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Revision as of 02:12, 1 February 2005 by Adam Carr (talk | contribs) (even from Hanoi I am vigilant)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)King O'Malley (July 1858 - 20 December 1953), Australian politician, was one of the more colourful characters of the early federal period of Australian political history.
Neither the date nor the place of O'Malley's birth is known with certainty. His biographer Larry Noye says he was born on 2 July, while the Australian Parliamentary Handbook says 4 July, which would be appropriate given O'Malley's American origins. O'Malley claimed all his life to have been born in Canada, which would have made him a British subject, but it is more likely that he was born at his parents' farm in northern Vermont. "King" was his mother's maiden name. He was educated at a primary school in New York City, then worked in a bank and as an insurance and real estate salesmen, travelling widely around the United States.
In 1881 he married Rosy Wilmot, but she died in 1886. In 1889 he migrated to Queensland, probably to escape debt. In Australia he again worked as an itinerant insurance salesman, also preaching evangelical Christianity and temperance. In 1895 he settled in Gawler, South Australia, and in 1896 he was elected to the South Australian House of Assembly as a radical democrat, opposed to the wealthy landowners who then dominated colonial politics.
O'Malley was defeated in 1899, and the following year he moved to Tasmania, the smallest and most parochial of the Australian colonies. Here a tall, fashionably dressed American preaching the Gospel and radical democracy drew immediate attention, and in 1901 he was elected as one of Tasmania's five members in the first Commonwealth Parliament. Although there was no Labour Party in Tasmania at this time, he joined the Labour Caucus when the Parliament assembled in Melbourne.
Historian Gavin Souter describes O'Malley at this time:
- O'Malley's monstrously overgrown persona seemed to be inhabited simultaneously by a spruiker from Barnum's three-run circus, a hell and tarnation revivalist, and a four-flushing Yankee Congressman. He was a moderately big man, auburn-haired with watchful grey eyes and a red-brown beard, wearing a wide-brimmed felt hat, blue-grey suit with huge lapels and a low-cut vest, loose cravat with a diamond collar stud, and in the centre of his cream silk shirt-front a fiery opal.
O'Malley was thus one of the most prominent and colourful members of the Parliament, but his radical ideas were not widely accepted, and many regarded him as a charlatan. He became a prominent advocate of a national bank as a means of providing cheap credit for farmers and small businessmen - one of the most common platforms of the late 19th century populism. He was not a member of Chris Watson's first Labor ministry in 1904, or of Andrew Fisher's first ministry in 1908. But in 1910 the Caucus elected him to the ministry of Fisher's second government. In the same year he married again, to Amy Horton.
O'Malley became Minister for Home Affairs, and played a prominent role in selecting the site of the future capital of Australia, Canberra. As a teetotaller he was responsible for the highly unpopular ban on alcohol in the Australian Capital Territory. He could also claim credit for beginning the building of the Transcontinental Railway from Melbourne to Perth.
He also agitated for the establishment of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, a state-owned savings and investment bank, although he was not the bank's sole inspirer as he later liked to claim. He later wrote that he had led a "torpedo squad" in Caucus to force a reluctant Cabinet to establish the bank, but historians do not accept this. Prime Minister Fisher was the bank's principal architect. Partly to allay fears of "funny money" aroused by O'Malley's populist rhetoric, Fisher ensured that the bank would be run on firmly "sound money" principles, and the bank as established did not provide easy credit for farmers as the radicals desired.
O'Malley's other legacy was the spelling of "Labor" in the Australian Labor Party's title in the American style. He was a spelling reform enthusiast and persuaded the party that "Labor" was a more "modern" spelling than "Labour." Although the American spelling has not become established in Australia, Labor has preserved the spelling.
Labor was defeated at the 1913 elections, and when it returned to office in 1914 O'Malley was not re-elected to the Cabinet. In 1915, however, Fisher retired and O'Malley returned to office in the first ministry of Billy Hughes, again as Minister for Home Affairs. But within a year the government split over the determination of Hughes to introduce conscription for Australia's contribution to World War I. O'Malley resigned from Hughes's Cabinet in protest and became an outspoken anti-conscriptionist.
Hughes called an election in 1917, and O'Malley was very narrowly defeated in his northern Tasmanian seat by a Nationalist candidate. He stood for the seat again in 1919, and for another seat in 1922, but he never returned to elective office. Although he was only 59 at the time of his defeat, he retired to Melbourne and devoted his time to building up his own legend, particularly in relation to the Commonwealth Bank, and to polemical journalism on a variety of pet causes. He lived to be 95, outliving his nemesis Hughes. At the time of his death he was the last surviving member of the first Commonwealth Parliament.
See also
Further reading
- Larry Noye, O'Malley MHR, Neptune Press 1985 (a short and very admiring biography)