of golf that he played at the Riversdale Golf Club in 1912. His playing partner was the 26 year old journalist, Keith Murdoch, who becomes a significant figure in the narrative from that point on. It is Fisher who commissions Murdoch to go to Gallipoli in 1915 and provide some accurate information on the real state of that campaign. Murdoch's eventual report proved to be a "political bombshell" that forced the British Government to accept that success was never going to be achieved there.
By the time the troops were withdrawn Fisher was no longer Prime Minister. He had been driven by a desire to show that Labor could be just as patriotic as the conservatives, but "this was not the purpose for which Fisher had devoted himself to a life of politics".
Day's third biography of a Prime Minister, following his studies of Curtin and Chifley, is an important contribution to the nation's political history. However, the book is not without flaws, the most irritating of which is that each chapter starts with a paragraph that attempts to capture Fisher's end-of-life situation, trapped upstairs in his Hampstead home, suffering from severe dementia. While a couple of these passages are movingly written, they tend to cloud our view of the active, energetic and ambitious younger Fisher.
Andrew Fisher, leaving Adelaide railway station by car.
Fisher is seated in the rear right hand side of the vehicle, ca. 1912
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