George Reid

Instead, the next three years were very unstable, with governments changing a number of times, and the Protectionists fell into third place in 1906.

Prior to that 1906 election, Protectionist leader Alfred Deakin made another attempt to introduce preferential voting, specifically CPV, in a pitch to Labor leader Chris Watson as an attempt to isolate George Reid's Free Traders.

"Have you thought of the exhaustive ballot, compulsory voting for every candidate? The lowest dropped out and his votes divided until someone gets a majority.

With this, our candidate and yours could not do each other anything like so much harm, and one or others of us would win in several Reidite constituencies.

The memoirs that I've largely described as quite boring, there is actually something much more complicated happening here and it is really a process of historical erasure.

At the beginning of their accounts of political life in Australia, so many of the big early federal period characters, George Reid, WG Spence, Billy Hughes as well, so many of these guys are participating in the consignment of First Nations people to history, is the short way of putting it.

And they do it in quite blatant, explicit ways.

Spence says that they were an unmarshalled people, unable to, you know, comparatively weak, although he doesn't say compared with who.

George Reid basically says that this was a people incapable of bargaining, incapable of asserting ownership of land.

Spence says something which I found quite confronting.

He basically says that when the squatocracy, when the sort of wealthy landed elite sort of overran Indigenous country and settled their sheep on the large pastoral runs, what we had was the displacement of one squatter with another, is what he says.