Maurice Blackburn: champion of the people

By David Day

[Maurice Blackburn] brought into public life a rare character, complete indifference to personal consequences, an uncommon scholarship, great zeal for humanity, and a firm belief, which I am happy to share, that men are immeasurably more important than laws. —Robert Menzies

[Maurice Blackburn] served the people who suffered injustice … He pleaded their cause, and he engaged in the study of how best he could serve them … He would allow nothing to turn him from what he considered to be the right, and however unpopular he might become, however discomforting his attitude might be to his colleagues, the divine monitor within him impelled him to stand for what in his soul he believed. — John Curtin

After his father died when Maurice Blackburn was a child, he was brought up by a mother who was descended from Melbourne’s gentry and was determined to raise him as a gentleman who would achieve greatness as a judge or a prime minister. However, Blackburn had humbler aims. With the support of his wife, he wanted instead ‘to make life better for the ordinary men and women of the country’. He went on to do so, defending the rights of working people as a leading barrister in the courts and as a politician in the parliaments of Melbourne and Canberra, and became much loved and admired across the political spectrum.

A socialist and internationalist all his life, who was twice expelled from the Labor Party for his principles, Blackburn became a leading opponent of conscription in both world wars, a supporter of rights for women, an advocate for peace, and a tireless campaigner for transforming Australia so that it served the interests of all its people.

Part love story, part gripping political thriller, the poignant story of the much-lauded Maurice Blackburn exposes a time when influence-peddling was rife, when political possibilities seemed limitless, and when a man of principle could still make a big difference to the course of Australian politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Nov 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781925938067

David Day

David Day is a bestselling and prize-winning biographer and historian, several of whose books have been published to acclaim in the United States and Britain and have been translated into numerous languages. Among his many academic posts, David Day has been a junior research fellow at Clare College in Cambridge, a by-fellow at Churchill College in Cambridge, and a visiting fellow at the University of Aberdeen and the Australian National University. He spent three years as a visiting professor at University College, Dublin, and two years at the University of Tokyo. He is currently an honorary associate in the history program at La Trobe University. Maurice Blackburn: champion of the people is his twentieth book.

Book preview

Maurice Blackburn

DAVID DAY is a bestselling and prize-winning biographer and historian, several of whose books have been published to acclaim in the United States and Britain and have been translated into numerous languages. His previous works include biographies of Andrew Fisher, John Curtin, Ben Chifley, and Paul Keating. Among his many academic posts, David Day has been a junior research fellow at Clare College in Cambridge, a by-fellow at Churchill College in Cambridge, and a visiting fellow at the University of Aberdeen and the Australian National University. He spent three years as a visiting professor of Australian history at University College, Dublin, and two years as professor of Australian studies at the University of Tokyo. He is currently an honorary associate in the history program at La Trobe University. Maurice Blackburn: champion of the people is his twentieth book.

Scribe Publications

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

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

First published by Scribe 2019

Copyright © David Day 2019

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.

9781925713787 (hardback)

9781925938067 (e-book)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

scribepublications.com.au

scribepublications.co.uk

Dedicated to the memory of John Moore, 1949–2019

‘Maurice Blackburn was a great scholar,

a great gentleman, and a great Australian’

Sir John Vincent Barry

Contents

1. Inglewood

2. Typhoid

3. Toorak Preparatory

4. Melbourne Grammar

5. University

6. Teaching

7. Law School

8. The Socialist Turn

9. A Perfect Match

10. True Love

11. Australia at War

12. The Second Referendum

13. Seeking Peace

14. The Blackburn Declaration

15. Wren’s Men

16. The Depression

17. Canberra

18. Expelled

19. Another War

20. Independent

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Notes

Chapter 1

Inglewood

To 1885

‘when the red wine sparkles bright’

On 1 April 1944, a straggle of people made their way along the narrow road from Box Hill station to the nearby cemetery, with its boundary of pine trees enclosing the neatly arranged memorials. Beneath a threatening sky, the walkers weaved among the private and official cars that had brought friends and family and a bevy of government ministers to farewell Maurice Blackburn. The political activist, lawyer, and politician had been a modest man who had devoted his life to the betterment of his fellow Australians. He had been the most independent of politicians and had the distinction of twice being expelled by the Labor Party for taking a stand on matters of principle. Blackburn was described by a journalist as being both ‘the most lovable and most fearless man’ in the federal parliament. His grieving widow was so upset by the way her husband had been treated by political friends and foes alike that she spurned Labor prime minister John Curtin when he offered his condolences. The politicians had come from Canberra to pay their respects at the brief graveside service, joining judges and trade-union officials, Catholics and communists, and hundreds of ordinary people whose lives he’d touched. ¹ Their sorrow was exacerbated by the ignominious manner of Blackburn’s recent parliamentary defeat and the untimely nature of his death.

*

The making of Maurice Blackburn began in the central Victorian town of Inglewood, about 45 kilometres north-west of Bendigo. It was one of many towns that had suddenly sprung into existence in the wake of the great gold discoveries of the 1850s. Aboriginal hunting grounds had been swept away in the 1830s and 1840s by gun-toting squatters and their sheep, who were pushed aside in their turn by the swarm of people scouring the unfenced land for the glint of gold. The newly established town of Inglewood, with its hastily built hotels and stores of wood and canvas, counted 40,000 inhabitants by 1860, only to have the gold-seekers move on as the easy pickings of alluvial gold petered out. The precious metal was still there in abundance, but it was caught in the quartz rock and buried deep down, which required companies with capital to explore the depths and erect the crushing machinery to separate the ounces of gold from the tons of quartz. The industry provided a solid economic foundation for Inglewood after the town was partially burnt to the ground in 1862, destroying its commercial centre. ² There was still money to be made from the deep leads, while a substantial Chinese camp continued to exist on the outskirts of the town. Some of the Chinese picked over the mullock heaps for overlooked nuggets. Others turned to market gardening or to shopkeeping in the rebuilt town, which now boasted solid buildings of brick and stone. ³ The two-storey Bank of Victoria building in the town’s main street was one of the most imposing, and it was there that Maurice Blackburn was born on 19 November 1880. ⁴

Maurice’s parents were as solid as the new town. His father, also Maurice Blackburn, was the son of the late city surveyor in Melbourne, James Blackburn, who’d enjoyed a successful career in the colonies as an architect and engineer. Starting in Tasmania in the 1830s, James designed many of that colony’s finest roads, bridges, and churches, as well as a water-supply scheme for Hobart. Before arriving in Tasmania, he’d been an inspector of sewers in London, while speculating in property on the side. The dark secret of the Blackburn family was that James had been sent to Tasmania in chains after being convicted of forging a cheque to cover his debts and being sentenced to transportation for life. His wife, Rachel, and their daughter followed him out. His talents as an engineer and architect proved so useful to the colonial administration that he was given an early pardon and was able to describe himself again as ‘gentleman’. This didn’t stop him being horse-whipped in a Hobart street by a disgruntled builder, upset over an unpaid bill. Yet James’s success allowed him to buy land in Campbell Town, in the mid-east of the island, where his son Maurice was born in 1848. ⁵

When James and his family sailed across Bass Strait to Melbourne in early 1849, he set up shop in Collins Street as an ‘Architect and Civil Engineer’. The recently established settlement desperately needed his expertise. Its drinking and bathing water came from the heavily polluted Yarra River and was carted in barrels to householders and businesses. The resulting waterborne typhoid had already taken three of his children. In response, Blackburn helped establish the Water Company, which set up pumping equipment in a specially designed building next to the river on the corner of Elizabeth and Flinders streets. To the annoyance of the existing water carriers, the company filtered the river water through sand and charcoal and sold it for a penny a barrel. James’s enterprise was immediately rewarded by Melbourne appointing him as the city surveyor, which saw him explore the nearby ranges for pristine streams that could be dammed to provide clean water for the fast-growing settlement. ⁶ Unfortunately, his plans were still being implemented when he was also stricken with typhoid and died in 1854. He was buried as a member of St Mark’s Anglican church in Fitzroy, which was yet another church he’d designed. Only five of his ten children survived him. ⁷ Maurice was the youngest of them all, being only about five years old at the time of his father’s death.

While James’s oldest son followed him into architecture, young Maurice chose the more-certain employment that could be found as an employee of the Bank of Victoria. With the wealth from gold and a fast-expanding population, it was a good time to be a banker. Presumably, he didn’t inform the bank of his father’s conviction for forging a cheque when he applied for the job at the age of seventeen. ⁸ In fact, he may not even have known of his father’s conviction, for such things were a matter of shame during much of the 19th and 20th centuries. If he did know of it, he certainly didn’t pass the information onto his own son, who was unaware of it until late in life. ⁹ Whatever the state of his knowledge, the young teller was soon appearing in court cases of his own, ironically as a bank witness against people forging cheques. ¹⁰ In the same way that he made a credible witness for a succession of magistrates, he must have made a good impression on his employer, because he was gradually promoted until by May 1876 he was made acting manager of the bank’s Inglewood branch at the age of just 27, with the position becoming permanent later that year. ¹¹

As a bank manager, Maurice saw himself as one of Inglewood’s gentlemen, and he took his civic duties seriously. When the railway was extended from Bendigo to Inglewood in 1876, he was one of the local worthies who sold tickets at a guinea each for the celebratory banquet presided over by the colony’s governor, with the ticket providing entrance for a ‘lady and gentleman’. He was also involved in the political affairs of the area, with his name appearing several times in the local newspaper as a staunch supporter of the liberal-minded Constitutional Association, which was established in January 1880 to run candidates for the colony’s Legislative Assembly. Maurice was on the committee of the Inglewood hospital too, serving as its president for a time, and he helped to organise the town’s fundraising fetes and competed successfully in one of its athletic events. He was treasurer of both the cricket club and the racing club, acted as timekeeper at race meetings, and helped form the rifle club, despite being an indifferent shot. ¹² When the government suggested that rifle clubs form the basis of a volunteer militia, Maurice was an enthusiastic supporter of the proposal. ¹³ In addition, he was a member of the Inglewood branch of the United Grand Lodge of England. ¹⁴ He was in great demand by organisations that wanted his skills and social standing to enhance their committees, but he also was an initiator of some of these groups. His standing in the community would have been enhanced when he was finally married at the age of 32 to a well-connected young woman from Melbourne. ¹⁵

Maurice’s wife was 27-year-old Thomasann Cole McCrae, the sixth daughter of a former British army officer, Captain Alexander McCrae, who’d visited Sydney and New Zealand in the 1820s and arrived in Melbourne as a free immigrant in 1841, bringing with him a small prefabricated timber house. ¹⁶ Alexander was a member of the Scottish gentry, with his forebears having made a fortune from slave plantations in the West Indies. But he was far from rich. According to family tradition, his father, William Gordon McCrae, had published an anonymous denunciation of slavery, which led to him being disinherited when his authorship was discovered. However, as Brenda Niall has revealed, his relative impoverishment was also due to a less noble cause. Despite a good education and having qualified as a lawyer and married into a wealthy family, the indolent William lived beyond his means and was only saved from bankruptcy by his in-laws’ securing him a minor post in the customs service. Those valuable family connections later secured a position in the army for his son, the young Alexander. And it was the McCraes’ class position that ensured Alexander and his siblings were accepted into the colonial elite when they landed ashore in Melbourne. Indeed, Alexander was one of the founders of the Melbourne Club and remained a member of the settlement’s upper class despite being impoverished by the colonial depression of the 1840s. Because ‘breeding’ and being a ‘gentleman’ had real meaning, he soon secured a position in the treasury department and was then made postmaster-general after Victoria was hived off from New South Wales as a separate colony in 1851. It was after his fortunes had recovered that Thomasann was born on 25 June 1852. ¹⁷

Thomasann spent a large part of her childhood living with a married sister, rather than with her many siblings in her parents’ eight-room timber home in the suburb of Richmond, before being enrolled in a private girls’ school in St Kilda. The exclusive establishment was run by three sisters who insisted the girls spoke French in class and ensured proper deportment was prominent on the curriculum. The well-bred girls were instructed on ‘the correct way to enter and leave a room, complete with curtsies’, so as to ‘fit the young ladies for their future social life’. It was during her time at this school that Thomasann also became an accomplished singer and pianist and joined the choir at St Kilda’s Anglican church. ¹⁸ Just as her future husband was raised to regard himself as a gentleman, Thomasann was raised to regard herself as a lady. Yet she also hankered to be a professional singer. She sang in churches and on the stage in Melbourne and in country towns, performing in both classical concerts and popular musicals and pantomimes. Among the family papers are two photographs of Thomasann by the renowned photographer John William Lindt, who had set up a studio in Collins Street in 1876, where he photographed portraits of theatre stars and leading members of Melbourne society. It was also where he developed his well-known photographs of the landscape and of the captured Kelly gang. Lindt took studio shots of Thomasann in early 1877, when she was performing in the perennially favourite Christmas pantomime Bluebeard at the Bijou Theatre in Bourke Street. ¹⁹

It wasn’t in the pantomime that Maurice first saw Thomasann. They’d been in the same social set when growing up and were sufficiently known to each other for Thomasann to send a note of commiseration to Inglewood after the death of one of Maurice’s relatives. It seems that their subsequent relationship developed as a consequence of that note. The strong-willed Thomasann took some time to be won over by the young bank manager. ²⁰ But it was hard to make a living on the stage, whether in pantomimes or her preferred classical music, and singing in popular theatre for raucous audiences wasn’t something that Maurice would have encouraged for his wife. Yet she would never abandon her love of performing. She would simply confine herself to more-sedate audiences in churches or recital halls. Just three years after the pantomime at the Bijou, she and Maurice were married at St Peter’s Anglican church in East Melbourne on 27 January 1880. Thomasann’s aunt Georgiana McCrae was one of the witnesses. Despite her illegitimate birth and limited income, the elderly aunt and sometime portrait painter was the acknowledged daughter of the 5th Duke of Gordon. ²¹ The choice of the church, located between Maurice’s childhood origins in Fitzroy and Thomasann’s in Richmond, also allowed their siblings and friends to attend the celebration. Of their parents, only Maurice’s mother was still alive. Now living near the church in East Melbourne, she had been ‘ailing for many months’ and may not have been well enough to be present. In fact, she died just weeks later, leaving an estate of nearly £3000, including two houses and land in George Street, Fitzroy, with some of it being inherited by Maurice. ²²

When he brought his new bride home to Inglewood by steam train, their luggage was taken to the living quarters atop the bank building on a corner of the town’s main street. ²³ It would have been a great contrast to Thomasann’s life of relative privilege in Melbourne. Now, she was living in a small town that lacked the wide range of cultural and other diversions that were available in the colony’s capital. Whatever her disappointments, Inglewood remained a town of some wealth and continued to enjoy the physical endowments bequeathed to it by the retreating gold rush. It had a reservoir for clean water, several churches, about a dozen hotels, a mechanics’ institute with a library, a newspaper office, a state school and two religious schools, a botanic garden, a race course, a shooting range, a court house, a fire station, several masonic organisations, and a hospital. The line of shops on its main street, most of them shaded by verandahs, catered for a population that had slumped from nearly 3,000 in 1861 to just 1,200 in 1881, yet Maurice would later boast that while in Inglewood he’d been a member of more than 50 organisations. ²⁴

Although Maurice could point out to his bride all the signs of wealth and civilisation, the pages of the Inglewood Advertiser told another side of the town’s story, with alarming reports of diseases that were stalking the picturesque settlement. In April 1880, when Thomasann was pregnant with their first child, the newspaper questioned why such a ‘thinly populated place’ as Victoria, enjoying a ‘temperate and salubrious climate’, should be visited by epidemics that were believed ‘peculiar to crowded cities’. Typhoid was of particular concern, with several cases having been recently reported in Inglewood. As a young assistant teacher from the state school lay on her deathbed with the disease, the council called a special meeting to discuss the issue in the hope of stemming the epidemic. The health officer repeated the common belief that the germ was ‘taken into the system by the breath’, not realising that the disease was usually spread by drinking water infected by the germ-laden faeces of a typhoid patient or carrier. Although the proximity of drinking wells or underground water tanks and cesspits was often the cause, the health officer believed that the germ could be kept at bay by rigorous disinfection of houses and drains. ²⁵ With his own father having died of typhoid, the repeated presence of the disease in Inglewood would have been of particular concern to Maurice and presumably helped to prompt his involvement on the hospital committee.

Although Thomasann would not have gained entry to some of the town’s male-only organisations, her name soon started to appear in the pages of the Inglewood Advertiser. Often it was in relation to the activities of St Augustine’s Anglican church, where Maurice was a church warden and Thomasann took over as leader of the choir. In July 1882, she was one of the three principal singers who performed in an evening’s religious entertainment, with the three ‘singing the various parts in a way that left little or anything to be desired’, while her performance on another occasion ‘quite took the hearts of the auditory’. When the Bishop of Ballarat came to lecture in the town’s Royal Hall, she helped provide the entertainment, singing two solos and a duet. And she led the Anglican choir when it performed in the hospital’s female ward as part of a service to raise funds for the institution. She also sang solos in the Royal Hall on behalf of the Wesleyan church’s building fund, with a newspaper correspondent reporting that she ‘was in excellent voice, and her appearance on the platform elicited hearty applause as usual’. When a ‘Fancy Fair and Bazaar’ was held to raise funds for the mechanics’ institute, Thomasann went along dressed as ‘Cherry-ripe’. ²⁶ These contributions to the town’s cultural life continued despite the birth of four children in relatively quick succession.

Maurice McCrae Blackburn was the first of the four, being born on 9 November 1880, just ten months after their marriage. His brother, James Gordon McCrae, and sisters, Gertrude Agnes McCrae and Elsie Thomas Ann McCrae, followed over the next five years. The inclusion of McCrae in all their names was a reminder to the children of their well-bred lineage and the social standards they were expected to uphold. Maurice’s early childhood in their home atop the bank can only be imagined. There are no letters or diaries and little in the way of reminiscences to help paint the picture. His father was often absent, fulfilling his duties as a bank manager or occupied with the many organisations with which he was involved, whether it was the rifle or racing club, the hospital or the masonic lodge, or simply socialising at one of the town’s hotels. It meant that Thomasann did most of the parenting. She would have been guided by her own upbringing and strict schooling. Maurice and his siblings would have been told how to speak correctly and how to behave, so that they could be accepted by ‘society’, with a beating being used to punish any transgressions. Maurice would later recall that a beating by his mother was a regular feature of his life until he finally brought it to a stop at the age of 16, while his future wife would describe her mother-in-law as ‘a temperamental woman of very strong character [who] completely dominated the lives of her four children’. ²⁷

Thomasann would have employed a servant to help with the domestic chores. ²⁸ Unlike the matriarchs of many other families, particularly in the bush, she didn’t expect Maurice and his siblings to help with the housework, which she would have regarded as being below their preordained station in life. But she did expect them to behave in a manner appropriate to their status. One of the occasions when they were together as a family was when the parents took their children to services at St Augustine’s church and to its Sunday School, where Thomasann trained its choir. Although Maurice was too young to have started school in Inglewood, his mother would have done her best to lay the groundwork for his later education, presumably leavened with a good helping of Bible stories and perhaps emulating her own schooling by having them speak French, a language in which Maurice would become proficient. To keep the children away from unsavoury influences, newspapers were not permitted in the house and the four were forbidden to go to the theatre. ²⁹ At the same time, there is a suggestion that Maurice may sometimes have escaped the attention of his mother and the servant and enjoyed some of the freedom that was available to rural children, with his daughter later saying that four-year-old Maurice had once wandered off into the bush from their home in the town’s main street and was found and given shelter overnight in the local Chinese camp. ³⁰

Although the Chinese suffered physical attacks on some goldfields and would suffer increasing discrimination in the colonies, culminating in the ‘White Australia’ policy of 1901, they were treated with relative tolerance in Inglewood during the 1880s. A newspaper reported that the Chinese New Year of 1885 was marked during the day by a ‘liberal distribution of fruit and other eatables’ by the Chinese to those children of the town ‘who chose to accept them’, while at night the Chinese camp was the scene of ‘a banquet after the Celestial fashion’. Several of the Chinese men in the camp were married to European women, while others cohabited with women and girls who were sometimes brought before the court for vagrancy or other offences. ³¹ This exotic world was part of the backdrop to Maurice’s childhood, with the existence of the camp, enclosed by a rough fence of tree branches, giving it a certain fascination. While the Chinese encountered hostility in colonial Australia, they could also carve out a respectable place for themselves. In 1884, St Augustine’s hosted ‘a fashionable marriage’ between the local Chinese businessman Charlie Ah Ak and his Irish bride from Melbourne, followed by a sumptuous banquet at the camp, complete with a metre-high wedding cake. ³² The church was also the scene of a more-traditional celebration in March 1886, when the Bishop of Ballarat ‘administered the rite of confirmation to fifty-two young persons of both sexes’, with Maurice’s mother being one of them. ³³

The confirmation service was held just as Maurice’s childhood in Inglewood was coming to an abrupt end. In April 1886, his father was promoted to manage the bank at Avoca, 75 kilometres south-west. The family’s departure was marked by a banquet in the long dining room of the old Pelican Hotel and the presentation of an illuminated address by the leading citizens of the district, which included two state politicians. By the light of kerosene lamps, and with the wallpaper peeling from the hotel’s canvas-lined walls, ³⁴ the Blackburns were regaled with songs and recitations, one of which went, in part:

The twelve long years that you have been in pleasant Inglewood,

In all that time you’ve never done, ought but for its good,

We shall miss your morning greeting,

We shall miss your frank good night,

We shall miss you at the festive board,

When the red wine sparkles bright.

Among the many speeches, Maurice’s father was praised as someone ‘who would speak his mind’ and had ‘always thoroughly identified himself with all institutions and public movements calculated to advance the social and commercial interests of the neighbourhood’. His mother’s departure was equally regretted, as she was responsible for ensuring the continuation of the choral service at the Anglican church, and was ‘highly esteemed for her many amiable qualities in social life’ and for contributing her ‘soul stirring melody’ to so many charitable entertainments. The next morning, the family were accompanied to the station by a crowd of well-wishers, who cheered them on their way to Avoca. ³⁵

Chapter 2

Typhoid

1886–1887

‘the insidious attacks of this malignant disease’

Gold had been found in Avoca a few years prior to the Inglewood rush, and both towns had settled down as a base for mining companies and a service centre for the surrounding sheep and wheat properties. By the mid-1880s, the towns were similar in size and wealth. Avoca was described in 1886 as ‘a picturesque little town, situated near the source of the river of the same name’ and close to the Pyrenees, with a population that ‘includes a good percentage of miners and a considerable sprinkling of Chinese fossickers’. ¹ The town was distinguished by having two newspapers, which was a reflection of the irascible personality of the Avoca Free Press’s proprietor, Thomas McHugh, who established his paper as a loud rival to the Avoca Mail. With the two newspapers shouting at each other, the town had a sense of being divided into two warring camps, and the main street seemed to emphasise the division. Instead of Inglewood’s relatively narrow main street, where a conversation could be held across its width, Avoca had a main street that was wide enough to accommodate a turning dray of 20 bullocks. Even a shouted greeting would have trouble reaching someone on the opposite footpath. ²

The single-storey Bank of Victoria was one of the town’s oldest buildings. It had been built in 1854 at the intersection of the two main roads connecting Avoca to other goldfields towns, Maryborough to the east and Ballarat to the south-east. Steam trains took passengers to Melbourne by way of Castlemaine in six or seven hours, while Cobb & Co coaches provided daily services to towns not connected by the train. On the north side of town was the Anglican church and a recently built state school that was like a temple to learning, with tall chimneys, a church-like spire, and windows shaded by verandahs. The Bank of Victoria was much plainer. It was a rectangular solid-brick house with little adornment and was set back from the street. At one end of the building, with a separate entrance, was the commercial section, while the manager’s residence was at the other end, with sufficient accommodation for the couple, their four young children, and a ‘general servant’. ³

Once Maurice turned six years old at the end of 1886, he should have attended school. In the absence of a suitable private school, he would have been expected to enrol at the Avoca state school. However, with three large classrooms, each holding about 60 students sitting at four-metre-long desks, there was little more than rudimentary rote learning on offer. ⁴ The school also underwent some upheaval that year when a new head teacher, Henry Carter, was appointed in May. He seems to have done a good job. An inspection of the school under his leadership found it to be in ‘a very efficient condition’, with Carter and his assistants teaching a new syllabus that covered ‘history, mensuration, composition, and a training of the perceptive faculties’. ⁵ Yet a search of the school’s enrolment register has failed to reveal Maurice’s name, perhaps because Thomasann didn’t like the idea of her eldest son spending his days in a classroom with the uncouth children of shopkeepers, labourers, and miners. ⁶ Instead, he was kept home, where she could tutor him and he could help with the supervision of his three younger siblings. Thomasann later recalled that she was determined ‘not to have him taught anything until he was much older’. Until then, she ensured that he learnt the alphabet, which he mastered by the age of four, and gave him the Bible and the works of Sir Walter Scott, which he’d read by the age of seven. ⁷

As in Inglewood, his parents immersed themselves in the many activities of the town. The frequent mention of their names in the Avoca Free Press provides ready confirmation of their strong community spirit, which would have impressed itself on young Maurice. Both were involved with the Anglican church, which had been built just 17 years before with a very distinctive biochromatic brick in the style of early English gothic. His father became a church auditor, while Thomasann sang at services and community functions and trained the Sunday School choir. She was also on the committee of the Ladies’ Benevolent Society, run by the Anglican church, which collected money and clothing for the district’s poor. As in Inglewood, Maurice’s father was in great demand by many community organisations and served as treasurer of the Avoca council, for which he received a small stipend. In November 1886, he was elected chair of the town’s Boxing Day Sports Committee, which organised ‘attractions for athletes and fun and frolic for young and old’. On the day, townspeople gathered in the main street to hear the brass band before they were led off in procession to the botanic reserve on the banks of the Avoca River. Despite a police constable being on hand to prevent people gaining free entry, the event failed to cover its costs. ⁸

Maurice’s father was deeply involved with the recently formed branch of the Australian Natives’ Association. The ANA was modelled on British friendly societies that offered sickness