Andrew Fisher (29 August 1862 – 22 October 1928) was an Australian politician who served as the fifth Prime Minister on three separate occasions. Fisher's 1910-13 Labor ministry completed a vast legislative programme which made him, along with Protectionist Alfred Deakin, the founder of the statutory structure of the new nation. The Fisher government legacy of reforms and national development lasted beyond the divisions that would later occur with World War I and Billy Hughes' conscription push.
Fisher's second Prime Ministership resulting from the 1910 federal election represented a number of firsts: it was Australia's first federal majority government; Australia's first Senate majority, and the world's first Labour Party majority government at a national level. At the time, it represented the culmination of Labour's involvement in politics. Passing 113 Acts, the 1910-13 government was a period of reform unmatched in the Commonwealth until the 1940s under John Curtin and Ben Chifley. Serving a collective total of four years and ten months, Fisher is second to Bob Hawke as Australia's longest serving Labor Prime Minister.
'Labour' was renamed to 'Labor' during 1912 at the instigation of King O'Malley.
Read more about Andrew Fisher: Early Life, High Commissioner, Honours
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English and Scottish Ballads (The Poetry Bookshelf)
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)