The Stone Cutter becomes a Premier

by Glenn N. Holliman


Stonecutter to Premier....

Tom Price in his 30s installed the stone pillars of Parliament House in the British colony of South Australia.  In his 50s, he occupied an office in the same building as premier of the state of South Australia! An emigrant from Liverpool, England, he and his new wife, Anne, arrived in the capital of Adelaide in the early 1880s, where Tom worked hard as a stone cutter. 

He entered politics, helped found the Labor Party and rose to the highest office in the state, the first premier from a labor party in the entire British Empire.

His ideals of expanding the right to vote, improving condition for workers, opening markets for farmers and establishing free public education were advanced during his tenure.  

He was ahead of time, driving South Australia into new social territory, pushing for improvements in health and a social safety net a generation before the United Kingdom and the United States did so. A social progressive, during a generation when women had reduced legal rights and no right to vote in the U.K. and USA, he led his party in the emancipation of women, including Aboriginal women. 

Nor can we overlook the contributions of Annie, his wife and mother of their many children. She became the first female Justice of the Peace and Acting Magistrate in the Empire.

Several years ago, my wife and I met the author of this biography, Steph McCarthy, a dynamo of ideas and inquisitiveness, and an accomplished playwrite and author in Australia.  At the time she told us she was working on a biography of her great grandfather, Tom Price, first Labor premier of her home state of South Australia.  A premier is the equivalent of the governor of a U.S. state.  Steph has been a regular contributor to this blog, and has kept me apprised of her work on this tome.

Over the holidays, she mailed me a copy of Tom Price, and over a lengthy sea cruise, I immersed myself in a world that I thought would be alien to my historical knowledge.  What I found was this nascent colony on the edge of the British Empire was experiencing the same problems concerning industrialization, political power and unequal personal wealth that Western Europe and North America also were confronting at the time.  Under Tom's leadership, South Australia addressed these issues and moved toward a more equal and just society.

Tom was not just ahead of his time.  One could say, as far as advancement of human happiness, he moved 'time' forward, setting an example for the modern industrialized nations. In the 1890s, the Fabians in England were only holding seminars, the U.S. Senate was controlled by wealthy trusts and a newly centralized Germany was only considering old age pensions.  But in South Australia, a land of sunshine, wheat farmers and vine yards, leaders such as Tom Price were demanding and achieving social gains that were a generation ahead of older societies.

This then is amazing story worthy of study by political scientists and historians the world over, but the tale gets better as Steph brings to life her great grandfather's personal struggles.  Born in Wales in 1852 to an alcoholic father and an illiterate mother, Tom moved with the family to Liverpool and attended 'penny school' until going to work at age 9 as a stone cutter apprentice.  He found the energy to enroll in the Liverpool Mechanics Institute for night school and was deeply influenced by the Methodist Church and the strong Sunday School movement of his time.

He advanced in his trade, even starting his own business.  But the stone cutter disease, the inhaling of dust, weakened his lungs.  At age 32, seeking a warmer, drier climate, he took his new bride to southern Australia, and there he prospered as a laboring man.  Know for his speaking abilities and philosophy of equal opportunities for all, he soon was involved in the Trades Union movement, the formation of the Labor Party and after several decades of struggle, became the first Labor premier!  The stone cutter's disease, which destroyed lungs, eventually took Tom at the relatively young age of 57, but he had made his mark.

Below, the author, Steph McCarthy, left, and another descendant of the British Empire, Nancy Marshall of Ontario, Canada in Vienna, 2014.

The author has done an immense amount of research, bringing to life a person, a place, a time and the politics of an era facing rapid technological and social change.  Political biographies can be a bit dry, but this one is not.  Steph's talents of keeping the reader engaged as she walks one through numerous political debates and parliamentary sessions is a wonder. I found myself eagerly returning to Tom Price day after sea day, wondering what Tom would do next to further his political goals, seemingly forever stymied by reactionary forces.

In the end, Tom Price made a huge difference in the lives of millions, and although he died early, he left the foundations for institutions that thrive to this day in Australia.  And his great grand daughter, very much a chip off this stone cutter's dynastic block, has written a work that should engender historians to look more closely at the progressive movement in Australia. The history of 'Down Under' has lessons for leaders of the 21st Century concerned about unequal distribution of wealth and human rights and justice.

Thanks Steph for your time and energy in resurrecting a noble life, a man who stood for values central to our humanity.

Tom Price from Stonecutter to Premier, 421 pages, was published by Wakefield Press, 16 Rose Street, Mill End, South Australia 5031in 2015.  Their web site is www.wakefieldpress.com.au .

Order at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Tom-Price-From-stonecutter-Premier/dp/1743053630 or  

Book Depository http://www.bookdepository.com/Tom-Price/9781743053638 .

Comments always welcome....GNH

A Worried Look at Global Climate Change

by Glenn N Holliman

Terry Field, a retired business man and out-of-the-box thinker, writes the following anguished cry from the Cunard ship, Queen Victoria in the mid Atlantic.  He reflects with despairing concern on the Paris Climate Change Conference....and the future of the planet.

As with his writing, his political sense of humor is robust as his American cap so demonstrates....

"I thought that I would pen a short note after the conclusion of the Paris climate change conference and public communiqué. 

The impression given to the world is that there is a universal agreement to act to restrict climate change to 2 degrees, and try to achieve 1.5 degrees C.  It would be good to start a conversation about this matter on the blog.

The latest, most tested science would indicate that the Earth's climate is more sensitive to CO2 than has been previously accepted. In addition, the most informed scientists seem to agree that the carbon load in the atmosphere and the configuration of the global economy makes limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees C a practical impossibility. This is not given significant 'air-time'.

The Paris agreement has no enforcement powers, is not a treaty, and is a set of intentions expressed purely in general political terms.

The context here is the point. For three hundred years, the growth in the world's economic activity has driven and sustained the growth in human population. At the same time, the world has given up its resources to an economic system that is blind to anything other than the myriad of individual opportunities that we call 'capitalism'. It has been spectacularly effective as a generator of wealth, with powerful vested interests in the shape the system has taken on today.

This system is at its essence undirected. The shapes it takes on are not predictable; but its consumption of gigantic and ever increasing energy inputs is a common, enduring and unending reality.

The directed economy experiment - whereby a political framework could define the end results, and the productive systems could be made subservient to this 'social objective' architecture, has been tried. It started in 1917, in Russia. In the 1980s, that approach collapsed in utter, ruinous failure.

Yet Paris tries to do this again, but on a much, much larger scale.

Paris tells the blind, deaf, dumb capitalist economy that all its refinements that generate the kaleidoscope of undreamed-off outputs are at an end. Paris tells the world economies that their primary drivers, where it derives its energy sources, where they are deployed, what their technical and cost nature must be, and who in society will gain and who will lose ( to the most profound extent imaginable) is to be coerced into a shape and framework that the capitalist economy would otherwise not replicate voluntarily.

So from where will the forces of change come?

Will the investor community, responsible for many trillions of dollars of asset allocation every month decide that romantic notions of favouring wind vanes, solar-cells, electric-vehicles, fuel cells, hydro-stations, combined energy technologies etc over the - now - abundant, well understood, powerful, cheap and understood easy-to-manage hydrocarbon technologies?

WHY WOULD IT DO THIS?????

If it does not, what price distortions can be applied by governments to force these changes? How much impoverishment will the old, western societies accept in this process?  Economists blithely talk about subtle changes required to effect the changes. That is a fantasy; energy price manipulation is a sledgehammer that changes every aspect of a modern productive economic system.

Will India Brazil, China, Indonesia etc scrap the thousands of newly installed and planned coal fired power stations?

If there is a willingness to switch technologies, what of the proffered alternatives? Wind vanes by the million? Hundreds of millions of square miles of solar panels? Hydrogen storage from these ephemeral and certainly not base-load systems.

What it comes down to, in the end, is - are the alternative systems of power generation even viable?????

How do the new alternatives supply base-load (continuous) power? Example - what happens when the sun does not shine, and the wind does not blow????

Why is nuclear being closed down by 'greens'? What possible justification is there for this? After fifteen years of 'greening' the economy, and closing down nuclear, the Germans have barely touched the total CO2 load they emit.

The French are keen on concepts; the French government is dirigiste-socialist (directed by the state). It likes talking.

I am reminded, after the Paris conference, when listening to the far-too-smooth-of-his-own-good French foreign minister 'announcing the agreement' of Margaret Thatcher's comment on modern politics. She observed that politicians tend to think that because they have discussed a subject and reached an agreement that something has happened.

When in fact, nothing has happened at all.

Which brings us back to the hard physical reality, that is subject to physics, and not to marketing nuances.

The world is on track for probably - a range from 3 to 6 degrees of warming by 2100. 

The interactive graphs published by the Financial Times recently that shows what needs to be done to reduce this as a probability clearly states that, now, there is the ABSOLUTE requirement for ALL THE MAJOR POWER BLOCKS to reduce their net carbon output to ZERO by 2035 to even stand a chance of reducing the 2100 temperature to 4 degrees plus.

Yet we have just agreed to a series of pious hopes. Nothing more.

With escape clauses, with nothing binding, with no agreements about border sharing over and above the 65 billion transfer. Universally agreed as being pitifully inadequate.

I would submit that there are no adequate technologies either in existence, more on the drawing board, which can begin to generate the required result to avoid the death of what could be up to 80 percent of the human population, and the removal mammalian life from the belt from Capricorn to Cancer.  Not to mention massive desertification, the loss of the Levant, North Africa, Southern Europe, much of the Amazon, much of Africa, much of the west and centre of the United States.  A globe destroyed by super-storms, wildfires the size of countries, the loss of most coastal plains where the bulk of food is produced, and unlivable cauldron cities.

The continuation of ordered civilisation is in question if this scenario is not avoided.

And remember, the IPCC has been conservative in understating the real heating and CO2 output trajectory, and its models take no account of reinforcing 'feedback' effects (eg methane release, albedo effect, etc) since they cannot be known and estimated at present.

I am personally surprised at the complete silence from all the media on the subject.

I assume that this is because nobody has adequately assessed the shortfall Paris represents over the requirements that are mandatory in order to avoid utter catastrophe and the probable premature end of the lives of most of our grandchildren and their children-to-be.

I think that this subject deserves conversation on your blog in addition to the other matters that we have recently discussed.

The matter has been politicised along left / right lines; a testament to the dysfunctional stupidity of our societies?" - Terry Field

A frightening  polemic written by our friend who tends a garden of over 3,000 tulips, apple trees and lavenders and stores fine Bordeaux in his wine cellar....comment anyone? - GNH