1919
A Billy Hughes novelty paperweight
The little digger
A ceramic paperweight caricature of Prime Minister William Morris Hughes was made in 1916–17 by Mashman Brothers in Sydney. The figurine clearly makes fun of the prime minister’s oversized features, but it’s unclear whether the humour is in jest or spite – Billy Hughes was a divisive figure.
Hughes was elected for the Australian Labor Party to the first federal parliament in 1901. A senior minister in two administrations, he became prime minister in 1915 when an exhausted Andrew Fisher retired. Hughes was quickly swept up by the Great War, and his visits to the United Kingdom and then the Western Front entrenched his belief in the rightness of the Empire’s battle against the Germans. Australia, he felt, was not doing enough. His solution was to conscript Australians.
Hughes almost tore the country apart with his 1916 and 1917 conscription campaigns. In November 1917, when he was campaigning in the town of Warwick, Queensland, his hat was knocked off his head by a thrown egg. A fight broke out and Hughes attempted to get into the melee personally. The PM demanded Senior Sergeant Henry Kenny arrest persons in the crowd. When Kenny declined, Hughes resolved to create his own police force – which evolved into the Commonwealth Federal Police.
Conscription divided Australia as never before or since. The greatest opposition came from the Irish community, and especially Archbishop Daniel Mannix, who was called by some ‘the Rasputin of Australia’. The sectarian divide that had always been strong in Australia widened. The ALP was essentially a Catholic party, and the war became a great moral quandary for it.
When the first conscription plebiscite was lost in October 1916, Hughes was expelled from the ALP. He took 24 members with him, merged with the Opposition and retained the prime ministership. In November 1917, he held another conscription referendum that was even more divisive than the first.
Hughes was in Europe for the peace conference at Versailles. Legally, Britain spoke for its dominions, which included Australia. Hughes’ main contribution was insisting that the dominions be represented and have a seat at the conference separate from England’s. The Treaty of Versailles was the first international agreement Australia signed.
Regarded by many as an irritant and buffoon, especially by American president Woodrow Wilson, Hughes took it upon himself to hobble Wilson’s League of Nations. Being a staunch racist, Hughes fought the Japanese push for racial equality in the League. He opposed the American postwar plan for German reconstruction, finding common ground with the excessively punitive French.
In Australia, Hughes lost the prime ministry to Stanley Bruce but stayed in parliament until he died at the age of 90. He was the longest-serving member of the federal parliament, changed party five times – three times due to expulsion – and was the last member of the first parliament to leave.
Hughes, even as a young man, resembled a gnome, and thus was a gift to caricaturists. He was partly deaf and prone to turning off his hearing aid when it suited him. His voice was harsh and unpleasant but he was clearly a charismatic figure and a polarising personality – arguably the dominant character of his age.