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ABSTRACT
Some of the most eloquent advocates of Australian Federation in the 1890s imagined that there was nothing more natural than “a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation”, as the first prime minister, Edmund Barton, put it. The reality was more complicated, as the difficult process of achieving Federation revealed. Differences between colonies, and then states, really mattered. There was a gulf between north and south, east and west that was economic, political, physical and psychological. Above all, the settler ideal of a White Australia ignored Indigenous belonging and was made meaningful only through exclusion of Asian and Pacific peoples. This lecture explores recent transformation of the nation imagined by Barton into something that would likely have dismayed him and fellow Federation founders. The pandemic reminded Australians that soft state borders could quickly turn hard, that differences between states still mattered, and that state and territory government was embedded in everyday life in ways Australians had overlooked or underestimated. Meanwhile, Indigenous sovereignty offered a different kind of challenge to conventional understandings of settler sovereignty and national space. Australians, settler and Indigenous, have received a crash course in a new political geography inhabited by First Nations peoples, each increasingly recognised by name and Country, and each with culture, language and stories it proudly calls its own.
Acknowledgements
This lecture was delivered at King's College London on 20 April 2023. The author thanks Malcolm Allbrook, Joshua Black and Emily Gallagher for their advice.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
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2 Tom Griffiths, “The Frontier Fallen,” Eureka Street, March 2003, https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article/the-frontier-fallen.
3 Callum Clayton-Dixon, Surviving New England: A History of Aboriginal Resistance & Resilience through the First Forty Years of the Colonial Apocalypse (Armidale, NSW: Anaiwan Language Revival Program, 2019), 23–24.
4 Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (London: Fontana Press, 1981), 326.
5 W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming; Black and White Australians--An Anthropologist’s View (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1969).
6 Bruce Moore, ed., The Australian National Dictionary: Australian Words and their Origins: M–Z, Second Edition (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2016), 922.
7 “Mallee (Habit),” Wikipedia, accessed 17 August 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mallee_%28habit%29; Richard Broome et al., Mallee Country: Land, People, History (Clayton, VIC: Monash University Publishing, 2019).
8 Adam McNicol et al., The Wimmera: A Journey through Western Victoria (Ballarat East: Ten Bag Press, 2021), 10.
9 Frank Bongiorno, “The Wimmera,” The Top Paddock, 30 June 2021, https://www.kcl.ac.uk/the-wimmera.
10 Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788–1930, University of Newcastle, accessed 2 April 2023, https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/detail.php?r=548.
11 Troy Bramston, Robert Menzies: The Art of Politics (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2019), 18; McNicol et al., The Wimmera, 22; Robert Kenny, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper & the Ruptured World (Carlton North, VIC: Scribe Publications, 2007); Judith Brett, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (Chippendale, NSW: Pan Macmillan Publishers, 1992), 166–67.
12 Jessica Urwin, “The British Empire’s Dr Strangelove? Ernest Titterton and the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia,” History Australia 18, no. 4 (October 2021): 714–36.
13 Robert S. Brain, Official Record of the Proceedings and Debates of the Australasia Federation Conference, 1890, Held in The Parliament House, Melbourne (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1890), 77.
14 Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, Volume Three: Nation (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2014), viii.
15 Tim Rowse, Indigenous and Other Australians since 1901 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2017), 200–12 and Tim Rowse, “Indigenous Heterogeneity,” Australian Historical Studies 45, no. 3 (September 2014): 303–7.
16 Stuart Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s (Sydney: NewSouth, 2015), 269.
17 Sir Robert Menzies, Central Power in the Australian Commonwealth: An Examination of the Growth of Commonwealth Power in the Australian Federation (London: Cassell, 1967).
18 The political history I have narrated in the foregoing paragraphs relies on Frank Bongiorno, Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia (Collingwood, VIC: La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc., 2022), chap. 4–9.
19 Alison Bashford, “At the Border: Contagion, Immigration, Nation,” Australian Historical Studies 33, no. 120 (October 2002): 344–58.
20 Mark Finnane, “Governing in a Pandemic: Law and Government in Australia, 1919,” Australian Historical Studies 53, no. 2 (April 2022): 266–83.
21 “Covid: Separated Australian Families Swap Hugs at Border on Father's Day,” BBC News, 6 September 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-58458978.
22 Donna Lu, “Is It Necessary to Close Children’s Playgrounds during Covid Outbreaks in Australia?,” Guardian, 20 August 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/20/its-risky-is-it-necessary-to-close-childrens-playgrounds-during-covid-outbreaks-in-australia.
23 Andrew Markus, Mapping Social Cohesion 2020 (Caulfield East, VIC: Scanlon Foundation, Monash University, 2020), 52, https://scanloninstitute.org.au/report2020.
24 Judith Brett, “COVID Exposed our Fractured National Identity, but State-Based Loyalties Were Rising Long Before,” The Conversation, 20 October 2021, https://theconversation.com/covid-exposed-our-fractured-national-identity-but-state-based-loyalties-were-rising-long-before-170017.
25 Rory McClaren and Stacey Pestrin, “SA Becomes First Australian Jurisdiction to Create First Nations Voice to Parliament as Historic Bill Passes,” ABC News, 26 March 2023, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-26/sa-first-jurisdiction-to-establish-voice-to-parliament/102146780.
26 Geoff Gallop, “The Federation,” in Dear Mr Rudd, ed. Robert Manne (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2008), 50.
27 But the transformation is registered in W. S. Arthur, F. Morphy, and P. L. Dodson, eds., Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia, Second Edition (Sydney: Macquarie, 2019).
28 Dominic O’Sullivan, “Treaties and Re-setting the Colonial Relationship: Lessons for Australia from the Treaty of Waitangi,” Ethnicities 21, no. 6 (202): 1070–92; Harry Hobbs and George Williams, “The Noongar Settlement: Australia’s First Treaty,” Sydney Law Review 40, no. 1 (2018): 1–38.
29 Adam Carey, “School Library Discards Outdated and Offensive Books on Colonisation,” Age, 18 February 2023, https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/school-library-discards-outdated-and-offensive-books-on-colonisation-20230216-p5cky4.html; Louise Swinn, “Getting in the Good Books at Northcote High School Library,” AEU News, 5 December 2022, https://news.aeuvic.asn.au/in-depth/getting-in-the-good-books-at-northcote-high-school-library/.
30 “Australia’s First Peoples,” Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, accessed 2 April 2023, https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/australias-first-peoples.
31 Genevieve Jacobs, “Ngambri People Challenge Government Recognition of Traditional Owners in ACT Supreme Court,” Riotact, 2 August 2022, https://the-riotact.com/ngambri-people-challenge-government-recognition-of-traditional-owners-in-act-supreme-court/580564.
32 Laura Rademaker, Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2018).
33 Emma Thompson, “Ngunnawal People Are Revitalising their Traditional Language, One Canberra Workshop at a Time,” ABC News, 11 April 2022, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-11/ngunnawal-people-determined-to-revitalise-aboriginal-language/100980558.
34 “The Killing Times,” Guardian, accessed 2 April 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/2019/mar/04/massacre-map-australia-the-killing-times-frontier-wars.
35 Tony Bennett, “Museum Transactions: Negotiating Knowledges, Governing Cultures,” Humanities Australia 9 (2018): 20.
36 Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly, Songlines: The Power and Promise (Port Melbourne: Thames & Hudson, 2020), 52; Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987).
37 Final Report of the Referendum Council (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2017), 16, https://ulurustatemdev.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Referendum_Council_Final_Report_2017.pdf.
38 Stan Grant, “Many of my Own People Tell Me They Don’t Understand the Voice,” ABC News, 19 February 2023, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-19/stan-grant-voice-to-parliament-wiradjuri-land-aboriginal-history/101992012.
39 Julia Bergin, “Forget Dutton, Alice Springs Locals Say Jacinta Nampijinpa Price Is the Real Problem,” Crikey, 14 April 2023, https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/04/14/jacinta-price-peter-dutton-alice-springs-locals/.
40 Final Report of the Referendum Council, 16.
41 Grant, “Many of my Own People”.
42 Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
43 Shaunnagh Dorsett, “Plural Legal Orders: Concept and Practice,” in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, ed. Peter Cane, Lisa Ford, and Mark McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 34.
44 Final Report of the Referendum Council, 17.