23/06/2020
Bruce Elder's Aussie Towns is a fabulous resource.
Tenterfield will be the final night stop on our new 9 day road trip from Adelaide to Byron Bay. Other nights are at Melrose, Broken Hill x 2, White Cliffs, Bourke, Lightning Ridge, and Moree. Lots of time for the sights and to learn about First Nations heritage.
Start date for Wayward Bus 2020 is pushing back to 1st September due to the border uncertainties. We'll be arranging some more Queensland offerings in August while we wait. Stay tuned...
Sir Henry Parkes at Tenterfield
Tenterfield’s main claim to fame, apart from Peter Allen and his song about a saddler, is that it is recognised as the home of Australian Federation.
The town celebrates in appropriate style with a section of the School of Arts devoted to Henry Parkes and the famous meeting he held in Tenterfield in 1889.
In the School of Arts there is a huge banquet table and a photograph of the “Banquet of the Premier” which is still regarded as the beginning of the push to create a Commonwealth of Australia.
The Banquet Table is located in the Sir Henry Parkes Memorial School of Arts. In 1889 it became one of the most famous buildings in New South Wales when Henry Parkes (who was premier of New South Wales five times) delivered a famous speech about the future federation of Australia.
On Friday 25 October, 1889 the Sydney Morning Herald reported the speech.
Parkes, it wrote, had raised the question of “authorising the troops of the colonies to unite in one federal army” and had gone on to address the question of the control the Imperial Government in London had over the colonies.
“The great question which they had to consider”, the article continued, paraphrasing Parkes, “was, whether the time had not now come for the creation on this Australia continent of an Australian Government, as distinct from the local Governments now in existence.”
The paper reported that this was greeted with wild applause.
Parkes called for a nation which would be both cohesive and united. Most historians regard this speech as the official beginning of the movement which culminated in Federation eleven years later and produced the Australian Commonwealth in 1901.
But it might never have happened had it not been for the Tenterfield Mayor, Edward Reeves Whereat. He organised the banquet and, most significantly, he “withdrew his unopposed candidacy for the seat of Tenterfield in December 1882 and nominated in his stead Sir Henry Parkes who had lost his seat of East Sydney. Mr Whereat's selfless act returned Sir Henry Parkes to Parliament as the Member for Tenterfield.”
Now while Whereat’s act was selfless it always needs to be said that nations that are forged out of a federation of states (think both the USA and Australia) are, by their very nature, creatures of compromise.
Smaller states don’t want to be overwhelmed by larger states. Some states hold out until they get what they want. Some indicate that they don’t really want to join and will be happy to go it on their own.
The result: the absurdity in Australia of Tasmania, with a population of around 500,000, electing the same number of senators as New South Wales, which has a population of over 7 million. If the principal of “one person, one vote” applied, then New South Wales should have 14 times the number of senators as Tasmania.
And, of course, in the USA (by the way – our Senate was based on the US model) Federation forced an “Electoral College” onto the system and that results in such absurdities as Hillary Clinton getting 3 million more votes than Donald Trump and Trump winning the electoral college.
Don’t talk to me about Federation. It might have been a great idea to get the states to cooperate and form a national government but it is a totally dud idea if you believe that democracy is about one person, one vote.
Think about it: if my Senate vote counts for one, then every vote by a Tasmanian is equal to fourteen of my votes. Is that fair?
The photo is of the famous table with a photo of the actual event behind it.
