page_title: Edward Wittenoom
section_title: Political career
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Wittenoom / Biography / Political career
caption_attribution_description: Sir Edward Wittenoom standing outside the old Legislative Council chamber entrance at Parliament House, western façade on Harvest Tce.
context_page_description: Sir Edward Horne Wittenoom KCMG was an Australian politician who served intermittently in the Legislative Council of Western Australia between 1883 and 1934, including as President of the Legislative Council from 1922 to 1926. He sat in the Legislative Council from 1883 to 1884, 1885 to 1886, 1894 to 1898, 1902 to 1906, and finally from 1910 to 1934. Wittenoom was a minister in the government of Sir John Forrest, and was also Agent-General for Western Australia between 1898 and 1901.
context_section_description: From around 1883, Wittenoom became increasingly involved in public life. On 30 May of that year he was elected to the Legislative Council's Geraldton seat in a by-election occasioned by the resignation of Maitland Brown. Wittenoom resigned the seat on 23 January 1884 and was replaced by John Sydney Davis. He again won the seat in a by-election on 25 June 1885 but resigned again on 6 November 1886. He became a member of the Murchison Road Board in 1890.
  On 16 July 1894 Wittenoom was elected to the Legislative Council for the Central Province. On 19 December of that year he was appointed Minister for Mines, Education, and Posts and Telegraphs in the Forrest ministry. At that time, newly appointed ministers were required to re-contest their seats, so Wittenoom resigned his seat on 19 December, and was re-elected in the subsequent ministerial by-election of 16 January 1895. He retained his seat and ministerial portfolio until the general election of 28 April 1898, which he did not contest. The following month he was appointed Agent General for Western Australia in London, a position that he held until 1901.
  While in the UK, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George in 1900, being the last KCMG to be personally invested by Queen Victoria at Osborne House prior to her death in January 1901.
  On returning to Western Australia, Wittenoom was again elected to the Legislative Council on 12 May 1902, this time for the North Province. He held his seat until 6 November 1906, when he resigned to contest a seat in the Australian Senate in the federal election of 12 December. He stood unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Western Australian Party. He returned to state politics in the following election, winning a North Province seat in the Legislative Council on 13 May 1910. He would hold this seat for 24 years, finally losing after declining to contest the election of 12 May 1934. During this period, he was President of the Legislative Council from 27 July 1922 to 10 August 1926. He also spent a brief period at consul for France in Western Australia.
caption: Edward Wittenoom c. 1922
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