The Knowledge Solution by Anna Clark

Author:Anna Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522875423
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

15

LEGISLATING LIBERTY

Peter Cochrane reveals the passionate ideas and emotions that took a colonial outpost to a self-governing nation and the people who led the charge

From Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian democracy, published 2006

ON 2 SEPTEMBER 1853, William Charles Wentworth stepped up to the table of the Legislative Council of New South Wales to make an apology for his temper and his bad language.

‘Unhappily Sir,’ he addressed the Speaker, ‘… there is within me a flood of lava which ever and anon boils over, and which I cannot keep down. Sir, it is rather the infirmity of my nature than the fault of my heart.’

Wentworth’s apology was out of character and it startled everyone, from the noisy peanut munchers in the public gallery and the scribblers in the reporters’ box to Wentworth’s fellow members on the floor of the chamber. Wentworth was never a man to apologise. He was not a man to admit an ‘infirmity’, let alone to confess an infirmity of nature, a foible that was, presumably, beyond the reach of anyone to improve or change in any way. Yet here he was, in the midst of a fierce constitutional debate, confessing to intemperate language and wild temper. While hardly a deathbed recantation, it was, as it turned out, a clarification for posterity. After thirty-five years as an agitator and a decade spent in the Legislative Council, the elder statesman of colonial politics was on the verge of retirement.

This, Sir, is probably the last occasion … that my voice will be heard within these walls. And the time, Sir, cannot be far distant when this tongue will be mute in death. In the short interval which must elapse between me and the eternity on the brink of which I now stand, I would ask, what low motives, what ignoble ambition can possibly actuate me? Sir, the whole struggle and effort of my life have been directed to the achievement of the liberties of my country.1

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.