NEW MINISTER

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 39, 15 August 1945, Page 4

NEW MINISTER

EX-SHEARER'S RISE

AUSTRALIAN CABINET O.C. SYDNEY, July 18. Mr. Herbert Victor Johnson, who secured the vacancy caused by the death of the Prime Minister, Mr. Curtin, in Australia's Labour Ministry, is an ex-champion shearer. He is credited with having once shorn 3761 sheep in 17-h days. As Minister for the Interior, Mr. Johnson takes over from 80-years-old, bearded Senator Joseph Silver Collings who has passed to the comparative obscurity of the Vice-Presidency of the Executive Council. In his new post, Mr. Johnson is virtually Canberra s landlord, for which residents there are thankful after four years under stubborn and autocratic Senator Collings. It is belived that Caucus' choice of Mr Johnson for the only vacancy was partly to keep Western Australia represented in the Cabinet and to emphasise the Rightest character of the Ministry. For Mr. Johnson is bitterly anti-Communist and lost no time after his appointment in stating that his election was Labour's answer to Red infiltration of the unions. This was in keeping with his attitude towards Communism as president of the most powerful political union in Australia— th:e k Australian Workers' Union, with which he has been associated for '30 years. BIGGEST ELECTORATE IN WORLD. I Mr Johnson is member for the KalIgoorlie electorate—the biggest in the world, covering 900,000 square miles. He claims he has bicycled over much of it and says" he knows practically every waterhole in it. He won the seat at a by-election in 1940 and held it with an increased majority at the General Election in 1943. He showed he had political courage when, within a year of his election, wartime emergencies demanded the cessation of gold mining. Mr. Curtin realised this move might make Mr. Johnson unpopular among the miners of the electorate and offered to "go out and tell them the reason." Mr. Johnson .replied: "You've got enough jobs on your hands at present. The goldminers are in my electorate and I'll face them." Politics apart, Mr. Johnson had a picturesque career. At the age of 14 he took one of his father's horses and ran away from home. At 21 he was one of the fastest shearers in Australia. In 1912, due to shear in the Kimberley district, central Western Australia, he was at Geraldton, courting the present Mrs. Johnson. Mr. Johnson missed the coastal steamer Koombana, which was never heard of again. Mr Johnson can speak seven aboriginal dialects and says he knows every shrub tree and wildflower m the Australian bush by its native name. After his Cabinet election he came out into the lobbies, rang his wife in Perth, then said to a friend: Well, now I'm going away into a corner by myself. I'm going to light my pipe and have a think."