Melbourne, Sydney, and Monash Universities, publishing widely on Austra-
lian and British imperial history, with perhaps his most notable book being his
last,A History of the Port Phillip District: Victoria before Separation(Shaw 1996).
He had a prodigious and accurate memory and remained lucid until his death
in 2012. I was fortunate to be able to spend many hours with him in the
decade before his death and we talked extensively about our family history. He
had vivid recollections of his father’s stories of H. V. McKay and the Harvester
Case, and these have provided much of the background for this chapter.
By the time the Harvester Case was heard, Charles Hyde, the Raywood
farmer who had rejected young H. V. McKay’s plea forfinancial support in
1884, was considering moving with his family to Australia’s new agricultural
frontier, the wheat lands of Western Australia. In 1910 he selected land at
Dalwallinu, 260 km north-east of Perth, and through hard work and good luck
with the seasons and prices he built up a highly successful farming enterprise.
By 1929 he owned over 10,000 acres, with 2,900 acres planted for wheat.^18 His
grandson, John Hyde, farmed his share of the family properties before turning
to politics, where he became famous as a leader of the‘dries’in the Liberal
Party, who campaigned strongly for free-market policies during the 1970s and
1980s. The two central planks of the dries’agenda were the dismantling of
tariff protection for Australian industry and the freeing up of Australia’s rigid
and centralized industrial relations system. While they encountered strong
resistance from both sides of politics, many of their ideas were taken up by
Paul Keating, John Howard, Peter Reith, and others, and they came to dom-
inate Australia’s public policy for much of the late 1980s and through the
1990s. As tariff barriers were dismantled and the Chinese economy began its
export-driven boom, Australian manufacturing’s lack of competitiveness was
revealed and the sector rapidly contracted. The Sunshine Harvester Works was
just one of the victims. How might recent Australian history have been
different if John Hyde’s family had taken up and retained a large holding in
H. V. McKay’s harvester business?
References
Baillieu, W. L. 1910.Victorian Parliamentary Debates. Legislative Council, vol. 126,
Melbourne: John Ferris.
‘Ballarat Contest. Recount Refused’. 1913,Australasian, 21 June, p. 35.
Blainey, G. 1958.Gold and Paper: A History of the National Bank of Australasia.
Melbourne: Georgian House.
Blainey, G. 1980.A Land Half Won. Melbourne: Macmillan.
(^18) Western Mail(Perth), 31 January 1929, p. 49.
The Industrialist, Solicitor, and Justice Higgins