Henry Parkes

Australian politician

• Born: May 27, 1815
• Birthplace: Stoneleigh, Warwickshire, England
• Died: April 27, 1896
• Place of death: Annandale, Sydney, New South Wales (now in Australia)

As premier of the colony of New South Wales through five terms, Parkes successfully promoted immigration to Australia, established public education, and sponsored the movement for federation that would lead to Australia’s unification in the early twentieth century.

Early Life

Henry Parkes was the youngest of seven children of Thomas Parks (the spelling of the family name at the time) and his wife Martha. Thomas Parks was a tenant farmer on a property the Parks family had worked for generations, but in 1823 he was forced by accumulated debts to leave, and the entire family went to Birmingham. In the city, all the children had to work, and Henry Parkes, at the age of eight, found employment first as a rope maker and then as a laborer in the brickyards and on the highways, where conditions were harsh and treatment often cruel. He later was able to apprentice himself to a bone and ivory turner.

Although his parents were both uneducated, Henry himself learned to read and write and, at an early age, came to love literature, especially the works of William Shakespeare. Part of his education during this period no doubt included exposure to the extensive political agitation for reform taking place in Birmingham, where impassioned orators addressed mass meetings. Parkes was soon contributing prose and poems to the Chartist, and apparently also attended classes at the Mechanic’s Institute in Birmingham. Having completed his apprenticeship in 1836, he set up a trade of his own in bone and ivory turning, and was married to Clarinda Varney, the daughter of a well-established businessperson who immediately disinherited her for the inappropriate marriage. Parkes, in his long career, was never successful in business, and his first venture failed within two years. The young couple then left Birmingham and moved to London, perhaps with some intention of emigrating, for after a few dire weeks of poverty, in which Parkes was again unable to establish himself, they announced in December of 1838 their decision to leave for Australia.

Parkes, his wife, and their two children sailed in March, 1839, as assisted immigrants on the Strathfieldsaye, arriving in Sydney in July of that year, along with a third child born during the voyage. The pastoral boom of the 1830’s was in progress and employment was hard to find in the city, so Parkes went up to the Penrith area to work as a laborer on the estate of Sir John Jamison. The difficult and poorly paid work dissatisfied him, and six months later he was in Sydney working first as a salesperson for an ironmonger, then as a hand in a brass foundry, and finally as a tide waiter for the Customs Department.

The latter position lasted three years and enabled Parkes to set his affairs upon a good enough foundation to try his hand again at his own trade. Subsequently, in 1845, he opened a business in ivory and toy manufacturing, and later he even tried branch shops in Maitland and Geelong, though they soon failed. It was during this period that Parkes put together his first volume of verse, entitled Stolen Moments , and found a hundred subscribers willing to finance it. The poems are conventional and didactic, but they do reveal the sincere and heartfelt thinking of a sensitive young man.

From the first, however, it was clearly politics that absorbed Parkes’s energies; upon his arrival in Australia, he quickly became conversant with the political issues and questions of the day. Gradually, as he became known in Sydney, he became acquainted with leading citizens, and in 1848 he acted as organizing secretary for Robert Lowe’s campaign against William Charles Wentworth for the Sydney seat on the Legislative Council. In 1849, Parkes was active in the protest against England’s renewal of convict transportation to Australia, becoming a prominent public organizer and speaker. Finally, in 1849, Parkes entered fully into his political career with the founding of a daily newspaper, the Empire , a venture backed by a few wealthy friends and encouraged by many others; Parkes was now in a position to command attention and respect.

Life’s Work

Parkes worked diligently and with delight at his journalistic labors on the Empire from 1853 to 1858. During that period the Legislative Council drafted and adopted a conservative constitution, under the direction of Wentworth, which heavily favored squatters and landowners at the expense of the middle class and small settlers. The liberals opposed it vigorously and formed a constitution committee of their own, of which Parkes was an important member.

Although the constitution came into operation in 1856, the liberals had organized themselves into an effective political force and were later able to mitigate some of the more regressive features of the new constitution through the passage of the Electoral Act of 1858 and the Land Acts of 1861. Parkes himself was elected to the new parliament’s Legislative Assembly in 1856, having previously been a member of the old Legislative Council in 1854. He was thus able to use the Empire as an effective vehicle of liberal political opinion.

By 1857, however, Parkes owed more than fifty thousand pounds to the paper’s creditors and in 1858 was forced to cease publication of the Empire. This latest business failure was a bitter blow to Parkes, for he had invested his time, money, and hopes into the paper, and it led him to consider entering the legal profession at the age of forty-three as a way to secure his economic well-being. Nevertheless, Parkes could not resist politics for long, and between 1858 and 1861 he was alternately in and out of Parliament. Between 1861 and 1863, he was in Great Britain as one of two commissioners sent there by the Legislative Assembly to encourage immigration, his wife, Clarinda, and the children having been left behind in Sydney. During this lecture tour of Great Britain, Parkes met several prominent and influential people, in particular Thomas Carlyle and Richard Cobden, the great advocate of free trade who, Parkes claimed, won him over.

Upon his return to Australia in 1863, Parkes was once again active in politics, and in 1864 he was again elected to Parliament. By this time, Parkes had many supporters and admirers, both for his political views and for his personal qualities of leadership, pious idealism, and sheer energy. He was clearly a politician of promise and had quickly and astutely mastered the skills of the dubious art of manipulative politics. Parkes could be guileful and ruthless, but he was considered effective by all.

In 1866, Parkes obtained his first cabinet position as colonial secretary in the government of James Martin, and during that period Parkes was responsible for the passing of the Public Schools Act of 1866, which enlarged and unified the system of national schools and was generally recognized as a progressive piece of legislation. This act was a major accomplishment for Parkes, and his close identification with the bill (and his subsequent position as president of the Council of Education) accorded him considerable public attention.

Parkes also persuaded Florence Nightingale to send a contingent of trained nurses to Sydney to improve the hospitals in the colony, an achievement of which he was proud. Although Parkes resigned from the government in 1870, having once again gone into bankruptcy, he returned the following year, and finally, in 1872, became premier at the age of fifty-seven. Thus began the ten-year period in which Parkes was premier three times, alternating with his chief rival, John Robertson (with whom he eventually forged a coalition lasting from 1878 to 1883). This was the summit of his political success, and his knighthood in 1877 seemed to confirm it.

Most of Parkes’s accomplishments during this time were legislative and social: He helped reorganize the hospitals; he took an interest in the needs of delinquents and orphans and set up institutions for poor children; he continued to extend education reform; he sought to control the liquor trade more closely; he undertook numerous public works programs for roads, water systems, and railways; and he continued to encourage immigration to Australia from Great Britain. Parkes was well liked by the populace: His manner was dignified and his speech suitably platitudinous, his long white beard and white shock of hair gave him a masterful appearance, and his ministerial efforts appeared to be grounded in democratic principles. Parkes’s views on matters were not always sharply distinct from those of his opposition—the 1880’s and 1890’s were a time of broad liberalism and reform, of widespread belief in “progress”—so his success was more often the result of his political skill and temperament than of his articulation of policy choices.

In 1881, Parkes became ill and was advised by his doctors to go abroad, which he did, while remaining premier, and spent eight months traveling in America and Great Britain. The trip turned into a triumphal procession in which he was hailed by politicians and entertained by eminent people on two continents, including several memorable days with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who appears to have treated him as a fellow poet. Upon his return in late 1882, though, Parkes found that his political situation had eroded and his government was soon defeated.

After a short period serving in the parliament, Parkes once again departed for Great Britain in 1883, in part to find a way to improve his finances, and then returned to Australia in August of 1884. Back in Parliament briefly, he resigned over dissatisfaction with the state of politics, but stood for election again in 1885, when the government’s action in sending troops to aid the British in the Sudan conflict angered Parkes. Then, in 1886, at the age of seventy-one, Parkes was once more premier. During the next two years, Parkes made some notable improvements, including the placing of the civil service and the railways under government commissions to avoid the abuses of political patronage. He also virtually banned the immigration of the Chinese, whose great numbers were considered a threat to the wage structure and economy of the country. In doing so, he may have averted serious racial conflicts that could have caused international repercussions.

These successes came at a difficult period for Parkes: Clarinda died in 1888, and his marriage in 1889 to Eleanor Dixon was not acceptable to polite society, or indeed to his own daughters. His financial problems continued: He once again declared bankruptcy in 1887 and assigned his estate to creditors. However, as the grand old man of Australian politics, Parkes was undeterred, and he continued to act with vigor and acumen; after a defeat in 1888 put him out of office, he came back within a few months and, as premier in 1889, formed his fifth and last ministry.

Despite these successes, Parkes’s powers of leadership were waning, for the younger generation of politicians was increasingly impatient with his views and his style, and Parkes had some difficulty in maintaining unity among his cabinet ministers. The boldest move Parkes made during this last period in power, and the one for which he is most often remembered, came as a complete surprise to his cabinet and seemed to reassert his capacity to lead. Returning from a trip to Queensland in 1889, he stopped at the town of Tenterfield and delivered a resounding speech advocating, in urgent and eloquent terms, the federation of the then separate Australian colonies. This was by no means a new idea, but Parkes had now thrown his weight behind it and moved rapidly and forcefully to gain his goal.

In 1891, Parkes convened a federal convention in Sydney to draft a constitution. This was achieved, despite considerable difficulties and disagreements, in part because of the resolute efforts of Parkes and the persuasiveness of his impassioned oratory. Attempts were then made to have the new federal constitution ratified by all the colonies. However, Parkes was unable to convince the people of New South Wales that this should be their primary concern, and without what he considered sufficient public support, he delayed in putting the measure before Parliament. In 1891, tired and suffering from the consequences of a serious accident, Parkes resigned from office, and the federation bill was not acted upon until after his death.

For the next three years, Parkes continued to serve in Parliament, but his effectiveness was finished. He retired in 1894, but in 1895 made an ill-advised attempt to unseat his old rival within his own party, George Houston Reid, and after an unusually bitter campaign, in which Parkes attacked his previous allies, the free traders and the federalists, he was defeated. During the campaign, Parkes’s second wife died, and, left in penniless circumstances with many children, he married a third time, to a young woman named Julia Lynch. Parkes was soon seriously ill with pneumonia, and on April 27, 1896, he died of a heart attack.

Significance

Sir Henry Parkes spent almost half a century in public service, from the antitransportation movement during the 1840’s to his last years in Parliament during the 1890’s. His rise to prominence and power from humble beginnings is a testimony to the possibilities inherent in a democracy such as Australia’s. His accomplishments were of a sort that may seem unglamorous and pedestrian, but they were instrumental in providing New South Wales (and later the whole of Australia) with the firm foundations of a responsive and responsible government. Matters of public education and welfare, of public amenities and works, are of the fabric of social cohesiveness, and Parkes labored to that end.

Not only was Parkes a politician in the sense of a man concerned with policy, but also he was one who understood the nature of party politics; as a leader he knew how to manipulate the machinery of government to his own advantage, and in a number of instances he revealed a certain pettiness and vindictiveness of character that suggests more the ruthless politician than the dignified statesman. Parkes saw himself as a man of the people, and often as the man of the hour, and this belief made him self-confident, though it also blinded him to his own worst defects and motives. The people may have laughed at his posturing and self-importance, at his chronic economic incompetence, but they were seldom scornful of Parkes. They accepted his foibles because they saw him as someone who had their interests at heart, and Parkes did much to repay that confidence.

Parkes is perhaps best remembered for his earliest accomplishment, the Education Act of 1866, and for his last accomplishment, the National Australian Convention for federation in 1891. The twenty-five years spanning these contributions were important years for the young colony, and Parkes did much to assist its growth and maturation. Although he did not live to see the advent of a federated Australia in 1901, he was surely a founder of the new nation.

Bibliography

Bavin, Sir Thomas. Sir Henry Parkes: His Life and Work. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1941. This volume contains the John Murtagh Macrossan lectures given by Sir Thomas Bavin in 1940. It is a useful work, providing a generous and judicious overview of Parkes’s career and his significant contributions to Australia. Bavin makes good use of contemporary accounts and draws upon Parkes’s own autobiography (see below).

Lyne, Charles E. Life of Sir Henry Parkes. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1896. This is a very early biography of Parkes and contains some interesting anecdotal information.

Martin, A. W. Henry Parkes. Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford University Press, 1964. This small booklet is a fine introduction to Parkes. Martin gives a balanced account and, in a short space, is able to draw a sympathetic and incisive portrait of the man. Some well-chosen illustrations accompany the text.

Palmer, Vance. National Portraits. Melbourne, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1960. This is a well-known collection of twenty-five brief lives of representative Australians. The chapter on Parkes, subtitled “The Politician,” places his achievement within the context of the emerging nation. Stylishly written.

Parkes, Henry. Fifty Years in the Making of Australian History. London: Longmans, Green, 1892. Written near the end of his life, this autobiography begins with Parkes’s arrival in Australia in 1839 and ends with the federation controversy of 1892. It is very much an apologia but, despite its tendentiousness, gives an excellent picture of the period.

Tennyson, Charles, and Hope Dyson. Tennyson, Lincolnshire, and Australia. Lincoln, England: The Lincolnshire Association and the Tennyson Society, 1974. This is a curious work, drawing upon the association of Parkes with the poet Tennyson. Contains some of their private correspondence.

Travers, Robert. The Grand Old Man of Australian Politics: The Life and Times of Sir Henry Parkes. Kenthurst, N.S.W.: Kangaroo Press, 1992. Comprehensive biography, describing Parkes’s crucial role in the creation of an Australian federation.