Alexander Gordon Huie: A Tribute

E.H. Collis

[Reprinted from the Single Tax Review, March-April 1916]

Mr. E. H. Collis, of the Temora, N. S. Wales pays this striking tribute to Mr. A. G. Huie, who needs no introduction to REVIEW readers

"Tall, slight, hook-nosed and bearded, Mr. A. G. Huie, the mildest-mannered opponent who ever thrust home in deadly debate. An unknown, inoffensive man, toiling long hours on an inadequate pittance in a Market-street office in Sidney, Mr. Huie's opinions are being received with increasing respect on tramcars and outback alike. How then is he making so deep a mark upon contemporary and future thought? In the first place Mr. Huie has the faith which moves mountains. To be a zealot is, however, not sufficient. The real secret of his strength is that which Lord Macaulay ascribed to the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, the greatest of whom was Voltaire. "They were men," wrote the great historian, "who with all their faults, sincerely and earnestly desired the improvement of the condition of the human race; whose blood boiled at the sight of cruelty and injustice; who made manful war, with every faculty which they possessed, on what they considered as abuses; and who on many signal occasions placed themselves gallantly between the powerful and the oppressed." As much might be said of Mr. Huie, our local champion of liberty, equality of opportunity and freedom of trade.

Alexander Gordon Huie was born in the bush near Wagga in October, 1869. He was the eldest son of Alexander Huie, a Scotsman from Edinburgh, who in 1868 married Miss H. Carige, both families having come to Australia in the early fifties. The infant Huie narrowly escaped being washed away in the great flood in the Murrumbidgee of 1870. A child of the bush, the first thirty years of his life were spent in remote country centers, where opportunities for education were somewhat few, and those not of the best. The Huie family had a full share of bush vicissitudes, and times were often bad. Unlike most country boys, young Huie was a good walker, whereas the Australian youth usually prefers to ride. He has walked from Wyalong to Lake Cudgellico, a distance of about eighty miles, in two days, a remarkable performance, although the time is perhaps slightly longer than the railway train will presently take to perform the same journey. The youth was also a good duck shooter, and thought nothing of walking twenty miles to pot these birds.

His first employment was as a shop assistant, but this did not last long. Before he was twenty he used to argue for free trade against those whom he smilingly described as "local fiscal heathens." Leaving the shop, the young man took up general bush work and fencing, wool washing timber cutting, building houses, working on bridges, and all the rest of it. Accordingly, when Mr. Huie discusses the land problem he cannot be dismissed as a doctrinaire, for he knows life on the land.

At the age of twenty Mr. Huie read Henry George's "Progress and Poverty." Up to this time he had argued for free trade from a natural sense of right and justice, but in this book, which opened a new world to so many, Mr. Huie realized the basic principles of production, employment, trade, and progress. A quarter of a century's experience has confirmed him in his faith. Mr. Huie is still a Single Taxer. No one who has been in his company has ever been left in any doubt on that point.

In 1894 he contested the Lachlan electorate. The young man did not succeed, but he surprised everyone by the run which he gave his opponents. Five years later he came to Sydney where he soon made his presence felt. He became secretary of the Single Tax League, and in 1905 he started The Standard which he has edited ever since.