Fisher and other Labor candidates in Queensland first stood in the 1893 Legislative Assembly election, and Fisher won Gympie and held his seat for three years. A bystander described him as having a ‘charming though unobjectionable self-confidence’. He was also an open-faced handsome man. He spoke in a strong Scots accent and was considered a good fellow, fond of cricket and chess. But he was a poor orator. He lost his seat in 1896, and because he attributed a great part of his loss to the lies of the Gympie Times, as well as starting a new job as an engine driver, he established a newspaper, the Gympie Truth.
He wrote a great deal of the copy but had a bout of typhoid in 1897 which forced him to concentrate purely on the paper’s management. When he won his seat back in 1899, he was a member of the first Labor government elected anywhere in the world—however transitory, unstable and minority it was—a phenomenon which seemed to convince many in the outside world that Australia must be the working man’s utopia. The momentary Labor premier was Anderson Dawson, a native-born miner from Rockhampton whose weakness for alcohol would ultimately destroy him. Fisher was meaninglessly appointed Secretary of Railways and Minister for Public Works—the government lasted only from 25 November to 7 December, and fell due to the failure of a coalition with Liberals, or as they were sometimes called Ministerialists.
Fisher, who would later so fulsomely support the dispatch of troops to the Great War, was opposed to sending Australian troops to the Boer War but, relatively rarely for a Labor man, devoted his mental energies to campaigning for the proposed Commonwealth before the Queensland referendum of 1899.He would then, as later, be a believer in broader rather than narrower powers for a federal government. In the first federal elections in March 1901 he won the seat of Wide Bay, and in May met in Melbourne with the other newly elected Labor parliamentarians to form a Commonwealth Labor Party. The new federal Parliament was, like colonial parliaments before it, composed of many immigrants—sixteen members came from Scotland, twenty-five from England, eight from Ireland and one from Wales. Other notable Scots in this parliament were George Reid, Alan McLean, promoter of arbitration and conciliation, Labor senator Gregor McGregor of South Australia, and handsome Western Australian Labor senator Hugh de Largie.
In 1901 Fisher married Margaret Irvine, his Gympie boarding house land-lady’s daughter. Margaret’s people came from the Shetland Islands, and her father had been killed in a Queensland mine accident. She was a Sunday School teacher in the program of which Fisher was superintendent. In her late twenties—an advanced age for marriage according to the perceptions of the time—she was marrying a man near forty. In the midst of a drought Margaret’s younger sister, Elsie, had to walk some miles to a local mine to get sufficient water for the non-alcoholic drinks at the wedding party. Margaret, who would be an active supporter of women’s suffrage, took part in street marches organised by the Alliance for Women’s Suffrage and would become a friend of the feminist leader Vida Goldstein.
Vida is more than worth lingering on, and not just because Andrew Fisher was an acquaintance. If Fisher was characteristic of Labor’s origins, the charismatic Vida was equally characteristic of the energetically pursued women’s politics of Fisher’s era. She attracted many renowned friends, including Miles Franklin. She was the daughter of a Cork-born Jewish immigrant named Jacob Goldstein, a devout Unitarian who devoted himself to creating a scientific structure for charity and the relief of poverty. He encouraged determination and independence in his four daughters. In the 1890s he involved them in forming labour colonies, notably at Leongatha, but like many visionaries he was hard to live with and his wife found him irritable and advised her daughters on what a trap marriage could be. Vida and her sisters opened a co-educational preparatory school in St Kilda, and ignored many proposals of marriage to work for women’s suffrage with the curiously named National Anti-Sweating League, and for reforms in women’s prisons.
Vida became a very accomplished and witty public speaker. In 1902 she would take a ship to the United States to speak at the International Women’s Suffrage Conference, and on being elected secretary gave evidence in favour of women’s suffrage to a committee of the US Congress. Since the federal government would that year extend the vote to women, on her return from America she became in 1903 the first woman in the British Empire to be nominated and stand for election to a national parliament, in her case as an independent candidate for the Senate. She was supported by the Women’s Federal Political Association, a body formed to organise the women’s vote for the first federal elections. There was public ridicule of her candidacy but she polled 51 000 votes. Whatever she thought of Margaret Fisher’s marriage, Vida was the friend who persuaded Miles Franklin to leave the cramped literary and political pastures of Australia and go to the United States.
The same year that Andrew Fisher married Margaret, one of his brothers died in the north of England. Another had been killed in a mining accident in India in 1893 and yet another in a railway accident in Canada in 1895. Andrew would have a kinder time of it in Australia, but his social reticence might have owed something to the deaths of three robust brothers in nine years. In the meantime, Margaret Fisher bore five sons and one daughter, with another child stillborn.
In April 1904, during a debate on the Conciliation and Arbitration Bill, Fisher would have a part in activating the first Labor government of the new federation. He moved an amendment designed to include state employees under the terms of the conciliation and arbitration legislation. Deakin, the prime minister, opposed the amendment, but in the following vote it was carried and Deakin resigned and Chris Watson, born in Chile, raised in New Zealand, took office, with Deakin’s Liberals now the junior side of the coalition. Fisher had never wanted the alliance Chris Watson had made with Deakin’s Liberal Party, but thought it could be tolerated while ever Deakin’s men supported Labor projects. Watson and others even discussed whether Labor should actually consider a formal coalition with Deakin’s Liberals. So a minority Labor government, led by Chris Watson with Fisher as Minister for Trade and Customs, came into being. The administration did not last long. Its collapse came in August as a result of Watson’s version of the same Conciliation and Arbitration Bill being voted down.
Earlier, in August 1905, Fisher had been elected deputy leader of the party, defeating Billy Hughes by one vote. Hughes was a man for long, rancorous grudges and never forgave Fisher, and in return the sober, un-flamboyant Fisher despised Hughes for his duplicity and outrageous ambitions. David Low, the Bulletin cartoonist, described Hughes in 1916 as ‘too small to hit, too deaf to argue with and too tough to chew’, and Fisher early found that this was the case.
Chris Watson suddenly resigned as leader of the party in October 1907, pleading ill health but making people draw their own surmises, including the fact that his wife did not like the long absences in Melbourne that being the leader of the party imposed on him. This time Fisher, a Labor protectionist, defeated the Labor Free Trader Hughes for the leadership. He was able to neutralise Hughes’s ironic bitterness through the respect even his opponents in caucus had for him.
Up to now Fisher had been on the left of his party, had moved that the ownership of all means of production, distribution and exchange should be part of the party platform, and saw society as a rift between the workers and the ‘speculating classes’. Nonetheless, mutual appeasement was possible. In a presidential address to the ALP in 1908, he said: ‘No more sneers and scorn for Socialism! . . . There are two ways open—the universal strike, and the other way of providing the necessary courts to see that the worker gets his remuneration. I am for the latter . . . we can do in parliament for the workers what we could not accomplish by the universal strike.’
In November 1908 Labor, which was again in unofficial coalition with the Deakin government, defected from its alliance because it thought a set of Deakin’s proposed tariff laws too weak to protect the workers. Deakin’s government collapsed. In part, the
Labor members had been influenced by a cohort of fifty unemployed Melburnians who broke onto the floor of the chamber and accused the Labor members of loafing away their time while men lacked breakfast and dinner. Fisher was invited to form a government and so became prime minister and Treasurer in Labor’s second minority government.
The emergence of Labor governments at federal level in Australia had an impact on labour movements everywhere else on earth, and Keir Hardie was one of many British Labour MPs who sent congratulations. The press reaction was anti-Labor, but Fisher himself, a confusing figure as socialist church goer, was treated with a sort of patronising respect. His hold on government was tenuous, since the party always had to come to terms with its Liberal partners.
Under Fisher’s prime ministership an amendment to the 1904 Seat of Government Act stipulated that the Yass-Canberra area would be the site of the new federal capital. Fisher himself had voted for Dalgety, near Cooma, to be the capital location. As we will see, none of this settled the matter anyhow. One of his cabinet, the exuberant American-born King O’Malley, the Minister for Home Affairs, would suggest that the capital be called Fisher, to which Fisher replied, ‘We don’t want any Yankee jokes, Mr O’Malley.’
None of this was as important as giving the Commonwealth more power over wages and prices, measures Fisher was unable to get through the House. He wanted a people’s bank, the Commonwealth, and standard banknotes issued by the government. Like Deakin before, he was a promoter of the necessity for a navy to protect the shores of a White Australia. He believed that fast ‘torpedo destroyers’ were better protection for Australia than the massive dreadnoughts many conservatives wanted. In the end he reluctantly accepted the idea of acquiring a dreadnought, a symbol of a serious navy, from Britain. He ordered three torpedo destroyers and, to the disgust of some radicals, having been a militiaman himself, he introduced, at the suggestion of British general Kitchener, a scheme of compulsory military training.
In May 1909, when Parliament resumed, Lord Dudley, the less-than-gifted Governor-General, read his speech about the coming legislative plans of the government, with his beautiful, talented, traduced and reformist wife Lady Dudley reduced to watching from the gallery. But Deakin’s Liberals were tired of being dragged along by Labor’s cries for more social reform than they desired, and Deakin had made a secret alliance with Joseph Cook, a former Lithgow miner and Labor man, soured by years of unsuccessfully pushing the Free Trade barrow. The new group, known as the Fusion Party, was led by Deakin and Cook, with Deakin as prime minister. People did not approve of the opportunism Deakin and Cook had shown and in April 1910 the Labor Party won at the polls and for the first time had control of both Houses of Federal Parliament. Deakin would remain in the House but slowly fade. He had always had a tendency to work to the point of nervous or physical breakdown, and he now suffered from this over-exertion. He retired from Parliament in 1913, and lived reclusively near Ballarat, occasionally active, occasionally travelling, always haunted not by his successes but his failures, always arguing with God about the value of existence. From 1916 a mental fog engulfed him and he would die an isolated death, watched over by his wife Pattie, in 1919.
With his mandate at the polls in 1910, Fisher was able to make his own policies for a trans-continental railway and new levels of social welfare. He created the Commonwealth Bank, of which he was the first depositor, a bank ‘directly belonging to the people and directly managed by the people’s own agents’. His government also legislated for the establishment of an Australian note issue for the whole Commonwealth, instead of the blizzard of individual bank-based notes with which people then did business. The new notes were at first mocked—according to the habits of Australian cynicism—as ‘Fisher’s flimsies’. He was presented with the first £1 note printed by the government. Other acts gave preference to unionists, lowered the criteria for pensions, provided workers’ compensation for industrial accidents and disease, and introduced a maternity allowance granted to the mother on the birth of her child, ‘the baby bonus’. He saw these reforms as a recognition of rights rather than a granting of privileges. Not ‘the slightest stigma of charity [is] attached to this allowance proposal’. He knew that ‘many women go through the most trying period of their lives, ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-equipped, without assistance, and with nothing left of them but a proud spirit’. The government owed something to sustain that pride and relieve that want.
Fisher’s house in Dinsdale Street, Albert Park, was now well peopled with his sons, his beloved daughter Peggy, his wife, and her mother and sisters. He found refuge in the company of a family of Scots painters, the Patersons, and—quite innocently—with their artist sister Esther. Through them he developed a sense that Australia was not a wilderness for higher sensibility but a venue for the arts.
On a visit to Britain on official business in 1911, Prime Minister Fisher was informed he had been appointed a Member of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council. Apart from its judicial section, which was the final court of appeal in the Empire, and to which Australians could make appeals from High Court decisions with the High Court’s permission, membership of the Privy Council had diminished in importance since the time of James II. But most Britons would still kill for the honour of being a member. Fisher, awkward about the offer, and perhaps knowing the appointment would not impress many of his Australian followers, begged off attending a Privy Council meeting convened to swear him in, using the excuse that he had an engagement in Kilmarnock—as he did, to meet members of the family. Correspondence between the Privy Council and Fisher became increasingly terse as it became clear that he hoped to leave the country without ever taking the oath and joining the Council. Eventually he was told that the King had consented to his being appointed to the office by an ‘Order in Council’, an edict no Briton could disobey. He was warned that the next time he came to England he would have to be sworn in. It is unlikely that anyone else in history put up such a struggle to reject such an honour. Fisher’s secretary, M.L. Shepherd, would remember his refusal to wear lace on his court dress for the coronation of George V. Yet Shepherd says that he insisted on every proper protocol while prime minister—in part, he did not want a Labor prime minister treated with any less respect than a conservative prime minister.
But Fisher was also something of an Empire loyalist, although he would say that same year, 1911, that he ‘would not hesitate to haul down the Union Jack if Australia’s interests required it’. He also reflected that in a way the conservatives, who had initially accused the Labor Party of profound radicalism, were now often following in Labor’s wake when it came to their own policies. Yet he was not radical enough for everyone. In 1912, during a bitter strike in Queensland which began over the right of Brisbane Tramways workers to wear their union badges, both the strikers and the state asked Fisher to send federal troops—the state wanted them to maintain order, the unions to protect the workers from the roughshod mounted police led by the ruthless old frontier policeman, Commissioner Urquhart. To the disgust of both sides, Fisher refused the request, but sent a personal donation to the strike fund.
Such was the earlier career of an Australian politician now nearly forgotten. It would take on added significance when as a result of his government’s legislation, though after Joseph Cook came to power in 1913 by a majority of one in the House of Representatives, the Australian navy emerged out of the Pacific. Appearing before the eyes of the public, the heavy cruiser Australia, launched by Lady Reid, wife of Sir George, in Glasgow, accompanied by the light cruisers Sydney, Melbourne and Encounter and the destroyers Warrego, Parramatta and Yarra, made their formal entry into Australia one early morning in October 1913. The heavy cruiser was 18 800 tons, and happened to be of the species of warship the escalation of whose numbers on both sides were commonly believed to have helped bring on World War I. Lining the heads and foreshores, people had greeted her arrival as if she were ‘a living sentient thing’—a validation
of the new nation. The Sydney Mail wrote that here were ‘ships of defence bought in love of country and Empire’. Though they were officially greeted as, to quote the Herald, ‘harbingers of peace’, the sailors and the public were aware of a formidable German East Asian Cruiser Squadron operating in the Pacific and led by Admiral Graf Spee. Billy Hughes would say of Australia and its flotilla that but for it ‘the great cities of Australia would have been reduced to ruins, overseas trade paralysed, coast wide shipping sunk, and communications with the outside world cut off’. In the next year, and in the months leading up to the declaration of war in 1914, Australia had visited all the chief ports to show herself to a national audience, and a feature film, Sea Dogs of Australia, was shot aboard her and opened just after war was declared in August 1914.
The war having begun, Cook used his loyalty to Britain as a stick with which to beat a popular Labor Party, but the fact was that Fisher was as engaged in the issue as Cook was. In Benalla the day war was declared, Fisher told an audience, ‘In a time of emergency there are no parties at all. We stand united against the common foe.’ Most of his party were with him, although some saw the war fervour as a potential underminer of workers’ welfare. But the Australians, as South Britons, lived in a society which in any case saw a declaration of war as a matter for the King, not for the Parliament of Australia. There were reasons of self-interest to participate (getting the Germans out of the South Pacific, for example). And, in any case, the coming conflict was not envisaged as the cataclysm it would prove to be. The idea of war held by most politicians and by society was based on the fleeting Franco-Prussian War of 1870, or else on the Boer War, in which typhoid was more lethal than bullets. British and Dominion politicians should perhaps have consulted the mayhem of the American Civil War, and added on another fifty years of technological development, for a clue as to how bloody the war would be.