INAUGURAL INDUCTION CLASS (2021)

Prince Leonard was born Leonard George Casley in 1925 in rural Western Australia. As a child, Casley would only complete elementary education, leaving school to work on the family farm. This would be a lifelong profession, with only a brief break to serve in the Borneo campaign of World War II.

In 1970, the government of Australia attempted to artificially inflate the price of wheat by limiting the amount that farms could sell. These quotas would only allow Casley to offload roughly 1% of his farm’s ready wheat harvest. After numerous appeals to both local and federal government to reverse this and other decisions he felt were crippling his livelihood, Casley decided he had enough.

The Hutt River Province declared independence from Australia on 21 April 1970. Regarded as both protest and an attempt to retain control over his livelihood, the newly declared Prince immediately began selling his wheat, defying Australian quotas.

Prince Leonard was known for engaging in tactics aimed at solidifying his claim to sovereignty. While most yielded failure, there was the occasional success. Numerous correspondences from officials citing him as the Head of Hutt River exist, including one on behalf of Queen Elizabeth of England in 2006. The Shire of Northampton listed Hutt River as “the site of Australia’s only independent principality” in 2005.

Under his rule, Hutt River became a tourist destination while issuing stamps, passports, and currency. It has been the subject of scholarly debate, academic papers, and books. Both Prince Leonard and the nation renamed the Principality of Hutt River in 2005 were pioneers of micronationalism and are often regarded as a quintessential presence in the field. The Prince himself has become one of a small number of figures that are widely seen as faces of micronationalism.

Prince Leonard has been lauded for setting an example on the importance of documenting nearly every aspect of a project’s existence. While regarded to be lacking in design, the website for Hutt River was known to be a treasure trove of publicly accessible documents on the nation’s dealings, both internal and external.

While not something he is generally praised for, Prince Leonard’s defiance of Australian taxes has generated important academic debates within the micronational community on sovereignty versus running afoul of local macro-national government. During Prince Leonard’s reign, he amassed roughly three million Australian dollars in unpaid taxes. This is a matter that plagued his reign, and frequently landed him in court battles. The Hutt River example has led to a commonplace behavior among leading micronations where taxes are paid under the visage of “foreign aid.”

Prince Leonard abdicated the throne in 2017, after a 45-year reign, to his son Graeme. He would live out the rest of his life quietly, passing away in 2019 at the age of 88. While the nation’s dissolution in 2020 is part of a larger trend of projects failing to survive their founder, the impact of Prince Leonard on the field or micronationalism cannot be understated.