Australian Dictionary of Biography

Frank Edward Roberts (1913–1992), solicitor, politician, and lord mayor, was born on 28 February 1913 in Melbourne, eldest of six children of Hugh Edward Roberts, farmer, and his wife Mary Alice, née Carpenter. As a baby he suffered paralysis of the legs and feet and required several operations that necessitated the lifelong wearing of custom-made surgical boots. Frank lived on a farm in the Victorian Mallee, not starting school until he was nine because of the isolation. He was educated at Mittyack, Victoria, and Hay, New South Wales. In 1932 he moved with his family to Queensland, where he was assigned relief work on the roads and quarries, as a sewerage miner, and as a builder’s labourer.

An evening student at the Teachers’ Training College from 1933, Roberts matriculated to the University of Queensland in 1936. On 3 June that year at St Andrew’s Church of England, South Brisbane, he married English-born Gladys Turtle, a shop assistant (d. 1975). He joined the Queensland public service as a clerk, working in the Lands Department and the Public Curator Office while studying arts and law at the university (BA, 1941; LLB, 1943). Rejected for war service on medical grounds, Roberts set up in private practice. He was admitted as a solicitor in 1949 and his firm, Duell, Roberts and Kane (later Roberts and Kane) was well known in Brisbane legal circles.

A member of the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU), the Builders’ Labourers’ Union, and the State Service Union, Roberts was a ‘solid Labor man’ (Worker 1952, 1). In 1943 he ran unsuccessfully as an Australian Labor Party (ALP) candidate for the State seat of Hamilton against (Sir) John Chandler, who was concurrently serving as lord mayor of Brisbane. Elected a member of the Legislative Assembly for Nundah in 1947, Roberts spoke stridently against capitalism, claiming to be ‘firmly convinced that true Christianity is completely and irrevocably incompatible with the capitalistic principle of the maximum gain for the minimum of effort’ (Qld Parliament 1948, 485). In what seemed an unwinnable contest, in 1952 the ALP nominated Roberts as its lord mayoral candidate for Brisbane against Chandler who had held the position for twelve years.

Brisbane was rapidly expanding. Although few realised it at the time, a recent redistribution had created a number of mortgage-belt seats, the residents of which were anxiously awaiting water and sewerage connections. Roberts, referring to the beautification projects of the previous council, called for ‘utility before camouflage’ (Cole 1984, 152). Promising to provide Brisbane and its suburbs with an ample supply of reticulated water and with sewerage, his team won seventeen of twenty-four wards in the Brisbane City Council elections. Despite criticisms from the rank and file, the Queensland central executive (QCE) of the ALP sanctioned Roberts’s holding the positions of State member and lord mayor, both paid positions. Roberts believed that he was not doing anyone out of a job because no one else in the party had wanted to run against Chandler.

With funds in short supply the new lord mayor found it difficult to keep his election promises. Parsimony was a hallmark of his stewardship. Cutting through red tape, he used second-hand pipes to connect residents in some outlying suburbs to reticulated water. During his time in office (1952–55), the City Fund’s position went from debit to credit and the Loan Fund debt was greatly reduced.

State Labor parliamentarians planned to raise their own salaries at the end of 1953, retrospectively to 1 July. In order to maintain the traditional proportional relationship between parliamentary and aldermanic salaries, Roberts proposed to increase the latter immediately as no retrospective provisions applied. Incensed, the QCE issued a directive ordering the council to rescind the salary increase. Unwilling to ‘accept dictation from any body or organisation which is not responsible to the people’ (Courier Mail 1953, 1), Roberts resigned from the ALP on 25 August. The president of the Queensland branch of the AWU, Joe Bukowski, claimed that he was ‘discredited in the eyes of the people as the key figure in the salary grab’ (Worker 1953, 1). Ironically, the council approved the increase in aldermanic salaries a few weeks later.

Roberts served for twenty months as an Independent lord mayor. Pledging to ‘navigate the civic ship between the rocks of ultra conservatism and the cliffs of excessive enthusiasm’ (Cole 1984, 166), he sought re-election as an Independent in 1955. The Labor premier, Vincent Gair, described his campaign as ‘a lot of high-minded nonsense’ (O’Dwyer 1996, 19). Roberts lost the mayoralty. At the 1956 State election he vacated his seat, where he was personally popular, to contest Gair’s seat as an Independent, but was defeated. Readmitted to the ALP in 1958, he failed to win back Nundah at the 1963 State election. The ALP executive did not endorse him for a Federal seat in 1966. The rest of his life was devoted to family, his legal practice, and honorary work for a wide range of community associations including Rotary, the Bribie Island Surf Life Saving Club, and the Nundah Aged Advocacy Centre.

Witty, intelligent, courageous, and fiercely independent, Roberts was the ‘sort of man who thinks before he speaks, and is hard to shift once he has spoken.’ In appearance he was ‘bland,’ ‘plump,’ and ‘bespectacled’ (Summers 1953, 2). On 12 August 1978 at his residence at Nundah, he married Florence Edith Schultz, née Rogers, a widow. Survived by his wife, and by the two daughters and two of the three sons of his first marriage, he died on 7 June 1992 in Brisbane and was cremated.