Henry Parkes

The Hon. Sir Henry Parkes GCMG (1815-1896) was five times premier of New South Wales between 1872 and 1891, and a consistent advocate for union of the colonies (Federation). An ivory-turner by trade, Parkes was a man of meagre education but immense energy, and his stints as premier were only one aspect of a multifarious life encompassing three marriages; many children; five volumes of verse; several prose works; numerous pamphlets; hundreds of letters; and a series of reversals of fortune, including several bankruptcies. By 1881, twenty- five years after winning the seat of Sydney City on the first New South Wales Legislative Assembly, he was recognised abroad as ‘the most commanding figure in Australian politics’. In all, he was an MLA for twelve different seats between 1856 and 1895. Near the end of his political career, in October 1889, he made the speech at Tenterfield, New South Wales, that earned him the title of Father of Federation, calling for a federal convention to work out ‘a great National government for all Australia’. The Federal Convention came to pass in Melbourne in February 1890. There, Parkes responded to a toast to ‘A United Australia’ by asserting that ‘the crimson thread of kinship runs through us all … We know the value of … British origin. We know that we represent a race … for the purpose of settling new colonies, which never had its equal on the face of the earth.’ In his seventies, he was twice remarried (to much younger women); he fathered a child; and he completed his book Fifty Years in the Making of Australian History. Alfred Deakin expressed the complexity of Parkes’s identity when he wrote that ‘there was in him the man he dressed himself to appear’.

Walter Barnett photographed Parkes several times in his Sydney studios. His post-retirement photograph of the statesman proved to be Barnett’s most enduringly famous portrait; an image derived from it appeared on the Australian five-dollar note issued in 2001 to commemorate the centenary of Federation.