George Kerr

Who was George Kerr?

George Kerr was an Australian politician, grazier, and blacksmith. He was born on 7 February 1853 at Beadnell, Northumberland, England and after training to become a blacksmith moved to Queensland in 1877. He became a mining speculator on the Croydon goldfields and then set up his own forge in Tambo, Queensland to service mining operations in the local region. He became involved in local politics for the Australian Labor Party, and in 1893 he was elected to represent the electoral district of Barcoo in the Legislative Assembly of Queensland and served in that post until 1909. He rose to senior positions within the party, culminating in his election as leader of the Queensland Parliamentary Labor Party in 1904 after the death of his predecessor William Henry Brown. Kerr's leadership was complicated by a split in the party in 1905 in which he and other senior Labor figures opted to form a coalition with the Liberal Party to achieve state-wide reforms. Although initially he commanded the confidence of the party, a state conference of the party in 1907 rejected Kerr's leadership and the Liberal-Labor coalition, opting to go into the 1907 state election alone.