I’m delighted to be here today to help launch Michael Easson’s thoughtful and important book.
Among all these distinguished guests, can I give a special acknowledgement to the members of the Watson family who are here with us.
It is strange to think that the first Federal Leader of Australia’s oldest political party and the Prime Minister in the world’s first Labor Government remains something of a mystery.
This book shows us John Christian Watson is a mystery well worth investigating.
A person and a leader with a life and legacy deserving of further study.
We are fortunate Michael Easson has taken us with him in this search for answers.
He gives us the full sweep of Watson’s life, his humble beginnings, his rapid rise, his whirlwind time as Federal Labor’s founding Leader and Prime Minister.
And all that followed: the months on the backbench when he was paired for every vote in the House of Representatives because he was in South Africa, looking for gold.
The brutal split on conscription and his expulsion from the Party.
Of course, there are some mysteries beyond even the most talented researcher.
Michael writes with understated clarity - but you can feel the pain when he tells the story of an over-enthusiastic gardener at the Watson house accidentally taking a whole trunk of the former Prime Minister’s personal papers to the local tip.
Yet the absence of the kind of ‘private’ material most biographers seek out actually serves to sharpen this book’s focus on Watson the public figure - and the place he deserves in Australian political history.
For me, one of the most striking things about this book is to be reminded that for virtually every decision Watson faced, he was working without a map.
Think about our movement today: the reverence we have for our history, the inspiration we draw from those who’ve gone before us.
And the lessons that all of us have learned, from our engagement as volunteers and branch members and candidates, our participation in the process over many years.
For Watson and his colleagues, there were no party elders, there was no collective Caucus memory, there was no well-worn way that things had always been done.
There were precious few campaigns, victories or defeats to look back and learn from.
In everything they did, that Labor generation were breaking new ground – and not just in Australia but around the world.
At the same time, the institutional hostility they faced was fierce.
Watson and his contemporaries took their places in the Chamber at a time when many in the political and media establishment considered the very notion of Labor in government both offensive and frightening.
The quote Ross McMullin chose for his book on Watson, from The Maitland Daily Mercury described the new Labor Government as:
“So monstrous a travesty”.
It was typical of the fair and balanced coverage of the time.
Parliament offered its own challenges.
Alfred Deakin had famously complained that the House of Representatives in those early years was like a game of cricket with three elevens on the field and each player free to change who they were playing for.
When Watson became PM, Opposition Leader George Reid described it as the equivalent of one side ‘courageously’ deciding to take on the other two.
And yet what shines through in this book is a picture of calm, competence, resolve and determination.
A new Labor Government intent on passing the toughest and most important democratic test: earning people’s trust and proving worthy of it.
A Prime Minister who demonstrated not just the legitimacy of a Labor Government – but also the value of one, the capacity to drive change within the democratic framework.
In the end, Watson’s Government did not last long, not quite three months.
Yet what they proved to themselves, to the movement, to Australia, endures even 120 years later.
And so much of that is down to Chris Watson, as Michael puts it:
More than anyone else in its early years at the national level, Watson exemplified what Labor stood for.
That’s the place in history he deserves: someone who grasped the essence of labourism and acted to define it.
We see that in his advocacy for the rights of workers to organise and negotiate.
Or arguing the age pension should be a universal right, not a matter of charity.
Of course, the Labor Party of the Federation era also held views we find appalling today – particularly in their fervid support of the White Australia Policy.
The contemporary relevance of Watson’s leadership is not the individual measures, it is the overall approach.
The willingness to engage in the big debates about our nation’s future, to make a case for social and economic change, to build a consensus for reform and bring people with us in our work.
The bedrock understanding that delivering real, lasting, meaningful improvement in people’s lives depends on Labor being a party of government, as well as a movement for change.
That’s the urgency and determination that still drives us.
Indeed it’s something I spoke about at New South Wales Conference on Saturday, the fact that the job of progress is never done.
We must always be striving for more, aiming higher, working to do better.
Opening the doors of opportunity – and widening them for those who come after us.
There’s a great quote in here from a speech Watson gave in Melbourne in 1902:
“Every hill scaled in the march of human progress only disclosed fresh views and vistas.
Every labour movement, under its own name or another, would be animated by the spirit of humanity, and agitation would cease only with the end of time itself.”
That’s the story we are still part of, the tradition we still belong to.
And it’s why, for all the acrimony of the split over conscription and the years of distance between Watson and Labor that followed his expulsion, when he passed away in 1944, it was Prime Minister John Curtin who led the warm tributes in the Parliament.
When you think about it, that is itself a Watson legacy.
Forty years after the first Labor Government, it was another Labor Government steering Australia through our nation’s darkest hour.
This book adds to every Labor person’s understanding of the tradition we belong to – and where it began.
And it reminds all of us that from the very earliest days of our history, our mission has always been the future.
We still have ‘hills to scale’ and mountains to climb.
We still have fresh views to discover.
We still have work to do – and we always will
It is my great pleasure to congratulate Michael Easson and launch: In Search of John Christian Watson.