Brunswick's Grog Election

In the Labor – and working class camp was the mercurial Frank Anstey. Described as one of the best orators the labour movement has produced Anstey was pugnacious, proudly working class and a rising star of the Victorian Labor Party.

Anstey, a boxing fan, moderate drinker, occasional punter and friend of liquor and gambling baron John Wren vigorously opposed the “wowsers” in State Parliament.

The Christian Social Reformers targeted Anstey and the seat of Brunswick in the 1907 General Election. Methodist lay preacher William Henry Judkins opposed Anstey in Brunswick. A prominent wowser, Judkins could count on the support of the Protestant Churches, the Brunswick City Council and the Salvation Army.

The Wowsers were at the height of their powers and were determined to close down John Wren and end poverty amongst the working class by oppressing the evils of drink and gaming. A recent attempt to achieve their aims via legislation had failed in part due to Frank Anstey’s wily parliamentary tactics.

Anstey claimed that the campaign to close down small clubs and hotels – of which there were many in Brunswick – revealed a bias against the working class. Anstey contended that it was not drink or gambling that caused the oppression of the working class – and its attendant suicides, embezzlements, murder, crime, insanity and poverty - but rather the social system itself.

Anstey was backed by the Wren-Catholic-ALP alliance, local Labor Branches led by the likes of a young John Curtin, trade unions, the Brunswick Football Club, the league of sportsmen and Brunswick’s many hoteliers. After a campaign of increasingly vitriolic accusations about sectarian hostility and class enmity or moral degeneracy and political corruption, Anstey was elected with 60 per cent of the vote.

Anstey’s triumph was one of those which would set the stage for the first half of the 20th century. Brunswick in 1907, and other such triumphs, meant that it was the Wren-Catholic alliance, and its Tammany Hall style machine would dominate the ALP for decades to come.

Frank Anstey would go on to become Labor’s Deputy Leader in Federal Parliament and Minister for Health in the Scullin Depression Government of 1929-31. When Anstey died in 1938 a grateful community got the Brunswick North Railway Station renamed in his honour—today it is still the Anstey Railway station.


- Christopher Anderson
Brunswick's Labor History
No. 03/2005