Let us, thankfully, ignore our boring MPs and tell of a far more entertaining MP from the past — Henry Manders. A member of a wealthy Dublin brewing family, he was born in London in 1829 and attended Rugby School. By the 1850s he was in Australia, married with three children, but alone when he turned up in Queenstown in 1862, becoming a regular contributor to the Lake Wakatip Mail . His contributions included material which in May 1875 led prominent businessman Denis Powell to accost him in Ballarat St, "assaulting and beating him with his fists and kicking and horsewhipping him". Elected as MP in 1876, Manders opened himself to ridicule by endorsing Slesinger’s Balsam in advertising which ran for months, "the vial you gave me proved most efficacious in curing chronic attacks of lumbago".…