Parkes was not so easily dissuaded when it came to his dreams of a united Australia. I believe the time has come. Persuading his fellow Australians to combine the six existing colonies into one commonwealth, he argued: "Surely what the Americans did by war, Australians can bring about in peace. More than ten years passed before his vision was fulfilled. It was four years before Federation came about in his beloved Centennial Park. Skip to content Search. Centennial Parklands offers outdoor learning programs for classes of all ages, which focus on environmental education, sustainability, fieldwork, and developing a life-long connection to nature.
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He attended the great public protest meetings of the Chartists in Birmingham. In he finished his apprenticeship and married Clarinda Varney. Adventurer: years Clarinda and Henry settled in London looking for work. In search of a better life, as migrants they took the long passage in a sailing ship to Sydney arriving in Times were bad then and he had to work again as a labourer to support Clarinda and their new baby.
Education finally gained him a secure job in the Customs Department as a tide waiter. Man of ideas: years He started a newspaper The Empire and helped set up the Australian League to educate people about the rights and duties of citizens in a democracy. He argued for universal suffrage, i. Development of democracy : All adult men were given the right to vote and the electoral system was reformed. This website is best viewed with JavaScript enabled, interactive content that requires JavaScript will not be available.
He was a political survivor, evidenced by the fact that he was premier of colonial New South Wales five times between and His political life spanned the second half of the 19th century, from the establishment of responsible self government in , through the era of faction politics characterised by shifting alliances, to the advent of the party system.
John Dunmore Lang and J. Wilshire established the Australian League to work for universal suffrage and transformation of the Australian colonies into a 'Great Federal Republic'. Parkes wrote to Lang to denounce the 'dung-hill aristocracy of Botany Bay' and to assert his eagerness to 'enrol in the league for the entire freedom and independence' of this 'land of my adoption and of my children's birth'. In July he worked as chief organizer and canvasser when Lang stood against J.
Holden for a vacant Sydney seat in the Legislative Council. In this campaign Parkes joined the Chartist, David Blair , to issue the Representative: A Daily Journal of the Election as a counter to the 'discreditable handbills' circulated by Lang's opponents. Lang won the seat but his league did not survive long and Parkes's republicanism soon evaporated.
But this was only part of the story; Parkes was already finding a more congenial cause in the liberal movement which by the early s was becoming the most effective spearhead against the old colonial conservatives.
Parkes, who had been prominent in the great protest which greeted the convict ship Hashemy in , eagerly dedicated his organizational talents to the Anti-transportation League and drifted easily into the liberal campaigns against the anti-democratic Electoral Act of Late in he found support to set up as editor-proprietor of the Empire , a newspaper destined to be the chief organ of mid-century liberalism and to serve as the rallying and reconciliation point for the sharpest radical and liberal minds of the day.
Critics of the existing system as diverse as C. Full-time journalist and politician now, he abandoned shopkeeping for a happy reconciliation of desire and duty: the Empire allowed devotion to a political cause and promised steady economic support for a growing family.
By , deeply involved in organizing the Constitution Committee to oppose Wentworth 's constitution bill, he was ready to seek a place in the Legislative Council. Failing at a by-election that year, he won Wentworth's old Sydney seat in , defeating Charles Kemp in a contest generally seen as a trial of strength between liberals and conservatives over the constitutional issue.
The radicals' acceptance of a frankly liberal Parkes as their candidate in place of Lang symbolized the merging in his person of radical and liberal movements. The liberal leader, Charles Cowper , warmly welcomed him to the council as an opponent of 'Wentworthian and Thomson ian policy', and Parkes's election to the Chamber of Commerce signified his acceptance into the inner liberal group.
Parkes entered the council near its end: the constitutional proposals were under scrutiny in London and no longer a subject for effective local debate. Meanwhile the liberals' reformism was chiefly reflected in a range of inquiries instituted by the dying council into such matters as a nautical school for boys, the importation of Asiatic labour, the adulteration of food and the state of agriculture. In this work Parkes won repute as an assiduous and imaginative committeeman.
In March at the first Legislative Assembly established by the new Constitution, Parkes was one of the liberal bunch which carried all four seats in the premier Sydney City constituency.
He supported Cowper in the complex manoeuvres of the first parliament until obliged in December to resign to give full attention to the Empire , then in serious financial difficulties. He re-entered parliament in January for the North Riding of Cumberland but in August had to resign for insolvency.
The Empire had collapsed, ending his dream of using the paper as 'an independent power to vivify, elevate and direct the political life of the country' and leaving him 'to begin life afresh with a wife and five children to support, a name in a commercial sense ruined and a doubt of the practical character of my mind'.
He survived bankruptcy proceedings, struggled on with the support of friends and the proceeds of occasional journalism and planned briefly to abandon politics for a legal career. But in June he was back in parliament to represent East Sydney. Politics in the assembly had by then settled into a faction mould. Having in declared his independence of Cowper and John Robertson , Parkes developed a personal following in the House and in emerged as critic and rival of the established liberal leadership.
But economic insecurity made him vulnerable, and early in he accepted an invitation by Cowper to tour England with W. Parkes sailed in May, leaving his family in poverty on their rented farm at Werrington. In England he attended vigorously to his duties, though with limited success. Prevailing English sentiment was well expressed by Sir John Pakington, who declared at Parkes's meeting in Droitwich his unwillingness to see 'the pith of our English population seeking a home elsewhere'.
Early in Parkes returned to Sydney in good spirits, his self-confidence strengthened by the kind attention he had received from government officials and such literary idols as Carlyle, Hughes and Cobden, and having established while in Birmingham a new fancy goods importing business which he hoped might in the next six years 'provide for the rest of our lives'.
An opportunity to return to parliament offered itself in August when J. Darvall sought ministerial re-election at East Maitland. Parkes opposed Darvall and lost the contest after a bitter campaign, but in January was returned at a by-election for Kiama, a seat he held until From late until early he opposed consecutive Martin and Cowper ministries, while steadily rebuilding his own faction.
In Cowper tried without success to buy him off again, with offers first of the lucrative post of inspector of prisons, then of a portfolio in his ministry. By early Martin and Parkes were in private negotiation: successful censure of Cowper followed and Martin, commissioned to form a ministry, included Parkes, as colonial secretary, and two followers. This coalition, scarcely more than a marriage of convenience, failed to develop a positive and unanimous programme.
Its leaders differed on such basic issues as the tariff, state aid, electoral and land reform. Parkes was responsible for establishing the hulk Vernon as a nautical school for destitute boys, for an Act requiring the inspection of hospitals and for bringing to Sydney under Lucy Osburn nursing sisters trained by Florence Nightingale. But the government's support was uncertain and its ministers quarrelsome; its only major legislation in two years and a half of office, Parkes's Public Schools Act, passed the assembly with Opposition assistance.
This measure was Parkes's first important contribution to education reform. Prompted by the high cost of competing national and denominational systems of education, it aimed at rationalizing expenditure by placing both under a Council of Education which was also to oversee teacher training and the content of secular lessons.
The measure aroused sectarian controversy which Parkes did little to assuage. It revived again in March when H. O'Farrell attempted to assassinate the visiting Duke of Edinburgh. The government, alleging a Fenian plot, carried a savage Treason Felony Act suspending civil rights, but no conspiracy was discovered.
In September Parkes resigned from the ministry in protest at its handling of a quarrel between the treasurer, Geoffrey Eagar , and W. Duncan , collector of customs. Lacking Parkes's support, Martin's ministry fell within a month. Meanwhile in a speech at Kiama Parkes had alleged that he had evidence to prove O'Farrell had acted on Fenian orders and that one conspirator had been murdered when suspected of revealing the plot.
While his move had obvious political purposes, Parkes's correspondence also shows that he was obsessed with fears for his own safety and a belief in Catholic ambitions to seize political hegemony.
A select committee under W. Macleay found no proof of the allegations, but though Parkes rallied sectarian and factional support to have its report expunged from the records of the House, the 'Kiama ghost' long remained an embarrassment. Parkes's financial difficulties had been mounting: his importing venture failed and in December he collapsed again into bankruptcy. He resigned his seat but soon assured his sister that he would be 're-elected to the Legislature whenever I choose to offer myself, and strange as it may seem two-thirds of the mercantile classes will vote for me.
They have got a notion that I am wholly unfit for business, but the fittest of all men for Parliament'.
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