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and women were intended to be “the comfort and solace of our homes”. By 1899, however, he’d had a sudden changeof heart. It is thought that his wife, Margaret, who by that time had joined the Suffrage League, inspired the premier’s sudden enthusiasm for the cause.
    Forrest’s attitudes to Aborigines were similarly unenlightened. Historians Bob Reece and Tom Stannage concluded that Forrest and his colleagues were “locked into and promoted an ideology of development which had racism at its heart”. Whileit seems clear that Forrest had a sympathy for individual Aborigines who had helped him as a surveyor and explorer, he had no vision of a future for indigenous people in a white society and viewed the surviving Aborigines in settled areas as little more than a public nuisance. He believed it was the government’s duty to help indigenous people in need “until the race died out”. But as an investorin sheep stations, Forrest needed Aborigines as a source of cheap labour, and in 1893 he called for restraint by those whites who would regularly shoot Aborigines caught stealing food or cattle. “It’s all very well for us to be incensed against these native outrages, but we must remember this: they are not all bad,” he said. “How would we like to be shot at when we had done nothing wrong? Thosewho do the mischief deserve punishing, no doubt, but this sort of random retribution would kill both the innocent and the guilty … We must endeavour to civilise them by degrees. I must not, in the position that I am in, do anything or sanction anything that will lead to the impression that an indiscriminate slaughter of blackfellows will be tolerated or allowed by the government of the colony.”
    Unsurprisingly, his attitudes to foreigners were hardly progressive either. Forrest told parliament he did not want any Asians to settle permanently in the colony. “There are millions of them, and if we do not place some restrictions on them they will overrun the country, and, instead of being a British country, this will be an Asiatic country,” he said. Forrest introduced an Immigration RestrictionAct in 1897, which established a dictation test aimed at excluding the Chinese from living in Western Australia, and he was proud that his government had not allowed Asians to be issued with mining rights. This sort of unconcealed racism was common, of course, at the time. Frank Crowley believes Forrest “took with him to his grave this compound of social snobbery, laissez faire capitalism,sentimental royalism, patriotic Anglicanism, benevolent imperialism and British racial superiority”.
    By 1900 John Forrest had been joined in parliament by two of his brothers, Alexander and David. The three of them owned the vast Minderoo sheep station, which David Forrest had managed since the 1870s. John and Alexander Forrest, in particular, became the target of gossip that they took advantageof their government work to acquire big landholdings. But there was no evidence of corruption, certainly not on John’s part. “He [John] used his own money to finance expeditions, didn’t charge travelling expenses and, as an early member of parliament, was not paid,” wrote Forrest family historians Alison and Dinee Muir. “He refused to take a parliamentary pension as he said the country couldnot afford it and he had enough money of his own.”
    Alexander, however, proved to be exceptionally gifted at seizing the lucrative business opportunities that were emerging in the fast-growing economy, accruing interests in pastoral stations, gold mines, newspapers, the timber industry, butchering and cattle shipping – even as he sat in parliament. He was the first genuine entrepreneur inthe Forrest family and would remain its most successful until his great-grand-nephew became Australia’s richest man in 2008. According to the Forrest family’s historians, Alexander Forrest was a “prolific investor and played the stockmarket with zest”. After