From that time on Hughes was the Brains of Australian Labour. He organised his industrial rough riders into a powerful and constructive union. With it he drove a wedge into the New South Wales Legislature and gave industry, for the first time, a seat in its Councils. He became its Parliamentary Voice. He was only thirty.
Having got his foot in the doorway of public life, he now jammed the portal wide open. As trade union official he forged ahead. He became the Father Confessor of the Worker. His advice always was: "Avoid violence: put your faith in the ballot box." With this creed he tamed the Labour Jungle: through it he built up an industrial legislative group that acknowledged him as chief.
Though he was rising to fame the struggle for existence was hard. No matter how late he toiled in legislative hall or union assembly, he read law when he got home. He was admitted to the bar, and despite his deafness he became an able advocate. When he had to appear in court he used a special apparatus with wire attachments that ran to the witness box and the bench and enabled him to hear everything that was going on.
He became a journalist and contributed a weekly article to the Sydney Telegraph. An amusing thing happened. He noticed that remarkable statements began to creep into his articles when published. When he complained to the editor he discovered that the linotype operator who set up his almost indecipherable copy injected his own ideas when he could not make out the stuff.
The limitation of a State Legislature irked Hughes. He beheld the vision of an Australian Commonwealth that would federate all those Overseas States. When the far-away dominions had been welded under his eloquent appeal into a close-knit Union, the fragile, deaf little man emerged as Attorney General. At last he had elbow room.
It was due to his efforts that Australia got National Service, an Officers' School, ammunition factories, military training for schoolboys. They were all part of the kindling campaign that he waged to the stirring slogan of "Defence, not Defiance."
Always the friend and champion of Labour, he was in the thick of incessant controversy. His enemies feared him: his friends adored him. He got a variety of names that ranged all the way from "Bush Robespierre" to the "Australian Abraham Lincoln."
The Great War found Hughes the Strong Man of Australia, soon to be bound up in the larger Destiny of the Empire.
Even before the Mother Country sent her call for help to the Children beyond the seas, Hughes had offered the gallant contingent that made history at the Dardanelles. Thanks to him, they were prepared. It was Hughes who sped the Anzacs on to Gallipoli: it was Hughes who, on his own responsibility, offered fifty thousand men more. These men were not in sight at the moment, but the intrepid statesman went forth that very day and started the crusade that rallied them at once.
Hughes was moving fast, but faster moved the relentless course of the war. Gallipoli's splendid failure had been recorded, the Australians stood shoulder to shoulder with their British brothers in the French trenches when the opportunity which was to make him a world citizen knocked at his door.