LOOKING BACKWARD

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 77, Issue 6974, 6 October 1948, Page 12

LOOKING BACKWARD

“BILLY” HUGHES AUSTRALIA’S “ELDER” STATESMAN Sixty-four years after he first landed at Brisbane from an immigrant ship, Australia’s “elder statesman” was recently back in town with the Federal Parliamentary delegation touring Queensland, states a newspaper reporter. Now 83, seven stone, and deaf, William Morris Hughes, M.H.R.’ still can show the quick clear thinking that helped guide Australia as Prime Minister in the first world war. At the State Government’s reception to the delegation at Parliament House, he told me stories of last century politics, interspersed with, pithy comments on the world of today. As he talked he sipped orange juice and smoked cigarettes. He recalled how Holman, himself, and others had helped to build up the Labour movement in the late last century and how the solidarity pledge they had given (the movement—“even if you don’t believe in pledges”—had proved the strength of the movement by giving it unity. He spoke of the Waterside Workers’ Union which he largely founded and deplored that the union had become so powerful that it could hold the country for ransome.

To stress his points Billy poked me on the belt. The poke had the energy of a man of 30.

He praised arbitration, but said it lost its value if industrial law were not enforced just as other laws were. He emphasised that, in the international field, Russia must not be allowed to triumph. France, he said, was shaky, but Britain stands firm against Communism. And he told funny stories of politics in the old days, and while he talked his eyes sparkled. When Billy landed here from Wales in 1884 he went west. Ten years later he was a member of the New South Wales Parliament for a Sydney electorate.

Meanwhile he had been a railway tally clerk, an odd-job man, sleeper cutter, shearer, fruitpicker, a volunteer in the Queensland Defence Corps, seaman, cook, steward, Shakespearian super teacher, and umbrella mender.