Sir Henry Parkes is known in Australia as the founder of Federation. I grew up near Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Faulconbridge, named after Parkes’s mother, was Parkes’s last home and is the location of his grave. It is also the location of the Corridor of Oaks, where each Australian Prime Minister – or his or her nearest kin – plants an English oak. Our current Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has yet to plant his tree, as has our last Liberal prime minister, Scott Morrison. Due to the rapid turnover of prime ministers lately the corridor is running out of room.

I always had a vague idea that Sir Henry Parkes was an English aristocrat. In fact, he was a working class boy from the Midlands. Trained as a bone turner, he had very little formal education, but became involved in politics from an early age. He struggled to make ends meet in England and so emigrated to New South Wales with his wife.

Parkes made a name for himself as a newspaper publisher, poet, orator, and politician. He is the longest-serving Premier of New South Wales and is credited with convincing the separate Australian colonies to federate into one colony, though he didn’t live to see his dream realised.