How a faith healer who “talked” to the dead influenced Alfred Deakin

William Terry was hailed an expert at talking with the dead and won the admiration of a three-time Australian PM.

William Henry Terry, early Melbourne spiritualist. Picture: National Library of Australia

As the kingpin of Melbourne’s spiritualist movement, William Terry was hailed as an expert in conversing with the dead.

But of all the privileged and powerful Melburnians he lured into spiritualism, none was more influential than future three-time Prime Minister Alfred Deakin.

Terry is the subject of a new episode of the free In Black and White podcast on Australia’s forgotten characters:

The story appears in a new book called Girt Nation: The Unauthorised History of Australia Volume 3, by Sydney author David Hunt.

Born in London in 1836, Terry and his family emigrated to Australia just before the Gold Rush and set up a general store in Flemington, selling goods to miners headed for the goldfields.

Former three-time Prime Minister Alfred Deakin.

Before long, Terry embraced the new religion of spiritualism, becoming a medium and claiming he was able to use his powers to converse with his dead brother.

“Spiritualism was a way of communing with the dead, and asking the dead questions, taking advice from them, commonly through seances where you’d employ a medium,” Hunt says.

According to Terry, his questions were answered by the spirits of the dead giving him gentle electric shocks on his forehead.

“I think he probably generally believed in certain aspects of spiritualism, but then he realised that it was a damned good way to make money from the gullible,” Hunt says.

Abraham Lincoln with youngest son Thomas, who died aged 18, William, who died aged 11, eldest son Robert, and wife Mary Todd Lincoln.

Mary Todd Lincoln conducted seances in the White House.

Statue of Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln.

Spiritualism was taking off worldwide, thanks in part to Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary, conducting seances in the White House to talk to her two dead sons in the 1860s.

“Once this religion was embraced within the White House … it became respectable,” Hunt says.

“And nowhere did it become more respectable really anywhere in the world than Melbourne. Melbourne was sort of a spiritualist centre.”

Terry used his paranormal “powers” to both diagnose and cure disease.

“He would go into a mesmeric trance, the spirits would diagnose the condition of the patient that he was treating, and then he would sell them his own personal herbal remedies,” Hunt says.

“If you lived in the country, you could mail William Terry a lock of your hair and 10 shillings, a not inconsiderable sum, and he would get the spirits to have a look at your hair.”

Girt Nation, by David Hunt.

Sydney author David Hunt.

In 1874, Terry met a teenage Alfred Deakin, who had been drawn to mesmerism by Charles Dickens’ use of “magnetic powers” in trying to cure a friend of her “spectres”.

“(Deakin) says to Terry that he’d successfully mesmerised a young lady at a party, (and) he’d used the power of his mind to make a man in a neighbouring room come to him, before paralysing him with the force of his mind,” Hunt says.

“So he’s interested in these sort of psychic powers that he thinks he has.”

Young Deakin had visited Terry to seek psychic healing for his sensitive digestive system.

“Terry cures him of his ailments, and Alfred Deakin becomes William Terry’s sort of newest disciple, and fully immerses himself in the spiritualist scene in Melbourne,” Hunt says.

As Deakin worked his way up through the movement, Terry gave him control of the Spiritualists’ Sunday school.

“Deakin is there offering Spiritualist guidance to kids, basically lots of marching and singing – and summoning dead people,” Hunt says.

“And it’s actually at this Sunday school that Deakin meets his future wife, Pattie, who claims as a girl that she’s able to summon the spirit of Shakespeare, which is pretty good Spiritualist cred.”

William Henry Terry. Picture: National Library of Australia

Deakin thought he too had psychic powers as a youngster.

Hunt says that as well as influencing the future PM, Terry changed the face of religion in Australia by turbocharging the new religion of spiritualism.

“Deakin becomes a public figure and ultimately I think the greatest prime minister of at least the first half of the 20th century,” he says.

“He was the man who gave us Deakin, who was the man who gave us much of modern Australia we have today.”

Listen to the interview about William Terry with David Hunt in the In Black and White podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or web.

See In Black & White in the Herald Sun newspaper Monday to Friday for more stories and photos from Victoria’s past.