His biographer writes that George, ‘a slight, wiry child’, was sent ‘as a 5-year-old to Scotch College, Melbourne, where he remained until matriculating in 1868, failing to excel in anything the school then considered important’.

Wise stood unsuccessfully for parliament no less than five times before narrowly winning the House of Representatives seat of Gippsland in 1906, by 97 votes, standing as a Protectionist.

[1] In 1906 when George Wise when was first elected to parliament a journalist described him as ‘a small figure, [with] a picturesquely bald head, two bright and restless eyes, and a mouth with a distinctly humorous twist to it’ – and always ‘an industrious political organiser’.

Wise recalled that he got a taste for politics by watching the great democrat George Higinbotham debate in the legislative assembly in the late 1860s.

In 1887 when he was both the Mayor of Sale and the President of the Sale branch of the ANA, he told a meeting of the branch that ‘The wealthier or so-called upper classes can no longer treat the laboring and poorer classes as so much machinery to be worked at high pressure ... Man must begin to realise that his fellow man is a being like himself’.

[4] On 22 February 1917, following the events of the Australian Labor Party split of 1916, Wise announced that he would support the Nationalist government that included many of his former Protectionist colleagues.

[1] George Henry Wise helped found the Sale branch of the Australian Natives' Association (ANA) in 1886, becoming its first president, and joined the board of directors in 1887.