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John George Gough (5 November 1848 – 15 November 1907), was one of the founders of the New South Wales Labour Party, initially the Labour Electoral League, the first political Labour movement in Australia. He was also one of Labour’s five-member leadership group when the party first made its appearance in the New South Wales parliament in 1891. Representing Young, he was first elected in 1889 to the parliament’s lower house as a member of the Protectionist Party, which produced Australia's first two prime ministers, Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin. From 1891 to 1894 he represented Labour.〔Bede Nairn, ''Civilising Capitalism: The Labor Movement in New South Wales 1870-1900'', Canberra (ANU Press), 1973, chapter 6; Martin A.W., ''Members of the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, 1856-1901: Biographical Notes'', Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1958; obituary in the ''Burrangong Argus'' 20/11/1907.〕 Proud that he was a second-generation Australian on his mother’s side, he was a strong nationalist and republican. One of the pioneers of the Young-Grenfell district, he began his working life as a miner and also became a successful contract builder, leaving a fine legacy of public buildings across New South Wales. He was also a Methodist lay preacher – all but one of the 35 founding elected members of the New South Wales Labour Party were devout Methodists.〔Ross McMullin, ''The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party, 1891-1901'', Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1992〕 Descended from transported convicts on both sides, and orphaned at the age of 13, he was a self-made man. == Background == Gough was of English ancestry on his father’s side and Irish, both Protestant and Catholic, on his mother’s. He was a second-generation Australian on his mother’s side.〔(Gough’s family history is documented by following the links at )〕 While according to Gough’s death certificate he was born at Mount Egerton, Victoria, he referred in a parliamentary speech to having been born in Melbourne. His baptismal record describes his father, also John George Gough, as a stock-keeper of Darebin Creek, today Heidelberg in north-east Melbourne. John George Gough senior was christened in 1807 at West Lavington, Wiltshire, England, and English census returns of his twin brother William show that he was born at the nearby hamlet of Littleton-Pannell. In 1824 he was sentenced to death for stealing a horse. But King George IV commuted the sentence to seven years’ transportation, and he arrived in Sydney in 1825. John George Gough senior married Sarah Jane Bruce at Melbourne’s (Church of England) St James’s Church in 1845. She was born around 1826 in New South Wales, probably in the Sydney area, the daughter of John Bruce and Catherine Kelly. Both had been transported Irish convicts. John Bruce, a millwright born in Newry, County Down, in about 1792, to a Presbyterian family, was sentenced in Dublin in 1814 to seven years’ transportation for stealing a watch, and arrived in Sydney the following year. Catherine, a Catholic born around 1798 probably in Dublin, was sentenced there in 1815 to fourteen years’ transportation for attempting to pass a forged banknote. According to a published biographical sketch of Gough when he entered the New South Wales parliament, his mother Sarah died when he was an infant. When his father died at Lambing Flat (later renamed Young) in September 1862, he was a butcher. He may have also been a gold-rush digger - a John Gough was one of the 3,394 signatories of the February 1861 miners' petition at Lambing Flat seeking government assistance to prevent Chinese gold-diggers competing with the Europeans. John Gough senior died by 'taking an overdose of strichnine'. The coroner's report which might explain the reason has not survived. The day after his death, the local ''Burrangong Courier'' had no explanation for the event: ''`A man of the name of John George Gough, an old colonist, who occupied a butcher's shop adjoining Myers' cordial manufactory in Main Street, committed suicide yesterday morning by swallowing strychnine. He was in the Diggers' Theatre, apparently in excellent spirits, on the previous night, and no one now can tell what led to the sad act. Gough was a widower, and leaves a young son who is now unprotected, and for whom we now appeal to the sympathies of the generous in order that he may be enabled to earn an honest living. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「John George Gough」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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