Welcome to the deep dive. You know, we spend
a lot of time on this show looking at really
sweeping historical narratives. Right. Or, you
know, dense scientific papers or these sprawling
investigative reports. But the source material
we are diving into today is well, it's entirely
different. We are looking at just a single. wikipedia
page yeah and not just any page it is literally
titled list of mayors of newtown which i mean
on the surface sounds like a complete cure for
insomnia It really does. If you were to pull
up this page right now, your first impression
would be that it's just this stark black and
white table. A chronological ledger of municipal
leaders for a place called Newtown in New South
Wales, spanning from 1863 to 1948. Basically
a spreadsheet. Exactly. It looks like the driest
spreadsheet imaginable. You've got columns for
years, columns for names, and a little column
on the side for notes. But that is actually the
perfect setup for our mission today. Because
when you know how to actually read a data...
set like this, when you start looking at the
anomalies, the sudden shifts in formatting, and
most importantly, when you click on those tiny
superscript citation numbers at the very bottom
of the page. Oh, the footnotes. Yes, the footnotes.
When you do that, that dry spreadsheet completely
shatters. It really does. It transforms into
this dramatic, chaotic, and genuinely groundbreaking
map of human behavior. It is a phenomenal exercise
in reading between the lines. We are going to
track the patterns today. day and dig into those
archival citations to pull out the history that
is basically buried underneath what looks like,
you know, basic bureaucratic record keeping.
OK, let's unpack this. If we go to the very top
of the table, the very first data point is from
1863. Right. February 17th, 1863, to be exact.
But the person in charge, Frederick William Holland,
he doesn't actually have the title of mayor.
No, he doesn't. The column header for these first
few years is actually chairman. We see Holland.
then Joseph Kingsbury, Henry Monroe, William
Curtis, and James Conley. They are all listed
as chairman up until early 1868. What's fascinating
here is what that specific shift in terminology
implies about the realities of early local governance.
Because the word chairman suggests a much more
informal, almost committee driven approach. Yeah,
that makes sense. Think about the 1860s in Australia.
Yeah. These early leaders were likely just trying
to get the absolute bare bones infrastructure
of a municipality off the ground. Like dirt roads.
Exactly. Dirt roads, basic sanitation, figuring
out property lines. It requires a tremendous
amount of resilience to chair a newly formed
local body with very little precedent to lean
on. It feels like they were basically a startup
council. That's a great way to put it. And you
can see in the text that it wasn't until February
15th, 1868, which happens during Henry Monroe's
second stint in leadership, that the column officially
shifts. Right. He officially takes on the title
of mayor. And that is a distinct upgrade in status.
Yeah. Suddenly Newtown isn't just an ad hoc committee
anymore. It's a formalized municipality with
a mayor. And the citations from this early era
really reflect that sort of buttoned up foundational
period. The source notes for those early years
rely heavily on the New South Wales Government
Gazette and very brief formal notes in the Sydney
Morning Herald. Very official. Very polite. Exactly.
But the formal buttoned up era does not last.
Not at all. As we track the list into the late
19th century, the source text starts dropping
some serious hints about the human drama playing
out in these council chambers. Oh, definitely.
Let's look at 1896. OK. The mayor is James Smith.
Now, if you scroll down to the citations and
look at a publication called The Australian Star
from September 17th, 1896, the headline used
in the reference is just incredible. It is so.
It literally reads Newtown Council, a deadlock.
The mayor leaves the chair. That single line
completely destroys the illusion of boring local
government. You can instantly picture the scene,
the gridlock in the room, the arguments echoing
off the walls, the factions completely refusing
to budge. The frustration reaches such a boiling
point that the mayor doesn't just adjourn the
meeting. He physically abandons his post. He
just leaves the chair. He just walks out. And
the timeline of how they resolve it is just as
revealing as the walkout itself. Right. The very
next citation in the text, which is also from
the Australian star, is dated September 23rd.
Almost a week later. Right. And the headline
is Newtown Municipal Council Alderman J .F. Smith.
re -elected mayor wow they had this massive theatrical
walkout on the 17th and it takes them almost
a full week of behind the scenes wrangling to
resolve the gridlock only to put the exact same
guy right back in the chair It highlights how
intensely personal and volatile this arena was
because the data shows the same names popping
up repeatedly during this era. William Rigg,
for example, is noted as serving multiple non
-consecutive terms stretching from 1892 all the
way to 1913. Yeah, you see his name constantly.
Harold Thomas Morgan serves terms in the 1890s,
the 1900s, and the 1910s. This is a tight -knit,
highly competitive ecosystem where grudges and
alliances are constantly shifting. And that volatility.
really seems to set the stage for a massive visual
shift that hits the data set a few decades later.
Yes. If you're scrolling down this list, everything
looks fairly uniform for a long time. It's just
a column of names. But then you hit December
1925. Right. The newly elected mayor is Isidore
Edwin Ryan. And right next to his name, an acronym
suddenly appears in parentheses. A .L .P. Yes.
A .L .P. Which stands for the Australian Labor
Party. Right. And from an analytical perspective,
this is a massive turning point in the source
material. Starting with Isidore Edwin Ryan in
1925, almost every single mayor listed for the
next two decades carries that exact same AOP
designation. Yeah, completely takes over. Joseph
Solomon in 1928, Reuben Sidney Guittard in 1929,
Joseph Vincent Bugler in 1930. The acronym essentially
dominates the column. Now, I want to be very
clear for everyone listening. We are tracking
this purely because it is a distinct. verifiable
data point in the text. Exactly. We must remain
strictly impartial here. We are simply tracking
the historical data points provided in the source
material. We aren't endorsing any political viewpoint
left or right. Right. We are just reading the
map. Exactly. The table explicitly changes format
to include this acronym. It marks a very clear
moment where the historical record shifts from
listing independent local figures to highlighting
national party affiliations. If we connect this
to the bigger picture. The sudden, consistent
appearance of a major national party acronym
in a local municipal list tells us a lot about
how society was organizing itself at the time.
Before 1925, these were ostensibly independent
local businessmen or community leaders fighting
it out. The introduction of the ALP designation
marks the era where local councilists began to
be absorbed into the broader, highly organized
political machinery that was sweeping the country.
Yeah. Local politics was becoming a proxy for
larger ideological organization. And the citations
from this period proved that this transition
was not a quiet one. Not at all. Let's look at
1928. William Henry Delve is mayor, and then
Joseph Solomon takes over in December. The citation
for this moment from the Evening News on December
12th, 1928 features a headline that is just two
words long. It tells you everything you need
to know. It really does. The headline is, Newtown
Uproar. You don't get the word uproar in a newspaper
headline unless the council meeting is completely
devolved. Right. It suggests a fiercely contested,
loud, and deeply divided environment. The shifting
names, the new party acronyms, the dramatic headlines,
it all points to a municipality experiencing
serious growing pains as the political stakes
get higher. Which makes the next major data point
in this list so remarkable. Here's where it gets
really interesting. Oh, this is my favorite part.
If you keep moving down the timeline past the
upwars and the entrenched party politics of the
1920s and early 30s, you hit December 1938. Yes.
The new mayor is Lillian Fowler. Serving from
December 1938 to December 1939. And the text
at the very top of the Wikipedia page in the
introductory notes makes sure to highlight her
significance. It does. She is documented as the
first female mayor in Australia. Think about
that. Imagine looking back through that entire
list. Decades of Fredericks, Williams, Josephs,
and Jameses stretching all the way back to 1863.
Just a wall of men's names. A total wall of men.
And then... Right before the 1940s, Lillian Fowler's
name appears. It's incredible. And the text also
notes she didn't just stop at local government.
She later became a member of the Legislative
Assembly, an MLA for Newtown from 1944 to 1950.
The magnitude of that milestone is incredible,
especially when you consider the context we just
established. She didn't just break a glass ceiling
in a quiet, polite, bureaucratic office. She
walked into a political arena that the citations
have already proven was prone to gridlock, walkouts,
and literal uproars. Yeah, a total shark tank.
Exactly. To navigate that specific room, to build
enough consensus to take the mayoral chair, and
to use that momentum to reach the state level
speaks to an extraordinary level. of political
skill and resilience. It is a perfect example
of why data is never just data. Behind that single
line in a table is a massive shift in Australian
political history. Absolutely. But as serious
and groundbreaking as Lillian Fowler's term was,
the source material also reveals that the Newtown
Council had an undeniably eccentric side. They
really did. In fact, the citations reveal a pattern
for breaking political stalemates that is genuinely
hard to believe. You were talking about the fact
that they repeatedly resorted to drawing names
from a hat. I am. We already established they
were prone to deadlocks back in 1896 when the
mayor stormed out. Right. But apparently, as
the decades rolled on, they found a new, incredibly
unorthodox way to solve a tied vote. Yeah. They
didn't debate until someone flipped their vote.
They didn't hold a runoff election. They literally
threw the names in a hat and pulled one out.
And this wasn't an isolated incident that happened
once and was immediately outlawed. The footnotes
provide undeniable evidence that this was a recurring,
accepted, democratic solution for this municipality.
The sheer volume of citations backing this up
is wild. It is. Let's start in 1920. An evening
news article from December 22nd has the headline,
Mayors in the Hat. That establishes the president
right there. Then you move forward to 1925, an
article from The Sun on December 16th. The headline
is, they drew for it. So five years later, the
council finds itself in the exact same impossible
deadlock and uses the exact same bizarre solution.
But it doesn't stop in the 1920s. You jump all
the way to the 1940s. A citation from the Sydney
Morning Herald, December 6th, 1944. The headline
reads, Mayoralty won on draw from hat. This is
right in the middle of the 20th century. Modern
political parties are involved and they are still
using a hat. And then the very next year. The
Sydney Morning Herald, December 5th, 1945, headline,
draw from hat elects mayor. They did it two years
in a row. Two years in a row. You can almost
picture the local journalists just waiting outside
the council chambers every December with their
notepads, wondering if the hat was going to make
an appearance. Oh, absolutely. But when you really
analyze that quirky pattern, it tells you something
deeply revealing about the margins of local politics
in Newtown. How so? Think about what has to happen
for a council to resort to a game of chance.
The factions must have been split perfectly down
the middle. It means the political divisions
were so entrenched and the alliances were so
rigid that absolutely no one was willing to compromise.
They would literally rather leave the leadership
of their entire municipality. to blind luck,
they can concede a single inch to the opposing
side. It's hilarious on the surface, but it represents
a profound failure of negotiation. They were
so stubborn that drawing a slip of paper from
a hat became standard operating procedure. Exactly.
It's fascinating, but as we move past this hat
-drawing era of the mid -1940s, we run into the
final and perhaps biggest historical mystery
in the text. The list abruptly terminates. Right.
We have been tracking this continuous timeline
of municipal history for over 80 years. Mayors
serve one year terms, sometimes two. The succession
is clear. We get to December 1947 and Ruben Sidney
Goddard is elected. Then on July 27th, 1948,
Ernest Gerard Wright takes over. Okay. And then
nothing. On December 31st, 1948, the list just
stops. It's a wall. There are no mayors listed
for 1949, no names for 1950. The entire municipality
just seemingly vanishes from the record. To figure
out why a municipality suddenly stops having
mayors, we have to connect a few data points
that are buried quite far apart in the source
material. We actually have to look decades backward
to understand the end of the timeline. Let's
trace it. If you look back at the term of William
Rigg in 1911, there is a specific citation from
the Sun newspaper on February 15th of that year.
The headline poses a question. What is it? Will
they amalgamate? Will they amalgamate? Meaning,
will they merge or be absorbed by another local
government body? Exactly. That rumor was already
generating headlines 37 years before the list
ends. That question clearly hung over the council
for decades. And if we jump all the way from
that 1911 rumor to the very last citation on
the page dated August 13th, 1948, we find a reference
to the Government Gazette of the State of New
South Wales. Okay. The text of the citation simply
reads, Local Government Act, 1919 Proclamation.
Furthermore, the overarching archival source
for this entire list of aldermen is credited
as the City of Sydney Archives. So what does
this all mean? By synthesizing all those fragments,
the persistent early rumors of amalgamation,
the decisive government proclamation in the second
half of 1948, and the fact that Newtown's municipal
records now reside in the City of Sydney Archives,
it paints a very clear picture. Yeah. The independent
municipality of Newtown ceased to exist on the
last day of 1948. It was absorbed into a larger
municipal body, likely the city of Sydney, bringing
an 85 -year run of independent mayors to an abrupt
end. It's like reading the final sentence of
a novel, but the sentence is just a dry legal
citation. That's a great comparison. Which brings
us back to the core reason we wanted to dive
into this specific source material today. You
might assume that an old Wikipedia list of mayors
is just dead data. Right. But this list proves
that a spreadsheet is never just a spreadsheet.
It is a dense, coded map of human history. Behind
these columns of dates and names, you have trailblazing
women changing the landscape of Australian politics.
Yes. You have massive political uproars, mayors
storming out of council chambers, and a government...
so fiercely divided that they spent decades choosing
their leaders by pulling a name out of a hat?
This raises an important question. It reminds
us to look closely at the mundane records of
the past. History isn't solely forged in massive,
sweeping global events. No, it's not. It is built
in these hyper -local, often chaotic moments.
The bitter arguments in a small council chamber,
the slow institutionalization of party politics,
the hard -fought milestones of equal representation.
These local realities eventually ripple out to
shape the society we live in. They absolutely
do. And as we wrap up, I want to leave you with
a final thought to mull over. We look back at
Newtown in the 1920s and 40s, and we laugh at
the idea that drawing a name from a hat was an
accepted, legally documented way to solve a political
crisis. Right. It seems crazy. It feels entirely
absurd to us today, but it makes you wonder what
unconventional, slightly ridiculous methods are
we using in our own modern institutions right
now. Oh, that's a good point. What bureaucratic
workarounds or quirky unwritten rules are we
employing today that historians 80 years from
now will look back on with that exact same...
sense of amusement. Think about that the next
time you find yourself sitting in a gridlocked
meeting. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive
into the archives. We will see you next time.