Premier of NSW
William Holman was born on the 4th August 1871 in London, the son of actors William and Martha. He was educated in that city and apprenticed as a cabinetmaker, and emigrated with his parents to Australia in 1888. In Sydney he worked as a cabinetmaker and maintained an interest in literary societies, in reading and in drama.
Through the 1890s Holman frequented the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts reading room, where he came into contact with reformist intellectuals such as W.M. Hughes and George Beeby, and became a member of the Socialist League and Sydney Single Tax league. The intellectual appeal of reform appealed to the bookish Holman and he read widely on philosophy, economics and socialism. He joined the Labour Electoral League in 1891.
While never attracted greatly to trade unionism as a movement, Holman organised for the AWU in the late 1890s and was the secretary of the Railway & Tramways Employees’ Union in 1893. In that year Holman proposed at a conference of the young Labour Party a motion in favour of a Pledge for members to comply with the ALP’s platform and policy, the instrument which thereafter bound elected Labor candidates.
While a political and philosophical radical, Homan believed entirely in Parliamentary reform as the only viable tactic for achieving gains for workers; he rejected revolutionary agitation and he was sceptical of the power of unions to significantly alter society. In 1898 he made good on his convictions, and won for Labour the country seat of Grenfell in the NSW Legislative Assembly. He supported Federation with significant democratic misgivings, became increasingly impatient with Labor’s tactical brokerage of minority Governments, and during the Boer War, took an anti-war, anti-capitalist position.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Holman simultaneously helped develop the intellectual background for Labor government in Australia and continued his own intellectual growth. Recognising the importance of legal training to the advancement of his Party in Parliament, he studied Law and was admitted to the Bar in 1903.
In 1907, Holman was elected again to the NSW Legislative Assembly as Member for Cootamundra, and when Labor formed Government in 1910 he was made Attorney-General. When Premier McGowan retired in 1913 due to involvement in a soured industrial dispute, Holman became Premier of New South Wales.
By the time Holman gained the leadership of the ALP he had earned the enmity of many of Labor’s powerful supporters. Throughout the beginnings of his career in Parliament, Holman made enemies of much of the trade union movement and the rank and file, and had antagonised many other Labor politicians including the future Prime Minister Hughes. By the time the Federal issue of conscription for overseas service grew into a national controversy by 1915, he had lost much of the popularity amongst Laborites he had once enjoyed.
Throughout the divisive conscription battles Holman supported YES votes, against the Conference, the bulk of the trade union movement, and the great majority of the Labor rank-and-file, and was expelled formally from the ALP in 1917. Like Billy Hughes in the Federal Parliament, Holman made a nearly seamless change from being Premier in a Labor party to Premier in a Nationalist, anti-Labor Party, and in a 1917 election he was re-elected easily against a bitterly divided ALP. In 1920 he lost the State election and his own seat, and through the 1920s he would remain involved in conservative politics. He was elected to the Federal Parliament in the seat of Martin in 1931, but died on the 5th June 1933. He was one of the Labor Party’s most controversial figures, both contributing greatly to the establishment of the ALP and to its disastrous split.