Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Deakin, Alfred
DEAKIN, ALFRED (1856-1919), Australian politician, was born at Melbourne 3 August 1856. He was the only son of William Deakin, an accountant, by his wife, Sarah Bill, daughter of a Shropshire farmer. Educated from 1864 to 1871 at the Church of England grammar school, Melbourne, he decided to adopt the law as a profession, and, after study at the university of Melbourne, he was admitted in September 1877 to the Victorian bar. But he was more attracted by literature, and was persuaded by David Syme [q.v.], who then controlled the Melbourne Age, to take up journalism. Under Syme’s influence he finally abandoned the belief in free trade which he had learned from the works of John Stuart Mill, and was induced in 1879 to stand for the constituency of West Bourke as a supporter of (Sir) Graham Berry [q.v.] in his violent conflict with the conservatives, who had the support of the legislative council, that body being elected on a high property franchise.
Successful at the polls, Deakin insisted as soon as parliament met on resigning his seat, as the validity of his election was challenged on a technicality. In the ensuing by-election he was defeated, and also at the general election of February 1880; in July 1880, however, he won the seat at the new general election necessitated by the fall of the new ministry. He immediately sought to promote a coalition between Berry and a section of the conservatives, and, when this failed, declined the attorney-generalship offered by Berry, though he supported his ministry and in 1882 won attention by a forcible denunciation of the errors of Victorian land legislation. In 1883 coalition came about between Berry and James Service [q.v.], and Deakin entered the ministry in March as minister of water supply and commissioner of public works, accepting in November the solicitor-generalship also. At the end of 1884, as president of a commission on water supply, he undertook a mission to America, the results of which were recorded in his Irrigation in Western America (1885). On the close of the coalition ministry, he formed, as leader of the liberal party, a new coalition with Duncan Gillies [q.v.], taking office in 1886 as chief secretary and minister of water supply; and in this capacity secured the passage of the Irrigation Act of 1886 and the adoption of an irrigation policy, which, at first seriously defective, finally proved a marked success. Next year he visited England as representative of Victoria at the colonial conference summoned to mark the jubilee of the Queen’s reign. His strictures on the failure of British policy as regards New Guinea and the New Hebrides were combined with an insistence on the unity of the Empire, which attracted favourable attention; while his democratic spirit was exhibited in his refusal of the then much coveted order, the K.C.M.G. An outcome of his visit to Europe was his Irrigation in Egypt and Italy (1887). Disaster, however, awaited the reckless finance of the ministry, which fell in November 1890, and, though Deakin was offered office in every subsequent Victorian government up to 1900, he preferred to remain a private member. By Syme’s invitation he visited India in 1891; his investigations of irrigation and his comments on British rule and Indian life, religion, and art are recorded in Irrigated India (1892) and Temple and Tomb (1893).
From 1892 Deakin worked seriously at the bar as a means of livelihood, and his main political work was devoted to furthering the federation of Australia. While still in office, he had been a member of the conference at Melbourne in 1890, and he was asked to represent Victoria at the conventions of 1891 and 1897-1898. Never a great constitutional lawyer, his direct contribution to the framing of the constitution was of small account, but he excelled in effecting the essential compromises between conflicting views, and it was largely due to his platform advocacy that the people of Victoria were induced in 1898 to approve federation by an overwhelming vote. In 1900 he was sent by the Victorian government to London to take part in the discussions with Mr. Joseph Chamberlain as to the passage of the Constitution Bill through the imperial parliament, and he played an important part in securing the compromise which reserved to the Commonwealth high court the power of deciding all constitutional issues.
Deakin’s services to federation were naturally rewarded by his appointment as attorney-general in the first Commonwealth ministry (January 1901) of (Sir) Edmund Barton [q.v.], and he was the moving spirit of the ministry. On Barton’s retirement in September 1903 to become a judge of the newly established high court, Deakin became prime minister. Convinced that responsible government could only be worked on the basis of two parties, and confronted by two opposition parties, the supporters of a revenue tariff, led by (Sir) George Reid [q.v.], and the labour party, he invited overtures for coalition. Neither party responded, and, as a convinced federalist, Deakin refused the labour demand to subject the public services of the States to the control of the Commonwealth court of conciliation and arbitration. Defeat ensued, and a labour ministry held a feeble tenure of office from April to August 1904, when it was ousted by a coalition between Reid and a section of Deakin’s following. Deakin had declined to serve under Reid, but had consented to a compact to last until May 1906; in June 1905, however, dislike of Reid and anxiety lest a truce should prove harmful to protection induced him to break his compact. Reid naturally resented this act, and labour would not do more than give the new ministry lukewarm support, so that its period of office, terminated by the defection of labour in November 1908, was largely barren of achievement.
In 1907 Deakin revisited England for the colonial conference; his chief endeavour on that occasion was to convince the public of the necessity of consolidating the Empire by preferential tariffs, despite the decisive verdict of the British electorate in 1906 against protection; but he also sought the concurrence of the Admiralty in his scheme for an independent Australian navy. His defence bill of 1908 was taken up in part by his successor, Andrew Fisher; and from June 1909 to April 1910 he enjoyed, by coalition with (Sir) Joseph Cook, a brief term of office, marked by the participation of the Commonwealth in an imperial naval and military conference which sanctioned Deakin’s naval scheme in its main idea. The public, however, resented as dishonourable this coalition of old enemies, and the general election of 1910 terminated Deakin’s period of office. His mental powers, fatally overstrained by his efforts of 1907, had long been impaired, and though loyalty kept him leader of the opposition until the end of 1912, it was at the cost of any chance of recuperation. A brief tenure of the chairmanship of a royal commission on food supplies, appointed in August 1914, and a visit to San Francisco in 1915 to represent Australia at the Panama-Pacific international exhibition, ended his official work; his memory, and his power of co-ordinating his ideas, were steadily failing; a flying visit to London in 1916 brought no relief, and thereafter until his death at Melbourne 7 October 1919, his time was spent there or at his seaside cottage. He was survived by his wife, Pattie, eldest daughter of H. Junor Browne, a Melbourne merchant, to whom he was married in 1882, and by three daughters.
Deakin’s contemporaries reproached him with an unpractical idealism and lack of understanding of the character of the Australian public. His ideals were in fact sane and moderate, but his anxiety to secure rapid results led him throughout his career to seek coalitions which were not very effective. He aimed at protection for manufacturers, with improved conditions for workers and regard for consumers, but only the first of these objects ‘was achieved’ by his ministries. He was able to expel the Kanakas and close the door to Asiatics, but he could effect nothing for British immigration into the Commonwealth. He failed to promote imperial unity, and his defence schemes were matured by others. But his genius for compromise served the federal cause in the inception of the Commonwealth, and no Australian of his time surpassed him in personal integrity and devotion to what he deemed duty. His oratorical power was undoubted, though the wealth of his ideas and the rapidity of his delivery often confused his hearers. His interest in literature, religion, spiritualism, philosophy, and art was insatiable, but among his copious writings on these and political topics he left nothing ripe for publication. A devoted husband and father, a charming friend, and a brilliant conversationalist, he yet felt himself, as his private papers show, in a sense isolated in life, a fact which doubtless explains in some measure his comparative failure in politics.
[Walter Murdoch, Alfred Deakin, 1923; Victorian and Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates; John Quick and R. R. Garran, Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, 1901; B. R. Wise, Making of the Australian Commonwealth, 1913; H. G. Turner, History of the Colony of Victoria, 1904, and First Decade of the Australian Commonwealth, 1911; Sir G. H. Reid, My Reminiscences, 1917; personal knowledge.]