FED: True blue founding father was Welsh born Latin scholar

AAP General News (Australia)
12-29-2000
FED: True blue founding father was Welsh born Latin scholar

Eds: This is the second in a three-part series



By Doug Conway, Senior Correspondent

SYDNEY, AAP - Australia's constitution was written by a most unAustralian sounding
man - a Welsh-born scholar whose idea of relaxation was to translate Dante from Latin.

He was part of an equally unrepresentative sounding group - a bunch of bearded old
men, not a woman among them, all appointed by their state parliaments.

The guiding hand behind the nation's founding document, as Thomas Jefferson was for
America's declaration of independence, belonged to Sir Samuel Walker Griffith.

The name remains unfamiliar to many Australians, even on the eve of the centenary of federation.

"But if any one man is credited with drafting the constitution, it is him," said Paul
Brunton, curator of manuscripts at the State Library of NSW, which houses the original
document.

"He was one of the great figures of the Victorian age."

Another surprise is that Griffith sprang not from the power bases of Melbourne or Sydney
but from Brisbane.

Queensland Premier at the time the constitution was framed, he went on to become the
state's chief justice and the first chief justice of Australia.

His origins were humble. He came from the Welsh mining town of Merthyr Tydfil, the
son of a pastor who took his family to Australia when Sam was eight, living at Ipswich,
Maitland then Brisbane.

His academic prowess propelled him into a career in law and politics, and he eventually
lived in luxury in a mansion called Merthyr on the Brisbane River.

He earned the nickname "Oily Sam" for his ability to argue on any side of any subject.

Though a cautious lawyer, one piece of history records that in his mid-20s he was "often
broke, unrepentant about his drinking and a past liaison with a married woman, and his
family saw him as irresponsible, his brother refusing to lend him money".

Though he developed unfounded aspirations to be part of the Welsh aristocracy, he possessed
a clearer vision of what it might mean to be Australian than the ageing Sir Henry Parkes,
regarded as the father of federation.

Parkes' famous "crimson thread of kinship" speech at the 1890 federation conference
in Melbourne depicted Australian identity as "forever subsumed within a wider British
aegis", said one historian.

Later that same year Griffith told the Queensland parliament: "The time has quite arrived
when we should cease to regard the name of an Australian as being in the smallest degree
less honourable than the name of an Englishman."

He resented being called a "colonist".

Every state sent seven delegates to the 1891 constitutional convention in Sydney.

Though Andrew Inglis Clark of Tasmania and Charles Kingston of South Australia had
circulated drafts based on the US and Canadian constitutions, it was Griffith who steered
the document to completion.

Though the charismatic figure of Parkes was president of the convention, it was his
deputy Griffith who marshalled and managed the nuts and bolts.

It was Griffith who hosted half a dozen other delegates aboard the Queensland government's
pleasure yacht Lucinda as it sailed around Sydney's Pittwater and Broken Bay, finalising
the constitution during Easter of 1891.

Although ideas and suggestions came from others, all the drafts were in Griffith's
hand, and it was he who bound them together and retained them in his private collection.

"In every clause the measure bore the stamp of Sir Samuel Griffith's patient and untiring
handwork, his terse, clear style and force of expression," remarked Alfred Deakin, Australia's
second prime minister.

"Few even in the mother country or the United States could have accomplished such a
piece of draftsmanship with the same finish in the same time."

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KEYWORD: FEDERATION AUTHORITY (REPEATING)

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