On the road from Yarralumla. (Politics).

As for further appointments after retirement I take a narrow view that for an Australian the governor-generalship is the apex. There is no office higher than it and one should not go below it. An apex is the wrong shape to be a stepping stone.

--Sir Paul Hasluck, 1979

ONCE UPON A TIME our governors-general came from Britain and returned home at the end of their tours of duty, never to be heard of again, at least not in the context of Australian public life. Today those who are appointed to that high office are distinguished Australians who continue to live among us, either immediately upon stepping down or after a brief sojourn overseas. Hitherto they have returned to their home states, but our latest former governor-general has retired to live in Canberra, just down the road from Yarralumla. The question of what, if anything, we should do with them after they leave Government House has never been considered in public policy terms, so far as I am aware, and such precedents as we have are ad hoc, contradictory and unsatisfactory.

Our present governor-general is the twenty-third to hold the office, and the tenth Australian. Dr Peter Hollingworth's Australian predecessors were Sir Isaac Isaacs, Sir William McKell, Lord Casey, Sir Paul Hasluck, Sir John Kerr, Sir Zelman Cowen, Sir Ninian Stephen, Bill Hayden and Sir William Deane.

SIR ISAAC ISAACS was a Queen's Counsel, member of the Legislative Assembly of Victoria, Solicitor-General and later Attorney-General for Victoria, occasionally acting Premier, member of the House of Representatives in the federal parliament, federal Attorney-General under Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, Justice of the High Court under Chief Justice Sir Samuel Griffith, Chief Justice, and finally, in 1931, at the age of seventy-five, the first native-born Australian governor-general.

His appointment was opposed by the King, by the federal Opposition, and by some sections of the media. His appointment was of significance to the empire, for it was the first appointment of a governor-general to be recommended to the monarch by a dominion prime minister and not by a British minister.

Isaacs was called upon several times to exercise constitutional functions in potentially politically troublesome circumstances, but he handled each situation impeccably. He also had to cope with the coming to office of an Opposition which had opposed his appointment. He handled that successfully and set a pattern for future incumbents who would be so placed. His term as the first Australian in the post has been described as one of the most important in the history of the office.