Ben Chifley was born at Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia.

Succeeding John Curtin, Chifley was Australia's prime minister from 1945 to 1949. His deputy PM was Francis Michael Forde.

 

On June 12, 1949, at the annual meeting of the Labor Party, Chifley delivered his speech The Light on the Hill.

On September 19, 2009, Wayne Swan, then Treasurer, commented on Chifley's speech as follows:

Because the man we remember tonight, Ben Chifley, wasn't just a titan of the Australian Labor Party. He was in his time the most respected person in the country. Perhaps the most respected in our history. His entire life embodies something about our nation: the ability of someone from the humblest of backgrounds to rise through talent and sheer hard work to the very top - and then, once there, to pull others up behind him.

Americans have a saying about their greatest leader, Abraham Lincoln - that he rose from a log cabin to the White House. We could almost say the same thing about Chifley. I say almost, because while like Lincoln he spent his youth in a wattle-and-daub hut, as Prime Minister he would accept nothing more luxurious than a simple room at the Hotel Kurrajong… sharing a bathroom with other guests. He was living at the Hotel Kurrajong in June 1949 when he wrote those famous words about our party's objective: "the light on the hill".

Sometimes politics is criticized for lacking poetry. Every single one of us has a duty to dispute this. Because a simple piece of poetry lies at the very heart of everything we do. "The light on the hill."

Doesn't sound much. Even Chifley's biographer David Day dismissed it as a "rather vague reformist objective" that "would be seized upon by Labor supporters as best expressing the aims of the movement."

It's certainly simple. Just five words. All of just one syllable. No "isms" - like socialism or liberalism or capitalism. No corporate jargon. A plain speaking man like Ben Chifley today might say "and no bullshit either". But you and I know this simplicity is its strength.

No one would accuse Martin Luther King of lacking poetry, but his most famous quote - the one that summed up the hopes for justice of millions of Americans in the 1960s - had just four one-syllable words: "I have a dream". And nobody would say President Obama's famous three words "Yes We Can" do not carry a poetic ring. No biographer has ever dismissed these as vague sentiments.

(From The Light on the Hill in the Fog of Global Recession, 25th Ben Chifley Light on the Hill Oration, Bathurst, September 19, 2009)
 

 

Ben Chifley died at Canberra from his second heart attack.