The biggest crowds gathered at Castlereagh Street and Hunter Street, where platforms had been erected and the two leaders of the parties and those members of the Legislative Assembly and the Council not at their own constituencies congregated, some to urge the people to vote and others, like Charles Booker-Reid, who had not the least wish to visit his distant constituency, to enjoy the spectacle and, he trusted, the triumph. George Drummond-Smith, whose constituency was similarly remote, had also chosen to remain in the city during the whole of the campaign and was not about to leave now that victory was in sight. Henry Rothe, whose constituency was conveniently placed at Potts Point, welcomed his constituents personally with his wife at his side and enjoyed the harbour views with a glass of breakfast champagne and a jaunty wave to the occupants of the fleet of small craft that had taken to the water for the occasion. The Fraser Pykes were at Parramatta, having packed into two carriages before dawn and travelled to the west so that Fraser could urge on his own electors with the aid of his entire family, nurse and baby included. Ned Dempsey, being temporarily without an electorate, stood firmly with the anti-federalists at the busier city polling booths, offering warnings that were dire and, as the day wore on, increasingly fatalistic. His sister, who had decided she quite approved of the idea of Federation, stood beside her brother encouragingly while not actually agreeing with a single word he said. In an electorate even further west than Fraser Pyke’s the widower Everett Judd clasped the hand of each man who had come to vote, regardless of how he had voted, and thanked him and did not dwell on the fact that at every previous election his wife had stood by his side.

Alasdair Dunlevy was also at his constituency in the southwest, though his wife did not accompany him. Instead it was his secretary, Mr Greensmith, very neat today in a pinstriped suit and pale grey silk Ascot tie, who stood at his side. Volunteers from the local branch of the party had set up stages outside the largest polling stations and Mr Dunlevy was shuttled from one to the other throughout the day on a dray festooned with bunting and pulled by two horses donated by a local brewery. Spirits were high in the south-west, the public holiday and the cessation of the rain almost certainly being the cause of it, the prospect of a newly federated nation coming a distant third, and as Mr Dunlevy took to the stage some wag called out, ‘Will he speak or will he just stand there?’, for word had got around—thanks to the Herald report—that Mr Dunlevy had frozen at the Premier’s event at Bathurst. It was repeated throughout the day at each polling station he arrived at, and Mr Dunlevy suffered it with good grace, for what else could he do?