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