He left school at the age of 14 and worked a variety of jobs, eventually establishing a real estate agency in the Sydney suburb of Auburn.

He remained loyal to the ALP following the 1916 party split over conscription and served as state treasurer from 1920 to 1922 in the governments of John Storey and James Dooley.

In 1923, Lang replaced Dooley as state leader of the ALP, a position he would maintain for 15 years despite a confrontational and pugnacious leadership style and competing factional demands.

During the Great Depression, Lang was a key figure in the ALP split of 1931, which saw the defeat of the federal Labor government led by James Scullin.

Attributing his defeat to communists, in 1940 he formed the Australian Labor Party (Non-Communist), which achieved some electoral success but soon rejoined the official ALP in the interests of wartime unity.

His father suffered from rheumatic fever for most of Lang's childhood, and he supplemented his family's income by selling newspapers in the city on mornings and afternoons.

[3] In the mid-1880s, due to his parents' poverty, he was sent to live with his mother's sister on a small rural property near Bairnsdale, in the Gippsland region of Victoria, attending for about four years the local Catholic school.

His first jobs were in the rural areas to the south-west of Sydney: on a poultry farm at Smithfield, and then as the driver of a horse-drawn omnibus in and around Merrylands and Guildford.

"[5] During the banking crash of the 1890s which devastated Australia, Lang became interested in politics, frequenting radical bookshops and helping with newspapers and publications of the infant Labor Party, which contested its first election in New South Wales in 1891.

He was so successful that he soon set up his own real estate business in an area much in demand by working-class families looking to escape the squalor and overcrowding of the inner-city slums.

[8][9][10][11][12][13] He was elected as a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly in 1913 for the district of Granville, serving as a backbencher in the Labor Party government led by William Holman.

[14] When Prime Minister Billy Hughes twice tried to introduce conscription to the country in WWI, Lang sided with the anti-conscriptionist wing of the ALP.

[6] During his first term as Premier, Lang carried out many social programmes, including state pensions for widowed mothers with dependent children under fourteen, a universal and mandatory system of workers' compensation for death, illness and injury incurred on the job, funded by premiums levied on employers, the abolition of student fees in state-run high schools and improvements to various welfare schemes such as child endowment (which Lang's government had introduced).

Adult franchise for local government elections was also introduced, together with Legislation to safeguard native flora and to penalize ships for discharging oil.

However, his government's agenda required more political support to pass than the upper house was able to give, and Lang and the Labor party sought to eliminate what they saw as an outdated bastion of conservative privilege through this approach.

After New South Wales returned to single-member electorates, Lang was elected as the member for Auburn, a seat he held until he left state politics in 1946.

[citation needed] He passed laws restricting the rights of landlords to evict defaulting tenants, and insisted on paying the legal minimum wage to all workers on relief projects.

Lang was a powerful orator, and during the crisis of the Depression, he addressed huge crowds in Sydney and other centres, promoting his populist program and denouncing his opponents and the wealthy in extravagant terms.

Lang caused some controversy when he insisted on officially opening the bridge himself, rather than allowing the Governor, the King's representative in NSW, to do so.

Key points of the Lang Plan included the temporary cessation of interest repayments on debts to Britain and that interest on all government borrowings be reduced to 3% to free up money for injection into the economy, the cancellation of interest payments to overseas bondholders and financiers on government borrowings, the injection of more funds into the nation's money supply as central bank credit for the revitalisation of industry and commerce, and the abolition of the gold standard, to be replaced by a "Goods Standard," whereby the amount of currency in circulation would be fixed to the number of goods produced within the Australian economy.

In October 1931 Lang's followers in the federal House of Representatives crossed the floor to vote with the conservative United Australia Party and bring down the Scullin government.

Andrew Moore and Michael Cathcart, among others, have put forward the possibility that such a clash would have seen the Commonwealth Armed Forces fighting the New South Wales Police.

On 2 July 1932 Game wrote to his mother-in-law: "Still with all his faults of omission and commission I had and still have a personal liking for Lang and a great deal of sympathy for his ideals and I did not at all relish being forced to dismiss him.

In federal parliament, he is often cited as being the most effective of the opposition to the government of his old rival, Prime Minister Ben Chifley[citation needed], despite voting for the latter's Bank Act in 1947.

Lang spent his long retirement editing his newspaper The Century, and wrote several books about his political life, including The Great Bust, I Remember and The Turbulent Years.

Lang gave a number of lectures at Sydney University circa 1972–1973, at which he discussed his time in office and other topics such as economic reform.

"[22] Lang died in Auburn in September 1975, aged 98, and was commemorated with a packed house and overflowing crowds outside Sydney's St. Mary's Cathedral at his Requiem Mass and memorial service.