McEwen ceded power to John Gorton after 23 days in office in January 1968, and in recognition of his service was appointed deputy prime minister, the first time that position had been formally created.

[4] McEwen attended state schools in Wangaratta and Dandenong until the age of thirteen, when he began working for Rocke, Tompsitt & Co., a drug manufacturer in central Melbourne.

[6] He passed the entrance exam, but instead chose to enlist as a private in the Australian Imperial Force, in order to be posted overseas sooner.

He and the other soldier-settlers in the Stanhope district suffered a number of hardships in the early 1920s, including droughts, rabbit plagues, and low milk prices.

[9] In 1926, McEwen sold his property and bought a larger farm nearby, which he named Chilgala (a portmanteau of Chiltern and Tongala, the birthplaces of himself and his wife).

[18] In 1936, following the Privy Council's ruling in James v Commonwealth, McEwen moved in parliament that the constitution be amended to allow for the federal government to legislate on the marketing of agricultural products.

[20] He rose rapidly within the parliamentary Country Party and narrowly failed to win the deputy leadership after the 1937 election, losing to Harold Thorby by a single vote on the second ballot.

In response, he issued a statement denying the legitimacy of his expulsion and stating it was instead because he had been "too powerful in opposing the ambitions of the radical element in control of the Victorian central council".

His parliamentary colleague Thomas Paterson resigned from the Victorian Country Party in solidarity, with he and McEwen re-elected with the support of the LCP at the 1940 election.

[26] Page resigned as Country Party leader following the outbreak of World War II, in order to facilitate the resumption of a coalition government with the UAP.

[27] McEwen contested the resulting leadership ballot on 13 September 1939, losing by seven votes to five to South Australian MP Archie Cameron.

[29] Only a few weeks after his election, McEwen joined three other Country Party MPs in crossed the floor to support an ALP amendment to a bill on conscientious objectors.

[29] Following the resumption of the coalition with the UAP, McEwen was appointed Minister for External Affairs in the second Menzies ministry on 14 March 1940.

[32] Fadden had been acting in the portfolios for several months following the death of James Fairbairn, who had been one of three government ministers killed in the Canberra air disaster in August 1940.

In August 1941 he despatched Richard Williams to London to establish RAAF Overseas Headquarters, with the aim of securing greater Australian input in decision-making.

[citation needed] Beginning in the early 1950s, McEwen and his departmental secretary John Crawford played a key role in the normalisation and acceleration of the Australia–Japan trade relationship.

[44] The resumption of trade after the war was politically sensitive, due both to lingering anti-Japanese sentiment – including from several of McEwen's parliamentary colleagues who had been prisoners-of-war – and concerns from Australian manufacturers over the cheaper cost of labour in Japan.

[45] McEwen came to see the resumption of trade with Japan as important for Australian producers, as Australia sought new markets outside the existing framework of Imperial Preference.

[46] McEwen first put forward a cabinet proposal to enter into trade negotiations with Japan in July 1953, which was rejected although an accompanying recommendation to liberalise restrictions on Japanese imports was accepted.

[49] After years of negotiations, McEwen and his Japanese counterpart Kishi Nobusuke signed the Japan–Australia Commerce Agreement in July 1957, with each country conferring most favoured nation status on the other and Australia providing a commitment to revoke its Article 35 exception.

[45] In 1973, the Japanese government awarded McEwen the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, making him only the second Australian politician after Edmund Barton to receive the honour.

He and his party favoured interventionist economic policies and were opposed to foreign ownership of industrial assets, which placed him frequently at odds with his Liberal colleagues.

[61] McEwen's most serious disagreement with Holt came in November 1967, when it was announced that Australia – which had converted to decimal currency the previous year – would not follow the recent devaluation of the pound sterling.

McEwen contended that if Casey commissioned a Liberal as interim prime minister, it would give that person an undue advantage in the upcoming ballot for a full-time leader.

[citation needed] Another key factor in McEwen's antipathy towards McMahon was hinted at soon after the crisis by the veteran political journalist Alan Reid.

[citation needed] According to Reid, McEwen was aware that McMahon was habitually breaching Cabinet confidentiality and regularly leaking information to favoured journalists and lobbyists, including Maxwell Newton, who had been hired as a "consultant" by Japanese trade interests.

[citation needed] Gorton created the formal title deputy prime minister for McEwen, confirming his status as the second-ranking member of the government.

In his memoir, he recalls his career as being "long and very, very hard", and turned back to managing 1,800 head of cattle on his property in Goulburn Valley.

)[20] On 26 July 1968, McEwen married Mary Eileen Byrne, his personal secretary for 15 years, at Wesley Church, Melbourne; he was aged 68, she was 46.

The pain became unbearable in later years, and he began refusing food in order to hasten his death; he died of self-imposed starvation on 20 November 1980, aged 80.