Reminiscences of Early Castlemaine Elections – Mt Alexander Mail, 25 August 1891 – Trove
A writer in the Sydney “Daily Telegraph”, in noticing the Electoral Bill to be introduced by Sir Henry Parkes, gives the following account of elections in Castlemaine in the early days:- Castlemaine may fairly boast the most conspicuous records amongst the electorates of Victoria. Under what was for many years popularly known as the “New Constitution” (the Act which conferred responsible government upon the colony) Castlemaine was entitled to return three members to the Assembly. Though under the operation of subsequent enactments now shorn of its fair proportions, at the period in which it returned three members, Castlemaine was a large constituency. There is no constituency in Victoria which can claim to have on the roll of its members a greater number of representatives who have held offices as Ministers of the Crown. Amongst the names of able men thus distinguished who flash through memory are Messrs R.S. Sitwell, Vincent Pike, Dr Macadam, Messrs Butler Cole Aspinal and Richard Davies Ireland. Even in the last and present parliaments a Minister of the Crown in the person of Mr James Brown Patterson sat for Castlemaine.
In the good old days when the population was large, gold plentiful and everybody hard-working and prosperous public-houses were plentiful in the town and they dotted the roads leading to and from it with what might be esteemed a fairly consistent liberality. That is the first point. The second is that with three members of Parliament, some of whom would be called with more or less suddenness to enter the highest and greatest of all conceivable Upper Houses (charity, it is to be hoped, will readily admit the possibility of a member of the Lower House of a colonial Parliament being permitted to pass the celestial gates), with members being expelled (Mr Chapman was), and with members coming back for re-election as Ministers of the Crown, elections for Castlemaine came to be of exceptionally frequent occurrence.
Now, amongst the electors of Castlemaine there lived, some three miles from the town, a gentleman of the name of Aberdeen and at the zenith of his fame he was a person of considerable property. Whatever his idea may have been, he determined that no election should take place for the Castlemaine district without a contest, and if no one came forward as a challenger he would present himself. Now, to contest such a constituency at such a time involved the expenditure of a large sum of money and also a very great exertion. Every public-house was a power and as there was no Licensed Victualler’s Association in existence to bind the wounds inflicted by competition, so as to lead to the giving of a solid vote, every publican fought for his own hand. A candidate was expected to hold some sort of meeting at nearly every roadside hotel. If he did not spend much himself he was the cause of much spending on the part of others – a really much better thing – so that a contested election became a period so exciting and every way glorious, that in Castlemaine to dispense with it would be a thing most intolerable, calamitous and wrong. He was in short, nothing more than a bogus candidate.
By the Electoral Act of 1861 a deposit of L50 was required of each candidate upon nomination and this deposit was liable to forfeiture unless a certain proportion of votes were polled. This was the legislative remedy instituted in Victoria for the subjection of “bogus candidates” such as Aberdeen, and a protective measure of the same character has found its way into laws of nearly all the Australasian colonies. The truth is, the idea of bogus candidates is itself a bogey. The Aberdeen incident has a right to be regarded as an exceptional case, in an exceptional constituency at an exceptional period. Instead of dealing with Aberdeen and Castlemaine specially, the Victorian Legislature passed a section in the Act of 1861 which affects all candidates and operates in all electorates in the country, and other colonial Parliaments have proved much too ready to follow this bad lead. Probably they would not have been so ready if it had not been seen that, founded upon a poor excuse, the requirement of a monetary deposit upon nomination was really highly conservative measure and one of the worst sort, for the property qualification thus devised was practically placed in pawn, and under certain circumstances it might never be got out again. The electors of the country should be “free and independent,” free to choose their candidates, free to exercise their franchise and there should not exist anything to operate as a stop or hindrance in the way of any man offering his services to the people. Upon the grounds of broad principle the monetary requirement at nominations should be swept away, and that it will be swept away there cannot be much reason to doubt. When it is swept away the only mourning will be for the fact that it ever obtained a place on the Statute-book and was suffered so long to remain there.