‘How are the Egyptians behaving?’: Herbert Brookes, British‐Australian

Abstract

Herbert Brookes was a wealthy businessman, a distinguished patron of high culture in Melbourne society, an anti‐Labor eminence who moved comfortably in the highest of imperial circles. The richness of his papers in the National Library provides the opportunity to examine the life of a leading British‐Australian, to analyse issues of conscience and purpose that do not figure much in current historiography and perhaps to throw new light on the concerns of the generation that saw its world disrupted after 1914. Using the notion of Protestant stewardship, I have suggested that Brookes' life offers one way into the dynamics of liberalism before the Great War and of loyalism after it.