cover

Edmund Barton

GEOFFREY BOLTON







ALLEN & UNWIN

1 This project was generously supported by the National Council for the Centenary of Federation

Copyright © Geoffrey Bolton 2000

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Bolton, G.C. (Geoffrey Curgenven).
   Edmund Barton.
   Bibliography.
   Includes index.
   ISBN 186508 409 3.

   1. Barton, Edmund, Sir, 1849–1920. 2. Prime
   ministers—Australia—Bibliography. I. Title.

994.041092

Set in 10.5/14.5 pt Trump Mediaeval by DOCUPRO, Canberra
Printed and bound by Griffin Press, South Australia

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Encountering Edmund Barton

1 Mr Micawber’s son

2 Young Australia

3 ‘Mr Speaker’

4 ‘My bristles are up’

5 Slow progress

6 Federation becalmed

7 Federation reviving

8 Leader of the Convention

9 Barton versus Reid

10 Federation triumphant

11 Prime Minister: Foundations

12 Life at the top

13 The road to resignation

14 Mr Justice Barton

15 Death of an elder statesman

16 Reputation

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

In compiling a list of acknowledgements of the support and help received during the writing of this bibliography, I am constantly worried that I shall omit someone obviously deserving recognition. If there is any such omission I apologise profoundly and hope that there will be a second edition in which amends may be made.

This project has been generously supported by an ARC Large Grant and by a grant from the Centenary of Federation Committee towards the distribution of Barton’s biography to secondary and tertiary institutions. In addition, the National Library of Australia awarded me a Harold White Fellowship in 1998 which proved invaluable in providing time for writing together with access to many important primary sources. I am most grateful to those responsible for making these awards and also to the referees whose testimonials were instrumental in the process. The University of Queensland, Edith Cowan University and Murdoch University have each, in turn, provided accommodation and support during the gestation of this book and I hope that the finished product will repay that support.

Kevin Blackburn, Dirk Moses, Helen McCulloch and Marion Brooke all gave good service as research assistants. I received valuable assistance from Patricia Pyne in Canberra, who undertook the extensive preliminary trawl of the National Library, and my friend and collaborator of many years, Terry Owen. Chester Andruskewicz made a distinctive contribution in the later stages of research. Birgit Gabriels is excellent at wordprocessing.

I’ve gathered information and advice from many sources. Sir Edmund and Lady Barton’s four grandchildren, Bettina Rankin-Reid (Mount Keira), Ann McIntosh (Bellevue Hill), David Barton (Bayview) and Edmund Barton (Essex, England) have been generous and helpful commentators. In the early stages of my research I benefited from conversations with Father John Parsons, who has also researched Barton and defended him against accusations of idleness. Penny Pemberton shared her knowledge of the Australian Agricultural Company. Tom and Maureen Campbell have been wonderfully hospitable and Tom, as biographer of Sir George Dibbs, has exchanged much good conversation and information with me.

In following Barton’s track in rural New South Wales, I was helped by my old friends Eric and Shirley Andrews in Newcastle and by David Rowe. At the Berrima District Hospital and Family History Society my path was smoothed by Ron and Betty Mumford, Linda Emery and Leah Day. Theo Barker at Bathurst and the Lithgow Historical Society helped with aspects of Barton not covered in the Sydney press. Clive Beauchamp has also helped.

During recent years I have discussed Barton with many friends and colleagues and have inflicted sections of the manuscript on several. Brian de Garis, Derek Drinkwater, John Hurst, Stuart Macintyre, Allan Martin, Jenny Mills, Graeme Powell, Margaret Steven, Katharine West and the late Jules Zanetti have all contributed improvements and insights. These mutual support systems are beyond the calculations of economic rationalism, and I value them. In the process of publication it has also been a pleasure to work with (and to try the patience of) John Iremonger at Allen & Unwin and his colleagues Emma Cotter and Karen Penning.

Once again, my wife Carol and our family have been a sure source of loving support. It seems appropriate to dedicate this book to Jed McArthur-Bolton, Bleys McArthur-Bolton and Ariel Atkin-Bolton, Australians of the twenty-first century.

Geoffrey Bolton
Claremont, 2000

A NOTE ON ILLUSTRATIONS

The photographs in this book, as well as the cartoons from the Bulletin and Melbourne Punch, are all reproduced by courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

Introduction:
   Encountering
Edmund Barton

EDMUND BARTON first seriously entered my life on the evening of 13 September 1952 at the Port Hotel in Derby, Western Australia. An inexperienced post-graduate student, not quite 21 years old, I had for the past three months been researching the history of the Kimberley pastoral industry and thought that a spare Saturday night might usefully be spent yarning at the bar with some old-timer about his experiences.

I soon found my old-timer. He was a station cook, 73 years of age, battered and leathery with years of outback living; Russel Ward would have been proud of him. We talked while I sipped my beer and he drained his crème de menthe from five-ounce glasses and, presently, he said: ‘Do you know what was the greatest moment of my life?’ No, I said, I didn’t, but I’d like to hear. I thought he might relate some epic of droving or some anecdote of Gallipoli or the Somme. But he told me that when he was eighteen years old he was a kitchen-hand at Petty’s Hotel in Sydney, and that night after night Edmund Barton would bring some of the delegates from the federal convention to dinner after a session. ‘I seen them all,’ he told me, ‘Reid, Deakin, Forrest—I seen them all. But the prince of them all was Edmund Barton.’

This encounter impressed me. As a well-trained graduate of the University of Western Australia I knew about Barton, of course. The previous year, 1951, had been the half-centenary of Federation. There had been a parade through the main street of Perth, one item in which was a float on which various well-known local actors in frock coats sat around a table imitating the Founding Fathers, their speeches rising in passion as they worked through the refreshments with which somebody had thoughtfully provided them. Postage stamps had been issued with the portraits of Barton and Sir Henry Parkes. And I had bought and enjoyed John Reynolds’ recently published biography of Edmund Barton and knew that the federal movement promoted him in its propaganda as ‘Australia’s noblest son’. Barton was, however, essentially an urban, middle-class politician, and it came as a surprise to find an old bushie in the Kimberleys, a character who was neither urban nor middle class, praising Barton so emphatically more than half a century after Federation. I made up my mind that one day I would find out about Barton.

This curiosity, it seemed, was shared by few other Australians. No later biography has appeared to supplement Reynolds’ pioneering study, although a good deal more manuscript material has been lodged in the National and Mitchell Libraries, and Martha Rutledge contributed an excellent 5000-word entry on Barton to Volume 7 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Far from dominating the official mythology of his nation as Washington does in the United States or Nehru in India, Barton is less remembered than, for instance, Sir John A. Macdonald in Canada or Louis Botha in South Africa. A schoolteacher friend of mine tells me that 20 years ago he asked a class of fifteen-year-olds whether they could name the first American president and the first Australian prime minister. Nearly everybody named Washington, nobody knew about Barton. In 1994 he repeated the experiment with a similar class and found a noteworthy change. Hardly anybody knew about either man.

This neglect invites two possible explanations. One is that Barton was not really important. He might be seen as a compromise figurehead behind whom more purposeful talents such as Deakin and Forrest manoeuvred to promote their favoured policies. Such an interpretation would draw support from the nickname ‘Tosspot Toby’, reflecting Barton’s indulgence in food and drink. It might also be argued that he was Commonwealth prime minister for only two years and eight months, during part of which time he was overseas, and that his decision to retire to the less conspicuous responsibilities of the High Court rules him out of consideration as a serious statesman. (On the other hand he remains, with the exception of Robert Menzies and perhaps Andrew Fisher, the only one of Australia’s 25 prime ministers to quit office at the moment of his own choosing.) Inescapably Barton’s biographer has to reckon with the possibility that he was an amiable and fortunate second-rater who reached the history books by accident.

A second explanation lies in the eddies of fashion in historical writing. During the 1970s the Federal Constitution came under attack as a relic of the horse-and-buggy era, a botched compromise lacking the appeals to noble sentiment which prefaced the constitutions of the United States and the former Soviet Union. After a quarter of a century of largely futile attempts at constitutional reform, most critics today are prepared to concede some respect for the generation of politicians who at least managed to put together a workable constitution and secure its acceptance by a majority of voters in every part of Australia; but it has taken the approaching centenary of the Australian Commonwealth to bring the process of Federation more sharply into focus. Understandably, however, much research is concentrating on the grassroots of the federal movement.

We really know astonishingly little about the motives of the people who voted for or against Federation. We know a good deal about the process by which the constitution was created, largely thanks to the work of J. A. La Nauze and L. F. Crisp, and we know something of what the politicians said when they went on the campaign trail or corresponded with one another. But the uncharted country crying out for discovery by historians includes the growth of national sentiment among ordinary Australian men and women.

Many of today’s practising historians are moved by a moral imperative to give voices to the obscure and the disadvantaged who have previously been overlooked in the reconstruction of Australia’s past. Writers of ‘history from below’ tend to mistrust political history as a genre dealing with the transactions of powerful elites, and political biography as liable to uphold the myth of ‘the great man in history’. Barton at first appearance conforms to a conventional stereotype. A middle-class male from the professional classes, of English parentage and English sympathies, conformist, overweight, and comfortable in the Establishment, he seems a prime representative of a dominant class and gender which have come under searching challenge in recent decades. Nor is his image enhanced by the circumstance that most of his surviving portraits show the public face of a statesman posed for the eye of posterity. He lacked the memorable idiosyncrasies of a George Reid or a Billy Hughes. Can such a figure be made interesting or relevant to the Australians of our generation?

It’s worth a try. The features which many of us now deplore in the political culture of Barton’s era—the faith in nationalism as an energising force for a community, the belief in European racial superiority, the exclusive masculinity of the governing classes—were not unique to Australia but were entrenched in most of the civilised world. To ignore or berate the public figures of a hundred years ago because they were insensitive to issues which we now consider important is to invite similar derision from the scholars and readers of a hundred years hence. Barton and his contemporaries should be assessed in the context of the possibilities open to them in their time. It mattered that Australians in the 1890s should decide whether they wished to remain a scatter of British colonies to the south of Asia or whether they should embark on the unprecedented experiment of creating a single nation in a continent. It mattered, if Australia federated, that a federal constitution should be devised of sufficient flexibility to allow for change and growth during the next century and beyond. In the political processes required to achieve these objectives it was important for the Australian people to find representatives who would devote time and energy to those aims, negotiate the necessary agreements and compromises, and speak to the public in words that carried conviction. Barton was one of the politicians who accepted this responsibility. Eventually he was thought by his colleagues to have shown such devotion to the cause that he deserved to be the leader under whom the rest would serve. Such examples of practical cooperation are not common in politics. How did Barton become the necessary man?

In exploring this question we shall see how an easygoing Sydney politician became possessed by the one great enthusiasm of his life; how, although only one of many who contributed to the federal cause, he came to be seen as its actual and symbolic leader; and how, having passed the peak of his form, he had the timely wisdom to step aside from political leadership. I do not intend to present Barton as a hero, believing with Brecht that happy is the land that has no need for heroes. But I see in him an example of a peculiar capacity—John Monash and John Curtin are other Australian examples which come to mind—for flawed and fallible individuals to lift their performance in moments of crisis and so to make a lasting contribution to public welfare. (This peculiar capacity is not limited to Australia; I think of Truman and many others.) Australians are often, and deservedly, cynical about their politicians. It is worth remembering the occasions when their elected representatives have behaved constructively.

The materials for Barton’s biography presented problems. Plenty could be found about his public activities during the Federation era and the period of his prime ministership. The Barton papers in the National Library of Australia could be supplemented by correspondence with Parkes, Deakin and many other leading political figures. Australia in the Federation years also boasted a diverse and lively press. Cities and large country towns supported several newspapers in which the speeches, activities and personal foibles of politicians were reported in detail. Barton’s private life was harder to approach. Unlike Alfred Deakin he kept no confessional diaries voicing spiritual yearnings, and very little family correspondence has survived.

Barton and his family deliberately guarded their privacy. Barton himself was well aware that he had taken part in significant events in Australian history. At some point after leaving politics and going to the High Court he and his wife systematically went through their past correspondence, carefully preserving letters which they thought of permanent interest, but destroying almost all personal and family material. This happened probably around 1909 when they moved from ‘Miandatta’, their North Sydney residence of twelve years, to a smaller house. The remaining correspondence was further winnowed by Barton’s executor and son-in-law, David Maughan, before the Barton papers were deposited in the National Library in 1929. Even then certain material referring to the family’s personal affairs remained under restricted access until a few years ago. Oral history cannot do much to help. Very few people who remembered him were alive in the 1990s, and these only from the perspective of small children. Fortunately John Reynolds recorded some interviews when he was researching for his biography of 1948. Barton’s grandchildren have offered me every cooperation—but large gaps remain in the record.

I have not found out how it was that Barton lost his money in the 1893 financial crisis. I have very little first-hand evidence about the swings of temperament which were covered by his normally calm, good-humoured and formal exterior. Least of all have I found out nearly enough about the point of view of Jeanie Barton, from all the evidence the one woman in his life. She was evidently an intelligent woman, who played the piano, wrote with a good hand, and with little preparation held her own in upper-class society in London, but she has left remarkably little trace of her own thoughts and feelings. For example, I could find nothing about her relations with her sister and brother after her marriage and departure from Newcastle. It was only within months of completing this biography that I was shown by Dr David Barton a cache of letters from his grandfather to his father. From these it appeared that the sister remained on close visiting terms with the Bartons throughout their marriage. She may well have been a source of support for Jeanie during the many times that she was left alone with the children because of her husband’s public commitments. But this is no more than informed conjecture. There is much else in the lives of Jeanie and Edmund Barton which remains unknown, because they were good at minding their own business.

I have done what I could with the materials at my disposal, but while I believe I have given a more complete portrayal of Barton than any previous attempt, I would be the first to admit that important questions are left unanswered. Nevertheless after several years in close proximity with Edmund Barton he retains my respect—an outcome not always experienced by biographers—so that my account of him aims at balancing justice and affection. A propaganda campaign marking the centenary of Federation took up my schoolteacher friend’s point that many Australians know nothing of their first prime minister. My hope is that this book will do a little towards demonstrating that Edmund Barton was and is worth knowing.

1
Mr Micawber’s
   Son

THE MINIATURES were probably painted in 1827, in the last years of Georgian England. Her profile suggests a spirited and pretty eighteen-year-old, his a man in his early thirties, both facing the future cheerfully and confidently. They were about to marry and go to New South Wales, that raw convict colony established less than 40 years earlier on the other side of the world, but already in some eyes a land of promise. It would never have occurred to Mary Louisa Whydah or to William Barton that by the end of the century a son of theirs would become the first prime minister of a united Australia.

They had no intention of settling permanently. William Barton was the youngest son of a London perfumier, a member of a merchant family with interests in the East Indies. Born in 1795, he had not prospered greatly despite the careful mentoring of an elder brother, until in May 1827 the opportunity came of appointment as accountant to the Australian Agricultural Company. Formed three years earlier as a result of lobbying by the Macarthur family, the Company was one of the first attempts to mobilise British investment by capitalising on the promise of an expanding wool industry to acquire large tracts of Australian land. With £1 million behind it the Company was willing to pay the handsome salary of £500 a year for a smart young executive to go to New South Wales as accountant and secretary. William Barton’s family supported his application. He had a seven-year contract, but he would be best served, wrote his elder brother, by a stay of at least fourteen years in a land flowing with milk and honey. In this hopeful frame of mind William and Mary Louisa were married in June 1827 and embarked upon the Frederick for the five-month voyage to Australia.

First impressions of Sydney were propitious. They were immediately received into the first rank of society; Governor Darling invited them to a ball and supper for the King’s birthday; and their first child was born, named William, like his father. But in December 1828 the Company closed its Sydney office and moved its establishment to Port Stephens, 150 kilometres northward. In this remote and underdeveloped peninsula, swampy and ill-drained, 600 officials, workmen and convicts laboured to build a pastoral empire on land unsuited for sheep. ‘It was, in effect a new colony settled by Englishmen with no colonial experience.’ After the first manager’s dismissal, discipline slackened and quarrels flared. In this remote and alien environment, so different from his familiar London, William Barton went somewhat to pieces, covering his anxiety by displays of inappropriately grandiose behaviour.

The Bartons came to a barely completed brick and adobe cottage which William endeavoured to landscape like an English gentleman’s residence, with an ornamental wall and a flourishing vegetable garden. He remained professionally competent, beavering away at various practices which he thought were costing the Company money, but his temper became erratic and unpredictable, especially after the arrival in December 1829 of a new local manager for the Company, Sir Edward Parry. Only five years older than Barton, Parry owed his appointment largely to his reputation as a successful Arctic explorer. Barton seems to have expected that he would be content as a figurehead while his diligent accountant managed the Company’s affairs. Parry quickly made it plain that he was in charge, but the Parrys and the Bartons remained on civil terms for about a year. One summer afternoon Lady Parry, out driving in her dog-cart with her maid beside her, passed young Mrs Barton’s cottage, and seeing her with her two small children, invited her to come for the drive with her, leaving the maid to walk the two kilometres home. That evening William Barton penned a furious letter to the Parrys protesting against the insult to his wife in asking her to sit where the maid had been sitting. Soon after followed a letter from Mary Louisa, asking the Parrys not to trouble themselves over her husband’s ‘ridiculous note’, but it was of no use. Relations soured irrevocably between Parry and Barton.

A series of squabbles over petty issues culminated in March 1831 when a convict sent by Parry to Barton’s house complained that Barton drove him away by throwing gravel-stones at him. Parry had Barton suspended from his duties, prosecuted for assault, and evicted from his house before ordering him and his family to return to England. Acquitted of the stone-throwing shortly before his departure, Barton arrived in England in December eager to report his side of the story to the Company, only to find that the directors had already decided to terminate his contract, following advice from Parry.

Settling his family in lodgings in Bloomsbury, Barton waged a paper war against the Company for two years, but to no avail. Early in 1834, by now with four children, the Bartons departed once more for Sydney. Barton sued Parry for malicious prosecution, and was awarded the contemptuous damages of one farthing. With little capital, William was now driven by determination to triumph over his critics by proving himself a successful businessman. In August 1834 he established a public bazaar in a former hotel in Macquarie Place. It was a kind of ancestor of the modern shopping centre, where goods could be warehoused and retailers might rent trading outlets under the same roof. Barton himself was advertising London-built one-horse carriages and hoped to attract others in the same line of business as well as sellers of furniture and musical instruments. By April 1835 the Sydney Bazaar had added books, stationery, toys, millinery, haberdashery and baby linen to its stock, but a few weeks later it closed. Undeterred, Barton in June was advertising a brand of repeater rifle useful for inland settlers ‘in the present crisis’ (presumably Aboriginal resistance) as well as continuing to deal in vehicles. In the midst of these ventures he hit on his longest-lived vocation. At the end of July he began advertising himself as an agent for the transfer of shares in banks and other companies. By publishing Australia’s first list of stocks and shares he secured his niche in financial history as the nation’s pioneer stockbroker.

At first this could be only a sideline because there were as yet few public companies with negotiable shares. Early in 1836 Barton was busy with the formation of the Australian Fire and Life Assurance Company. He was interim secretary but somehow failed to become a member of the permanent directorate. Could it be that his peers judged him a lightweight, ineffectually scrabbling on the margins, or did he lose friends through the protective self-importance which had coloured his relations with Sir Edward Parry? At any rate the man was unsinkable. Later in 1836 he was offering himself as a house and land agent, but his stockbroking activities continued, and in 1838 he published The Particulars of Joint Stock Institutions in New South Wales. Unhappily all this activity failed to translate itself into steady income, and during 1838–39 Mary Louisa Barton, although by now the mother of six children with a seventh on the way, was obliged to run a school for day and boarding students.

During the next few years New South Wales enjoyed a pastoral boom. Borrowing from former Australian Agricultural Company colleagues, William Barton began investing in land: 104 acres and a cottage at Five Dock in outer Sydney, 640 acres in the St George basin, 736 acres near Bathurst, 1120 acres at Sugarloaf, four town lots at Muswellbrook. Early in 1842, with unabated optimism he set up as an auctioneer in Pitt Street, dealing mainly in property but with a share auction every Wednesday—just in time for a calamitous slump. In April 1843 he went bankrupt, one among many, and the trustees took hold of his possessions, even the two cows, four pigs and poultry on the Five Dock estate. Once again Mary Louisa went schoolteaching. Within twelve months William was able to settle with his creditors and resume his stockbroking, but to judge from the infrequency of his newspaper advertisements during the next five years he was learning caution in promoting bright new ideas.

The family continued to increase and by 1846 numbered seven daughters and three sons. Perhaps because of pressure of numbers the Bartons left the central part of Sydney where they had lived since returning from England, and took a house in Hereford Street, Glebe, a developing suburb about five kilometres to the south-west. Here Mary Louisa became pregnant for the eleventh time, and here on 18 January 1849 she gave birth to her fourth son. Six months later he was christened Edmund, a name not previously used in the family. Perhaps he was named after the explorer Edmund Kennedy, recently killed by Aborigines on his Cape York Peninsula expedition. The child Edmund arrived at an improving moment in the family’s fortunes. In 1849 William Barton re-emerged as a real estate agent and dealer in shares and by 1851 the family was back in central Sydney, with William’s office at the Sydney Harbour end of George Street and the family in Cumberland Street—for the Rocks was still a respectable neighbourhood. That was the year when the discovery of gold in the gullies north of Bathurst launched New South Wales and Victoria on an unprecedented boom. Sydney’s population increased from under 45 000 in 1851 to 56 000 in 1861 and, although Melbourne dramatically outstripped the older city, Sydney did well enough to change from a straggling port at the fag-end of the convict era to a prosperously thriving mercantile centre.

As Sydney’s only specialist sharebroker William Barton could hardly avoid benefiting from these changes. Whereas his earlier business had been mainly in banking, gas lighting and steam navigation shares, the 1850s saw growth in gold and coal mining companies. Of course the expanding economy attracted competition and before long Barton was no longer leader in the field, but even so he had never done better. Mary Louisa may still have felt the need for added financial security, for instead of taking the opportunity to devote herself exclusively to her large family she continued running a ladies’ college in Macquarie Street. Perhaps she was one of those uncommon nineteenth-century married women who, having established a professional career, was able to continue enjoying it. By 1853 William was at last able to inform his brother in England that he was living comfortably and saving, but had given up his intention of returning to England and meant to remain in New South Wales. He had taken more than twenty years to acclimatise, but his children, especially the younger of them, would grow up thinking of themselves as Australian.

So it was that, in comparison with his older sisters and brothers, Edmund Barton was to enjoy a childhood of moderate financial security. Probably also emotional security, as the baby in a large family with a majority of girls; for although soon after Edmund’s third birthday a brother was born, Sydney Fitzgerald Barton, he survived only nine months. His loss may have strengthened Edmund’s position—‘Toby’, as the family called him from an early age—as the cherished youngest child. From such beginnings Toby would soon have developed the charm on which so many people commented in later life, as well as the quickness to perceive and understand the point of view of others; a quickness which sometimes shaded into his least attractive characteristic, too great a readiness to appear to agree with those viewpoints. Possibly also it was a youngest child’s experience which led to the adult Edmund Barton’s over-fondness for his food and drink, as well as a somewhat happy-go-lucky attitude towards money. One story survives from his childhood. The very tall Bishop Barker, making polite conversation with small Toby Barton, asked him what his father called him. ‘Damned young scamp,’ replied Toby, ‘’cause I put my finger in the inkpot and was writing over his writing to make it big.’ With a family which was long remembered as ‘one of the most literary in Sydney’ and his mother an experienced teacher and woman of character, it would also have helped that he showed signs of being a very intelligent little boy who took readily to schooling. After two years at the nearby Upper Fort Street primary school, attached to the garrison church at St Philip’s, he was sent to Sydney Grammar School, probably at its re-opening in 1857 and certainly by the time he was ten in 1859.

By that time each of his five eldest sisters had married and left home. Remarkably, none lived in Sydney; one had gone to London, three to Brisbane, and the other married first a physician and then a journalist who lived several years in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) before settling in Melbourne. Of those who remained at home, Alice, four years his senior, was his favourite, whom he would remember as ‘the flower of the flock’. She was destined in 1865 to make what seemed the best match of all, when she married an Oxfordshire squire, Edward Hamersley, and went to live in an English manor-house; but the dampness of the Thames Valley would promote a tubercular condition, and she would be dead by 30. Ellen, a year younger, was even less fortunate. She died aged fourteen in July 1860 of injuries sustained in a fire eighteen weeks earlier. It has been impossible to discover the circumstances of the fire, but the trauma for the family must have been considerable.

Of the sons, the eldest, William, was at 30 a dim figure, unmarried, junior partner in his father’s firms, and dabbler in goldmining investments. The third son, Henry, made hardly more impression. There was nothing dim or unimpressive about the second son, George Burdett Barton. A clever youth, he entered the University of Sydney in 1853 at sixteen, intending to follow a legal career after taking his degree. Shortly before he was due to graduate, George quarrelled with the professor of classics, John Woolley, pursued the dispute provocatively in the newspapers, and was expelled from the university. This was to be the pattern of his life. Gifted, handsome, energetic, apparently fit for early success, he so often timed his rebellious gestures for the moment when they would wreak the maximum of harm on his worldly prospects. He was a role model for Edmund to avoid, but at this point of their lives George’s cantankerousness may have benefited his younger brother. Somehow the family found the means to send George to London to qualify in law at the Middle Temple. By 1859 his progress disappointed old William Barton, who was moved to write to his son attributing his lack of success to idleness.

This provoked a tremendous rejoinder, 40 handwritten pages in length. It was his deafness, George argued, coupled with a prolonged bout of depression, which explained his slow progress. He turned the attack on his father, accusing him of neglect:

I acknowledge that from my earliest years you have treated me with understanding kindness . . . Punishment, unfeeling or unreasoning, I have never received from you . . . but . . . You have neglected to give me that training and cultivation at home in the absence of which the best of youngsters run great risks . . . I cannot recall to mind that you have ever spent five minutes in conversation with me of any kind, certainly not in conversation of that kind which every Father should unremittingly hold with his Son.

Old William Barton, said George, had never taught him to look after his health or to take exercise or to cultivate a moral sense:

But I have another and more practical reason for moralising in this vein. In your last letter you mention Edmund’s success at the Grammar School and add ‘You, too, began well. I trust that he will not flag as he proceeds.’ Now, observe this. If by good fortune his health continues unimpaired he will not flag as he proceeds, he will go on as he has begun . . . But, if he is allowed, as I was allowed to become the victim of disease, you will have a second time to mourn the disappointment of your hope . . . Let my fate, then, be a lesson to you for your profit. Mark out on his Chart the rocks on which I have split and I shall not have suffered in vain. Let him learn early what I have learned late. Do not allow him, the Benjamin of your heart, to remain in ignorance of those things on which his welfare, for Time and for Eternity entirely depend. Cultivate his Body—Cultivate his Mind—Cultivate his Soul.

In his mid-sixties William Barton was neither of an age nor of a temperament to pay much heed to the insights of an angry 23-year-old son; but someone in the family must have thought the letter worth keeping. George qualified and returned to Sydney in 1860, but instead of practising law, drifted into journalism. In 1864 he was one of the founders of Sydney Punch, a weekly intended to repeat the success of its London namesake. Next year he married, and a secure future seemed open to him in the form of a government appointment worth £500 a year. With his habitual poor timing George chose that moment to publish in Punch a satire on the government entitled ‘Jupiter and Ganymede’. The premier was not amused, and the government appointment was cancelled. After another two years in Sydney, George went off to New Zealand in 1868 for further turbulent experiences in law and journalism. Meanwhile the younger William Barton faded out of life in 1863—after convulsions lasting four days, according to the death certificate— and Edmund became more and more the hope of the family.

Whether or not because of George Barton’s advice, Edmund did well at Sydney Grammar School. Despite a dilapidated fabric and tight finances the school met high academic standards, with particular strengths in Latin and Greek, taught by the headmaster, an Oxford graduate. Here a lifelong love of classics was kindled in Edmund Barton. Henceforward he carried in his head the resonances of a great culture far removed from colonial Sydney or from the Regency England of his father’s reminiscences. Sydney Grammar also gave him a great liking for cricket, an enthusiasm shared by his best friend, Dick O’Connor. Two years younger than Barton, Richard Edward O’Connor was descended from a family notable in the 1798 Irish rising, but his own father was a highly respectable parliamentary clerk. Although Barton and O’Connor did not overlap at Sydney Grammar, they apparently met in those years, and friendship followed. For the rest of their lives O’Connor would be the only friend who continued to call Barton ‘Ted’.

Having been captain of the school in 1863 and 1864, a position which went automatically to the dux, or academically most gifted boy, Edmund Barton in 1865 matriculated into the University of Sydney with such excellent results that the Senate awarded him a special prize. At university he specialised in classics, with minors in mathematics, physics, French and English literature. The latter was taught for a while by his brother George, whose influence may well have stimulated nationalist ideas in the young Edmund. For in 1866 George Burdett Barton published Literature in New South Wales, surely one of the first blasts of the trumpet on behalf of Australian creativity. ‘Unless a radical change takes place in the temper of the people, the prospects of an independent literature are extremely dim . . .’ George went on:

We shall thus be left to rely helplessly upon the productions of another land, as we do at present, we shall produce nothing of our own beyond slavish imitations . . . This is not a prospect which any lover of his country can regard with pleasure . . . Patriotism has not yet developed itself amongst us; and the history of the world has shown that where there has been no patriotism, there has never been a literature.

These were the accents of the young Australia which Edmund would represent in his political career.

It was Edmund’s good fortune that in his second year a new professor of classics arrived, Charles Badham, with an international reputation and a great talent for tutoring. Disappointed in his Oxford career because of an unorthodox theology and a sometimes untimely wit, Badham at 54 was a great catch for Sydney. He had edited several of the works of Plato, who with his mentor Socrates and his pupil Aristotle was seen as setting the basic questions of Western political philosophy. Badham was particularly renowned as a textual critic skilled at identifying the original words and intentions of ancient writers. The fastidious use of language required in such exercises resembled the analytical approach used by judges and senior counsel in interpreting the wording of laws. Badham must have been a profound influence for a student such as Barton whose later career would be so much bound up with the framing and interpretation of legal and political concepts.

Although he championed the humanities against public men such as Governor Robinson, who thought all higher education should have a strictly practical bent, Badham was no cloistered academic. He gladly talked to working men’s institutes and other public groups, and would if necessary have served as a school inspector in the interests of communicating between the university and the community at large. According to one of his students: ‘His speeches at the Commemoration were looked forward to by the undergraduates, were listened to with attention, and were punctuated with applause.’ Barton responded to his teaching, winning the Lithgow scholarship in his second year and the Cooper in his third. In 1868 he graduated with first-class honours in Classics and was awarded a special University prize for the substantial sum of £20; over $2000 by the standards of 2000. Two years later, in May 1870, he took his Master of Arts degree, which in those easygoing times was largely a formality, if an expensive one.

While an undergraduate, Barton took up rowing, and in 1870, a trim 21-year-old weighing just over 60 kilograms, he was a member of the Sydney four beaten by the University of Melbourne. Next year in the Sydney regatta he was one of the Osprey crew who won an event from Circular Quay to Lavender Bay, around Fort Denison and back. Cricket remained his main enthusiasm, though he was remembered as no more than a fair batsman and an appalling fieldsman. Probably his best work for the University club was done administratively. He served on the grounds committee in 1869 and the general committee for several years from 1868, including two spells as acting chairman and two as honorary secretary. When the team visited Melbourne over the Christmas of 1870 to lose narrowly to the rival university, Barton came in at number seven, making four in the first innings and five in the second. The following year when Melbourne returned the visit, the home side won by nine wickets, Barton’s contribution being a modest four singles. These games were major social events, with a German band to play in the intervals, and champagne toasts at the end of the match. The visiting team received free rail passes from the host government, and both sides were invited to theatres and choral societies. Prophetically the Argus editorial praised such events for their value in bringing the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales closer together.

During 1869 and 1870 Edmund Barton intermittently kept a diary. In its pages he comes across as a pleasant, sociable young man, on good terms with his parents and enjoying many friendships. He notes reading Macaulay and Blackstone, but writes more of cricket and fishing. One of his fishing mates was a thickset young Treasury clerk four years older than himself, George Reid, with whom he went to the races, cruised on Sydney Harbour and exchanged comic Valentines. In March 1869 Reid took him to the School of Arts debating society, where Barton ‘tried to speak and made a fool of himself’; but he persevered, hardly imagining how much oratory lay ahead for Reid and himself. Many years later Reid recalled: ‘I never met a more deficient beginner as a speaker than he was. I often used to encourage him, as a very young man, to get on his feet and speak . . . but he did not take to it kindly.’

His dissipations were mild, although on a spring night following a rowing celebration he wrote: ‘Drank much beer, which together with more drunk coming home from Fred Fitzhardinge made too much. Accordingly played some pranks’, with the inevitable sequel: ‘Very bilious and seedy. Didn’t go to Regatta.’ He had a not uncritical eye for a pretty girl. After dancing with a Miss Austen known as ‘the Belle of Balmain’, he commented: ‘A fair girl with good features, but indifferent light blue eyes and little brain, as far as I could tell.’ On occasion he could be a combative young male. At the May Ball at Government House (where, oddly by today’s standards, his father accompanied him), as there were 800 present Edmund ‘was wise enough not to dance much in such a mob’ but stood up resolutely to a ‘snob’ who accused him of pushing past his girlfriend. ‘Snob’ was Barton’s severest term of criticism in those years.

Then at Easter 1870 the University cricket team visited Newcastle, where the University made 69 and 97. In the second innings Barton was the second highest scorer, making fifteen runs. Newcastle was all out for 38 in the first innings but recovered to win by three wickets. During this weekend Edmund’s friend Dick Teece introduced him to two middle-aged ladies, a Mrs Coulter, accompanied by her daughter, and Miss Home, with her niece. Both girls were pretty. ‘Janet Coulter is a jolly little cuss and sings like a bird,’ Barton remarked, but it was her friend for whom he fell: ‘And Jeanie Ross is beautiful and she sings and is a dear.’ He lost no time, because the day concluded with ‘Tea at Miss Home’s. Jolly. And walk after. Jollier.’ The next day there was a wine party given by the mayor and mayoress. The competitive young Barton suspected that their son had an eye on Jeanie, but she took no notice, and it was Edmund who walked the young ladies home. For the rest of the week he saw her every day, and when it was time to return to Sydney he spent a sleepless night with what he called ‘the blue devils’. He sent her a copy of that classic mid-Victorian statement on gender relations, Tennyson’s ‘Princess’, and correspondence followed. It was arranged that Jeanie would come to Sydney late in May.

He was only 21, and she not quite nineteen, but they were ready to commit themselves. On 26 May he wrote:

Walked with Jeanie and had a serious talk with her speaking fully about my circumstances and prospects. Her admirable character displayed itself more completely to me. The knowledge of my poor and wretched situation and of my small estimate of my chances, seemed to make her more tender than before . . . How I love that Girl!

When he took her to the Opera he saw ‘no one fit to hold a candle to her’. All was well too with his parents: ‘Jeanie seemed quite in love with the old people.’ Her own parents were dead. Jane Mason Ross (always known as ‘Jeanie’) was the London-born daughter of a Scottish engineer, David Ross, and his wife Euphemia. With their three children they emigrated to Newcastle, where David Ross was credited with building some of the port’s earliest coal-handling equipment. Having lost money in mining investments he turned publican, becoming licensee of the Albion Inn in Blane Street (now Hunter Street West), ‘quite a famous hostelry’, according to a local historian, ‘catering for visitors from Sydney and the country districts . . . It was an old-fashioned cottage type of building . . . standing well back from the roadway, with a wide verandah in front’. Many years later some old Newcastle hands thought they saw a prophecy of Federation in the gilt inn sign, which depicted a man trying to break a bundle of sticks across his knee with the motto ‘Union is Strength’.

Widowed early, Ross brought out his wife’s sister, Ellen Home, to look after his young family. Tradition remembers her as ‘a very terrifying disciplinarian and stern unbending Presbyterian’. The same family source also asserts that she made her brother-in-law give up the hotel, but if so it can only have been shortly before his death in 1868. His obituary describes him as ‘contractor’. Gossips took care to inform Edmund that Jeanie’s father had been a publican, but he was unmoved. This was the girl he meant to marry. In any case the family’s respectability survived challenge. David Ross had served two terms as alderman, and his Presbyterian funeral was attended by 300 mourners. Jeanie herself played the organ at St Andrews Church. The only, the critical, impediment to marriage was that Edmund had first to make a career.