20 Facts About George Higinbotham

George Higinbotham was a politician and was a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria, which is the highest ranking court in the Australian colony, later state, of Victoria.

George Higinbotham was the sixth son of Henry Higinbotham, a merchant in Dublin, and Sarah Wilson, daughter of Joseph Wilson, a man of Scottish ancestry who had gone to America and became an American citizen after the War of Independence and returned to Dublin as American consul.

George Higinbotham entered himself as a student at Lincoln's Inn on 20 April 1848, and on 6 June 1853 was called to the bar.

On 1 December 1853 George Higinbotham left Liverpool for Australia on the Briseis and arrived in Melbourne on 10 March 1854, where he contributed to the Melbourne Herald and practised at the bar with much success.

George Higinbotham was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly in May 1861 for Brighton as an independent Liberal, was rejected at the general election of July the same year, but was returned nine months later.

In June 1863, George Higinbotham became attorney-general in the Sir James McCulloch government.

George Higinbotham contended that in a constitutional colony like Victoria the secretary of state for the colonies had no right to fetter the discretion of the queen's representative.

George Higinbotham did not return to power with his chief, Sir James McCulloch, after the defeat of the short-lived Sladen administration; and being defeated for Brighton at the next general election by a comparatively unknown man, Sir Thomas Bent, he devoted himself to his practice at the bar.

In September 1866, a royal commission on education was appointed of which George Higinbotham was made chairman.

In July 1868, McCulloch became premier again, but George Higinbotham would accept only a subordinate position in the cabinet.

George Higinbotham became Vice-President of the Board of Land and Works without salary.

Later on in the year, in response to a request that representatives of the colony should be sent to a conference on colonial affairs in London, George Higinbotham moved and succeeded in carrying five resolutions declining to send representatives, and repeating his views that the internal affairs of a colony are its own concern and that the colonial office should only look after matters that effect the whole empire.

George Higinbotham's opponent, Thomas Bent, was a man who understood the art of looking after his own constituency.

George Higinbotham cared nothing for its special needs and thought only of the good of the whole colony.

George Higinbotham welcomed his release from the bickerings of politics and for two years built up his position as a barrister.

In 1880 George Higinbotham was appointed a puisne judge of the Supreme Court, and in 1886, on the retirement of Sir William Stawell, he was promoted to the office of chief justice.

George Higinbotham was a champion for women's rights from the beginning of his parliamentary career, when he proposed the Married Women's Property Bill and was posthumously lauded by the Women's Political Association of Victoria for proposing women's suffrage in 1869.

George Higinbotham is mentioned as an exception to typical men of the nineteenth century as a "legislator of unusual wisdom for that era" in Henrietta Dugdale's utopian novel "A Few Hours In A Far Off Age".

George Higinbotham died at South Yarra, Melbourne, on 31 December 1892, and was survived by his wife, two sons and three daughters.

George Higinbotham had a private funeral at his own request.