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Speaker, 21 February 1967 to 29 September 1969; 25 November 1969 to 2 November 1972
Liberal Party of Australia
William Aston (1916-1997), 14th Speaker of the House of Representatives, held the office for less than six years but was Speaker during the terms of four prime ministers at a time when the political mood of the country was changing dramatically.1
Aston was born in Mascot, Sydney, the elder son of a locally-born barber and his wife. After completing his intermediate certificate he found employment with a firm of milliners and qualified as an accountant. Initially a company clerk, he switched to commercial travelling, seeking out orders from department stores in country towns. In 1941 he married Beatrice (Betty) Burrett, a milliner.
In 1940 Aston was mobilised in the Citizen Military Forces and in 1942 transferred to the 2nd AIF as a gunner. Promoted to lieutenant in January 1943, he served in Port Moresby with the 82nd Australian Mobile Searchlight Battery.
After the war Aston and his wife established a successful millinery business in Sydney. He was a Waverley Alderman from 1949 to 1953 and Mayor in 1952-53. He gained Liberal Party preselection for the eastern suburbs seat of Phillip for the 1955 federal election and narrowly won the seat from Labor.
In 1960 Prime Minister Menzies appointed Aston Deputy Government Whip but at the 1961 election he lost his seat. He regained Phillip in 1963 and was reappointed Deputy Government Whip, becoming Government Whip in 1964. His interest in the Speakership grew as he continued to be passed over for the ministry.
When Speaker John McLeay retired at the 1966 election, Aston was one of nine contestants in the party room ballot, narrowly defeating his main rival before being elected Speaker in February 1967. He took considerable interest in procedural reform but was mostly unsuccessful in persuading the government of the benefit of the changes which he supported.
Aston established his authority in the House but was accused of partisanship by the Opposition. During his second term as Speaker he faced some notable incidents of disorder in the House, and in 1971 he was the subject of a no-confidence motion during which the Deputy Leader of the Opposition denounced him as ‘arbitrary, capricious, inconsistent and undeniably partisan’.2
Aston was knighted in 1970. He remained Speaker until he was defeated in Phillip at the 1972 election. In retirement he was a director of a small public relations company and chairman of Australia’s largest manufacturer of women’s hosiery. He died in 1997, survived by his wife and two daughters. His son, Raymond, was Member for Vaucluse in the NSW Legislative Assembly and Minister for Corrective Services at the time of his early death in 1988.
William Edwin Pidgeon
Sydney-born portraitist, cartoonist and illustrator William Edwin ‘Wep’ Pidgeon (1909-1981) was a respected caricaturist and three-time winner of the Archibald Prize. Pidgeon attended the JS Watkins Art School and East Sydney Technical College before becoming a cadet artist with the
Sunday News in 1926. He later worked for a range of newspapers including the
Daily Guardian, the
Sunday Sun,
Smith’s Weekly, the
World and the
Daily Telegraph. His cartoons for the
Australian Women’s Weekly in the 1930s made him a household name. Pidgeon worked as a war correspondent and artist for Consolidated Press Ltd in World War II, depicting the aftermath of battles in Darwin, Morotai, New Guinea and Borneo. Disillusioned with the constraints of cartooning, Pidgeon focused on building a career as a portraitist, winning the Archibald Prize three times. His portrait of Prime Minister Harold Holt was painted posthumously following Holt’s presumed drowning in 1967. He also wrote art critiques for the
Daily Telegraph and illustrated a number of books. His work is represented in several major public collections, including the Australian War Memorial.
3
William John Aston
by William Edwain Pidgeon
1968
Oil on canvas
115 x 79.4 cm
Historic Memorials Collection, Parliament House Art Collections
References
1. Information in this biography has been taken from the following unless otherwise sourced: D Boadle, ‘Aston, Sir William John (Bill) (1916–1997)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2021, accessed 30 August 2021; G Souter,
Acts of Parliament: A Narrative History of the Senate and House of Representatives Commonwealth of Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1988.
2. L Barnard, ‘Mr. Speaker: Want of confidence motion’, House of Representatives,
Debates, 21 April 1971, p. 1766.
3. P Spearritt, ‘Pidgeon, William Edwin (Wep) (1909–1981)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 2012; ‘William Edwin Pidgeon (Wep)’; ‘Pidgeon, William Edward (‘WEP’)’, A McCulloch, S McCulloch and E McCulloch Childs, eds,
The New McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Aus Art Editions in association with The Miegunyah Press, 2006, p. 780. Websites accessed 25 March 2021.