FEDERATION’S MAN OF LETTERS – PATRICK McMAHON GLYNN

On Thursday 6 June 2019, the Vice-Chancellor of Australian Catholic University, Professor Greg Craven, joined The Sydney Institute’s Anne Henderson to launch the P M Glynn Institute’s Federation’s Man of Letters.  As Greg Craven explained, polymath Glynn should not have been a man who fell through history’s cracks. But he has. The publication of Anne Henderson’s booklet – with response contributions by Dr Patrick Mullins, Professor Anne Twomey, Dr Susan Rutland, Professor Peter Boyce and The Hon John Fahey – should now prompt further scholarly examination of the contribution made by Patrick McMahon Glynn to Australia’s founding and ongoing policy ideas.

FEDERATION’S MAN OF LETTERS – PATRICK McMAHON GLYNN

ANNE HENDERSON

Tonight, in Sydney, we are celebrating the life of Patrick McMahon Glynn, one of Australia’s founding fathers, an early federal government MP and minister, a founding father who was born in Ireland, spent much of his working life in Melbourne and hailed from South Australia. Yet, do not despair. Paddy Glynn has one important connection to Sydney.

It was in Sydney, in 1897, during the second of the conventions to design the constitution to be put to the British parliament for a federation of the Australian colonies, that Patrick McMahon Glynn, aged 42, proposed by letter – on Tuesday 7 September – to a Miss Abigail Dynon, who lived in Melbourne.

Paddy Glynn and Miss Dynon had met just once – some two years before. But she obviously remembered Glynn fondly from that one meeting. Postal deliveries were a lot quicker in those days so, when Miss Dynon accepted by telegram immediately, Glynn booked his overnight train for Friday and they were married in Melbourne on Saturday 11 September with King O’Malley as best man.

The Glynns thus spent their honeymoon in Sydney, attending a long list of official engagements until the end of the Convention on 24 September. In classic P M Glynn style, he being an addicted reader, his grand daughter Maev O’Collins recalls that it was reported from one outing for the delegates that P M Glynn was found reading in one train carriage while his pretty young wife was happily chatting with others in separate carriage.

As marriages go, in spite of its unique beginnings, it was a very successful union producing eight children, six of whom would grow to adulthood.

Sir Robert Menzies, commenting on Patrick McMahon Glynn – whom he would have come to know as a barrister appearing before the High Court sitting in Melbourne – described Glynn as “looking like a black beetle and talking like a silver tongued angel”.

Glynn was a well-loved and attractive individual. Cartoonists and journalists found him to have the colourful character for portraiture in print. His small physique like a jockey, his thick Irish accent, his bushy moustache and his somewhat tweedy attire. But cartoonists very often drew him with an oversized head – the head of a man of letters whose erudition captured attention.

For, in his wide reading of the classics and political philosophers, Paddy Glynn saw beyond the immediate in ways that, a century later, have resonance.

 On 18 February 1898, he wrote in Sydney’s Australian Star that:

We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the theatre of the world’s struggle is being shifted from West to East . . . the time may come when England will tell us that she has other duties to which she must subordinate the defence of Australia, and ask her [Australia] to herself secure her standing in the counsels of Eastern Asia.

Paddy Glynn could also plough on in tough negotiations, as in the Murray Rivers Agreement, to extract practical outcomes from conciliation and compromise.

In the political times of Patrick McMahon Glynn, bigotry and prejudice abounded as it does in our own today. It was Glynn’s way, however, not to revolt or agitate against his opponents. He preferred to remain strong in the face of debate, while seeking wherever possible to meet halfway, or at least strive for reasoned understanding.

 In this, Glynn has many messages for contemporary life.

Patrick McMahon Glynn made his way to Australia from Ireland in 1880, leaving from Plymouth on 4 September. He was 25. An articled clerk in Dublin, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and a student of the law at Middle Temple in London, Patrick McMahon Glynn was taking his luck in the Australian colonies where he hoped to prosper, as he had not done at the bar in Ireland.

Leaving England’s shores, Glynn noted in his diary his poor prospects at the bar in Dublin where he had hoped to make a living only to encounter an empty brief bag, writing: “… the ills of the flesh are sometimes experienced in the stomach … In Ireland, energy and ability are only one of the prerequisites for professional success … I shake hands with the past and take my hat off to the future.”

Glynn, like many an Irishman of his day, walked two worlds – Catholic and Protestant. The Catholic one had nurtured and guided him from childhood, albeit a middle class one from the hard earned success of his family of west coast merchants in the town of Gort. Surviving amid the destitution of many, this upbringing had instilled in Glynn a collective memory of prejudice, repression and struggle. From his Catholic background, Glynn inherited perseverance and the courage of tribal loyalty.

But the Protestant world of British political and literary traditions would give Glynn his intellectual ambition, a path to success and many of the principles and heroes he lived by – Milton, Shakespeare, Burke, Carlyle, Mill, De Quincey, Chatham and so on. His hero for political style and thought was undoubtedly Edmund Burke.

Assessing the men of the federation assemblies, Protestant Alfred Deakin wrote that Glynn was “If not the best read man of the Convention, [Glynn] … certainly carried more English prose and poetry in his memory than any three or four of his associates”.

Colleague (also Protestant) Robert Garran concurred, writing that Glynn had “a prodigious memory … [and] was a fine speaker …[who] showed signs of careful preparation.”

Deakin, commenting on Glynn, put it more astutely than Garran: “Glynn, with greater assiduity of research, splendid and carefully polished diction and stiff delivery, never caught or kept the ear of an Assembly, like all popular bodies jealous and antagonistic to scholarship and style, unless forced upon them by more practical merits.”

Throughout the tough days of Glynn’s first couple of years in Australia, his reading held him strong. Of Christmas Day 1881, he recorded, “I spent the day in the Botanical Gardens reading my constant companion Shakespeare.”

Glynn arrived in Australia with letters of introduction to some of Melbourne’s leading legal and political figures. For all that, he did not find an opening in the law and for quite some time found himself needing to pawn his few valuable possessions, at one stage taking to the road (unsuccessfully) selling life insurance.

Ironically, Glynn’s break when it came was thanks to his aunt, Mother Bernard Wallsh of the Sisters of St Joseph who, in mid-1882, recommended him to an Adelaide firm of solicitors who were looking for a Catholic lawyer to open an office in Kapunda – a mining and pastoral town 80 kilometres north.

Over the next two decades, Paddy Glynn would steadily make his name as lawyer, newspaper editor, public speaker and politician.

  It was a hard climb financially, but Glynn remained positive, spending more time riding his horses than meeting pretty young women at dances. As he explained in a letter to his mother, his enduring interest was the public debate: “We have a big public dance once a fortnight – a lawn tennis club – private parties etc. and a general air of smartness in everything compared to a provincial town at home. However, these are things I reckon very little. As long as I think that I might have beaten a few fools in a bigger sphere of action, I can never remain quiet.”

Appointed editor of the Kapunda Herald in April 1883, a position he held alongside his legal work until 1891, Glynn was rarely silent. His leaders in the Herald attracted attention in Adelaide and he soon became a recognised public figure, giving talks on matters of interest from the arts to big and new ideas around land management. In 1884, Glynn wrote the 176-page Manifesto for the South Australian Land Nationalisation Society. He had become a supporter of American economist Henry George, who had popularised the idea of a tax on the unimproved value of land.

In the Manifesto Glynn opined, ”About a million and a quarter acres of the best agricultural land in South Australia, situated within the line of rainfall, is at present owned by about thirty persons. It seems unjust on the face of it that population should be driven to settle upon the arid plains of the north, while such vast tracts of suitable country nearer home are not put to their proper uses.”

The “proper uses” Glynn referred to was small farming for agricultural purposes not grazing. He wanted a redistribution of land so that a few pastoralists no longer had a monopoly.

 It was revolutionary stuff. Yet, there are echoes of Glynn today in both the Coalition and Labor’s policies to help first home buyers enter the housing market. Land and its distribution have been at the heart of Australia’s development over the centuries.

Glynn both won and lost on the back of his public stand on land – entering the South Australian parliament as an MP in 1897 only to lose his seat in 1890.

After moving his practice to Adelaide, Glynn then won North Adelaide in a by-election in 1895, lost the seat in 1896 and regained it in a by-election in 1897, the year he was also elected as one of the ten delegates from South Australia to sit at the Australasian Federation Conventions. He was elected to the federal parliament in South Australia’s state-wide poll in March 1901 and in 1903 was returned for the new seat of Angus which he held until 1919.

Glynn was a supporter of George Reid’s Free Traders but was given his first portfolio as Attorney General in Alfred Deakin’s Fusion ministry in 1909,

 was Minister for External Affairs in Joseph Cook’s (Liberal) Government and Minister for Home and Territories in the Hughes Government from 1917. Paddy Glynn, however, was a very independent thinker and was never entirely a party man.

Irish born Patrick McMahon Glynn carried no alienation in his identity as a citizen of the British Empire. From his approach to Home Rule for Ireland to his aspirations for the emerging Commonwealth of Australia, his support for the Crown was unambiguous, all of which in time endeared him to a majority of his political colleagues. His position on solutions for Irish Home Rule backed Ireland being part of the United Kingdom, as part of a federation. He condemned Sir Roger Casement for his role in the Easter Rising in 1916.

Glynn’s seductive eloquence made its mark in the first days of the Adelaide Convention, alongside his erudition and wealth of knowledge.

  A cameo of Patrick McMahon Glynn at the first Constitutional Convention was recorded in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph on 25 March 1897, some of which I can read to you:

From right away at the back benches a diminutive figure, in a brown tweed suit and a light blue necktie, sprang up and caught the President’s attention. This was Mr Glynn … In a few seconds he had drenched the Convention in a torrent of words… He contemptuously dashed aside the fears expressed by Sir Richard Baker as to the system of responsible government under Federation and quoted learned authorities who had an implicit belief in genus of the English system. … Mr Glynn had volumes, documents, papers and reports, and from one he travelled to another. He quoted extensively. He threw masses of statistics at the representatives. He went to the United States, to Germany, to Austria. Words still poured out in a continuous and a magnificent stream. … Mr Glynn took his seat amid general cheering.

Sadly, for students of Australian history, a study of the coming together at federation of the Australian colonies is not so exciting as that of the colonies of America where a bloody war saw their independence from Britain and the birth of a federal constitution gained in the colourful heat of battle. Yet the achievement of the Australasian Conventions in the late 1890s and the energy of the debates was charged with the confidence of a young and proud people ready to take the plunge.

A mix of liberalism and conservatism drove Glynn. He was with the majority in thinking that competition from cheap Pacific (Kanaka) and Asian (Chinese) labour would only degrade the wages of the colonies. Yet, in his editorials and words at the Conventions and in the federal parliament later, he gave voice to the consideration of the rights of Chinese wanting to settle in the colonies.

In the move to federate the colonies, Glynn saw free trade as an imperative arguing: “[F]ederation without inter-colonial free trade would be an anomaly.”

The case for free trade would not be won for many decades after Glynn’s death, yet free trade between the states had succeeded in the coming together of the colonies at federation. In the early years of federation, Glynn wrote and published pamphlets opposing even Imperial trade preference.

In his years as a colonial MP, Glynn supported payment for members of parliament, female suffrage and reform of the upper house, which aligned him with the more liberal (or progressive) side of politics. In his 1899 campaign for the South Australian seat of North Adelaide, one of his strongest supporters and campaigners was the leading suffragist Catherine Spence. In his years as a federal MP, Glynn was often praised for the advice he gave MPs on all sides of the debates.

Glynn’s foresight and argument for a single-gauge railway track across the former colonies did not succeed, but he played a key role over two decades in bringing about the River Murray Waters Agreement of 1915,

 its locks and storage facilities ensuring navigation of the river for trade in South Australia from Wentworth at the Murray-Darling junction to farmers and others downstream. Glynn would have been stunned to think that his advocacy for South Australia’s water rights would have echoes a century later.

By far the best known contribution from Glynn in the Constitutional Convention debates was his success in getting the final Convention to include a reference to God in the preamble to the constitutional document sent to Britain for acceptance as an Act of the British parliament in setting up the federation.

The debate over the reference to God in the preamble was intense and opposed by prominent delegates such as Edmund Barton and Henry Bournes Higgins. Their argument was principally that any reference to God in the federal Constitution threatened the rights of states to have sole jurisdiction over laws relating to religion. These delegates merely wished to preserve the separation of church and state as in the American constitution. Glynn himself, no pedantic or pious Christian, however, saw the words “Almighty God” as a non-sectarian presence guiding the hands of men in a powerful and precarious moment.

The words – written by Glynn – and accepted by the final Convention in Melbourne were “humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God”.

 While accepted without a vote, this step provoked Higgins to push for a further amendment to protect against any federal involvement in laws relating to religion. The amendment would go on to form the basis of section 116 of the Constitution which reads: “The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.” For all that, religious freedom and its implications for our federal government are issues that remain today.

There was never any doubt that Glynn identified as an Irish Catholic, but as he often remarked during the divisions over Ireland during 1916-18 and the First World War, thousands of Irish had joined up and were fighting in France. As Australians divided bitterly over conscription, Glynn remained strong in his support for the war effort.

Yet, as a minister in the Hughes Government, Glynn would join the campaign, which eventually included maritime unionists, to try to prevent the 1920 deportation of German born Catholic priest Fr Charles Jerger who had been falsely accused, in 1916, of making seditious statements during a Sunday sermon. Letters in the archives show Glynn argued strongly over some years, against his own ministerial colleagues, seeking to have the injustice of the Jerger case resolved in Jerger’s favour.

The campaign would fail. And Glynn would lose his seat in 1919.

A century and more later, matters that Glynn drew attention to continue: the Murray-Darling basin; our place in the East-West divide; the need to find ways to a more equitable distribution and collection of tax; how to answer bigotry and mob pressure in the social fabric; section 116 of the Constitution and freedom of religion; and an eternal question – whether increasing secularisation and materialism should – or can – hold a nation together.

In any debate about Australia’s future or identity, Patrick McMahon Glynn deserves resurrecting for scholarly consideration – for his life, his inspiration, his intellectual heroes and his ideas.