Doug Anthony, former Nationals leader and deputy prime minister, dies aged 90

Australia's longest-serving deputy prime minister, Doug Anthony, has died at the age of 90.

Mr Anthony led the Country-turned-National party for 13 years.

His family has confirmed the former farmer died this morning at a nursing home.

He is survived by his wife Margot, their three children and nine grandchildren.

Mr Anthony's career began as a dairy farmer in his home town of Murwillumbah, in the Tweed Valley in northern New South Wales.

Politics was in his blood and a young Mr Anthony spent his childhood accompanying his father, Hubert Lawrence "Larry" Anthony — a minister under Menzies — on trips to Canberra where they stayed at the Kurrajong hotel.

Those occasions meant he became acquainted with political giants like Earl Page and Labor war-time prime minister John Curtin.

"The person I liked the most was Curtin," he told the ABC in 2014.

His father died suddenly when Mr Anthony was 27 years old and it was then that he, somewhat reluctantly, agreed to leave his full-time job on the farm and run for the seat of Richmond.

He won that by-election in 1957 and was quickly groomed for the leadership. In the same year he married his wife, Margot.

By 1964, Mr Anthony had been appointed Minister for the Interior and three years later became Minister for Primary Industry.

He was known as an approachable, relatively relaxed politician, who was often portrayed in the media as a bit of a country bumpkin.

"I loved it, that was me," he told the ABC's Heather Ewart in her 2014 documentary Country Road.

Flexing political muscle

But he was also a fierce political operator and renowned for never taking a back seat as the junior coalition partner.

Together with Ian Sinclair and Peter Nixon, he fought battles on numerous fronts. The three men built a reputation as the "Troika".

"We weren't timid and if we had to fight we would fight … we tried to be reasonable, but we weren't going to take any nonsense from anybody either," Doug Anthony recalled in his eighties.

The three men first flexed their political muscle in the early 1970s, when former prime minister Billy McMahon was pushing to increase the value of the Australian dollar.

Fearing the plan would hurt rural exports, they stormed out of cabinet three times and considered leaving the coalition.

"We were prepared to stand up to him and we were a pretty powerful group, the three of us together."

Doug Anthony tackled the big farming issues of wool and wheat and publicly lambasted Britain in the early 1970's when it left Aussie farmers high and dry by joining the common market.

As trade minister, he travelled to London for what became a fiery meeting with his British counterpart.

"Here we were, their best friend they'd ever had. We'd sent our forces to Gallipoli, we'd sent our forces to France. The second war we came along and gave all the support possible," Mr Anthony fumed decades later.

"And yet here, after supplying you with about 15 years of food at a concessional price, you go and dump us!"

To fill the gap, he pursued trade deals in Asia and the Middle East and strengthened Australia's ties with Japan.

And he helped Malcolm Fraser bring down Gough Whitlam at the 1975 federal election in a landslide victory that became the biggest majority in Australian history.

Doug's Dynasty

Doug Anthony's son, Larry, carried on the family tradition by serving in the seat of Richmond for three terms. But Mr Anthony did not ever like to call it a "dynasty".

"I've got no great ambitions. I never have had any great ambitions. But I suppose I like responsibility, yes, I respond to responsibility."

Mr Anthony preferred to stay out of the limelight in his later years, choosing to spend time with his wife, Margot, on the family farm.