Workers’ Champion

In Search of John Christian Watson: Labor’s First Prime Minister
by Michael Easson
Connor Court, 2024, 206 pages, $29.95

Dr Michael Easson’s newly published account of the life and career of Chris Watson, Australia’s first Labor Prime Minister, is suitably succinct—Watson’s government lasted for only four months in 1904 after all—and yet it is by no means stinting.

Easson’s bibliography indicates that he has delved into a wide range of primary source material including minutes of Sydney’s former Trades and Labour Council held in the State Library of New South Wales. A former Labour Council insider himself, Easson is well positioned to pick up the nuances lurking in such records.

Easson also pored over helpful latter-day articles on Watson written by diligent academics and journalists. The contribution of one of the journalists he relies on deserves to be dwelt on in particular. It provides a key to understanding Watson’s legacy.

The scribe in question is the veteran journalist Malcolm Ellis, who wrote for the Bulletin magazine in Sydney. In the middle months of 1962, Ellis was as usual hard at work. He was writing about Watson but he was also poring over his review copy of the inaugural volume of Manning Clark’s A History of Australia. He was looking for all the factual errors or misprints that he could find. It was a big job.

Ellis needed to write a discrediting review for the Bulletin—and he duly did—because he saw Clark as a traitor to his class.

From a background that was Tory in the strict sense of the word—a Church of England father, a mother with links to Victoria’s landed gentry, a stint at Oxford University—Clark had veered to the left politically. He was drawn to—though without joining—left-wing groups in the labour movements in England and Australia. He admired Lenin, as he set out in his 1960 publication Meeting Soviet Man.

Besides tracking down Clark’s fatal errors, Ellis also was writing a series of weekly articles on Australian Prime Ministers. In early August he reached John Christian Watson.

Watson was the nation’s first Labor Prime Minister but Ellis, who hated the Labor Party, was not annoyed by Watson’s affiliation. He was kind in his Bulletin piece even as he was stoking up his anti-Labor fervour in readiness to exposing Professor Clark’s lack of credibility.

Ellis’s piece on Watson, published on August 18, 1962, was suffused with kindness and admiration, whether touching on Watson in his prime (“tall, slim and handsome, six feet of sound manhood, obviously full of life”) or after his death, with Ellis providing a touching account of meeting another former Prime Minister, the aged Joseph Cook, at Watson’s state funeral in the spring of 1941.

Ellis had a soft spot for Watson because the Labor’s leader’s career, as Easson’s new book about him clearly documents, demonstrates an unwavering commitment to perpetuating, albeit improving, basic social and economic conditions in Australia.

A compositor by trade, Watson became an active trade unionist in Sydney in the early 1890s at a time when the unionised workforce was being buffeted by economic adversity. Watson did not doubt what the best response was. He favoured respectable political engagement over heated socialist agitation. In 1892 he was elected President of Sydney’s Trades and Labour Council. For the next few years, in this capacity, he presided over conferences of the colony’s newly established Labor Party. Under his “courteous and imperturbable guidance” the delegates hammered out the key doctrine of caucus solidarity.

Bearing the imprimatur of his new party, Watson was elected to the New South Wales parliament in 1894. In 1901 he was elected to the inaugural Commonwealth Parliament. His caucus colleagues there chose him as Labor’s first federal parliamentary leader. He embodied the Labor cause as it made its debut on the national stage.

Watson was never a fiery agitator calling for the speedy destruction of capitalism. He was always consensual and considerate. The point, as he saw it, was to carefully civilise capitalism, as the historian and biographer Bede Nairn later pointed out.

This conciliatory approach suited the times. During most of Watson’s Labor career the non-Labor forces in state and federal politics never comprised a single bloc. After 1901 they were divided nationally between Free Traders led by George Reid and Protectionists led by Alfred Deakin. Neither grouping enjoyed a majority, ensuring that Labor held the balance of power. A conciliatory approach of respectful interaction was the order of the day.

Watson became a byword for skilful political diplomacy. Tactful and moderate, he was adept at incrementally advancing Labor’s agenda through deft dealings with non-Labor members of parliament, securing solid improvements through patient negotiations. Operating within a broad progressive consensus, Watson helped to advance specific pieces of enlightened legislation, such as measures protecting factory workers and bringing in old-age pensions.

Industrial relations reform is often the bane of Australian governments, as Watson soon came to discover. His minority government, installed in April 1904, fell four months later amid controversy surrounding the introduction of the nation’s once-famed conciliation and arbitration system.

Watson was aged thirty-seven when he briefly served as our Prime Minister. He remains the youngest person to occupy the position. Happily, he did not grow old and embittered in politics. He stood down as Labor leader in 1907 and retired from parliament in 1910. He knew that the structure of politics was changing. In 1909 the non-Labor parties, with Labor’s numbers steadily rising, sank their differences and formed a single bloc. The era of parliaments without solid majorities—an ecosystem in Watson flourished—was over.

It was the Free Trade champion George Reid who facilitated Watson’s happy release from politics. He was “paired” with Watson in an arrangement which gave Watson an extended leave of absence, on full pay, from parliament. He took this opportunity to head off to South Africa where, supported by Melbourne business interests, he sought to break into the gold mining industry. The attempt failed.

Watson’s comfort with conventional attitudes continued to be evident. Being a Labor Party figure of his time, he was an opponent of non-European migration to Australia. His stand, Easson notes, was “mainstream but terrible racism”. This aspect of him flourished after he left parliament. To keep the nation white he supported the creation of an Australian naval force and the introduction of compulsory military training. In 1916 he supported Billy Hughes during the divisive debate over conscription for overseas service. Along with Hughes and other conscriptionists, he broke with the Labor Party on the issue. Their absence left Labor open to be taken over by industrial militants. The pre-war era of innocence—Watson’s political world—was gone for good.

Watson was associated with Labor’s opponents in the new Nationalist Party for a while but the connection was not strong. By the time he died in 1941 his calm leadership of the Labor Party was a distant memory. The connection had become frayed. Malcolm Ellis, ever a militant right-winger, did not feel out of place when he rocked up to the state funeral. Six of Watson’s eight pallbearers were fellow former members of the Labor Party who had left the party during one internal crisis or another. They had come to honour a stalwart. It was their firm conviction that it was Labor, and not Chris Watson, who had diverged. That’s why Ellis, who felt likewise, admired him.

Watson’s latter years, it must be stressed, did not comprise a sad declension.

At the time of his death he had been out of party politics for a long time and yet he was an active public figure to the end. Michael Easson’s short biography ably reminds us that Watson ended up having a highly successful private sector career all through Australia’s two inter-war decades.

The 1920s saw more and more Australians embrace private automobile ownership. Cars were convenient and fostered independence. Chris Watson was on their side. He became the long-serving inaugural president of the National Roads and Motorists Association and later chaired the board of directors of the Ampol petroleum retailing company.

More mobile Australians needed better roads, a sound vehicle insurance system, affordable petrol and reliable support services. The NRMA pushed or worked hard on such issues. Its president was “a sort of unofficial PM of Auto-Australia”. It is therefore fair to say that Chris Watson probably did more to directly improve the lot of ordinary Australians when he ran the NRMA than when he was in politics. That certainly is the great message from Michael Easson’s excellent book.

Stephen Holt is a historian who lives in Canberra. Among his books is A Short History of Manning Clark (1999).