Graham Berry, from the 1898 Australasian Federal Convention Album (photograph via Wikimedia Commons/National Library of Australia)

The career of Graham Berry (1822–1904) was as exciting as they come. It is a tale replete with sex scandals, class antagonism, democratic struggle, constitutional crisis, and threats of revolution. And yet, despite being a three-time Victorian premier (1875, 1877–79, 1880–81) and a leading colonial politician for four decades, at his death the newspapers commented on the underwhelming crowd and felt obliged to remind readers whom they were mourning.

Much could be written on why Australians neglect their colonial past. In the early twentieth century, it was perhaps the ongoing embarrassment of the ‘convict stain’ that was better left in the past. In the early twenty-first century, it is often the uncomfortable truth of Indigenous dispossession that is avoided.

The result has been that 1901 forms a precise and tenacious line of forgetting. The career of Alfred Deakin falls ever so slightly on the ‘right’ side of this line. Despite being the nation’s second prime minister, he was the first of Headon’s First Eight to be honoured when the project launched in 2018. The year before, he was the subject of Judith Brett’s award-winning biography. All the more remarkable then that Berry, one of Deakin’s most important political mentors, has received little scholarly treatment since Geoffrey Bartlett’s PhD thesis in 1964 (also from ANU). Scalmer has rescued not only the man but his key ideas and intellectual legacy.

The protectionist movement that profoundly shaped the early Commonwealth was not an invention of Deakin and Barton, nor even of the influential proprietor of The Age, David Syme. If it has a single intellectual progenitor, it is probably Berry, though Scalmer rightly notes that these ideas were circulating even before his conversion.

The Eureka Stockade of 1854 is often seen as a novelty of sorts in Australian history. Like Canada’s Rebellions of 1837–38, it can too easily be dismissed as an uncharacteristic tantrum from an otherwise well-behaved child of the British Empire. But the democratic convictions that led to that fatal shootout, and the popular demand that (white) Victorian men were entitled to a gun, a vote, and land, was not extinguished with the granting of responsible government.

Berry, who was one of the jurors to acquit the Eureka rebels in a highly popular miscarriage of justice, was a key figure in moving the democratic campaign from violent to intellectual combat. The battle lines would no longer be drawn at makeshift forts on the goldfields but inside that eminently British institution, the Victorian parliament.

Scalmer skilfully unpacks the way Berry responded to early electoral defeats and took charge of his political narrative. When his blueblood opponents used his supposedly Dickensian origins as a slur, he returned fire to expose their snobbery. The ‘Prahran grocer’ would use – indeed exaggerate – his humble beginnings to frame himself as a genuine tribune of the people. Trained initially as a London draper and running a successful family business, he was working class but no Oliver Twist when he set sail for Melbourne.

At the heart of this book is the struggle between the popular lower house and the conservative upper house. It was an intellectual contest for the ‘true’ meaning of the unwritten constitution seen, in many variations, around the British Empire. After little Nova Scotia distinguished itself as the first British colony to receive responsible government in 1848, the limits of democracy were negotiated all over the British world. One of Scalmer’s real achievements in this book is demonstrating the ferocity of the democratic struggle in Victoria and the way Berry utilised the first organised political party to push the pendulum in the people’s favour.

This is no hagiography. Scalmer is quick to point out just how narrow Berry’s conception of ‘the people’ was. First Nations Peoples and the Chinese were certainly not part of his democratic adventure. While open to expanding the Victorian polis to women, this was not high on his political agenda either.

Scalmer maintains a disciplined focus on Berry’s political life and presents this engrossing story in fewer than 300 pages, excluding notes. He resists the urge to draw on the rich reservoir of personal correspondences in the Berry Papers and to paint a broader picture of colonial society, a tendency that has resulted in a some Brobdingnagian colonial biographies (Don Baker’s colossal treatise on John Dunmore Lang comes to mind). Scalmer states plainly that the menu card Berry perused in the members’ dining room is of no interest to him. For this reason, the book maintains a sharpness throughout, and Berry’s heavy influence on Victorian and Australian democracy becomes all the more clear.

Democratic Adventurer is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Berry and deftly demonstrates how the democratic battles of a nineteenth-century colony shaped a twentieth-century nation. There are moments of rhetorical excess. Was Berry the most gifted and controversial colonial politician, as the author claims? In Victoria perhaps. Charles ‘Slippery Charlie’ Cowper, in New South Wales, was just as skilful politically and just as effective in establishing democratic norms. Lang, the irascible preacher, politician, republican, and occasional jailbird, was just as radical and controversial.

If Scalmer’s admiration for his subject occasionally shines through, it is not to the detriment of this excellent book. This is a historian at the top of his game. Democratic Adventurer will be required reading for those who study colonial Australia, but its clear focus, accessible style, and the excitement of the tale will attract a popular audience also.