On Paper: some election ephemera

Many will try to keep them all in one hand while holding their sacred democracy sausage in the other. Some will throw them away, possibly without reading them. That’s because things like political flyers and how-to-vote cards are by nature ephemeral.

The word 'ephemera' means 'designed to be used for a short time'. While most people who receive election campaign material throw it away, sometimes immediately, there are always the odd few who don't. Museums and collectors are grateful for that, because you never know when something flimsy and disposable might turn into a gem.

Here are some interesting, creative or quirky examples of election ephemera from elections past.

How many voters would actually vote?

Voting is compulsory in Australia, which means at most elections more than 90% of enrolled voters cast a vote. It wasn’t always so, and the cigarette card from 1906 (below) shows how some people profited from non-compulsory voting in unusual ways.

This card asks people to guess how many voters would actually vote, and offers a cash prize of £100 (in today's money, over $14,000).

The number of votes cast was only 951,688 for the House of Representatives (due to the way the Senate votes were counted, it's impossible to say how many voted for the Upper House). This was a turnout of just over half, which demonstrates a reason Australia turned to compulsory voting two decades later.

Sadly, we don’t know who won the money.

Vote for Barry to fight communism

The Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist), which would later form into the Democratic Labor Party, produced this flyer for its leader in Victoria, Bill Barry, in 1955 (slide 3). The election of that year was caused when Barry’s bloc, having left Labor, voted to bring down the government. For that act, Labor members threw thirty pieces of silver at his feet.

The message of this flyer is very blunt – vote for Barry (he, like others in his party, described themselves as ‘Official Labor’) to fight communism. Some others even offered a return to a ‘Christian Social Order’.

Barry’s anti-communism message may not have been the best one for the (then, as now) left-leaning Carlton electorate and Barry was defeated at the 1955 election. He could take some solace though – Anti-Communist preferences largely favoured the Liberal-Country parties, and helped to elect Liberal leader Henry Bolte as Premier in a landslide. Bolte would stay  Premier for a record 17 years, and Labor would not regain power until 1982. In 2010, Barry’s grandson Peter Kavanagh became the first DLP member to be elected in Victoria since 1955.

Better the devil you know

Imagine this: a politician releases official campaign material featuring him with horns and a pitchfork. Not his opponent; himself. If this happened today, how do you think social media would react?

Fortunately, Victorian upper house member Percy Feltham had no internet to worry about when he released this How to Vote card for the 1967 state election. Feltham had been a Country Party member until 1965, and campaigned for re-election as an Independent. His pitch is clear: better to re-elect Feltham, whether you like him or not, than risk someone new and unknown.

As innovative and noteworthy as it is, voters didn’t respond as Feltham would like. He lost his seat at the election.

Women’s Electoral Lobby

Sometimes you need help deciding who to vote for. We all have our own ways of making up our minds, and for some people there are single issues which can be the critical factor.

The newly-formed Women’s Electoral Lobby issued this leaflet to the voters of Maribyrnong in 1972. They ranked each of the six House of Representatives candidates, and gave each of them marks out of ten on issues they saw as critical to women. The Liberal candidate scores very poorly on equality in work and education but very well in childcare, while the Labor candidate does well across the board. Interestingly, K.M. Young is graded poorly despite being a woman. This might be because of her politics – while on the ballot as an independent, Katrina Young was actually a neo-Nazi, representing the National Socialist Party of Australia. It’s not hard to guess why they might have favoured the male Labor candidate!

Doing things on the cheap

There’s something wonderfully endearing about this hand-drawn flyer for a Green Independent candidate. This flyer is from 1990, at a time when the Australian Greens had yet to become the significant force they are today. Many candidates around this time campaigned as ‘greens’ despite having no official backing from a state or federal party.

Without the party machine to print slick and spiffy campaign literature, independents sometimes have to do things on the cheap. Jim Collins’ campaign saw him place third, with a respectable 10% of the vote. Was it the koala that did it?