Richard Edwards (Australian politician)

Richard Edwards was born in 1842 in Montgomeryshire, Wales. He migrated to Australia in 1862, becoming first a goldminer in Victoria and then a shopkeeper in Brisbane. He invested in both sugar and newspapers. Elizabeth Munro Edwards (née Gibson) was born in Scotland on 11 May 1840 and came to Australia with her parents, Thomas Gibson and Christina Thompson in 1864. Three years later she married Richard. Interested in politics also, she hosted the first women's suffrage league in Brisbane in 1889, and was appointed as the Government representative to a Royal Commission on working conditions in Shops and Factories. She was active in the Early Closing Movement.^{[citation needed]}

In the first federal election in 1901, Edwards was elected to the Australian House of Representatives as the member for Oxley. Although there was no protectionist organisation in Queensland, he described himself as such and sat with the Protectionist Party in Parliament. In 1906, he defected to the Anti-Socialist Party and, after the fusion of the Protectionist Party and the Anti-Socialist Party in 1909, he was a Liberal member.^{[citation needed]}