With the state election looming, let's observe a historical political figure of influence from the Shoalhaven. Numbaa-born Mark Morton was possibly the Shoalhaven's longest-serving state politician.
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Mr Morton was elected as the Member for Shoalhaven in July 1901, and apart from two terms where he failed to win seats, served in state parliament until he died in 1938.
In his career he was aligned with the Liberal Party, the Nationalists and the United Australia Party.
The Shoalhaven Historical Society has provided us with an insight into Mr Morton's political birth, published in the Shoalhaven News.
Mr Morton garnered support from young men in Pyree and Numbaa who met on Sundays under a big acacia tree to debate political matters of the day. These men wanted a change in parliamentary representation. He won the endorsement of Joe Watts, a respected community member, and from 1899, Mr Watts would used every opportunity possible to tell people that Mr Morton could be their man, if he would stand.
The following excerpt was penned by editor CJB Watson in 1938.
In 1901 Mark Morton came into my office in Nowra wearing a big note of interrogation.
Tipping his usually lazily-worn felt hat over the back of his head, he opened one of the windows and sat in the sill. He spoke with some hesitancy.
An election was in the air.
"If you were asked by 100 electors to contest Shoalhaven, would you do it?" Mark queried.
"No!" I answered.
"If 200 electors asked you, would you then stand?"
"One might probably sleep on that."
"Well, supposing 300 were to requisition you?" Mark continued.
"In that case I should be taking my morning walk a bit earlier."
"What if 400 electors requested you?" Mark asked.
"Four hundred," the editor slowly repeated, as he callously waste-basketed letters on Town Baths and The Spread of Cape Weed.
"If you have that number in the proper requisition order," I added, "you ought to take the situation seriously."
"I have a requisition this morning signed by 513 electors," Mark finally announced. It was the largest requisition of the kind ever presented in NSW.
"You ought to bring the hammer down on that," I suggested.
He did. And the district, as readers know, has, politically, been his ever since. He has beaten at various times both the local man and the carpet-bagger. No man in NSW deserves more at the hands of the electors, and there is not one that is rendering better local and general service in the parliamentary representation.