📍Tatong, Victoria 3673, Australia
1872 – 1893“I was born at Tatong, near Benalla in Victoria, in 1872, the youngest of eight children of Irish Catholic immigrants, Richard Savage and Johanna Hayes. We lived on a small farm in hard country, and when I was five my mother died; my sister Rose largely brought me up. I went for five years to the tiny state school at Rothesay, near my father's farm, and that was the end of my formal schooling. At fourteen I went to work in a wine and spirits shop in Benalla, and I stayed there for seven years, attending night classes at Benalla College to make up for the education I had missed. Life in rural Victoria in those years was tough, and I saw how families were at the mercy of drought, debt and bad employers. Later I worked as a gold miner near Rutherglen, studied to become a winding-engine driver, and became secretary of a local co-operative society. I joined the union movement and the debating societies, and I read everything I could about social reform. In 1907, at thirty-five, I crossed the Tasman to New Zealand, where I worked as a cellarman and a flax-cutter before rising through the Labour movement. In 1935 I became the first Labour prime minister of New Zealand, and my government introduced state housing, social security and free health care, so that no family would face hardship alone. Those reforms came from what I had seen as a boy in rural Victoria. Today Tatong and Benalla remember me with a memorial, and New Zealanders still remember me as the leader who built the welfare state.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons