‘A Valuable, but Minority, Section’: The Country Townspeople's League and responses to farmer politics in 1920s Victorian country towns

Explanations of the historical success of the Country Parties in Australia have largely accepted a key argument forward by Don Aitkin in his work on the party in New South Wales. That is, that the Country Party only ultimately survived because of significant electoral support from country towns, and that this support was largely due to an acceptance amongst townspeople of the ideology of ‘countrymindedness’, based upon the central importance of primary production to rural areas and the nation as a whole. In Victoria in the early 1920s, however, a group called the Country Townspeople's League very rapidly gained great importance and support in the towns based upon policies which largely challenged any such belief, and which publicly characterised the aims and needs of the farmers as being mere “minority interests” in the rural community. This, and other evidence, suggests that if ‘countrymindedness’ was important in Victoria it only became so in a later period, and that its role in rural politics is less clear.