Twiggy (2 page)

If Forrest’s achievements had ended at this point, he would still be remembered
as one of Western Australia’s most important citizens. But he was about to embark on a spectacularly successful career in state and federal politics, which would take him to within one vote of the prime ministership. At age thirty-five, Forrest had become surveyor-general and a member of Western Australia’s executive council – the first locally born man to be admitted to the colony’s highest
governing body. It did not take long for Forrest, always a man of strong opinions, to clash with the colonial governor of the day, Frederick Broome, whom Forrest accused of ruling in a despotic style. But Forrest established a reputation as a shrewd political tactician and was regarded by the public as a “local boy made good”.

When Britain granted Western Australia the right to self-rule
in 1890, John Forrest was elected unopposed to the seat of Bunbury in the Legislative Assembly. He then threw his hat in the ring to become premier, gathering supporters among fellow members of parliament and lobbying the governor at that time, Sir William Robinson, to give him the job. Crowley observed that the hugely energetic Forrest was desperate to become Western Australia’s first premier.

Why did he seek the premiership so ardently? The answer can only be found in the character of the man as it had been influenced by his career. He was without doubt a born leader, a man with a remarkable degree of self-confidence, who, unlike many gifted in that manner but not so fortunate, had been able to take advantage of situations best suited to his temperaments and his natural
talents. He had an appetite for leadership and power, and a temperament well-suited to decision-making.

After being named the state’s first premier, Forrest quickly employed CY O’Connor, who had twenty-five years’ engineering experience in New Zealand, as his chief engineer to build a harbour at Fremantle and find a way of transporting water to the Goldfields. The appointment was one
of his best decisions. Public works were urgently needed because the British government had been unwilling to approve spending in the distant colony. Across the vast state, railways, ports, jetties, lighthouses and town halls would be built by the Forrest government in a frenzy of activity. When O’Connor first cabled Forrest to ask what his new job would entail, Forrest simply replied: “Railways,
harbours, everything.” The water pipeline, in particular, was one of the world’s great engineering feats. Water was dammed outside Perth at Mundaring Weir and piped uphill for more than 550 kilometres to Kalgoorlie. To this day, it is a lifeline for mining towns perched on the edge of the desert.

In both its far-sightedness and scale, the Forrest government’s provision of infrastructure
is arguably unparalleled in Australian history. The town of Southern Cross, 370 kilometres east of Perth, had a railway by 1894, just four years after it was gazetted. Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie were connected by telegraph by 1894 and had their railway two years later. These were towns experiencing a population explosion as a result of the gold discoveries that were making news worldwide. Perth itself
experienced huge growth and was catapulted from the ranks of country town to one of the top ten cities of Australia by the turn of the century. Western Australia’s population soared from 100,000 to 240,000 in the decade to 1904, a period in which unemployment was high and industrial action common in the eastern states. Unlike today’s mining boom, which has attracted more international than interstate
migrants, most new settlers to Western Australia in the 1890s came from the economically depressed states of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia.

For better or worse, it is difficult to imagine governments of today acting so rapidly with such huge amounts of taxpayers’ money. But Forrest had the political courage to stare down his many critics and see projects through to completion,
even when accused – at home and abroad – of corruption or incompetence. London’s
Financial Times
, in a report on the economic miracle that was occurring in the colony under Forrest, wrote of the “waste and extravagance which one sees throughout Western Australia”. But Forrest, the politician, took political credit for the public works he was building, telling parliament that future generations
would thank his government. By this time his authority had been enhanced by a knighthood – he was the first native-born Western Australian to receive the honour. O’Connor, a more reclusive and sensitive man, shot himself while riding his horse into the waves at a beach near Fremantle in March 1902, aged fifty-nine, a year before the pipeline was commissioned. Weeks before his suicide, an article
in Perth’s
Sunday Times
newspaper had accused him of “gross blundering” and “reckless extravagant juggling with public funds”.

Another of Forrest’s great legacies is his guidance of Western Australia into the federation in 1901 despite strong opposition from within his rural electorate, his ministry and even his friends. Throughout the 1890s Forrest was a member of the national meetings that
framed the Australian Constitution, and he argued repeatedly for a strong upper house to give the less populous states a voice. He also lobbied the eastern premiers – largely unsuccessfully – for a number of concessions for Western Australia to enter the federation. Forrest called a referendum in 1900 and the margin was two-to-one in favour of federation, with women voting for the first time.
The mining boom in the Goldfields and the arrival of tens of thousands of “t’othersiders” from the east had boosted public support for Western Australia to join the commonwealth. But many of his former supporters never forgave Forrest for championing the “yes” vote, and he would be blamed for the supposed negative effects of federation on the state’s economy and finances for the next thirty years.
Many opponents of federation soon became firm advocates of secession – a fringe movement that survives in the west to this day.

As premier, John Forrest is credited with many social reforms, including extending voting rights to women. But in truth Forrest was nowhere near as visionary in his social outlook as in his economic policies. His attitudes to women were staunchly conservative, which
was hardly unusual for the era. He was pleased when an early motion to allow female voting was defeated in parliament, believing that it would lead to women sitting in parliament and neglecting their home duties. Forrest told parliament in 1897 that men were created to be breadwinners and women were intended to be “the comfort and solace of our homes”. By 1899, however, he’d had a sudden change
of heart. It is thought that his wife, Margaret, who by that time had joined the Suffrage League, inspired the premier’s sudden enthusiasm for the cause.

Forrest’s attitudes to Aborigines were similarly unenlightened. Historians Bob Reece and Tom Stannage concluded that Forrest and his colleagues were “locked into and promoted an ideology of development which had racism at its heart”. While
it seems clear that Forrest had a sympathy for individual Aborigines who had helped him as a surveyor and explorer, he had no vision of a future for indigenous people in a white society and viewed the surviving Aborigines in settled areas as little more than a public nuisance. He believed it was the government’s duty to help indigenous people in need “until the race died out”. But as an investor
in sheep stations, Forrest needed Aborigines as a source of cheap labour, and in 1893 he called for restraint by those whites who would regularly shoot Aborigines caught stealing food or cattle. “It’s all very well for us to be incensed against these native outrages, but we must remember this: they are not all bad,” he said. “How would we like to be shot at when we had done nothing wrong? Those
who do the mischief deserve punishing, no doubt, but this sort of random retribution would kill both the innocent and the guilty … We must endeavour to civilise them by degrees. I must not, in the position that I am in, do anything or sanction anything that will lead to the impression that an indiscriminate slaughter of blackfellows will be tolerated or allowed by the government of the colony.”

Unsurprisingly, his attitudes to foreigners were hardly progressive either. Forrest told parliament he did not want any Asians to settle permanently in the colony. “There are millions of them, and if we do not place some restrictions on them they will overrun the country, and, instead of being a British country, this will be an Asiatic country,” he said. Forrest introduced an Immigration Restriction
Act in 1897, which established a dictation test aimed at excluding the Chinese from living in Western Australia, and he was proud that his government had not allowed Asians to be issued with mining rights. This sort of unconcealed racism was common, of course, at the time. Frank Crowley believes Forrest “took with him to his grave this compound of social snobbery, laissez faire capitalism,
sentimental royalism, patriotic Anglicanism, benevolent imperialism and British racial superiority”.

By 1900 John Forrest had been joined in parliament by two of his brothers, Alexander and David. The three of them owned the vast Minderoo sheep station, which David Forrest had managed since the 1870s. John and Alexander Forrest, in particular, became the target of gossip that they took advantage
of their government work to acquire big landholdings. But there was no evidence of corruption, certainly not on John’s part. “He [John] used his own money to finance expeditions, didn’t charge travelling expenses and, as an early member of parliament, was not paid,” wrote Forrest family historians Alison and Dinee Muir. “He refused to take a parliamentary pension as he said the country could
not afford it and he had enough money of his own.”

Alexander, however, proved to be exceptionally gifted at seizing the lucrative business opportunities that were emerging in the fast-growing economy, accruing interests in pastoral stations, gold mines, newspapers, the timber industry, butchering and cattle shipping – even as he sat in parliament. He was the first genuine entrepreneur in
the Forrest family and would remain its most successful until his great-grand-nephew became Australia’s richest man in 2008. According to the Forrest family’s historians, Alexander Forrest was a “prolific investor and played the stockmarket with zest”. After leading a gruelling expedition in 1897 to the wild Kimberley region in the state’s far north, he was granted 5000 acres of prime pastoral land
near what is now the town of Derby. Because he was also the local member for West Kimberley at the time, the Legislative Council’s decision to grant the land to Alexander fuelled allegations of corruption. In 1897 he became lord mayor of Perth while continuing to sit in parliament.

With John entrenched as premier, critics of the Forrest family began to voice concerns that the state was being
run by a clique. Allegations continued to emerge in the press that Alexander Forrest was engaged in shonky business dealings and had secured government contracts for his various companies. “The truth was that it would have been almost impossible for the government to have bypassed his many interests,” wrote Alison and Dinee Muir. Geoffrey Bolton has adopted a cautious tone in analysing Alexander
Forrest’s fusion of money-making prowess and political influence. “As a capitalist he was an uncomplicated believer in the development of Western Australia’s natural resources, enjoying the gamble of speculative investment, generous in prosperity and uninterested in the acquisition of power beyond the extent necessary to serve his immediate interests,” Bolton wrote. “But he was careless of appearances
and failed to realise that the casual practices of a small-town business community, linked by kinship and connexion, could be interpreted unkindly in a more sophisticated commercial and political milieu.”

Alexander was dogged by rumours of corruption until his sudden death at fifty-one. He died with an estate worth £195,238, one of the largest amassed in the state at that time. A prominent
statue of Alexander Forrest stands on St Georges Terrace in the heart of Perth’s modern business district, an apt location for a memorial to an arch-capitalist.

After ten years as premier of Western Australia, John Forrest resigned in January 1901 to become the federal minister for defence in the newly formed conservative national government of Edmund Barton. At Australia’s first federal
election, in March of that year, he became the member for Swan. Forrest went on to serve as minister for home affairs, treasurer and acting prime minister in various conservative governments over the following seventeen years. But his greatest disappointment in politics came when he failed to win the leadership of the Liberal Party, then in opposition, by a single vote in 1913.

The opportunity
arose after Alfred Deakin had resigned as leader, providing Forrest with the moment he had been waiting for since leaving the premier’s office twelve years earlier. But Deakin, whom Forrest had regarded as a close ally and friend, threw his support behind Joseph Cook for the job and, five months later, the Liberals returned to power with Cook as prime minister. Deeply hurt by the probability that
he had missed out on the prime ministership by one vote and saddened by what he felt was Deakin’s betrayal, Forrest wrote a note to his old boss after the ballot: “My dear Deakin, ‘Et tu, Brute?’, Yours sincerely and in sorrow, John Forrest.”

John Forrest achieved another of his great visions in 1917, when a 1700-kilometre transcontinental railway line was joined on the Nullarbor Plain,
finally linking Perth to the eastern states. Sir John, who had championed the project for decades, saw it as vital to Australia’s economic development. A year later, at the age of seventy-one, Forrest was seriously ill with a cancerous cyst on his temple. He resigned as federal treasurer and boarded a ship for London to seek specialist medical attention. But on 3 September 1918, with his ship
off the coast of Sierra Leone, he died. When warned not to make the long journey to London, Forrest had said: “I have faced death before and I will face it now. What does it matter if I die at sea?”

To this day, Forrest’s record of public service – his years as an explorer, his decade as premier of Western Australian and his eighteen years of prominence on the national stage – remains virtually
unrivalled. His statue, a portly bronze figure swathed in robes, stands in Perth’s Kings Park, overlooking the capital city of a state that he transformed.