CHARLES CAMERON KINGSTON TRAIL: In the City of Adelaide

A rogue and a bully is celebrated with a life-size statue in Adelaide’s central Victoria Square? It is true, but that is because he was also a father of federation one hundred years ago. With South Australia about to focus on Federation Week, I hit the “Charles Cameron Kingston Trail” to colour in a Postcards portrait of this political giant at the turn of the twentieth century.

Beneath his tall statue near the Adelaide International Hilton Hotel tower is a plaque declaring Kingston a patriot and statesman, while one bronze panel on the granite plinth portrays his famous father. Sir George Strickland Kingston was himself controversial. A “brash and boorish Irishman”, he was also highly regarded as Speaker of the infant House of Assembly for twenty years. A pioneer settler, he was Col. Light’s Deputy Surveyor who became a colonial architect of note.

Just after his son Charlie was born, the family moved to Marino to what we now know as Historic Kingston House, high on the cliff top. His mother died when he was one. Two lofty century-and-a-half old Norfolk Island pines on the beach below were planted by the little brothers Pat and Charlie.

As an adult, Charlie walked through Victoria Square daily on his way to work from his home in the west of the city mile. The lawyer and Attorney General went on to become South Australia’s longest serving Premier of the nineteenth century. He also got himself into all kinds of mischief with some incidents happening right by where his statue now stands and as we discovered on our putative Charles Cameron Kingston Trail.

Parliament House on North Terrace is an essential element as we pursue one of the state’s greatest contributors to our one hundred year old Federation. Even as Premier at home, however, Kingston was hardly an unifying force. He tried to cut the salary of the Governor and even forced him to pay excise on his brandy stocks in Government House across King William Street. The incumbent wrote to London that the Premier was “blackhearted”. The next appointment, Lord Tennyson eventually contradicted that with a reference to him as a “loyal subject, and strong character.” Charlie roused the passions all right.

He lived on the Grote Street - West Terrace corner where a service station supplanted his roomy colonial home long ago. It was across the road from the Catholic Bishop’s House, and he got on with him very well. Perhaps he was also a South Adelaide Football Club barracker, for Charles was involved over decades both on and off the field. He even helped establish common inter-colonial rules for the infant Australian Rules code.

At the Adelaide Hospital, however, more blood was spilled. A senior nurse appointment query turned into a two year saga complete with a Royal Commission and mass doctor resignations. Kingston exacerbated matters by calling one medico a “medical Jack the Ripper”! And it is no wonder a cartoonist portrayed him and a fellow federationist as strange bed fellows. He called Josiah Symon “a forensic compound of squid and skunk.”

As we track the haunts of Charles Cameron Kingston, we pass his legal office in Eagle Chambers and head for Victoria Square again. As a young lawyer he walked through to the courts at the southern end, but he also appeared on the wrong side, so to speak, more than once. There was an objection to his admission to the bar because he was “living in sin” with his future wife, young Catholic Lucy. His legal partner and brother Pat was jailed for shooting at a cab driver’s hat and hitting him in the side of the head - that was unintentional, he claimed. (Later plagued by alcoholism, Pat killed himself in Port Augusta.)

Charles himself was tried here and found guilty of breaching the peace after an extraordinary incident. It happened under the shadow of the GPO at the other end of the square. After another slanging saga in parliament, Charles challenged another politician to a duel, sending him a revolver and cartridge by messenger and demanding that he turn up on this corner and have it out. Mr Baker sent the police instead, who arrested Kingston complete with loaded revolver in his pocket. In another mighty scandal that boiled over in the courts, he was named as the adulterer in a society divorce, and it was widely known that he adopted the baby, Kevin, who was the result of the affair with Mrs Watson.

Within weeks, however, he was throwing himself at the mercy of his electorate at a rally in the Adelaide Town Hall. His loyal West Adelaide constituents voted him in, and he was soon ensconced as Attorney General and Premier in his Treasury Building office. Here the great statesman side was played out, with his legislation on women’s right to vote and stand for parliament (the latter a world first), factory legislation for workers’ conditions, a State Bank and more.

Victoria Square is central then, to the Charles Cameron Kingston story. His statue even points westward to his faithful electorate. He walked past this point, too, on his way to his decisive chairmanship of the 1897 Constitutional Convention the colonies held in Adelaide’s Parliament House. On a side panel of the statue’s base, he’s pictured in the chair which he stayed in for other crucial conventions in the east that led to one federated Australia one hundred years ago.

His fellow founders of Federation are depicted in bronze, too. His many scandals are not, of course. Apart from the duel challenge in the square, for instance he was attacked here with a horsewhip on the way to work by a disgruntled businessman whom he had harangued in the house. Kingston was certainly a verbal bully. His statue appeal, nevertheless, was supported by the national Bulletin magazine who thought he should have been the first Prime Minister of Australia. He did make it into the first federal ministry and did much to set up a national customs system and the basis of the conciliation and arbitration process.

After his death, his widow Lucy became ever more eccentric at Kingston House at Marino. To her regret, he had refused a Knighthood in London, and they were ostracised by Adelaide society. Eventually she was arrested too for belting her own doctor. They will no doubt tell you more on a visit to Kingston House.

Our trail ends at the Kingston family plot in historic West Terrace Cemetery. After his passing in 1908, he was buried here after a huge funeral cortege which wound its way through his beloved west side of the city. Here lies the man who was one of the handful of founders of Australia as a federated nation. The Member for Adelaide could have been Prime Minister - a giant of a statesman who was also a big bully…Charles Cameron Kingston.

Note:

Kingston’s Federation Picnic
Sunday 14th October, 11.30am

Kingston Historic House
Cameron Avenue
Kingston Park, SA

· Children’s activities
· Music, food and drink stalls
· Storytelling tours

More information call (08) 8179 9500 - City of Holdfast Bay