Owen Sinclair (13 November 1862 – 17 June 1927) was an Australian politician. He was a member of the

Victorian Legislative Assembly The Victorian Legislative Assembly is the lower house of the bicameral Parliament of Victoria in Australia; the upper house being the Victorian Legislative Council. Both houses sit at Parliament House in Spring Street, Melbourne. The presiding ...

from 1915 to 1917, representing

Port Melbourne Port Melbourne is an inner-city suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, south-west of Melbourne's Central Business District, located within the Cities of Melbourne and Port Phillip local government areas. Port Melbourne recorded a populatio ...

for the

Australian Labor Party The Australian Labor Party (ALP), also simply known as Labor, is the major centre-left political party in Australia, one of two major parties in Australian politics, along with the centre-right Liberal Party of Australia. The party forms the f ...

and then as an independent. He was born in

to sugar boiler Charles Sinclair and Sarah Duff. He worked as a glassblower, for the Victorian Railways and as a tobacconist in Bay Street, Port Melbourne. On 27 December 1887 he married Emma Margaret Hudson, with whom he had three children. In 1894, he pled guilty to charges associated with running an illegal betting operation out of his tobacconist shop and was fined. In 1915, the ''Port Melbourne Standard'' wrote that he was "by trade a flint glass maker" but did "not now follow that calling, as he is a man of independent means". Sinclair had a long and prominent involvement in community and sporting roles in the Port Melbourne area. He served on Port Melbourne City Council from 1906 until his death, but reportedly declined the mayoralty as it came with an expectation of appointment as justice of the peace, and Sinclair did not wish to pass sentence on people. He was also a commissioner of the Melbourne Harbour Trust and member of the Melbourne Tramway Trust, chairman of Nott Street State School committee, and captain of the local fire brigade for many years, in which capacity he was seriously burned in an 1885 explosion at the Forresters Arms Hotel. Sinclair was also a keen sportsman, being a successful cricketer and footballer at local level, founder and trustee of the Port Melbourne Swimming Club, and for 17 years was a delegate of the

Port Melbourne Football Club The Port Melbourne Football Club, nicknamed The Borough, is an Australian rules football club based in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Port Melbourne. The club was founded in 1874 and has been competing in the Victorian Football Association/Leag ...

to the

Victorian Football Association The Victorian Football League (VFL) is an Australian rules football league in Australia serving as one of the second-tier regional semi-professional competitions which sit underneath the fully professional Australian Football League (AFL). It ...

, becoming a life member of the Association. In 1915, Sinclair was elected unopposed to the

as the endorsed Labor candidate in a by-election for the seat of

following the death of MP

George Sangster George Sangster is a Dutch ornithologist. He specialises in taxonomy and has written many articles on this subject for the magazines Dutch Birding ''Dutch Birding'', originally subtitled ''Journal of the Dutch Birding Association'', and curren ...

. He lost Labor preselection for the 1917 election to James Murphy, then resigned from the party in an unsuccessful bid for re-election as an independent. He later unsuccessfully contested the 1920 election as a "Democratic" candidate on a platform of free medical services for the poor, having the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court fill the role of Governor to save money, state-controlled railway works and granaries, free primary, secondary and tertiary education and the abolition of the Legislative Council. Sinclair died at his home in Graham Street, Port Melbourne, in 1927 and was buried at the

Melbourne General Cemetery The Melbourne General Cemetery is a large (43 hectare) necropolis located north of the city of Melbourne in the suburb of Carlton North. The cemetery is notably the resting place of four Prime Ministers of Australia, more than any other nec ...

. Flags were flown at half-mast at Victorian Football Association games that weekend, and a memorial tablet was later installed at the

Port Melbourne Town Hall The Port Melbourne Town Hall was erected in 1882. The Town Hall is an important element in the historic Bay Street streetscape of inner city Port Melbourne. After the amalgamation of the City of Port Melbourne with the City of South Melbourne ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sinclair, Owen 1862 births 1927 deaths Australian Labor Party members of the Parliament of Victoria Independent members of the Parliament of Victoria Members of the Victorian Legislative Assembly Colony of Victoria people