Medical Practitioner and Politician
Nott returned to Australia and took part in the campaign against hookworm and then was appointed medical superintendent of Mackay District Hospital. From 1924 to 1927 he was mayor of Mackay. In 1925 he won the seat of Herbert, then including Mackay and Townsville, in Federal Parliament for the Nationalist Party. In this contest he unexpectedly defeated the Australian Labor Party candidate Ted Theodore, who had resigned as Premier of Queensland in order to enter federal politics (he had to wait for a by-election in 1927 in a Sydney seat before he was successful). In 1928 Nott lost the seat to the Labor candidate, George Martens. He ran unsuccessfully in North Sydney (1929), Calare (1934) and East Sydney (1940).
Nott moved to Canberra in 1927, the year that it became the national capital. In 1929 he was appointed Medical Superintendent of the Canberra Hospital and held this position until 1934 and from 1941 to 1949. He was also a private practitioner throughout this period.
He campaigned for the creation of an advisory council for the Federal Capital Territory (in 1938 renamed the Australian Capital Territory, ACT) and was elected as a member of the council from 1935 to 1949. In 1949, he was elected as an independent as the first representative of the Division of Australian Capital Territory in the Federal Parliament, where he had unlimited speaking rights but could only vote on matters affecting the ACT. His break in parliamentary service of 21 years (1928–1949) is a record for the Australian parliament. He was one of only five people who have represented more than one state or territory in the House of Representatives, and the only one to represent both a state and a territory.
He was defeated by the Labor candidate Jim Fraser in the 1951 election. He was subsequently appointed as medical officer at the Newborough Clinic, Yallourn, Victoria, but collapsed on the flight to Melbourne and died the next day of leukemia in Royal Melbourne Hospital and is buried in the Presbyterian Section of the Woden Cemetery, Canberra.
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