Mitch Matters: Reflections on Prime Minister Stanley Bruce and his links to Frankston, Peninsula
I recently had the chance to see the colourised footage of a glittering occasion in Australia’s history.
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I recently had the chance to see the colourised footage of a glittering occasion in Australia’s history.
It happened on May 9, 1927.
Australia’s immaculate Parliament House in the nation’s new capital city of Canberra was officially opened.
There to do the honours from the Mother Country was HRH The Duke of York, and his wife, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.
While they were soon to achieve fame at a much higher level as King George VI and the future Queen Mother, their daughter Elizabeth, who was one year old and not with her parents that day, would be destined to create a little history of her own.
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What struck me watching the footage though was a connection to the Mornington Peninsula.
Dame Nellie Melba was there to sing God Save the King without any musical accompaniment, and I know the world superstar visited the Mornington region for holidays many times.
But there was a link stronger than that.
Our Prime Minister at the time was Stanley Bruce, the federal member for the electorate of Flinders, which included the Mornington Peninsula.
The previous year he’d built a ten-bedroom mansion on Pine Hill Drive in Frankston, fit for a PM.
At the opening ceremony in Canberra, Bruce decided that many accents of his colleagues in the parliament were a little too rough, so he took it upon himself to officially welcome the Duke of York to co-open the new building.
The Duke, who later became the subject of the hit movie The King’s Speech was probably relieved someone else was doing the talking.
Many years before Robert Menzies did the same thing to Queen Elizabeth II, Bruce reaffirmed to the Duke, Australia’s devotion to Britain.
Despite nearly 30 years as a federated nation, Australians were still considered British subjects.
Bruce had fought in WWI at Gallipoli, but as a member of the British Army rather than the Australian Imperial Force.
He was wounded twice in the war and while recovering, many of his peers were killed.
After witnessing the catastrophic loss of life, Bruce developed “a driving ambition to make something of a life which providence had spared.”
Representing the United Australia Party, he won the seat of Flinders in a 1918 by-election.
Within five years he found himself in the country’s top job.
He and his wife Ethel moved into The Lodge, which had been built around the same time as their Frankston mansion and which had borrowed heavily from its architecture and design.
Bruce was the first Prime Minister to lead a cabinet that consisted entirely of Australian-born ministers and yet Bruce himself was frequently caricatured in public as “an Englishman who happened to have been born in Australia.”
He drove a Rolls Royce, wore white spats on his shoes and was often seen as distant and lacking the common touch: characteristics that did little to endear him to the Australian public.
Stanley and Ethel’s connection to Frankston was not a lasting one.
In the 1929 election, for a variety of reasons, Bruce suffered the humiliation of becoming the first sitting Prime Minister to lose his seat, something that would not be repeated until it happened to John Howard in 2007.
The Frankston mansion was sold, but it is still there to this day, although the surrounding land was subdivided long ago.
The Bruces departed for England where Stanley became High Commissioner and Australia’s representative at the League of Nations.
He died in London in 1967 just a few months after losing his wife Ethel and his ashes were scattered over Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra.
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