The gold rushes of the early 1890s saw a large increase in the colony's population and allowed for a program of public works, including the construction of Fremantle Harbour and the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme.

Forrest's government also passed a number of social reforms, maintaining power through several elections in an era before formal political parties.

[3] Forrest's parents had arrived from Scotland in December 1842, accompanying Dr John Ferguson to work as domestic servants on his farm in the newly settled district of Australind.

[3] Its success allowed William to expand his land holdings to 400 acres (160 ha) and gave the family a high social status in the small district around Bunbury.

[7] Although three of William Forrest's sons became members of parliament, he had no involvement in public life beyond a local level and was not known to hold strong political opinions.

[9] He had already been taught celestial navigation by his father,[8] and under Carey learned the basic techniques of surveying, becoming proficient in traversing and the use of surveyors' tools, including Gunter's chains, prismatic compasses, sextants, and transit theodolites.

Forrest's team accompanied this group in a more northerly direction, but after a week of travelling it became clear that their destination was Poison Rock, where the explorer Robert Austin was known to have left eleven of his horses for dead in 1854.

Having found no evidence of Leichhardt's fate, and Mungaro having changed his story and admitted that he had not personally visited the site, they decided to push as far eastwards as they could on their remaining supplies.

[15] Forrest's brief was to provide a proper survey of the route, which might be used in future to establish a telegraph link between the colonies and also to assess the suitability of the land for pasture.

Forrest's team consisted of six men his brother Alexander was second in charge, Police constable Hector Neil McLarty, farrier William Osborn, trackers Tommy Windich and Billy Noongale (Kickett); 15 horses.

As a result, his party successfully completed in five months a journey that had taken Eyre twelve and arrived in good health and without the loss of a single horse.

[15] In August 1872, Forrest was invited to lead a third expedition, from Geraldton to the source of the Murchison River and then east through the uncharted centre of Western Australia to the overland telegraph line from Darwin to Adelaide.

Under the direction of the brilliant engineer C. Y. O'Connor, many thousands of miles of railway were laid, and many bridges, jetties, lighthouses and town halls were constructed.

He invited further criticism in 1893 with his infamous "spoils to the victors" speech, in which he appeared to assert that members who opposed the government were putting at risk their constituents' access to their fair share of public works.

Forrest's government also implemented a number of social reforms, including measures to improve the status of women, young girls and wage-earners.

In 1893, Forrest guided through parliament a number of significant amendments to the Constitution of Western Australia, including an extension of the franchise to all men regardless of property ownership.

He also had a significant role in repealing section 70 of that constitution, which had provided that 1% of public revenue should be paid to a Board (not under local political control) for the welfare of Indigenous people, and was "widely hated" by the colonists.

There he opposed the transfer of postal and telegraphic services to the projected Commonwealth as an "absurdity", and declared only a "lunatic" would want the federal capital located in the interior of the country.

Two days later, he received news that he had been made a GCMG "in recognition of services in connection with the Federation of Australian Colonies and the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia".

In that portfolio, he resolutely pressed the ill-starred project to site the national capital at Dalgety, despite having previously dismissed any location within Australia's interior as lunacy.

[35] Forrest would have been the first Australian peer, and the announcement was received critically from those opposed to the granting of hereditary honours, including many of Hughes' former ALP colleagues.

[40] His death occasioned the 1918 Swan by-election, which saw the 22-year-old ALP candidate Edwin Corboy become Australia's youngest member of parliament, a record not broken until 2010.

His upbringing and education were said by his biographer, F. K. Crowley, to have installed in him "a heady compound of social snobbery, laissez-faire capitalism, sentimental royalism, patriotic Anglicanism, benevolent imperialism and racial superiority".

[citation needed] However, as reported in The Ballarat Star on 12 July 1907, Forrest defended the use of neckchains to restrain enslaved indigenous captives, saying "Chaining aborigines by the neck is the only effective way of preventing their escape.

[43] He further described Aboriginal people in an 1892 address to the National History Society as "in the same category as Marsupialia in having a very low degree of intelligence", but was impressed with their complex traditions and hoped they would be recorded before the race "died out".

[44] In 1890, he submitted an anthropological paper on marriage in north-west Australia to the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, along with "a brief appeal to preserve the Aboriginal race and its culture from extinction".

[45] A study by Elizabeth Goddard and Tom Stannage of Forrest's public statements on Aboriginal people concluded that he was "locked into and promoted an ideology of development which had racism at its heart".

In 1893, on the topic of massacres, he stated that "I must not, in the position I am in, do anything or sanction anything that will lead to the impression that an indiscriminate slaughter of blackfellows will be tolerated or allowed by the government of the colony".

[51] In 1889 he had persuaded the Executive Council to commute a death sentence imposed on an Aboriginal man in Roebourne, who had been convicted of murder for a killing under customary law.

[48] Forrest's government nevertheless introduced harsher penalties for Aboriginal people caught stealing or killing livestock, including flogging and imprisonment.