Allan Callaghan resigns as South Australia agriculture department head after feud with minister Glen Pearson
South Australian government agriculture department director (1949-59) Allan Callaghan worked well with agriculture ministers Gordon Jenkins (top left) and Arthur Christian (bottom left). Callaghan’s relationship broke down with the next minister Glen Pearson pictured far right in 1967 as state deputy opposition leader with future premier Steele Hall and past premier Tom Playford. They are eating apples from a boxful given by orchardist Playford to Hall on his birthday.
Allan Callaghan resigned as dynamic director of the South Australian government agriculture department in 1959 because of ill health and collapse of his relationship with the government agriculture minister Glen Pearson.
From being appointed director in 1949, Callaghan enjoyed harmonious and productive relations with his agriculture ministers. The first was George Jenkins a pastoralist and long-serving Liberal and Country League member of the Legislative Council in the South Australian parliament. He retired in 1954 and was replaced by Arthur Christian, a farmer from Kimba on Eyre Peninsula. Both Jenkins and Christian clearly admired and respected Callaghan and supported his wide-ranging ideas to change and develop the agriculture department.
When Christian died in January 1956 after suffering a heart attack while fighting a bushfire in his district, premier Thomas Playford acted in the agriculture portfolio for a few months before Glen Pearson, a farmer from Cockaleechie of southern Eyre Peninsula, became the new agriculture minister in April. Pearson was a much more ambitious politician than either of his predecessors. (He went on to become state treasurer from 1968 to 1970.)
As agriculture minister, Pearson was less willing than Jenkins or Christian to go along with Callaghan’s ideas. He may well have been influenced by Playford’s concern that Callaghan was too intent on “building new Waite Institutes”. Pearson also, as a farmer, had his own views about agriculture services, especially on the way research stations should be run.
A classic case was Pearson's refusal to approve the building of a new woolshed at Minnipa, designed to handle handle small numbers of sheep undergoing different experimental procedures and to keep separate the wool clip of each small group. When Pearson couldn’t be persuaded of the need for such a design, the issue – along with others where Pearson and Callaghan couldn’t agree – greatly frustrated Callaghan.
Another sign of the changed relationship was Pearson’s decision to move his office and small department out of agriculture building to the education building, closer to the treasury and other ministerial offices in Adelaide city.
The deteriorating relationship with Pearson, together with the increasing pressures of public life, led to Callaghan’s serious illness. He suffered from recurrent attacks of paroxysmal tachycardia, causing reduced oxygen supply to the brain and temporary collapse. With seemingly no prospect of a cure for managing this complaint in 1959, Callaghan resigned because of ill health. Relieved of the tension that had oppressed him in the later years as department director, he made a full recovery.
