In Australia, people may have forgotten the man called Christmas.
One of Australia’s 31 Prime Ministers from 1901 to the present day was called Christmas. The 27th Prime Minister was a woman but Julia Gillard was not called Christmas.
Earle Christmas Grafton Page became Australia’s 11th Prime Minister in 1939. He was PM for a brief 19 days. That’s not the shortest premiership in Australian political history – that honour goes to Francis Michael Forde, who served for 8 days from 6-13 July 1945 after the death of John Curtin in office.
Earle Christmas Grafton Page (1880-1961) was from the Country Party and served from 7-26 April 1939, the second shortest premiership. When PM Joseph Lyons died suddenly in 1939, Governor-General Lord Gowrie (Queen Elizabeth’s representative in Australia) appointed Page as the caretaker Prime Minister while the government, the United Australia Party (UAP), chose a new leader – the former deputy leader Robert Menzies.
Page refused to serve under Menzies, saying that Menzies was incompetent and cowardly for not enlisting in the forces during the First World War. The Country Party subsequently deposed Page for verbally attacking Menzies. Robert Gordon Menzies, who served as PM from 1939-1941, and again from 1949-1966, had ‘an era in politics’ and was known as the ‘war leader’ taking the country into three wars and the Cold War.
Earle Page continued serving as a local politician for almost 42 years, making him the longest serving Australian federal parliamentarian who represented the same seat throughout his career. While nine Australian Prime Ministers were knighted, he was the only one who was knighted before he became PM.
Earle Page was the fifth child of his parents’ eleven children. He was given the name Grafton after his birthplace. His grandfather James Page arrived in Grafton in 1855. As was the Scottish tradition of the time, he was given the name Christmas from the surname of a childless relative. He didn’t like the name!
He became a surgeon, getting his medicine degree at the University of Sydney. He moved back to rural Grafton and opened a private hospital while being involved in local politics.
He married Ethel Blunt in 1906 and they had five children. When she died in 1958 at the age of 82, Earle married his secretary Jean Thomas in 1959. She was 32 years younger than Earle. He died from lung cancer in 1961, and Jean continued to live for almost 50 years after her husband’s death, dying in 2011.
MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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