John Tonkin

John Trezise Tonkin AC (2 February 1902 – 20 October 1995), popularly known as "Honest John", was an Australian politician. A member of the Australian Labor Party, he served as a Member of the Western Australian Legislative Assembly for a record 44 years from 1933 to 1977, and was the 20th Premier of Western Australia, serving from the 1971 election, where his party defeated the ruling Liberal–Country coalition led by David Brand, to the 1974 election, where the Labor Party was defeated by the Liberal–Country coalition led by Charles Court. A number of landmarks were later named or renamed after him, including the Tonkin Highway and John Tonkin College in Mandurah.

Biography

Tonkin was born in Boulder, Western Australia, on 2 February 1902. Of Cornish descent, he attended Boulder City Central School and Eastern Goldfields High School, and began working as a schoolteacher, teaching in several schools in country Western Australia. By 1923, he was teaching at Forest Grove, near Witchcliffe in the South West, where he established a branch of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). He married Rosalie Cleghorn on 29 December 1926 at St. Mary's Church in West Perth.

John Tonkin (New South Wales politician)

John Horace Tonkin (19 October 1889 – 2 November 1967) was an Australian politician.

He was born in Avenel in Victoria to storekeeper Samuel Tonkin and Josephine Emmerson. He attended Central College in Geelong and became a surveyor, working on the railways and for a number of local governments. On 11 October 1916 he married Harriett Doris Higginson, with whom he had two children. From 1919 he worked in Mosman in Sydney, and from 1927 to 1940 was managing director of Concreters Limited; he was subsequently a consulting engineer and builder. From 1940 to 1946 he was a United Australia Party member of the New South Wales Legislative Council. Tonkin died in Mosman in 1967.

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