King O'Malley

Before he moved to Australia, O'Malley lived a transient lifestyle as an insurance salesman and real estate agent on the west coast of the United States. There are contemporary references to him in California, Oregon, and Washington Territory, as well as in his presumptive home state of Kansas.[15] At various times O'Malley sold policies for the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, the Home Life Insurance Company of New York, and the Equitable Life Insurance Company.[16] In April 1887, the Chicago Inter Ocean reported that he had forwarded policies amounting to $200,000 from Oregon, an immense sum at the time.[17] He may have also made money engaging in land speculation, as he was wealthy enough to invest in property in Seattle which he retained for several decades.[18] Surviving records indicate that he had "somewhat dubious" business practices – in 1887 he made a series of large deposits at a bank in Corvallis, Oregon, then abruptly withdrew his entire account.[17]

As a young man, O'Malley became a devotee of the temperance movement; his apparent home state of Kansas had been one of the first to enact statewide prohibition.[19] He gave fiery public speeches in the towns where he sold insurance, warning against the dangers of what he called "stagger juice".[20] O'Malley supported the pro-temperance Republican Party, and in 1884 stumped for the presidential campaign of James Blaine.[21] He later claimed that he would have been appointed ambassador to Chile if Blaine won.[22]

While in Texas O'Malley founded a church, taking the title of "First Bishop of the Waterlily Rock Bound Church, the Red Skin Temple of the Cayuse Nation" in order to take advantage of a government land grant then being offered to churches. In 1881 O'Malley married Rosy Wilmot, who died from tuberculosis shortly before she was due to give birth in 1886. O'Malley claimed he had contracted the disease from her and in 1888, having been given six months to live, he sailed for Queensland, Australia.

Photo of O'Malley from the official album of the Melbourne Centennial Exhibition, 1888

In April 1888, the Oregon City Courier published an article titled "King O’Malley Exposed". The newspaper reported that he and a partner had "placed policies to the amount of tens of thousands of dollars by misrepresentation", and that the Home Life Insurance Company was actively warning customers not to take any money from him. O'Malley left for Australia a few months later, arriving in Sydney in late July 1888. He travelled from San Francisco via Hawaii aboard the SS Mariposa.[17] He then went south to attend the Melbourne Centennial Exhibition; his photograph appears in the exhibition's official albums, where he is listed as a representative of an American glass manufacturer.[23]

O'Malley had a different version of his arrival in Australia. According to his account, he moved to Australia for health reasons, as he was suffering from tuberculosis. He supposedly arrived in the country at Port Alma, Queensland, then took up residence in a cave at Emu Park where an Aboriginal man named Coowonga nursed him back to health. He subsequently walked overland to Sydney and Melbourne before eventually reaching Adelaide.[24][25] Of this account, Hoyle (1981) states "whatever its merits as a story, it has absolutely none as a statement of fact".[26] O'Malley fabricated a dramatic arrival story to hide his real reason for leaving the United States – to escape embezzlement allegations.[22] Given the documentary evidence placing him in Sydney and Melbourne in 1888, it would have required a rapid recovery from tuberculosis followed by a walking journey of hundreds of miles, conducted within a timespan of several months.[26]

Undated photo

In 1895 he settled in Gawler, South Australia, and at the 1896 election he was elected as a member for Encounter Bay in the South Australian House of Assembly as a radical democrat, opposed to the wealthy landowners who then dominated colonial politics. Calling himself a follower of Christian Socialism, his most popular platform among conservatives was to rid hotels of barmaids "hired for their physical attributes rather than their prowess in drawing ale". Although O'Malley was unsuccessful at the time, laws were passed in 1909 to require registration of barmaids, who had to be a member of the owner's family.

O'Malley's narrow win in 1896 has been credited to his popularity among religious leaders and conservatives for his extreme puritan views, but it seems his popularity with women voters was a bigger factor. Women were much taken by his appearance and O'Malley's "oratorial buffoonery" was the popular topic of discussion throughout South Australia. He called hotels "drunkeries", alcohol was "stagger juice", opponents were "diabolical rapscallions" and he referred to himself as the "bald headed Eagle from the Rocky Mountains".

O'Malley in 1908

O'Malley was defeated at the 1899 election, and the following year he moved to Tasmania, the smallest of the Australian colonies. There, a tall, fashionably-dressed American preaching the Gospel and radical democracy drew immediate attention, and he was elected at the 1901 federal election as a member for Tasmania, along with four others. In 1903 he was elected as the member for Darwin. Although there was no Labour Party in Tasmania at this time, he joined the Labour Party Caucus when the Parliament assembled in Melbourne.

Historian Gavin Souter describes O'Malley at this time:

O'Malley's monstrously overgrown persona seemed to be inhabited simultaneously by a spruiker from Barnum's three-ring circus, a hell-and-tarnation revivalist, and a four-flushing Yankee Congressman. He was a moderately big man, auburn-haired with watchful grey eyes and a red-brown beard, wearing a wide-brimmed felt hat, blue-grey suit with huge lapels and a low-cut vest, loose cravat with a diamond collar stud, and in the centre of his cream silk shirt-front a fiery opal.

O'Malley was clearly one of the more prominent and colourful members of the Parliament, but his radical ideas were not widely accepted, and many regarded him as a charlatan. He became a prominent advocate of a national bank as a means of providing cheap credit for farmers and small businessmen.

He was not a member of Chris Watson's first Labour ministry in 1904, or of Andrew Fisher's first ministry in 1908. But in April 1910 the Caucus elected him to the ministry of Fisher's second government. Ross McMullin, who wrote an official history of the ALP, suggested "his election as minister was probably attributable in part to the fact that several caucus colleagues owed him money".[27]

O'Malley drives in first peg of Canberra

O'Malley at the naming of Canberra ceremony

Final years in parliament

Caricature of O'Malley by Will Dyson

Labor was defeated at the 1913 federal election, and when it returned to office at the 1914 federal election, O'Malley was not re-elected to the Cabinet. In October 1915, however, Fisher retired and O'Malley returned to office in the first ministry of Billy Hughes, again as Minister for Home Affairs. But a year later the government split over the determination of Hughes to introduce conscription to fill the ranks of Australia's armed forces in World War I. Although he was not an active anti-conscriptionist, O'Malley was pressured by Hughes to resign his portfolio but he refused to do so. He finally lost office on 13 November 1916 when Hughes and twenty-four other Labor members walked out of the Caucus and formed the National Labor ministry.

Hughes called the 1917 federal election, and O'Malley was heavily defeated in his northern Tasmanian seat of Darwin by former Labor colleague Charles Howroyd, a conscriptionist who was running for Hughes' Nationalist Party. O'Malley suffered a swing of almost 15 percent, and was one of many Labor figures swept out in that year's massive Nationalist landslide. He stood unsuccessfully in the seat of Denison in 1919, and in Bass in 1922, but he was never again returned to elected office.

Although he was only 63 at the time of his defeat, he retired to Melbourne and devoted his time to building up his own legend, particularly in relation to the Commonwealth Bank, and to polemical journalism on a variety of pet causes. He lived to be about 95, outliving his nemesis Hughes by 14 months. At the time of his death he was the last surviving member of the first Australian Parliament and last surviving MP who served when Edmund Barton was Prime Minister. Furthermore, he was the last surviving member of Andrew Fisher's second Cabinet.

O'Malley's importance in developing the national capital is remembered in Canberra with the suburb of O'Malley being named after him. A pub in Canberra, King O'Malley's Irish Pub in Civic, is also named after him – a tongue-in-cheek reference to his sponsorship of the unpopular alcohol ban in the Australian Capital Territory during Canberra's early years.[28]

O'Malley is the subject of a 1970 musical play The Legend of King O'Malley by Michael Boddy and Bob Ellis.

• History of Canberra

• Catts, Dorothy (1957). King O'Malley: Man and Statesman. Publicity Press. ISBN 9130001102.
• Henderson, Rowan (2011). King O'Malley (PDF). Canberra Museum and Gallery. ISBN 978-0-9807840-3-9.
• Hoyle, Arthur (1981). King O'Malley: The American Bounder. Macmillan. ISBN 9780333337738.
• McMullin, Ross (1991). The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party 1891–1991. Oxford University Press. ISBN 019554966X.
• Noye, Larry (1985). O'Malley MHR. Neptune Press. ISBN 9780909131968.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to King O'Malley.

• Arthur Hoyle, 'O'Malley, King (1858–1953)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 11, Melbourne University Press, 1988, pp 84–86.
• King & Amy O'Malley Trust