Peter Bastian, Andrew Fisher: an underestimated man.

Hearn, Mark

Peter Bastian, Andrew Fisher: an underestimated man, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2009, x + 419 pages; ISBN 978 1 74223 004 7.

Peter Bastian presents a self-consciously revisionist account of Andrew Fisher, Australia's fifth prime minister, the second Labor leader to take his party into office and for no less than three terms: 1908-09, 1910-13, and from 1914 until his retirement from politics in October 1915.

In the latter terms of office Labor won control of both houses of the Commonwealth Parliament, a political feat it has only once repeated, in 1944. Fisher's 1910 administration culminated a decade of post-Federation nation building by establishing the Commonwealth Bank, issuing the nation's first bank notes and selecting the site for a capital; introducing compulsory military training; founding the Royal Australian Navy; and opening the officers' training college at Duntroon.

It was a long way from an impoverished childhood as a coal mine pit boy born in Crosshouse, Ayrshire, in 1862. So perhaps it should come as little surprise that Bastian asserts, as an opening gambit, that 'it is impossible to overestimate just how much Andrew Fisher contributed to the national development of Australia and its political culture'. As the sub-title of the biography indicates, Bastian clearly feels aggrieved on behalf of his subject's reputation.

The essential dilemma of Fisher's reputation as leader of the Australian Labor Party is that in comparison to the policy activism and political energy of his predecessor, John Christian Watson, and that of Fisher's own Attorney-General and successor, Billy Hughes, Fisher emerges as a static figure. This failing was identified by Alfred Deakin in 1911, in the Opposition Leader's capacity as an anonymous correspondent on Australian politics for the London Morning Post. In stark contrast to Hughes's 'trenchant, energetic' and 'well-documented' approach to policy and parliamentary performance, Deakin described Fisher's leadership as characterised by 'visible anxiety and manifest signs of insufficiency'.

Despite his revisionist intentions, Bastian's own account tends to confirm an impression of Fisher's 'insufficiencies'. Bastian underestimates the significance of Watson's relatively long period of party leadership (as opposed to his brief prime ministership in 1904), and Watson's continued influence over key policy debates within the Labor Party after his resignation from the leadership in 1907. It was Watson, not Fisher, who led the debate on compulsory military training at the party's Commonwealth conference in 1908. Of Fisher's own role at the conference, even Bastian observes that 'Fisher's speech offered little in the way of an intellectual framework for his party'.

After 1910 it was Hughes who consistently led the party's most ambitious policy initiatives--in particular, to radically expand the terms of Commonwealth legislative authority over corporations and industrial relations through two failed referenda campaigns in 1911 and 1913, debates largely forgotten but crucial at the time to Labor's strategic policy ambitions. Fisher took little part in these referenda, leaving the running to Hughes and, in the hustings in Sydney in 1911, to Watson. Bastian defends Fisher's role but notes that Fisher delayed the official opening of the 1911 campaign and left the country three weeks before polling day to attend the Imperial Conference in London. Fisher's authority as Prime Minister was never seriously brought to bear on influencing public opinion.

Absence is something of a theme in Fisher's career as leader: having become Prime Minister for the third time in September 1914, only weeks after the outbreak of war, Fisher left in December for a two-month holiday in New Zealand. Mentally, and to a significant extent physically, Fisher had already ceased being Prime Minister, as Bastian concedes: 'He was in poor health and suffering from the strain of mastering facts and putting these over to the people. This suggests that he had started to face difficulties with his memory.' Party leader since late 1907, Fisher no longer had the stamina for the job and no taste for the looming struggle over conscription.

Bastian repeats the familiar line that Hughes returned from London in 1916 determined to introduce compulsory military service. It's highly likely that Hughes previously left Australia gripped with the same conviction. As Mary Lloyd's contemporaneous diary entries make clear (later published as Sidelights on Two Referendums), tensions over the introduction of conscription emerged within the labour movement in early 1915, while Fisher was still Prime Minister.

The subsequent disastrous party split in 1916 could not have been soothed even by Andrew Fisher's equanimity and it is simply naive to suggest, as Bastian does, that had Fisher remained as leader it was unlikely that 'the subsequent and bitter divisions of 1916-17 would have occurred under his commonsense and steadfast leadership'. This is a conclusion Bastian offers after detailing how Fisher was worn down by the stresses of wartime leadership by late 1915, and after acknowledging Fisher's post-war confession that continuing in the prime ministership would probably have killed him.

There is little doubt that despite his instinctive diffidence, Fisher embodied a desired form of Labor leadership, and it's a pity that Bastian did not further explore this dimension of Fisher's appeal to his colleagues and presumably to the electorate, who extended to his leadership an unprecedented degree of trust. Fisher's innate integrity, together with an impression of reliability, evidently resonated with the public. The content of Fisher's speeches, and his engagement with the public and the party, might have been more extensively cited and interrogated to explore this theme.

After assuming the party leadership, Fisher set out to win office for Labor in its own right, rather than seek alliances with Deakin's Liberal Protectionists. Even in this Fisher embodied the will of the Labor caucus. Fisher also articulated a sense of Labor's mission on behalf of the working class and the emerging nation, but as his most famous phrase suggests, it represented a sense of identity tied to its identification with its source in the British Isles, to the last man and the last shilling.

It was not only a form of emotional dependence. Bastian asserts, as others have before him, that Fisher championed the establishment of an independent Australian Navy. However, as Eric Andrews observed in The Anzac Illusion, the RAN was dominated by officers of the Royal Navy and during World War I was largely subsumed within the operational requirements of the imperial forces, as was the AIF. Bastian notes that Fisher was unaware of the Gallipoli landings until after they had occurred, and was frustrated by the drip feed of military information provided from London. The tensions contained within this torn sense of allegiance and identity were ruthlessly exposed in the conscription debate, by which time Fisher had absented himself to the imperial capital, taking up his last public post as Australian High Commissioner. He died in Hampstead in 1928.

Over the course of his parliamentary career Fisher made a rather self-conscious status progression. Bastian notes that Fisher was the first prime minister to have his own official car, and insisted on being provided with only the best luggage for his attendance at the Imperial Conference. Fisher purchased Oakleigh Hall, a grand two-storey house in Melbourne in 1912. After visiting the new home Billy Hughes offered Fisher a compass to help him find his way to his bedroom after locking up for the night.

Each chapter is divided by a series of subheadings that make for a rather laboured and didactic structure; at times it reduces the flow to a series of stilted summaries. The argument would have worked more easily on the reader's imagination and intellect without these encumbrances. Andrew Fisher: an underestimated man provides a rather disembodied account of Fisher's life and political career. Presented as a kind of passive third-person subject whose life and activities are summarised by Bastian, too often Fisher is not allowed to speak for himself, and as such continues to elusively hover in the narrative of his own life.

Mark Hearn

Department of Modern History

Macquarie University