ALFRED DEAKIN

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Alfred Deakin was so idealistic that when he was first elected to the Victorian Parliament, he resigned immediately because he believed that administrative bungling of the poll had given him an unfair advantage. In the subsequent by-election, the voters rewarded his honesty by electing his opponent. Deakin's youthful idealism reflected his wide reading of romantic 19th-century literature, which dwelt on the days when knighthood was in flower. His father, an Englishman who joined the 1851 goldrush and later became a Cobb & Co executive, possibly set him on this track by naming him after Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate of England.

Despite schoolboy dreams of becoming a military hero, Deakin developed into an intellectual with a passion for the written word and a belief in its power to change the world.

After secondary education at Melbourne Grammar, he worked as a teacher by day to finance evening law studies at the University of Melbourne. In 1878, at the age of 22, he put up his plate as a barrister.

He was a tall, personable young man, fashionably bearded, with dark hair and eyes and alert and intelligent features. He already radiated an aura of confidence and was developing the pleasant manner which later earned him the nickname 'Affable Alfred'.

In a chance meeting, the media magnate David Syme took a liking to the handsome young man with his eager flow of ideas. He asked Deakin to write for his newspapers, converted him from a Free Trader to a Liberal Protectionist and, in 1879, backed his campaign for the seat of West Bourke. This was the seat which Deakin had won and surrendered. He won it again in the 1880 elections.

His talents attracted such attention that, in 1883, the Liberal-Conservative coalition appointed him Solicitor-General, Commissioner of Public Works and Minister of Water Supply. This triple portfolio enabled him to attack two special problems. One was the Melbourne factories, where employees, including children, toiled in Dickensian squalor and poverty. Deakin's Factories Act became a model for all the colonies and probably aroused the enthusiasm of his new wife 'Pattie' Browne, whom he married against her wealthy father's opposition. She later became a notable worker for child welfare.

The other problem was how to use the Murray River to irrigate thousands of square kilometres of potentially valuable land. On an overseas fact-finding tour, Deakin discovered three Canadians, the Chaffey brothers, running a successful irrigation colony in California. He tempted them to Australia with low-mortgage land and they opened the way for thriving towns and properties along the whole length of the Murray.

But Deakin's visions encompassed far more than colonial affairs. He had a grand dream of Australians evolving as a splendid new race of British stock "without the admixture of other races" By this he meant a policy of racial discrimination to exclude everyone but Anglo-Celtic immigrants.

And, like many of his contemporaries, he feared the colonial ambitions of Germany, France and Japan in the Pacific region. He visualised the continent as a kind of 'Fortress Australia' which would exert Anglo-Australian influence throughout the Pacific.

For such reasons he became an ardent Federalist. He hitched his wagon to Barton's star and worked tirelessly as Barton's lieutenant as well as in Victorian politics, Journalism and the law.

When Barton became Prime Minister, he appointed Deakin Attorney-General and virtually groomed him as his successor. They worked together on the Immigration Restriction Act, which encapsulated Deakin's vision of an all-white Australia of monocultural British heritage.

In Deakin's terms as Prime Minister, he worked doggedly to create the Australian Utopia of his dreams, initially with the support of the new Labor Party. His reforms included old age pensions, tariffs to protect Australian industry, laws to control business practices, and the first attempts at conciliation and arbitration between labour and management. His governments established the site of Canberra, began work on the Transcontinental Railway, established several Commonwealth departments and laid the foundations for the Australian Navy and Army. His foreign policy was that of closer ties between Australia and the rest of the British Empire.

In these and other ways, it is said that Alfred Deakin 'moulded the mind of Australia', but the effort exhausted him. In failing health, he retired from politics in 1913 and died in 1919.

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