Summary heading
Person registration completed as part of the Prime Ministers
Papers’ Project (April 2002).
Career within Commonwealth
Margaret Jane Irvine was born in 1874. She was 27
when she married Andrew Fisher in December 1901. He had taken his seat as a
member of the House of Representatives in the first Commonwealth Parliament
only a few months previously. She was his landlady’s daughter. They had six
children.
Although never prominent in her own right, Margaret Fisher
supported the Labor cause and her husband’s political career as a foundation
member of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, a Minister, Leader of the
Opposition, Prime Minister (three times between 1908 and 1915) and as the
second Australian High Commissioner to London (1916-1921). As Prime Minister’s
wife she accompanied him to London in 1911 for the Imperial Conference and the
Coronation of His Majesty, King George V.
The Fishers continued to live in London in the 1920s.
Margaret Fisher died in 1958, having outlived her husband by 30 years.
Links to other Commonwealth Persons
31 Dec 1901 – 22 Oct 1928: CP 713, The Rt Hon Andrew FISHER PC
Publications
End notes
Sources
‘Sunday Magazine’, Sunday Telegraph, 31 December 2000