The Honourable Jack Lang |
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23rd Premier of New South Wales Elections: 1925, 1927, 1930, 1932 |
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In office 17 June 1925 – 18 October 1927 |
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Preceded by | George Fuller |
Succeeded by | Thomas Bavin |
Constituency | Parramatta |
In office 4 November 1930 – 13 May 1932 |
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Preceded by | Thomas Bavin |
Succeeded by | Bertram Stevens |
Constituency | Auburn |
Personal details | |
Born |
Sydney, New South Wales |
21 December 1876
Died | 27 September 1975 Auburn, New South Wales, Australia |
(aged 98)
Political party |
Australian Labor Party Lang Labor Non-Communist Labor |
Profession | Politician |
John Thomas Lang (21 December 1876 – 27 September 1975), usually referred to as J.T. Lang during his career, and familiarly known as "Jack" and nicknamed "The Big Fella", was an Australian politician who was Premier of New South Wales for two terms (1925–27, 1930–32). He is the only Premier of an Australian state to have been dismissed by the state Governor.
John Thomas Lang was born on 21 December 1876 on George Street, Sydney, close to the present site of The Metro Theatre (between Bathurst Street and Liverpool Street). He was the third son (and sixth of ten children) of James Henry Lang, a watchmaker born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Mary Whelan, a milliner born in Galway, Ireland. His mother and father had arrived in Australia in 1848 and 1860, respectively, and married in Melbourne, Victoria, on 11 June 1866, moving to Sydney five years later. Although Lang's father had been born Presbyterian, he later became a Catholic like his wife, and the family "fitted into the normal low social stratum of the great majority of Sydney's Catholics".
The family lived in the inner-city slums for the majority of Lang's early childhood, including for a period on Wexford Street in Surry Hills, where he attended a local school, St Francis Marist Brothers' on Castlereagh Street. His father suffered from rheumatic fever for most of Lang's childhood, and he supplemented his family's income by selling newspapers in the city on mornings and afternoons. In the mid-1880s, due to his parents' poverty, he was sent to live with his mother's sister on a small rural property near Bairnsdale, in the Gippsland region of Victoria, attending for about four years the local Catholic school. Lang returned to New South Wales in the early 1890s to seek employment, aged 14. His first jobs were in the rural areas to the south-west of Sydney: on a poultry farm at Smithfield, and then as the driver of a horse-drawn omnibus in and around Merrylands and Guildford.