So Monstrous A Travesty: Chris Watson and the world's first national Labor government

By Ross McMullin

A century ago, Australia led the world in progressive social initiatives. Admiring visitors crossed the globe to inspect this advanced social laboratory. Chris Watson’s 1904 ministry, the culmination of Australian Labor’s astonishingly rapid rise, was the first national Labor government in the world.

This book is the story of that pioneering government.

Its accomplished prime minister, little known today, led a cabinet that included two future prime ministers, together with a practically blind ex-labourer and a defence minister who feuded with the British commander-in-chief of Australia’s defence forces. Watson’s cabinet also included the only MP to serve in a Labor ministry without being a member of the Labor Party, and the only MP to be expelled from Australia’s federal parliament.

This book explains how the government came to office, assesses its record and achievements, analyses its defeat, and illuminates its place in Australian history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Apr 19, 2004
• ISBN: 9781925693577

Ross McMullin

Ross McMullin is an award-winning historian, biographer, and storyteller. Life So Full of Promise is his sequel to Farewell, Dear People: biographies of Australia’s lost generation, which won national awards, including the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. His biographies include Pompey Elliott, which also won multiple awards, and Will Dyson: Australia’s radical genius, and he assembled Elliott’s extraordinary letters in Pompey Elliott at War: in his own words. His political histories comprise The Light on the Hill and So Monstrous a Travesty: Chris Watson and the world’s first national labour government. During the 1970s he played first-grade district cricket in Melbourne.

Book preview

SO MONSTROUS A TRAVESTY

Ross McMullin is a historian and biographer who has written extensively about the impact on Australia of its involvement in World War I. Dr McMullin’s books include his biographies, the award-winning Pompey Elliott and Will Dyson: Australia’s radical genius. His book Farewell, Dear People: biographies of Australia’s lost generation was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History.

Scribe Publications

18-20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409 USA

First published by Scribe 2004

Copyright © Ross McMullin 2004

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

9781925693577 (e-book)

CiP records for this title are available from the National Library of Australia.

scribepublications.com.au

scribepublications.co.uk

scribepublications.com

CONTENTS

Spelling Conventions

Abbreviations in the text

Prologue: First in the World, 23 April 1904

1 ‘Nothing But Admiration’:

The prime minister, April 1867–April 1904

2 ‘A Free Hand’ for Watson:

Forming the ministry, April 1904

3 ‘The Child Crying in the Dark’:

Reactions to the new government, April 1904

4 ‘The Surging Tide’:

Labor’s remarkable rise, 1891–April 1904

5 ‘Your Splendid Achievement Has Surprised the World’:

International comparisons

6 ‘One Step at a Time’:

Precarious start, May 1904

7 ‘Adept in Handling the Affairs of State’:

Governing the nation, April–August 1904

8 ‘A Strike Below the Belt’:

The Arbitration Bill and the government’s downfall, May–August 1904

9 ‘Unexpectedly Excellent … Clean Handed and Clear Headed’:

Assessing the government, August 1904

10 ‘The Great and Growing Army of Labor’:

Afterwards, August 1904–

Select Bibliography

Notes

Acknowledgments

SPELLING CONVENTIONS

The party that Chris Watson led was not known as the ALP in 1904. Its formal title varied from state to state, and in shortened form it was frequently referred to as both ‘Labor’ and ‘Labour’. This book has adopted the convention of referring to ‘Labor’ as the political party, and ‘the labour movement’ as the more broadly based entity which included the party.

Direct quotes, however, have been reproduced as in the original publication. This illuminates the variations, and not only when one newspaper mentions ‘the Labor Party’ and another refers to ‘the Labour party’. Other inconsistencies arise. Newspaper references to ‘honourable’ conduct, for example, contrast with the parliamentary Hansard’s record of the activities of its ‘honorable members’.

ABBREVIATIONS IN THE TEXT

FPLP  Federal Parliamentary Labor Party

GOC  General Officer Commanding

LRC  Labour Representation Committee

MHR  Member of the House of Representatives

MP  Member of Parliament

THC  Trades Hall Council

TLC  Trades and Labour Council

PROLOGUE

First in the World, 23 April 1904

IT WAS 3.00PM on Saturday, 23 April 1904. The Labor members of parliament had gathered excitedly in their meeting room at Parliament House, Melbourne. Before them stood their leader, 37-year-old Chris Watson. He was immaculately dressed as usual, his beard neatly trimmed. His shining blue eyes betrayed the significance of what he was about to say. The animated hubbub subsided swiftly when he began to speak.

Watson lost no time in confirming what his colleagues expected to hear. He had just returned from visiting the Governor-General, who had offered him a commission to form a government. He had accepted that offer.

The Labor members had every reason to be excited. This was the culmination of the Australian labour movement’s astonishingly rapid advance in the political arena. Watson and his colleagues would not only be forming Australia’s first federal Labor government. They would be creating the first national labour government in the world.

Chapter One

‘NOTHING BUT ADMIRATION’

The Prime Minister, April 1867–April 1904

THE NEW PRIME MINISTER’S NAME had not always been Chris Watson. Uncertainty about his earliest years persists. Every Australian prime minister has been born in Australia or the British Isles apart from Watson. He was born in Chile in 1867.

His parents, Johan Cristian Tanck and wife Martha, nee Minchin, met in New Zealand. Tanck was chief officer of the ship Julia that arrived at Port Chalmers, New Zealand, on Christmas Eve 1865. Johan and Martha were married there on 19 January 1866. They left New Zealand together on the Julia a fortnight later.

Their son, the future prime minister, was born on 9 April 1867 at the Chilean port of Valparaiso, where the Julia had been moored since its arrival eight days previously. Australia’s third prime minister was ‘born aboard a Chilean ship in a Chilean port to a Chilean-German father and a New Zealand-Irish mother’. He was named Johan Cristian Tanck like his father.

By the end of 1868 Martha had become a single mother. It is not clear whether she separated from her husband or became a widow. Her changed circumstances prompted Martha to move back to New Zealand with her young son. Before long she acquired a second husband. After another rapid romance she married George Watson, a 30-year-old Irish-born miner who had emigrated from Scotland, on 15 February 1869.

George and Martha proceeded to create a large family of their own. At some stage it was decided that the stepbrother living with this growing brood would adapt his given names and adopt George’s surname. Johan Cristian Tanck became John Christian Watson. It is unclear whether he took the initiative himself or his parents did it for him when he was a toddler. In the circumstances it was a convenient and hardly surprising change, of trifling significance apart from the issue that has been raised—long after his death—of whether he was eligible to sit in parliament.

The adoption of his stepfather’s British surname not only simplified his origins; it prevented any awkward questions being asked, once he developed parliamentary aspirations, about his eligibility. A profile of Australia’s new Prime Minister in the Argus, for example, stated that Watson had been born in Valparaiso while ‘his parents were on a visit from New Zealand’. It is possible that Watson blurred his past deliberately, but also conceivable that he was conveying what George and Martha had told him (and was unaware that his eligibility to sit in parliament might be open to question).

School ended for young Chris at the age of ten, when he began work as an assistant to railway construction workers. For a time he helped out on his stepfather’s farm. He was thirteen when he became an apprentice compositor at the North Otago Times. By 1882 he was working with the Oamaru Mail.

Losing his job was a watershed. Watson decided his prospects were better in Australia, and migrated to Sydney. He found work there as a stablehand at Government House. One day the Governor, Lord Carrington, initiated a brief chat and gave him sixpence for a beer. Watson spent it on a book.

In fact he liked a glass of ale. He also enjoyed cards and billiards, rugby and rowing. But he was also becoming a committed labour movement activist. He felt motivated to contribute to the cause, and was beginning to sense he had the attributes and aptitude to do it well.

After working briefly as a compositor at the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald, Watson transferred to the Australian Star in 1888. In New Zealand he had been a member of the local typographers’ union, and he quickly became prominent in equivalent associations in Sydney. In January 1890, still only 22, he became a delegate to the New South Wales Trades and Labour Council (TLC), an elected position, shortly after marrying Ada Jane Low, a 30-year-old English-born dressmaker.

These were heady days for Chris Watson. He became actively involved in top-level discussions about whether the labour movement should involve itself directly in politics by getting its own representatives elected to parliament. His view was that it should. What he said was influential. The TLC decided to endorse candidates for the forthcoming New South Wales election. Watson then participated in the debates about the platform and organisational structure of Labor-in-politics, and how its candidates should operate once they were elected.

In April 1891 he became the inaugural secretary of the newly formed Labor Electoral League branch at West Sydney. In that electorate he was the chief organiser of the Labor campaign at the election later that year. Some electorates contained multiple seats; there were four seats to be decided in West Sydney. At the election Labor won all four. Of the 141 seats to be decided across New South Wales, the embryonic Labor Party won no fewer than 35. It was a stunning debut. Watson had played a substantial role.

His rare talent was rapidly recognised. In mid-1892 he became both TLC president and chairman of the Labor Party in New South Wales after resolving a thorny dispute between them. He had just turned 25. Shortly afterwards he led a deputation—on horseback—to Parliament House to persuade Labor’s fractious MPs they should support a motion denouncing the government’s repressive intervention in a bitter mining dispute at Broken Hill. With the cohesion of Labor’s inexperienced parliamentary contingent increasingly undermined by their opponents’ artful traps, and escalating internal upheaval threatening to blight the new party’s prospects, a crucial unity conference was held in November 1893. Watson chaired it. About 200 delegates attended. There had been no more representative or more significant gathering of the labour movement in New South Wales. It was rowdy, often acrimonious and ultimately decisive in establishing innovative and enduring mechanisms that enabled the rank and file to control Labor’s MPs. Watson chaired this turbulent assembly with aplomb.

His prominence at such a remarkably young age resulted from his temperament as well as his ability. Genuine and humane, patient and reliable in his dealings with people, Watson radiated the calm wisdom of an old head on young shoulders while retaining a handsome and athletic appearance. Not quite six feet tall, he had blue eyes and dark brown hair, moustache and beard. He was articulate and astute, tactful and practical. The way he calmly and wisely influenced developments as Labor refined its structures and procedures through difficult controversies during the 1890s ensured that his leadership capacity was increasingly acknowledged.

Watson had … an effortless ability to relate humanely with practically everyone he knew and an instinctive capacity to instil in others the respect for himself that he had for them. Intelligent and liberal, leadership came naturally to him, the more effective because he could neither patronise nor scorn anyone, reinforced by physical strength, a well-adjusted personality and a down-to-earthness that stopped far short of cynicism.

Watson stood for parliament himself at the 1894 election. He could no doubt have arranged a safe seat for himself, but recognised that Labor needed to boost its appeal in electorates that were uncharted territory for the party. He agreed to contest the seat of Young in south-western New South Wales. His dedicated campaigning was rewarded with success. In parliament the new member for Young soon became a prominent assistant leader, loyally supporting ex-boilermaker Jim McGowen, who had been one of Labor’s 1891 originals and was now leading the party. Watson frequently negotiated with the government on McGowen’s behalf as their party pursued its policy of ‘support in return for concessions’, an understandable approach with Labor holding the balance of power in the Legislative Assembly. Labor’s strategy was open and straightforward. If the government enacted measures Labor wanted, support would continue; if it ignored Labor priorities, Labor would simply transfer its parliamentary numbers elsewhere.

The federation movement posed complex challenges for Watson and his party. There were pronounced Labor misgivings about the draft constitution that was the proposed basis for federation. Watson shared them and campaigned against it. Once it was endorsed by majority verdict of the people, however, he accepted that Labor would have to accept it. It was not only the diverse opinions held by prominent Labor identities about the merits of the draft constitution and about the appropriate approach for Labor that made federation a difficult issue for Watson. Most voters in Young endorsed the constitution. Watson’s criticisms of it, with a New South Wales election imminent, seemed to have jeopardised his parliamentary future. Nonetheless he was re-elected again, underlining the regard and respect the electors of Young had for their sitting member.

With federation now an unavoidable reality, however unpalatable the constitution underpinning it, Labor had to formulate its response. Watson involved himself in this process. He was prominent at the intercolonial Labor conference in January 1900 that established the party on a federal basis with a national platform of policy objectives for the first national election. At that election he stood, successfully, as Labor’s candidate for the lower house electorate of Bland, which included the area he had represented in the New South Wales parliament.

On 8 May 1901 Labor’s newly elected federal MPs assembled in a stuffy basement room at Parliament House, Melbourne, for the first caucus meeting of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party (FPLP). At this meeting they elected Watson as their leader. Having New South Wales, the oldest and most populated colony, as his state of origin was a big help. Labor had advanced further there than in any other colony, and no state had provided more Labor members to the House of Representatives. Watson’s elevation was also assisted by the absence from the first FPLP meeting of McGowen, who had been defeated in the federal seat he had contested.

However, Watson was now esteemed beyond his home state. His conspicuous leadership qualities soon impressed all his caucus colleagues. Perceptive, patient and dedicated, he worked long hours and was good at instilling a cohesive collective spirit in caucus. This was no easy task, considering the wide range of backgrounds, views, enthusiasms and priorities his colleagues brought to the FPLP. His leadership success owed much to his genuine charm, which disarmed much of the contrariness he encountered, but ‘never affected the resolute steel of his decisions’. Unassuming and unpretentious, Watson was praised for not being one of those politicians who liked the sound of his own voice. He preferred to speak only when he had something to say; for a leader, he spoke sparingly. Moreover, when in Melbourne for parliamentary sittings he stayed not in a grand residence or hotel but in an East Melbourne boarding house with a dozen caucus colleagues. In federal parliament he became widely liked and respected within and beyond his party for his ability, integrity and, in particular, his unflagging affability.

This latter attribute was especially significant while he was Labor leader because of the parliamentary situation. Watson’s party was vying with two other parties, the Protectionists and the Free Traders. Each of these non-Labor parties, as their names suggest, regarded the tariff issue as paramount. Labor did not. Watson was a protectionist, but some of his colleagues preferred free trade. Throughout the first decade of federal parliament none of the three parties managed to achieve a majority either in the lower house, the House of Representatives, or in the upper house, the Senate. In this era of intractable parliamentary

Reviews for So Monstrous A Travesty

[miaculpa-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Australian history is littered with events that Australians barely remember but which had great repercussions around the world. This includes the rich labour history of Australia, including the creation of the eight hour day, the Sunshine Harvester Case, which legally introduced minimum wages, and the first elected national labour government in the world ("the dawn of government by the common man" as it has been called).Chris Watson (or John Watson as I have also seen him referred as) was the head of the first elected national labour government in the world, way back in 1904, and "So Monstrous a Travesty" covers the Chilean-born Watson's historic role, what his Government did in their short time in power (not a great deal but not wholly their fault), their fall and the messy aftermath where Watson and other ALP leading lights like Billy Hughes leaving the ALP during WWI over the issue of conscription. Of course, it wouldn't be the Australian Labor Party without recriminations and lifelong hatred between former friends.