Frederick Illingworth

Frederick Illingworth (24 September 1844 – 8 September 1908),Australian politician, was a Member of Parliament in two Australian states, and a government minister in Western Australia. As a financier of land speculation in Victoria in the 1880s, he was heavily involved in the Victorian land boom.

Frederick Illingworth was born in Little Horton now part of Bradford, West Yorkshire on 24 September 1844. The son of a woolcomber, he emigrated to Victoria, Australia with his family at the age of four. As a young man he worked as an ironmonger at Brighton, Melbourne, and he later acquired pastoral land at Yalook. On 5 September 1867 he married Elizabeth Tarry, with whom he would have one son and one daughter. In the late 1870s he partnered with J. R. Hoskins to form an estate agent firm, but the business failed. In 1883 he returned to ironmongery, establishing an electroplating business in Melbourne.

In 1888, Illingworth founded and became the major share holder in the Centennial Land Bank. This was a land bank formed to finance speculation on real estate during the Victorian land boom, an economic bubble that had begun in the early 1880s. The boom peaked around 1888, then crashed. Nearly every land company went into liquidation, and Illingworth was left with large debts. Despite having been elected to the Victorian Legislative Council for Northern Province in July 1889, Illingworth fled to Western Australia in 1890, and the following year his seat was declared vacant for non-attendance.

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