Sir Henry Parkes was the true father of Australia’s federation

To say the man who would become Sir Henry Parkes had a tough childhood is an understatement. Yet poverty and a lack of formal education would not hold back the man who, arguably, was the most significant Australian political figure of the 19th century.

Sir Henry Parkes, the father of federation, circa 1887.

To say the man who would become Sir Henry Parkes had a tough childhood is
an understatement. Yet poverty and a lack of formal education would not hold back the man who, arguably, was the most significant Australian political figure of the 19th century.

Forced with his parents and six older siblings off the family farm when he was around eight years old because of debt, the Parkes’ eventually settled in Birmingham, England. There his father Thomas found work as a gardener and “odd-job man”.

Sir Henry Parkes and his second wife, Nellie Parkes. Picture: National Library of Australia

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As Parkes’ entry in the Australian National Dictionary of Biography notes, “obliged as a boy to help in supporting the family, he worked as a road labourer and in a brickpit and rope-walk, before being apprenticed to John Holding, bone and ivory turner of Moseley St.”

Likewise, his schooling was, as he described it, “very limited and imperfect” — a fact that would never handicap his lifelong love of learning, and particularly poetry, literature, history, and art.

Despite these disadvantages, the young Parkes would eventually start his own business and marry Clarinda, the 23-year- old daughter of a butcher.

The business failed due to tough economic times and the couple sailed for Australia on 27 March 1839, with Parkes, already showing signs of a great intellect despite his lack of formal education, publishing a poem in a local magazine condemning the unfairness of a Britain in which “men like this are compelled to seek the means of existence in a foreign wilderness”.

Sir Henry Parkes (centre) surrounded by delegates to the 1890 federation conference in Melbourne.

The journey took three months; the couple’s first surviving child was born two days before the ship arrived in Sydney. It was a tough trip even without Clarinda’s pregnancy and Parkes would later recall that they spent the journey “incessantly assailed by the coarse expressions and blasphemies” of other passengers in the steerage compartment of the vessel.

On arrival, the young father took a series of jobs but it wasn’t long before he found his calling as a writer and journalist and, eventually, politician. In 1850 he campaigned for the Australian League, which called for the various colonies to be united under one federal umbrella, finding the cause that would eventually earn him the posthumous moniker, the Father of Federation.

He was devoted to what were the liberal causes of the time, including an end to the forced transportation of convicts to Australia and free trade between the colonies. A master of the factional politics of the sort that still define our state more than a century later, Parkes would serve as NSW Premier not once but five times, and spearheaded the Public Instruction Act. Borne of his own intellectual longings and belief that education was the great equaliser, it introduced free education across NSW.

But it would be the cause of a united Australia that would be Parkes’ real legacy, embodied in a short (just over 1000 words) speech delivered on 24 October 1889 at the Tenterfield School of Arts. Tenterfield, in far north NSW, was a perfect setting for the speech. While far from the state capital of Sydney, its position close to commercial districts just across the Queensland border meant it suffered greatly from that state’s tariff policy which taxed out of state commerce.

What’s more, railway gauges were different from state to state meaning that it was hard to move goods, people and, in time of conflict troops from place to place.

Former Premier Bob Carr has called the speech a defining moment in the history and formation of Australia, on a par with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

A portrait of Sir Henry Parkes in 1892. Picture: National Portrait Gallery

Indeed, it was the US’s federal system which bound states together under a strong central government that Parkes had in mind when he drafted the speech: “Australia has now a population of three and a half millions, and the American people numbered only between three and four millions when they formed the great Commonwealth of the US,” Parkes told the crowd. “The numbers are about the same. Surely what the Americans have done by war, Australians can bring about in peace.”

Parkes never lived to see his dream come into being, dying suddenly of heart failure after being stricken with pneumonia in April, 1896, less than four years before federation. But the Tenterfield speech led to the
1891 National Australasian Convention and the drafting of a national constitution.

His was a huge, and sometimes puzzling, life, but one without whose Australia would not be the nation it is today.

Tributes to our greatest Aussies

There has been no shortage of attempts this year to diminish Australia Day — and with it, the unique success story of our nation that has made us the envy of the world.

But we know that what unites us is far stronger than that which pits us against one another.

That’s why, as Australia Day approaches, The Daily Telegraph is celebrating the Makers of Australia.

The men and women, past and present, who have through their talent, vision, and determination, contributed to make us who we are today.

We know that our history is not without conflict or pain. No nation can claim otherwise.

However, that’s no reason not to acknowledge our high points, either.

We celebrate the achievements of indigenous Australians, those who were among the first European settlers and also our recent migrants.

Politicians, generals, actors, writers, sports stars, doctors and inventors.

For a nation with a small population, we have huge talents — and we want to share them with the world.

And we think it only right that as Australia Day approaches we take the time to reflect and learn about the lives of those Australians who are responsible for forging our modern land.