Frank Anstey
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The Honourable Frank Anstey |
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| Member of the Australian Parliament for Bourke |
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In office 13 April 1910 – 7 August 1934 |
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| Preceded by | James Hume Cook |
| Succeeded by | Maurice Blackburn |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
18 August 1865 London, England |
| Died | 31 October 1940 (aged 75) Melbourne |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Political party | Australian Labor Party |
| Spouse(s) | Katherine Mary Bell McColl |
| Occupation | Tramway worker |
Francis George "Frank" Anstey (18 August 1865 – 31 October 1940), Australian politician, served 38 years as a Labor member of the Victorian and Commonwealth parliaments.
Anstey was born in London, England, the son of an iron-miner, who died five months before he was born, and he had little formal education. He stowed away on a passenger ship when he was 11 and arrived in Melbourne in 1877. He then spent ten years working on ships to the South Pacific islands. After spending a period as an itinerant worker (a "swaggie" in Australian slang), he moved to Sale, where he met Katherine Mary Bell McColl. They married in 1887 and had two sons. He became a cleaner in Melbourne, where he soon became involved in politics. He worked on the Melbourne tramways and became President of the Tramways Employees Union. Self-educated, he wrote extensively for Labor newspapers such as and Labor Call.
In 1902 Anstey was elected as a Labor member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly for East Bourke Boroughs, and from 1904 he was member for Brunswick, both electorates being in the working-class suburbs of Melbourne. He switched to federal politics at the 1910 election, winning the seat of Bourke in the House of Representatives.
Despite his English birth, Anstey was an Australian nationalist. He saw Australia as an economic colony of the finance houses of the City of London, which, like many in the labour movement at this time, he described as the "money power". His views are typified by this passage from a 1907 editorial in the newspaper of the Australian Workers' Union:
The Money Power! It is the greatest power on Earth; and it is arrayed against Labour. No other power that is or ever was can be named with it.... It attacks us through the press – a monster with a thousand lying tongues, a beast surpassing in foulness any conceived by the mythology that invented dragons, wehr wolves, harpies, ghouls and vampires. It thunders against us from innumerable platforms and pulpits. The mystic machinery of the churches it turns into an engine of wrath for our destruction.
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