Girt Nation by David Hunt

Author:David Hunt [Hunt, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Inc.

Deakin’s genuine remorse didn’t stop him spruiking the building society to investors, or telling its customers their money was safe. Those investors and customers lost out when the company went to the wall in 1892.

Deakin represented financial institutions in cases against distressed investors, and also took on the cases of friends and parliamentary colleagues implicated in fraud. He mounted an unusual and unsuccessful defence for Charles Staples, chair of the Anglo-Australian Bank: ‘Who should go free in the city of Melbourne if rash and even reckless speculation were considered criminal?’

Premier James Munro, chair of the Real Estate Mortgage and Deposit Bank, used funds from the financial institutions he controlled to pay for personal investments, and lent to family and friends with little or no security. As the depression deepened, Munro rammed the Voluntary Liquidation Act through parliament in a day, blocking minority shareholders who suspected fraud from initiating public inquiries into company operations. The next day, Munro used these laws to voluntarily shut down a bank and a building society he controlled, without his dirty laundry being aired.

An old school pal of Deakin’s, Theodore Fink, devised a scheme that took advantage of laws allowing three-quarters of a company’s creditors to agree to an insolvent company’s continued trading as an alternative to winding it up. The solution was to lend a tiny amount to lots of friends, who would then stack creditors’ meetings. Those friends’ companies would similarly extend small loans to you, and you’d turn up at meetings to keep their creditors at bay. A company owner who entered into such a cosy arrangement – in which they drained every penny from their dying company and avoided the shame of bankruptcy, while real creditors received nothing – was said to have ‘finked it’.

The Chaffey brothers, the beneficiaries of Deakin’s experiment of privatising the Murray, went into liquidation, surprisingly easy to do when your business is water. Fresh fruit was a luxury, with sales plummeting in the tough times, and Mildura’s growers refused to pay the Chaffeys’ water rates. The wet dream of irrigating north-west Victoria was dust.

Irrigation and religion remained two of Deakin’s great passions: he published Irrigation in India and Temple and Tomb in India in 1893, and delivered lectures on Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Deakin had written The Gospel According to Swedenborg, a 600-page exploration of the Swedish mystic’s views on the spirit world, revelation, religion, ethical living and duty, before his attraction to Eastern religions led him to embrace Theosophy and take on the role of secretary of a new Theosophical Lodge in Melbourne.

Theosophy was an offshoot of spiritualism developed by the aristocratic Ukrainian occultist Madame Blavatsky, publisher of the Theosophical magazine Lucifer and author of the faith’s sacred texts Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, The Key to Theosophy, The Voice of the Silence and The Secret Doctrine, the contents of which had been revealed to her by a secret brotherhood of spiritual adepts known as ‘the Masters’.

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