William Weston holds an odd distinction: the shortest-serving Premier in Tasmania’s history, in office for just 17 days in May 1857. Every list of Tasmanian premiers files him this way: a footnote number, filed alongside Champ’s 117 days and Gregson’s 58 as evidence that the colony’s first parliament couldn’t hold a government together for more than a few months at a stretch.
J. W. Beattie.
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The footnote rarely mentions that Weston was Premier twice. His seventeen days in 1857 were followed, three and a half years later, by a second term of 274 days, from 1 November 1860 to 2 August 1861. This time he was a member of the Legislative Council for Longford rather than the House of Assembly.[i]
The number is correct. The story behind it is not what the number implies.
The Man Who Brought Down a Government
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Weston was elected to the first House of Assembly, serving from 2 December 1856, representing the electorate of Ringwood. He did not spend his first months in parliament as a bystander amid the three governments of 1857: he was one of its authors. Weston moved the vote of no confidence that brought down Thomas Gregson’s ministry in April 1857, ending Gregson’s 58 days in office.[ii]
After toppling the government, Weston was called upon to form one of his own. He served as Premier without portfolio for about three weeks.
The Handover
Here is where the standard framing breaks down. Weston’s seventeen days did not end in defeat, resignation under pressure, or the kind of no-confidence vote collapse that had ended Gregson’s term. He resigned the leadership of the government to Francis Smith once he judged the ministry was stable.
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A contemporary Hobart newspaper reported him standing down, having seen the government he’d formed “firmly consolidated,” and doing so out of “a strong sense of his obligations” rather than any loss of support.[iii] He kept his seat in the Executive Council without portfolio, staying inside the tent rather than walking away from politics.
This was not a man who couldn’t hold power. He had built a working ministry, handed the top job to someone he judged better placed to hold it long-term, and stayed close enough to the centre of government to return to it later.
The Return
Smith went on to hold the premiership for three years and 173 days, the longest of any of the colony’s first five premiers, providing the stability the young parliament badly needed after its first six months. When Smith left the role in 1860 to become Chief Justice, Weston returned to the premiership, holding it for a second term of 274 days.
Read against that arc, “seventeen days” stops looking like a symbol of instability and starts looking like exactly what it was: a short, deliberate caretaker term that set up four more years of continuity, followed by a second premiership of Weston’s own nine months later. The repeated number is accurate. The story it’s usually attached to is not.
[i] There is no rule requiring Tasmania’s Premier to sit in the House of Assembly rather than the Legislative Council. It is a convention, not a constitutional requirement. The practice hardened only gradually, as it did in most Westminster systems, since a head of government sitting in an upper house that does not control supply or confidence becomes politically untenable. Eight premiers were drawn from the Legislative Council before the convention settled, the last being Philip Fysh, serving from 1887–1892.
[ii] Next in this series: back to Thomas Gregson: the man Weston brought down, and what actually ended his 58 days in office.
[iii] Courier (Hobart) 14 October 1857, p 2. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2460893
