Sir Harry Sutherland Wightman Lawson KCMG (5 March 1875 – 12 June 1952), was an Australian politician who served as Premier of Victoria from 1918 to 1924. He later entered federal politics, serving as a Senator for Victoria from 1929 to 1935, and was briefly a minister in the Lyons Government. He was a member of the Nationalist Party until 1931, when it was subsumed into the United Australia Party. Early life Lawson was born in Dunolly, the son of a Presbyterian clergyman of Scottish descent. He was educated at a local school and then, briefly, at Scotch College in Melbourne. He was a noted Australian rules footballer, playing for Castlemaine. He studied law with a Melbourne law firm and was called to the bar. He began a practice in Castlemaine, and was elected to the town council, serving as mayor in 1905. In 1901, he married Olive Horwood, with whom he had eight children. State politics In a by-election in December 1899, Lawson was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly for Castlemaine as a Liberal, and represented the district, in its different incarnations, for 28 years. In June 1904, he was elected to the new Electoral district of Castlemaine and Maldon, holding the seat until a redistribution in 1927, when he was elected as member for Castlemaine and Kyneton. Lawson was President of the Board of Land and Works in the government of William Watt from 1913 to 1915, and Attorney-General and Solicitor-General in the government of Alexander Peacock from 1915 to 1917. He remained loyal to Peacock when most country Liberal members supported John Bowser's rural faction, the Economy Party. When Bowser's short-lived government ended with his resignation in March 1918, Lawson succeeded him, also holding the portfolios of Attorney-General and Minister of Labour. Lawson became the longest-serving premier Victoria had seen, holding office for six continuous years, something none of his 26 predecessors had done. That was despite the further fragmentation of the non-Labor vote with the emergence of the Country Party. At the 1921 elections, Lawson's Nationalist Party won 30 seats, to Labor's 20 and the Country Party's 13. Both Labor and the Country Party preferred Lawson to each other, so Lawson was able to survive as a minority Premier. He was helped by Labor's continuing inability to win seats outside its strongholds in the industrial suburbs of Melbourne and a few provincial towns. The biggest