[Editor: The text of “Dryblower” Murphy’s election broadcast, published in The Sunday Times, 2 September 1934.]
For the Senate
“Dryblower” Murphy’s campaign
Opening broadcast address
Through broadcast station 6PR, Mr. E. G. Murphy opened his Senatorial election campaign on Tuesday evening last. Mr. Murphy said:—
“I want to speak to you to-night on the subject of the Senate elections, for which I am a candidate. My name, Edwin Greenslade Murphy, may convey to some, but not to all, that I am ‘Dryblower,’ of ‘The Sunday Times.’ When you pick up your ballot paper on September 15, you will see 13 names. Mine may be low down on the list — but it will be there. Opposite the name, Murphy, Edwin Greenslade, I ask you to put the figure ‘Number One.’ In your own judgment and honesty of purpose you can fill in the remainder as you think fit. That is your own business.
“Several groups of candidates are telling you not to vote for the other fellow, these are the antis. They are anti-each other and anti-everybody else. They are the Codlins and Shorts of the electors. They imply that if you do not vote for them, or the particular parcel or bundle in which they are tied or labelled, you will be politically lost. I am anti to no party, and anti to nobody. No creed or class has a mortgage or a prior right to be thought the saviours of our fellow men. No group has the right to glare over your shoulder at the ballot box, and guide your hand in electing your particular choice; I myself am playing a lone hand in this election as regards outside help. I have no committee, I have no secretary, no suite of offices, no organisers, and no typists. You, my listeners, are my committee and my organisers, I am content to let you judge my political fitness by my newspaper work in the past.
“First last and always I am a wholehearted Western Australian. I am proud of the fact that I love the land in which I have for so long labored. I am proud of the fact that I have trodden the tracks of almost every goldfield of the State, and that it has given me not only a living, but the friendship, the comradeship, and the appreciation of my fellow men. A writer, whether he be a political or social journalist, is but a reflex of your joys and sorrows, the successes and failures, losses and triumphs of the people whom amongst he lives and for whom he labors.
“This State has given me a companionship without which a writer is but an echo of himself, a puppet dangling on his own strings. You, dear people, have as much created me as I have created my work. The men of 1893 with whom I carried my swag, the present-day citizens, the lonely men and women of the outback, the widows and orphans who have inspired me, and the soldiers who saved for us civilisation, are but the wires of a harp on which God has given me the power to produce the harmonies of humanity. I am asking you to believe in me politically because you have believed in me poetically. I am asking you to send me where my pen as well as my voice will make itself felt in the halls of Canberra. I want to go there free, free and untrammelled, to do what I believe to be right and to do as I believe you would have me do. I do not want to be a puppet at the end of a string, one end at Canberra and the other in an office in Perth. Give me the charter to represent not only the people of the city, but the tired men and women of the farm lands, the prospector, the stockman, the timber-worker, and others who live far from the glamor and glitter of the lights. Let me help to save Western Australia from being a dummy on the chessboard of Lyons and Pearce and the rest of the Federal chair-warmers. They have sat too long in the cushioned seats of the mighty. You have sat too long on a bare plank.
“Four and thirty years ago I stood and strove with the late Mr. F. C. B. Vosper, to try and stem the flood of Federation. We tried in vain. My listeners, with us stood another rugged stalwart, the late Pat C. Hughes, a follower of Mr. Vosper. We three were stoned from the Boulder and Kalgoorlie. Our lives were threatened and meals refused us. Our leader, Mr. Vosper, spoke these words: ‘You reject my advice now, but you will come to me in time, when the Federal net is about you body and soul.’ They met his advice with cheap songs, brass bands, circus posters and fireworks that dazzled and obscured the issue. I alone am left of that group of three. Can you, will you, help me to pick up the work that brave man’s death cut short?
“Federation is at present bounded on the north by the Neon lights of Sydney, and farther north by the Sugar Bonus of Queensland. South of it is the Melbourne Centenary, and, thank God for it, on the west by the Nullarbor Plain. That stops Pearce and his political gang from coming here. I have backed my opinion and love for Western Australia, by putting all my sons on the soil. I lost all in wheat, wheat that the Prime Minister told us to grow, and grow still more. I am now sending those sons out prospecting to the goldfields which I helped to pioneer 40 years ago. I am sending them out to face the sun of prosperity along the tracks which I myself have trodden so long ago.
“I do not lay my pen down if you elect me, and believe me it shall not rust in the inkstands of Canberra. I do thank you, listeners all, for your patient hearing. Might I conclude with the words of an almost-forgotten English poet:—
“If you a public man would send
To sit amongst his peers,
One man should go and one alone —
The man whose heart has always known
Your laughter and your tears.”
(Signed E. G. Murphy, “The Sunday Times,” Perth.)
Mr. Murphy will be heard again from 6PR to-morrow (Monday), September 3, at 8.30 p.m., and again on Thursday, September 6, at the same hour.
Source:
The Sunday Times (Perth, WA), 2 September 1934, p. 26
[Editor: Corrected “treatened” to “threatened”.]
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