Rick Snell
Senior
Lecturer in Law
University
of Tasmania
Speaker
Notes 19 October 2004
Disclaimer and post talk reflections
What follows is a rough extract of my talk given at
the Mine Manager’s Offices at Queenstown on the night of the 19th
October 2004. Some parts of the talk have been dropped, other parts that were
skipped in the delivery have been included.
The morning after the talk I visited the freshly brushed-cut Pioneer
Cemetery and later that morning walked to Nelson Falls. The cemetery reminded me of how fortunate we
have been to have reclaimed an important part of our history. I have been to
many cemeteries around the world but few as magical as this one. Yet there was only a single small sign. Whereas at Nelson Falls, your
path is guided, in an unobtrusive way by informative signs and you walk away
not only experiencing natural beauty but with a better understanding. It
reminded me of the last part of my talk the night before about how much of the
King O’Malley story is missing from the West Coast..
I would like to thank Megan Cavanagh-Russell and her
team, especially Rachael Hogge, from the Cradle Coast Campus of UTAS for the
organization, flowers, great catering and
incredible support to make this talk a reality. Finally to the audience thank you for your
support and the great atmosphere. I am
sure that this is only one of many such joint efforts between the University of
Tasmania and the people of the West Coast that will continue to happen.
A second disclaimer and note September 2012
It was
always my intention to go back and properly edit this document, tidy it up, add
full references and maybe build on some of the themes. However it sunk down
into my pile of “Things I might get around to.” I still might get around to it
but in the meantime I would like to share it with family and friends ad others
interested in history, Tasmania and radical politics.
The
following sources were used to compile the talk (many flagged in the talk) but
some still to be accurately acknowledged:
·
Michael
Boddy and Bob Ellis, The Legend of King O’Malley (1974).
·
Dorothy Catts, King O’Malley: Man and Statesman
(1957).
·
Max
Colwell & Alan Naylor, Adelaide an Illustrated History. Landsdowne
Press 1974 (O'Malley biography Pgs 86 - 91).
·
Arthur Hoyle, King O’Malley: The American
Bounder (1981).
Opening comments
In the past
few years I have had the pleasure and privilege of speaking at venues all
around the world from Dublin Castle -
where my Irish ancestors were sent in shackles to Van Diemen’s Land - to inside the Indonesian parliament to a
gathering of generals, bureaucrats,
activists and journalists. I have given over 100 public talks and over
200 media interviews – nevertheless I regard this as my toughest and most
difficult speaking engagement.
Made more
difficult by having my Mum and Dad in the audience. This is the first time they
have had the opportunity to hear me speak in person in public. I would like to take this moment to publicly
thank them for making all this possible. Almost 30 years ago they gave me the
opportunity to leave this valley on a journey I am still on. Their support and
sacrifice made that journey possible and I would like to say thank you to two
wonderful people.
To return
home – is always a challenge - to
confront and engage with your past and the futures you never followed. Never
followed because you journeyed upon a
path that lead away from the valley and the West Coast both in terms of
geography and mental exploration.
Those now
few and distant years growing up in this valley and on the West Coast shaped,
contoured and gave a special quality to
my imagination and spirit.
I have
engaged in my activities as an academic, teacher, commentator and with my audiences in a way determined by
my interpretation of the history of the West Coast, by the spirit of this place and this
landscape and by a radical political legacy.
A political
legacy that in part can be traced to King O’Malley and the West Coast. In the words of Christopher Binks at page 156, in his book Pioneers of Tasmania’s West Coast it is a legacy that focuses on
long “running campaigns for better conditions,
better services, better legislation and better representation.”
I would
like to weave 4 threads together in this talk tonight –
First -To
rediscover some of the key elements of that larger than life figure King
O’Malley who inspired and was inspired by what he encountered on the West
Coast. To look at how this legend took West Coast ideas, ideals and values to a
wider audience.
Secondly,
to explore some of the themes that sparked the idea for this talk in the CD
Rom “Mining the Imagination: Queenstown
Spirit of the Place”.
Thirdly to
try and understand why King O’Malley was right about the contributions of the
West Coast to the beginnings of Australian democracy
Fourthly,
if time permits I want to see what place there is for King O’Malley in the Queenstown, and West
Coast of the 21st Century.
A prelude
My interest
in King O’Malley began one dark winters night when I and a handful of others
attended a talk by the leading Australian historian Manning Clark in the Murray
High School library.
Professor Clark, like some great character
from his own books, swept into the room
dressed in a flowing black shoulder cape, wide rimmed black felt hat – dripping
with rain – long flowing wispy grey
locks and with a burning enthusiasm for history, King O’Malley and the West
Coast. You could see that he was overflowing with the excitement of treading on
the same rocks and rain swept hills as King O’Malley had.
For the
next hour he transfixed me with the story of King O’Malley – how this one man
side show had went from selling insurance to selling a political vision, how he
had entertained crowds of miners from the balconies of places like Hunter’s
Hotel or from inside the Queenstown Academy of Music.
How because of the voters of Queenstown and
the West Coast – Australia was exposed to, and eventually implemented, ideas
like a national bank, aged pensions, the transcontinental railroad, Australia
House in London and a purpose designed capital city – Canberra.
Not
necessarily all O’Malley’s ideas but few advocated them as loudly and as long
as King O’Malley. Few worked as hard to see them transformed from pipe dreams
to reality – sometimes diminished in size, capacity and perfection compared to
the dreams but nevertheless given life.
Professor
Clark left little doubt that the people of the West Coast had done a great
service to Australia by pining their political hopes onto this exotic
character.
Exotic
-whether in his medicine show, spread eagle rhetoric, his eloquent but
eccentric dress or his ability to match inherently volatile mixtures in the
same mind -
- A passionate temperance (non-drinking) Christian
man who loved to hold hard drinking miners spell bound in smokey pubs and loved
to gamble
- A representative of the working class who made a
fortunate as a landlord and speculator
- A plain speaking honest man who hid his past in
confounding layers of fact, fiction and hard to believe myth.
- A man who did much to advance and support women
in politics and life, and left a considerable amount of his estate to a trust
to support female home economics students but found it difficult to be in the
company of all but a small number of women.
As I
engaged with the wider world first as a student and then later as an academic I
did so with a mindset inspired by the landscape and people of the West Coast –
and armed with the knowledge that despite the isolation of the West Coast, the
ugliness of the Queen river we had – in the form of King O’Malley given much to
this country (along with a gravel football oval) – and would always have much
to offer.
Turning to the main character –
King O’Malley
I always
think that King O’Malley was like a piece of conglomerate – a highly compacted
collection of distinct bits and pieces woven together in a fine but tough
matrix.
The life of
this amazing, eccentric character can be roughly put into four periods.
- His
life in America until the late 1880s
- His
wanderings and life in Australia prior
to 1899
- His
period as a member of the Federal House of Representatives from 1901-1917
- A
twilight, but far from uneventful, period until his death in 1954. The last of
the first federal members to die.
This talk,
you will be grateful to know, touches only briefly on the first 2 of those
stages and concentrates on the third the period 1901-1917. And neglects the
last 37 years of King O’Malley’s life.
.
The first period – The birth of the myth, the
construction of the basic elements of the legend of King O’Malley
This is the
period most shrouded in myth and endless variations of King O’ Malley’s
capacity for story-telling. King O’Malley was born either in Canada or the US.
If his birthplace was America it meant that he was illegally a member of the
South Australian Parliament for 3 years
and Federal Parliament for 17 years.
Born either
in 1854 or 1858 (so either he was near to 100 and waiting or the Queen’s
telegram when he died – or he just lived to a very ripe old age).
Brought up
by an uncle – began working life at the age of 14 in a small family bank.
Then moved
to New York to continue his banking education – a point of pride for O’Malley
later in federal parliament as the only trained banker in the whole parliament.
Important in respect of his
creditability in his later push to create the Commonwealth Bank.
O’Malley
left his career in banking around 1880 to spend the next few years of his life
selling insurance, land, temperance (and
even religion) throughout the mid west and west coasts of America . It was in
this wandering period that he constructed the elements of the legend ”King
O’Malley” –
-
Cowboy persona– clothes, manner, speech - “King
O’Malley is a tall man, whose appearance suggests a compromise between a
desperado from the cattle ranges, a spruiker from Barnum’s Circus and a Western
American statesman wrote journalist George Cockerill ( See Noye at
page 83).
-
-
Larger than life story telling (events he was
involved in, people met – claims that he
sold insurance to the Kings of England,
Germany and Tsar of Russia).
Two stories
about King O’Malley from this period demonstrate his capacity for
salesmanship. The first involved the selling
of real estate. He would come into a new
town and put up a sign “The Whole Earth
for Sale by King O’Malley – Come Inside” King O’Malley didn’t do things by half
– so he was always selling the best, the biggest, the brightest – whether it be
insurance, land, politics, religion or himself.
The second
story involved both real estate and religion. At one stage King O’Malley
created the “Waterlily Rockbound Church
– Redskin Church of the Cayuse Nation”. King O’Malley learnt that in Texas
religious organizations were eligible for substantial land grants if they had a
minimum sized congregation. So needed a church and a congregation and miracles. King O’Malley preferred night time miracles. O’Malley would stand on back of a wagon, in
front of a hill. At certain moments there would be sounds of
trumpets from the hills or blazing bushes of god would appear on a mountain
top. King O’Malley would ascend to the top of the hil and come back with stone tablets and the word of
God. His charade was finally exposed when he fired his Angel, an American
Indian who got drunk and told a local newspaper about King O’Malley’s scam.
Stage 2
Arrival and early years in Australia 1888-1899
Shrouded in
myth – O’Malley claimed he arrived with
tuberculosis, cured by an aboriginal elder in Rockhampton (see the start of
Nancy Catts’s biography) and that he subsequently walked on foot to Melbourne.
Whatever
the truth there appeared in Australia a young man – 29 – in cowboy dress, more accurately wearing the elegant American
rancher eye catching style –
prepared to wear lavender suits or do whatever it took to be noticed.
He had a lexicon of outlandish speech using phrases like “stagger juice” for alcohol. Some described it as a “wild and
woolly style” speaking style. O’Malley
described one opponent as “our lop-eared, lop-shouldered, knock-kneed,
slob-sided, ramshackle, bald-headed, poverty stricken, cross-eyed, toothless
old contemporary…” ( see Hoyle at page
12).
He also
arrived with money for investment and an eye for politics. The rest of decade
of the 1890s was a search to build investments and find a political role. A short stint in
Melbourne was followed by his arrival in Hobart in 1890. In this period he sold insurance, gave a talk
on Irish politics at New Norfolk and became a freemason.
He then
travelled to the Zeehan mining fields and later to Launceston to sell
insurance. This period clearly was a
time in finding his feet in Australia and looking for opportunities. There is a
missing period of 18 months - most likely spent speculating on the Kalgoorlie
mining fields – he returned to Melbourne and brought a number of small
cottages. For the rest of his life he used these rental properties as the main
basis of his income and fortune.
In the mid
1890s he arrived in Adelaide. In many ways a dress rehearsal of his later
campaigns on the West Coast of Tasmania. He spent 3 years of getting noticed
and selling insurance in South Australia. He was elected to state parliament in
South Australia on a weird platform that included advocating for lavatories in
railway carriages, seats for female shop
assistants and support for the Married
Women’s Protection League.
O’Malley
lost his seat in the South Australian parliament – a
close election - to a well financed campaign from the hoteliers association –
described by O’Malley as “These heroic artistic nose-painters, the
orphan makers, the goal fillers, the lunatic generators, are the blight of the
colony.” He left South Australia in search of another seat in some other parliament.
Stage 3 in King O’Malley’s life (and final
for purposes of tonight’s talk) The West Coast and federal politics
As I wrote
in the newspaper article (attached to the end of this talk) King O’Malley
arrived in full blown style on the West Coast– the aim was to be noticed.
Whilst he
lost his first attempt to gain election to the Tasmanian parliament in 1899 he had:
·
Picked up on key issues
·
Became better known
·
Decided to concentrate (but not exclusively) on
West Coast
·
Saw the need to add miners to the Electoral
Rolls
·
Made entertainment one of the key features of
his future electoral campaigns
But it was also
clear that he found a more radical tune to sing to – Better services, fair
treatment, a societal obligation to
support individual effort.
It was on
this platform he was elected to the first Federal Parliament.
For the
next 17 years represented the interests of the West Coast in federal politics
but just as importantly the West Coast kept a political maverick and firebrand
on the national stage. During that period whether from opposition, the
government backbenches or from the frontbenches of 2 Labor governments King O’Malley
mixed his showmanship, buffoonery and love of comedy with a zest for hard work.
When he
became Minister for Home Affairs in 1910 – he arrived at the office on his
first day at 8 am and had to get the caretaker to open the door – he then wrote
in large sized letters on the staff timebook – “King O’Malley 8am.” From that
moment on there was always a rush by his public servants to be above O’Malley’s
famous sign in line.
He agitated
for aged pensions –
“The miner
who goes to the West Coast of Tasmania and lives there in a hut, after years of
struggling, accumulates nothing. There are thousands and thousands of them but
the rich merchant, who does nothing but sends goods over there, accumulates a
good fortune out of the miner….Miners find themselves in their old age absolute
beggars in the midst of plenty.” (See Hoyle)
He
was also an early advocate for universal health care and;
-
Construction of national capital
-
National bank
-
Transcontinental railroad
-
Australia House – Designed to show the
Australian flag in the heart of the old country
He was a
favourite of Trades Hall but deeply despised by leading members of the
parliamentary ALP – especially Billy Hughes – who regarded him as mad,
dangerous, a fool or all three.
He was a
reformist who pushed for large nation building projects while looking out for
the interests of those who fell by the wayside. Sharp-eyed journalists noted
the difference in his public clowning and the way he attacked his work and the
serious issues of governing. In 1917 he lost the election because his
non-conscription/anti-militarism position put a wedge between him and the voters of the West Coast.
The Spirit
of the West Coast
In this
part of the talk I want to explore some factors which I feel shaped O’Malley’s
politics and vision. Most writers on O’Malley look at his politics and his
career as largely being derived internally – and treat the West Coast as simply
a stage with a more receptive audience than he had previously found.
My view is
different. The coming of King O’Malley to the West Coast saw the merging or
partnership of O’Malley’s reformist politics with a particular West Coast
vision. Anyone who has tarried for more than a few seconds on the West Coast
knows how dangerous it is to speak in generalisations about the West Coast –
there have been and will always be very vocal and often very fiery critics who
will let you know the world of difference between Queenie and Strahan, Gormie
or Zeehan and vast the differences of the first 4 from Rosebery goes without
question.
Yet like
Binks – in his Pioneers of the West Coast I believe there are many things which
support a view about a unique placed called the West Coast.
For decades
– till very recent times – the main focus of settlement has been mining or
related activities (very few other regions had such a focused activity at the
heart of the whole region). So whilst there may be wide gulfs between those who
supped at Penghana and those who lived in South Queenstown, or between the
miners of tin and those of copper, or the shopkeeper and the widow created by a
mining disaster – they shared more in common than those living elsewhere.
The
landscape
-
Natural beauty
-
And the man blasted moonscape
Better
talkers and writers than me have described the magic of the West Coast. I just
know that when I am heading down Mt Arrowsmith on my way to Queenstown I have
entered a landscape that swells and lifts my spirits to heights I pine for when
I am away from the coast.
Patsy
Crawford in her book on the King River and the quotations on the handout
express the dramatic contrast of
rainforest and snow topped peaks with
the stripped hills and pollution of the Queen River valley.
The weather
and the challenges like snow, bushfires, economic swings all forge a bond of
common identity regardless of town, football team, workplace or duration spent
on the West Coast. The rain forges new brotherhoods and the threat of job
losses new kinships across other lines of separation.
The need
for West Coast solidarity to gain access to essential infrastructure or
services whether it be:
·
Railroads,
·
Roads
·
Schooling
·
Hospitals
·
Political representation
·
or the dredging of the sand bar at Hell’s Gates
There
developed, and I think still remains, a strong degree of distinctiveness
between those who work and live on the West Coast to other Tasmanians. I used
to introduce myself first as a West Coaster, then Tasmanian – not sure if the
same applies today – I suspect it does.
In this
unique natural, employment, emotional and political landscape arose a sense of
unity, separate identity and a desire for a full community life. The ideal that
hard work – whether by forging through horizontal jungle like the
prospectors, building railroads, dams or
the hard life of an underground miner - merited access to good services whether
communication, education or recreational. And the women also did it tough –
from a poem by Peter Hay about a friend who lived at Williamsford –
The house
was freezing, the heater broken.
I’d put the
kids in the old Valiant
And all day
we’d drive Rosebery to Tullah,
Back an
forth,
So the car
would be warm when my husband knocked off….
Or a lyric
from folk singer Phyl Lobl called “West Coast Litany” (also borrowed from Pete
Hay’s book Vandemonium Essays):
Beauty lies
within the eyes
Of those
who choose to see,
Drawing in
my head I hear
The West
Coast Litany
That taught
me how to listen to the rain
And how to
be contented
Even though
I know I’ve lost my liberty.
This was a
region, that recognised the necessity to look beyond individual gain and
interest from time to time towards community and regional interest. Whilst the
individual, working shifts and playing footy in the winter and cricket in the
summer, saving a fortune - might have little need of good roads to Hobart or
Burnie an injured neighbour might.
Whilst
Hobart based bureaucrats and politicians may underestimate the hurdles from
primary school to further education – generations of West Coasters from King
O’Malley on have not.
So King
O’Malley came across a place he called the Rock of democracy – a place where
political representatives of all political persuasions and at all levels of
government put community service and community interest first.
It was from
that political milieu he forged his thoughts about a people’s bank, a nation
binding railway of a civic capital to represent all Australians from Cape York
and Albury to Gormanston. Whilst, in King O’Malley’s words living in hell was
preferable to living in Linda – the people in Linda still deserved pensions,
banking services and to have the opportunity to make their contributions to
Australia.
So whilst
King O’Malley articulated the vision and sold it like an old time insurance
salesman, showman and real estate seller it was a vision transformed by the
West Coast.
The final steps in this journey
In the time
remaining I just want to reflect on the relevance – if any that King O’Malley
has for the West Coast of the 21st century – for the West Coast and
King O’Malley a number of centenary marks have already passed and many others
will pass in the next months and next few years. King O’Malley has travelled
less well than many in the history books – such as Deakin, Fisher, Watson
and Billy Hughes.
He would
have rolled several times in his grave with the privatisation of the
Commonwealth Bank and even with the sale of Telstra. A bank that pays little recognition to its
founder either in terms of history or legacies like scholarships.
Books on or
about the West Coast whether it be Patsy Crawford’s – God Bless Little Sister or Blainey’s Peaks of Lyell often only give a brief mention or cameo role to the
King.
Canberra
has a suburb name O’Malley and the irony of all ironies a prize winning pub
called King O’Malley’s Irish Pub – for a temperance fighter and hater of the
“stagger juice”
Queenstown
has little except “O’Malley’s Restaurant “– now closed and a half torn and
burnt sign (about 6 cm by 4 cm) – a size designed for easy reading by
O’Malley’s favourite retort to heckler’s that there minds were the size of a Zeehan
flea. The Zeehan and Queenstown
Museums have minimal displays about this significant
national figure.
In other
places I would expect to encounter a statute or two, actors wandering the
street greeting “Brothers and Sisters” dressed in their Yankee finest or
performing from balconies, or a
interactive interpretation centre. The CD “Mining the Imagination : Spirit of
Place” comes the closest.
King O’Malley
was not the only, or greatest or most worthy of West Coast legends but his
national impact is one worthy of claiming for the West Coast.
The following article
appeared in The Queenstowner, Friday 15th
October 2004 at page 8
In late January
1900, a one- man political movement stepped off the Queenstown train. It was
one of those glorious Queenstown summer days when the ultra sharp blue of the
cloudless sky is reflected by the bright white of the exposed quartz on the
hillsides. “Tall, with golden beard and moustache,” noted one observer, dressed like a rich Yankee in a 10- galleon
hat, King O’Malley had arrived. This man, whose past would remain a mystery,
had arrived fresh from political defeat in South Australia. He came to preach a
radical political gospel to a working class still focussed on day- to- day survival
rather than stories of a promised land. He was a politician in search of a
constituency.
This was a new
mining town of buildings and tents, less than 10 years old. Unhesitatingly,
King O’Malley strode the main street greeting the locals with “good day
brother.” He admired new- born babes and their mothers admired him. He
organised and attended political meetings where he set out his demands for old
age pensions, miners’ disability pensions and better conditions for workers,
free education from primary school to university, construction of government
railways, a Queenstown hospital, and a Queenstown branch of the Supreme Court.
He moved around the camps and made his way to the little towns of Gormanston,
Strahan, North Lyell and Zeehan.
King O’Malley’s initial goal was a seat in the
Tasmanian House of Assembly but even at this stage he was thinking more about
laying the groundwork to become a member of the first Federal Parliament. After two months of hard campaigning, this
brash, strutting fashion peacock, who used to advise hecklers to take a good
dose of Epsom Salts (or to suggest that their intellects failed to rival those
of a Zeehan flea), lost the election to a better- known local candidate by a
few hundred votes.
O’Malley had noticed that
many of the miners failed to vote because they weren’t on the electoral rolls.
So over the next few months he wandered through the hills and small valleys of
the West Coast helping to create a new constituency. Miners who had been
underground for long hours would stumble out of their mineshafts to be greeted
by a tall, immaculately dressed American, although he always claimed he had
been born in Canada. Even in the pouring rain he would greet them with “Good
evening brothers. Are you on the Roll yet?” Over the campfire at night weary
miners would be entertained by the O’Malley’s oratory, a mixture of gospel,
history, politics which embodied a radical vision of a working man’s paradise.
In fact he had for many years had sold insurance, and he found the switch to politics
just required a simple alteration in the sales pitch. In a region often starved of entertainment, a
King O’Malley talk in a hall, from the balcony of Hunter’s Hotel or in a
strategic storefront position on a Saturday morning was a highlight of the
week.
He worked the
West Coast and the North West Coast (including King Island) like a Southern
Baptist preacher in the deep south of the USA. When the first Federal election
was held, he outpolled Braddon (the former Premier of Tasmania) on the West Coast
by over 1,000 votes out of the few thousand cast. King O’Malley became a member of the first
Federal Parliament of Australia.
Over the next
17 years King O’Malley continued to be the West Coast’s member in the Federal
Parliament. He was a larger- than- life figure amongst the other political
leading figures of that time, who included Barton, Deakin and Billy Hughes.
Hughes detested O’Malley with great and bitter passion – which was returned
ten-fold by O’Malley, who joined Hughes in the federal Labor Party.
During those 17
years O’Malley was a major driving force behind proposals for aged pensions,
the transcontinental railroad, the building of Canberra and the creation of the
people’s bank; the Commonwealth Bank. His contribution to these major aspects
of nation building were often bitterly resisted or derided, but O’Malley would
tirelessly campaign for his ideas. History, bitter rivals like Billy Hughes and
time itself have removed most traces of his contributions to these major facets
of Australian life. When he died in December 1952 he was the last surviving
member of the first Australian Federal parliament.
King O’Malley
and his life were full of paradoxes. Often his eccentric speech, clothing and
behaviour led people to treat and think of him as a fool rather than a
legend. Yet he had a vision for fair
access to services and infrastructure by West Coasters, and it seems strange
that there is so little left here that bears his name.
