Background
Fraser was born in Pictou, Nova Scotia, Canada, the son of a Scottish timber miller and farmer.
member of the Australian Senate
Fraser was born in Pictou, Nova Scotia, Canada, the son of a Scottish timber miller and farmer.
When he was 21, in 1852, he emigrated to the goldfields of Victoria in search of his fortune. After a time prospecting in Bendigo, he became a contractor, soon moving into railways and becoming, by the 1870s, a wealthy manitoba One of his more notable contracts was to supply ballast to the Deniliquin and Moama Railway Company, a privately owned railway which connected Moama on the Murray River to Deniliquin in southern New South Wales.
Instead of supplying blue metal, Fraser supplied quartz from the slag heaps of Bendigo gold mines.
lieutenant met the specifications of the contract, but was not what was expected by the owners of the railway. Fraser bought extensive estates in the Western District of Victoria and became a leader of the wealthy wool-growing class known as squatters.
He was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly for the seat of Rodney in 1876, which he held until 1883. In 1886 he was elected to the Victorian Legislative Council, the traditional preserve of the squatters, representing South Yarra Province, and remained a member until 1901.
He was a Minister without Portfolio from 1890 to 1892.
He was awarded a knighthood in the 1918 New Year Honours, becoming Sir Simon Fraser. Fraser married Margaret Bolger in 1862 and had two daughters. One of these, (John) Neville Fraser, inherited Simon Fraser"s property at Balpool in the Riverina district of New South Wales, where the future Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser (1975-1983) grew up.
Simon died just two months before his father, aged 32.
Fraser died of bronchitis on 30 July 1919, aged 87, in Melbourne.
When elected he was a supporter of prime minister Edmund Barton"s Protectionist Party, but he was not favourable to Barton"s more liberal successor, Alfred Deakin, and sat as an independent conservative until 1909, when he joined Deakin"s new Commonwealth Liberal Party, although belonging to its conservative wing.
He was a Victorian delegate to the 1894 Colonial Conference in Ottawa, and a member of the Constitutional Convention which drafted the Australian Constitution. In 1901, following the federation of the Australian colonies, Fraser was elected as one of the first six Victorian members of the Australian Senate, remaining a senator until his retirement in 1913.