People Australia

John ('Plumper') Hoolan (c.1849-1918) carpenter, miner, newspaper owner and parliamentarian

Birth: Reportedly in 1849 or 1850 at Sydney, New South Wales, son of Terence Hoolan, farmer, and Margaret, surname unknown. Unmarried. Death: 12 October 1918 in the General Hospital at Townsville, Queensland. Religion: Catholic. 

• Hoolan reputedly worked as a carpenter at Bathurst, New South Wales then “very early followed the gold ‘rushes’”. He moved to Queensland about 1873 and was a miner at Charters Towers, Queensland.
• He was editor of Croydon Mining News’ and Etheridge Gazette, Georgetown 1888-1895; proprietor and editor of Mundic Miner, Georgetown, 1889.
• “North Queensland unionism got its radical tinge in the main from a group of young Charters Towers men, who, although not themselves working miners, came to influence goldfields politics profoundly . . . The buffoon of the group was John Hoolan, who wrote doggerel verse under the name of ‘Sugarbag’, but was more widely known as ‘Plumper’ for his single-minded advocacy of whole-hog principles. He belonged to a type not yet extinct in North Queensland politics; the sort of man who so enjoyed trumpeting his radical principles and heaping his foes with scurrilous eloquence that his occasional good sense and generosity were often overlooked”. [Bolton, pp 191-192].
• In January [1889 John] Dunsford and Hoolan had been ringleaders of the push who broke up the Charters Towers Separation League’s meeting. Two months later they had organized a censure motion on the management of the local School of Arts. Next they formed a short-lived Land Nationalization League, to educate the North in the gospels of Henry George . . . (T)he Mundic Miner soon became notorious for its pungent prose”. [Bolton, pp 191-192].
• Hoolan was an unsuccessful candidate for election to the Queensland Legislative Assembly for the seat of Burke in 1888, and won it in a by-election in August 1890. A delegate to the 1892 Labor convention and member of the Central Political Executive of the Australian Labor Federation in 1892-1894, he was leader of the parliamentary Labor Party from 1893 until he resigned his seat in 1894 to allow his ally Thomas Glassey to return to parliament. Hoolan regained the seat in March 1896 and remained a Labor member until 1897; he was a non-Labor member from 1897 until 1899 when he contested unsuccessfully the seat of Cairns.
• He was defeated in elections to the Australian Senate in 1901 and for the State seat of Burke as an anti-Labor candidate in 1908.
• He had leased a grazing farm in northern Queensland in 1896. After leaving parliament he turned his attention to mining speculation and to cattle raising, and was fairly successful. He continued to live at Georgetown in the Ethridge region and as late as 1909-1910 appears to have still been associated with the Munic Miner
• Cause of death: general paralysis and heart failure (1 year). 

Sources
Duncan Waterson, Biographical register of the Queensland Parliament 1860-1929 (Sydney, 2001), p 93 [N.B. birth, marriage and death information in this source refers to the wrong man]; D. J. Murphy (ed), Labor in Politics: State Labor Parties in Australia, 1880-1920 (St Lucia, Qld, 1975) G. C. Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away, A history of North Queensland to 1920 (Canberra 1972), pp 181-213.