Where did Robert Menzies grow up and live?

📍Jeparit, Victoria, Australia

1894 – 1978

“I was born Robert Gordon Menzies on the 20th of December 1894 in Jeparit, a small wheat-farming town in the Wimmera district of Victoria, the son of a storekeeper and local politician. Jeparit and the Wimmera gave me the Australian inland — flat, dry, immense, the landscape of a continent still finding itself. I became a barrister, a politician, and the longest-serving Prime Minister in Australian history — serving from 1939 to 1941 and then again from 1949 to 1966. I was a monarchist and an Anglophile who said he was British to the bootstraps, and I governed Australia through its postwar prosperity and transformation. I founded the Liberal Party of Australia in 1944. The Jeparit childhood gave me the rural Australian values that I maintained throughout a career in the law and politics.”

👍 LovedThe Wimmera landscape and the rural Australian values it produced. The postwar economic prosperity of the long Liberal governments. The Liberal Party as a lasting institutional achievement.

👎 DislikedThe White Australia Policy that I maintained and that history has judged harshly. The commitment to Britain that sometimes came at Australia's expense. The refusal to engage seriously with Asia.

Map showing where Robert Menzies lived — Jeparit, Victoria, Australia

🗺️ Approximate location today

📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons

Sources: Martin, A. Robert Menzies: A Life (1993-1999), Melbourne University Press; Menzies, R. Afternoon Light (1967), Cassell