Andy, come up!

Andrew Fisher fares well in the new Museum of Australian Democracy, at Old Parliament House, Canberra. The entrance to the galleries is framed, on one side, by E. Phillips Fox’s dark 1913 portrait of an imposing and resolute Fisher, in contrast to the garish, spreading corpulence of George Lambert’s 1924 Sir George Reid on the other. Inside, in the procession of prime ministers, Fisher is represented more comprehensively and intimately than his peers. There is his miner’s crib – for this leader of Australia’s first majority Labor government definitely came from the working class – and his fountain pen, presented by his granddaughter to Kevin Rudd (who, the caption reads, is a ‘passionate admirer’ of his Queensland predecessor). Elsewhere in the Museum, in commemorating the suffrage movement, the key exhibit is a replica of the hat worn by Fisher’s wife, Margaret, when she marched beside Vida Goldstein in a London protest for women’s franchise in 1911.