Background
Higinbotham was born on April 19, 1826 in Dublin, Ireland, the sixth son (and youngest of eight) of Henry Higinbotham, a merchant at Dublin, and Sarah Wilson, daughter of Joseph Wilson, a man of Scottish ancestry.
Higinbotham was born on April 19, 1826 in Dublin, Ireland, the sixth son (and youngest of eight) of Henry Higinbotham, a merchant at Dublin, and Sarah Wilson, daughter of Joseph Wilson, a man of Scottish ancestry.
Higinbotham was educated at the Royal School Dungannon, and having gained a Queen's scholarship of £50 a year, entered at Trinity College, Dublin. He qualified for the degree of B. A. in 1849 and M. A. in 1853.
After entering as a law student at Lincoln's Inn, and being engaged as reporter on the Morning Chronicle in 1849, Higinbotham emigrated to Victoria, where he contributed to the Melbourne Herald and practised at the bar with much success. In 1850 he became editor of the Melbourne Argus, but resigned in 1859 and returned to the bar. He was elected to the legislative assembly in 1861 for Brighton as an independent Liberal, was rejected at the general election of the same year, but was returned nine months later. In 1863 he became attorney-general. Under his influence measures were passed through the legislative assembly of a somewhat extreme character, completely ignoring the rights of the legislative council, and the government was carried on without any Appropriation Act for more than a year. Mr Higinbotham, by his eloquence and earnestness, obtained great influence amongst the members of the legislative assembly, but his colleagues were not prepared to follow him as far as he desired to go. He contended that in a constitutional colony like Victoria the secretary of state for the colonies had no right to fetter the discretion of the queen's representative. Mr Higinbotham did not return to power with his chief, Sir James M'Culloch, after the defeat of the short-lived Sladen administration; and being defeated for Brighton at the next general election by a comparatively unknown man, he devoted himself to his practice at the bar. Amongst his other labours as attorney- general he had codified all the statutes which were in force throughout the colony. In 1874 he was returned to the legislative assembly for Brunswick, but after a few months he resigned his seat. In 1880 he was appointed a puisne judge of the supreme court, and in 1886, on the retirement of Sir William Stawell, he was promoted to the office of chief justice. Mr Higinbotham was appointed president of the International Exhibition held at Melbourne in 1888-1889, but did not take any active part in its management. One of his latest public acts was to subscribe a sum of £10, 106 a week towards the funds of the strikers in the great Australian labour dispute of 1890, an act which did not meet with general approval. He died in 1893.
Higinbotham had started his political career with all the perplexities of an inexperienced politician testing the practicability of his theories. By 1864 he publicly confessed a mistake in his judgment over the Duffy Act which gave temporary security of tenure to squatters, whom he called 'the wealthy lower orders', but achieved little for smallholders. Higinbotham's dogged struggle for educational reform was perhaps of more immediate importance, but that too revealed his hardening in the face of obstruction. Under him the Argus had encouraged educational development but he presented no clear solution for the religious difficulty. He recognized the need for a state school system but faced the dilemma that, although the state could not engage in spiritual education, education without religion was 'mere instruction'. Yet in 1862 he supported Heales's Act, which created a Common Schools Board with power to establish schools, because he had found that public indifference led to neglect of education.
Member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly (1861-1876)
Higinbotham was married and had two sons and three daughters.