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King O'Malley 1858-1953 |
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Biographical Timeline |
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1858 |
Allegedly born on Stamford Farm, Quebec, Canada, but more probably at Valley Falls, Kansas, United States of America. |
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1880
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1888 |
Moved West and began a successful career selling insurance, allegedly created the Waterlily Rockbound Church of the Cayuse Nation, of which he was the first and only bishop. In 1881 he married Rosy Wilmot who died from tuberculosis in 1886. O'Malley had contracted the disease from her and in 1888, having been given six months to live, he sailed for Queensland Australia. |
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1888
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1890 |
Allegedly landed at Port Alma, Central Queensland, gravely ill and took up residence in a cave at Emu Park where he befriended an aboriginal who cared for him until he recovered. Now healthy he walked the 2,100 km from Emu Park to Adelaide in South Australia arriving in 1893. In 1895 he settled in Gawler, South Australia, and in 1896 was elected as the member for Encounter Bay in the South Australian House of Assembly but was defeated in 1899 and the following year moved to Tasmania. |
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1901
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1915 |
Elected to one of Tasmania's five seats in the first Australian Parliament, winning again in 1903 and joining the Labor Caucus in Melbourne. Re-elected in 1910 he became Minister for Home Affairs in Fisher's second Labor government, in the same year he married Amy Garrod. Labor lost office in 1913 but O'Malley retained his seat then, and again in 1914 when Fisher again became prime minister, however he was not elected to the ministry. Following Fisher's resignation in 1915, O'Malley was elected to the Hughes ministry, again as Minister for Home Affairs. |
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1916
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1953 |
With the government split over conscription for Australia's contribution to World War I. O'Malley resigned from Hughes's Cabinet in protest and became an outspoken anti-conscriptionist. He finally lost office on 13 November when Hughes and twenty-four other members left caucus to form the National Labor ministry. In the 1917 election O'Malley was defeated decisively in his electorate. He was defeated again for Denison in 1919 and for Bass in 1922, he never returned to elected office. |
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The last survivor of the first Commonwealth parliament, O'Malley died on 20 December 1953. His estate and that of his wife who died in 1958 were invested in the King and Amy O'Malley Trust to provide scholarships for women studying home economics. |
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| O'Malley in Australian politics |
King O'Malley is one of the more colourful and enigmatic characters to enrich the theatre of Australia’s Parliament, his flamboyant character, outspokenness, radical social policies and shadowy past made him a controversial figure in national politics for nearly two decades.
Despite this controversy a fair reading of his career shows him as a man whose concern with social issues put him in the van of those politicians in our early Federal Parliaments whose reforms made Australia one of the world’s most advanced democracies in the early twentieth century. He was well ahead of his time in advocating greater rights for women and children, proposing and promoting the establishment of a Commonwealth Bank and was prominent in the creation of the new National Capital, Canberra.
The first verifiable record of O’Malley in Australia is his arrival in South Australia in 1893, he again worked as an itinerant insurance salesman, also preaching evangelical Christianity and temperance. In 1895 he settled in Gawler, South Australia, and in 1896 he was elected as a member for Encounter Bay in the South Australian House of Assembly as a radical democrat, opposed to the wealthy landowners who then dominated colonial politics. He was narrowly defeated in 1899 South Australian elections and moved to Tasmania where he resumed his parliamentary aspirations, standing for, and winning, a seat in Australia’s first Federal Parliament. For a detailed account of O'Malley's political career follow the links below; |
| Australian Dictionary of Biography Online |
| What the historians think |
| Gavin Souter |
" O'Malley's monstrously overgrown persona seemed to be inhabited simultaneously by a spruiker from Barnum's three-ring circus, a hell-and-tarnation revivalist, and a four-flushing Yankee Congressman. He was a moderately big man, auburn-haired with watchful grey eyes and a red-brown beard, wearing a wide-brimmed felt hat, blue-grey suit with huge lapels and a low-cut vest, loose cravat with a diamond collar stud, and in the centre of his cream silk shirt-front a fiery opal." |
| Arthur Hoyle |
"Tall and bearded, with flowing tawny hair, O'Malley had an arresting and, to many, an irritating presence. His mocking, mischievous personality contributed to the controversy he deliberately invited, but his verbal clowning never entirely obscured the complex and hard-headed man who was perhaps 'his own worst enemy'." |
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Canberra; a new capital for our nation |
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 O'Malley drives in the first peg at the Canberra Foundation Ceremony.
As Minister for Home Affairs O'Malley was responsible for the planning of the new national capital, Canberra, he threw himself into the task with enthusiasm although previously he had been heard to say that the Federal government should remain in Melbourne and that the site selected was 'a howling wilderness'. Controversy over the design of the new city was resolved when O'Malley endorsed the view of a majority of the selection committee and declared American architect Walter Burley Griffin winner of the town planning competition. On 20 February 1913 O'Malley drove in the first peg which marked the start of the development of the city. He was also present at the ceremony for the naming of Canberra on 12 March 1913. |
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| O'Malley and the Commonwealth Bank |
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A portrait of King O'Malley in the Commonwealth Bank Head Office.
O’Malley was one of the prime movers in the campaign for the establishment of a national bank, an ideal that was popular, not only from within the party but also among the electorate. The depression and financial crises of the 1890’s had left many people deeply suspicious of banks and there was widespread support for federal Government control over private banks. Despite considerable opposition from a powerful group within the labor party the proponents of a national bank had, by1908, sufficient strength to put the creation of a Commonwealth Bank on the party’s election platform, the details of which O'Malley had presented to parliament in a comprehensive plan for the creation of a national bank of deposit, issue, exchange and reserve earlier that same year. However it was not until 1911 that Prime Minister Fisher introduced a bill to establish a 'National Bank' to carry on general banking business in the same way as any commercial bank, this fell far short of what many, including O’Malley, had hoped for and there was widespread disappointment. When it was established the new bank bore little resemblance to O’Malley’s proposal “for the creation of a national bank of deposit, issue, exchange and reserve” but because of his pre-eminent role in pushing the concept “it may be claimed that O'Malley was the spiritual father of the later Commonwealth and Reserve banks.”* |
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| *Arthur Hoyle; Australian Dictionary of Biography Online. |
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