page_title: Josiah Symon
section_title: Federal politics
hierarchical_section_title: Josiah Symon / Federal politics
caption_attribution_description: English: Josiah Symon From the 1898 Australasian Federal Convention Album.
context_page_description: Sir Josiah Henry Symon KCMG KC was an Australian lawyer and politician. He was a Senator for South Australia from 1901 to 1913 and Attorney-General of Australia from 1904 to 1905.
  Symon was born in Wick, Caithness, Scotland. He immigrated to South Australia in 1866 and became one of the colony's leading barristers. He was appointed Attorney-General of South Australia in 1881, serving only a few months, and won election to the Parliament of South Australia in the same year. Symon supported the federation movement and won election to the Senate at the 1901 federal election. He served as Attorney-General in the Reid Government. After his death he donated his extensive personal collection to the State Library of South Australia.
context_section_description: Symon stood for election to the Australian Senate at the 1901 election for the Free Trade Party, and was placed first overall by the voters of South Australia. He was made leader of the opposition in the Senate, and was a leader within the Free Trade Party on tariff policy. After being elected to the Parliament, he stood down from his position as a member of the council of the University of Adelaide, a position he had held since 1897. In 1902, he was involved as the defense council in the highly publicised murder of Bertha Schippan trial. At the 1903 election he again topped the poll for the Senate in South Australia. When the High Court of Australia was created in late 1903, Symon was mentioned in the press as a possible judge of the court, although ultimately he was not appointed. From August 1904 to July 1905 he was the Attorney-General of Australia in the Reid Ministry.
  Symon was renowned as a tough and uncompromising politician. He has been described as both an "eloquent and emotional speaker" and often "abrasive and argumentative." Late in 1904, Symon was involved in a dispute with the judges of the High Court. In the court's early years, its official home was a courtroom in Melbourne, although it often sat at the court in the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. Justices Barton and O'Connor lived in Sydney, but Chief Justice of Australia Sir Samuel Griffith lived in Brisbane, and took a two-day train ride to attend each sitting in Melbourne. When Griffith asked for some bookshelves to be installed in the Darlinghurst courthouse, so that his law library might be moved from his offices in Brisbane, Symon criticised Griffith for holding any sittings outside Melbourne, and began intrusive inspections of the judges' travel expenses. Prime Minister George Reid tried to intervene, and Griffith even took the extraordinary step of delaying scheduled sittings early in 1905. The stand-off was resolved when the Reid government left power, and the new Attorney-General (and future Chief Justice) Isaac Isaacs permitted the judges to travel. Later, in 1930, when Symon was president of the Adelaide branch of the Royal Empire Society, he was an outspoken opponent of James Scullin's nomination of Isaacs as Governor-General of Australia.
  In 1909, when the Free Trade Party and the Protectionist Party merged to form the Commonwealth Liberal Party, Symon was one of a small group of politicians who did not join, instead remaining in Parliament as an independent. Symon did not hold any other ministerial positions, and eventually left the Senate after losing his seat in the 1913 election. He continued to practice as a barrister until his retirement in 1923 at the age of seventy-seven.
caption: Symon at the 1898 Australasian Federal Convention.
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