He was the eldest of the nine children of James Cook, a private in the Waikato Militia and later a failed farmer, originally from Walsall, England, and his wife Janet Mair, from Rutherglen, Scotland.

Hume Cook’s schooling was limited by his family’s poverty; in his teens in Melbourne he worked with his father, a semi-skilled tradesman, then set out on his own selling real estate in 1887.

In his reminiscences Hume Cook declared that he owed ‘almost everything’ to the ANA,[2] and certainly the association gave him an education in both practical and ideological politics.

[3] He became an accomplished if somewhat verbose lecturer, much in demand in both city and country branches; thus in ‘a crowded meeting’ in Castlemaine he ‘for an hour and a half riveted the attention of the audience’[4] He also gained fame as a singer of sentimental songs.

[1] Hume Cook won the Australian House of Representatives seat of Bourke at the first federal election in 1901 as a Protectionist and a supporter of Alfred Deakin,.

‘Between 1905 and 1908 he was party whip, cabinet secretary and honorary minister ... experiences he thought much less interesting than his rescue by the police from an armed lunatic who had invaded his parliamentary office’.