At the turn of the century, Higgins had been a lonely voice in Australian
public life in opposing the Boer War, but in 1914 he could see no alternative to
fighting Germany and he did not try to prevent his only son, Mervyn, from
enlisting. Mervyn’s death in action in 1916 was a devastating blow from
which Higgins never recovered. After the war Higgins paid for his nephew,
Esmonde, to follow Mervyn’s path in studying at Oxford, and he showed
remarkable tolerance as Esmonde became a fanatical Marxist and began to
attack his uncle as a tool of the capitalist system. In 1922, when Higgins
published a book on the conciliation and arbitration system,A New Province
of Law and Order, Esmonde wrote a shattering review from a socialist perspec-
tive. While most unions and almost all employers had seen Higgins as a‘friend
of labour’, to his nephew, the Arbitration Court under Higgins’leadership had
‘emasculated’unionism, broken down class consciousness, acted as‘a mere
convenience of capitalist social order’, and made labour‘mutely content with
a subordinate status’(Rickard 1984, p. 263). Higgins’response was to pen a
mild and understanding letter arguing that he had‘of necessity, worked
within the system,“under existing facts”in the interest of“workers who in
the meantime ought to be fed properly and treated as civilized beings”’(ibid.).
H. V. McKay’s business continued to prosper in the years after the Harvester
Case, and for many years the Sunshine Harvester Works was the largest factory
in Australia. A succession of new products and technological innovations
(notably the world’sfirst self-propelled harvester in 1924), together with rising
tariff protection, helped the business ward offfierce competition from North
American competitors. McKay maintained complete personal control of the
business at both a managerial andfinancial level, and his anti-union and anti-
socialist views became ever more strongly entrenched as he aged. He worked
hard to keep unions out of his factory, defeating and almost destroying the
Agricultural Implement Makers Union after a lengthy strike in 1911. To
counter the attraction of unions, he invested heavily to make the suburb of
Braybrook—later renamed Sunshine—into‘a model community of worker
freeholders opposed to militant unionism’(Lack 1986, p. 293). As well as
selling houses to workers on favourable terms, McKay provided the suburb
with a public hall, library, public gardens, and electricity, and planted
trees and provided land for schools. He also gave his workers generous
holiday leave, a contributory accident fund, and a personal loan scheme.
McKay believed that these measures would provide‘a loyal, diligent and
politically moderate workforce’, and, following the defeat of the strike of
1911, industrial relations at the Sunshine Harvester Works appear to have
gradually improved (ibid.).
McKay also attempted to promote his views on industrial relations and
protection through political action. In 1913 he won the Liberal Party nomin-
ation to contest the federal seat of Ballarat when Alfred Deakin, who had held
Peter Yule