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'Hugh Mahon' (6 January 1857 – 28 August 1931) was an Irish-born Australian politician and a member of the first Commonwealth Parliament for the Australian Labor Party.
Mahon was born at Killurin, near Tullamore, King's County, Ireland and migrated with his family to the United States in 1867, where he learnt about printing. He returned to Ireland in about 1880 and was jailed in 1881 for political agitation along with Irish National Land League leaders including Charles Stewart Parnell, but was released due to ill-health. He migrated to Australia in 1882 to avoid re-arrest and worked for newspapers in Goulburn and Sydney, before acquiring a newspaper in Gosford. He married Mary Alice L'Estrange in 1888 and subsequently sold his newspaper to follow her back to her birthplace, Melbourne. In 1895, he moved to Coolgardie, Western Australia. Mahon, Hugh (1857 - 1931)

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Political career

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Political career

Mahon stood for unsuccessfully for the state seat of North Coolgardie in 1897, but won the new federal seat of Coolgardie in 1901 for Labor. He was postmaster-general in the Watson government in 1904 and minister for home affairs in the Fisher government of 1908-09. In 1913, the seat of Coolgardie was abolished and partly replaced by Dampier, for which he stood unsuccessfully. In November 1913, he won Kalgoorlie at a by-election. He became minister for external affairs in December 1914 until the Labor split in 1916.
Mahon lost his seat in 1917, but won in 1919. After the death of the Irish nationalist Terence McSwiney in a hunger strike in October 1920, Mahon attacked British policy in Ireland and the British Empire, referring to it as "this bloody and accursed despotism", at an open-air meeting in Melbourne on 7 November. Prime Minister Billy Hughes moved to expel him and he became the first (and so far the only) MP to be expelled from the House of Representatives by a vote of that house. He failed to win back his seat at the subsequent by-election.
After a trip to Europe and Ireland, Mahon died in 1931 at the Melbourne suburb of Ringwood, Survived by his wife and four children.

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