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David Bird, ‘A parish pump politician from the potato plots of Tasmania’ Joseph Lyons

David Bird, ‘A parish pump politician from the potato plots of Tasmania’ Joseph Lyons

If one were to rank Australia’s most important Prime Ministers, Joseph Lyons would have to be high on the list. Not only did he lead the nation out of the Great Depression, but he was also responsible for readying the country for World War Two, presiding over five separate re-armament programs before passing away in office in 1939. Lyons’s personal journey is fascinating, as he not only went from being a Labor Tasmanian Premier to a centre-right PM, but the reason he did so was because he had been forever scarred by his father’s decision to bet the family’s resources on the Melbourne Cup. Plunged into poverty by this act of recklessness, he held that budgets must be balanced and debts repaid as an article of deep conviction.

In this week’s episode of the Afternoon Light podcast, Robert Menzies Institute CEO Georgina Downer talks to David Bird, who has written two books relating to Joseph Lyons, the PM under whom Menzies deputised.

Dr David Bird is an independent historian based in Melbourne. Educated at the universities of Tasmania and Melbourne, he has extensively researched and written about twentieth-century Australian history, utilising archival collections throughout Australia and the UK. He is the author of J.A. Lyons — The Tame Tasmanian Appeasement and rearmament in Australia 1932–39 and Nazi Dreamtime: Australian enthusiasts for Hitler’s Germany.