Federation, Democracy and the Struggle against a Single Australia

Abstract

One of the essential characteristics of modern nationhood is singularity. There is one Australia, with one story, one foundation, one destiny and one face to the world at large. However, singularity limits good history. It makes a particularly strong impact on our understanding of those episodes which seem to be crucial turning points in the history of the nation, including in Australia's case the period of federation and World War One. Good accounts of that period, and thus of the whole Australian experience, depend on avoiding the seductions of singularity, and the impact on scholarship of ‘the lethal chimera of the modern nation-state’.

Notes

¹Peter Carey, ‘“Robert Hughes was Australia's Dante”, says his friend Peter Carey’, guardian.co.uk, 7 August 2012; Sydney Morning Herald, News Review section, 11–12 August 2012, 7; Age, News Review section, 11–12 August 2012, 7.

²Jack P. Greene, ‘Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem’, William and Mary Quarterly 64 (2007): 235.

³Jack P. Greene, ‘Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem’, William and Mary Quarterly 64 (2007), 243–4.

⁴Jack P. Greene, ‘Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem’, William and Mary Quarterly 64 (2007), 248.

⁵Maya Jasanoff, ‘The Other Side of Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire’, William and Mary Quarterly 65 (2008): 206, 207.

⁶E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1968), 13.

⁷See, for instance, Robin L. Einhorn, ‘The Nation Is Already There’, William and Mary Quarterly 64 (2007): 275–80.

⁸Bernhard Wise, The Commonwealth of Australia (London: Pitman, 1913; 1st edn 1910), 170.

⁹David Shulman, ‘The Revenge of the East?’, New York Review of Books, 11–24 October 2012, 30.

¹⁰Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and see Libby Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007).

¹¹James Boyce, Van Diemen's Land (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2008); Alan Atkinson, ‘Tasmania and the Multiplicity of Nations’, Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings 52 (2005): 189–200.

¹²Peter Gibbons, ‘Cultural Colonization and National Identity’, New Zealand Journal of History 36 (2002): 6, 8–9, 15. Gibbons cites Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Quebec: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989), 14.

¹³Note especially the debate ensuing on R. S. Parker, ‘Australian Federation: The Influence of Economic Interests and Political Pressures’, Historical Studies 13 (1949): 1–24.

¹⁴B. K. de Garis, ‘1890–1900’, in A New History of Australia, ed. F. K. Crowley (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1974), 251–3.

¹⁵Russel Ward, A Nation for a Continent (Melbourne: Heinemann Educational Australia, 1977); Stephen Alomes, A Nation at Last: The Changing Character of Australian Nationalism, 1880–1988 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1988); Noel McLachlan, Waiting for the Revolution: A History of Australian Nationalism (Melbourne: Penguin, 1989). Manning Clark's History of Australia (6 vols, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1962–99) developed the same approach after the third volume (1979).

¹⁶Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: A History of Australian Feminism (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999), 51.

¹⁷Bernhard Ringrose Wise, The Making of the Australian Commonwealth, 1880–1900: A Stage in the Growth of the Empire (London: Longmans, Green, 1913), 236.

¹⁸J. A. Cockburn, speech, 3 April 1891, Official Report of the National Australasian Convention Debates, Sydney, 2 March to 9 April 1891 (Sydney: Acting Government Printer, 1891), 712.

¹⁹John Hirst, ‘Empire, State, Nation’, in Australia's Empire (a volume of the Oxford History of the British Empire: Companion Series), ed. Deryck M. Schreuder and Stuart Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 152, 153.

²⁰Cockburn, speech, 3 April 1891, 707–8; Western Champion, 5 September 1899, 5; Bernhard Ringrose Wise, The Making of the Commonwealth, 236; Helen Irving, ‘New South Wales’, Geoffrey Bolton and Duncan Waterson, ‘Queensland’, Marian Quartly, ‘Victoria’, in The Centenary Companion to Australian Federation, ed. Helen Irving (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 66–7, 96, 229.

²¹Charles Powers, speech, 9 July 1890, Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 61, 186.

²²A. I. Clark, speech, 11 February 1890, Official Record of the Proceedings and Debates of the Australasian Federation Conference, 1890 (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1890), 107.

²³A. I. Clark, speech, 1 April 1891, Official Report of the National Australasian Convention Debates, Sydney, 2 March to 9 April 1891, 546.

²⁴Arthur Rutledge, speech, 9 March 1891, and Cockburn, speech, 3 April 1891, Official Report of the National Australasian Convention Debates, Sydney, 2 March to 9 April 1891, 145, 712.

²⁵J. H. Gordon, speech, 30 March 1897, Official Reports of the National Australasian Convention Debates: First Session (Adelaide: Government Printer, 1897), 317.

²⁶William Russell, speech, 5 March 1891, Official Report of the National Australasian Convention Debates, Sydney, 2 March to 9 April 1891, 64.

²⁸Rose Scott, draft speech, n.d. [1898], Mitchell Library (hereafter ML) MSS 38/27, 3, 5–8.

²⁷Judith A. Allen, Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994).

²⁹Allen, Rose Scott, 146–8.

³⁰David Walker, ‘Youth on Trial: The Mt Rennie Rape Case’, Labour History 50 (May 1986): 28–41; Jill Bavin-Mizzi, Ravished: Sexual Violence in Victorian Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1990), 54, 56–7.

³¹Lake, Getting Equal, 29.

³³Rose Scott, notes on the Australasian Federation Enabling Bill, June 1899, and notes, n.d., ML MSS 38/27, 165.

³²Lake, Getting Equal, 55–6; Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (London: Phoenix, 2005), 321–59. I am grateful to Dugald McLellan for this last reference.

³⁴Rose Scott, notes, n.d., ML MSS 38/27, 292.

³⁵Stuart Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991), 9–10.

³⁶Rose Scott, draft speech, n.d. [1898], ML MSS38/27, 88.

³⁷Lake, Getting Equal, 20.

³⁸T. F. Holder, speech, 26 March 1897, Official Reports of the National Australasian Convention Debates: First Session, 144.

³⁹Rose Scott, literary notes, n.d., ML MSS 38/26, 390; Rose Scott, draft speech, n.d. [1897], ML MSS 38/27, 179. It is not clear that Jefferson used these precise words, but the idea runs through his writing. See, for example, Wai-chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 38. Lake similarly makes it clear for the post-federation period that feminists were not merely concerned with women; see Lake, Getting Equal, 50.

⁴⁰John Murray, speech, Legislative Assembly, 14 July 1891, Victorian Parliamentary Debates 66 (1891–2), 379; Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1994), 192.

⁴¹Isabel McCorkindale, ed., Torch-Bearers: The Women's Christian Temperance Union of South Australia, 1886–1948 (Adelaide: Women's Christian Temperance Union of SA, 1949), 55–6; Audrey Oldfield, Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or a Struggle? (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1992), 28–30; Lake, Getting Equal, 23–7.

⁴²Lake, Getting Equal, 49–51.

⁴³Scott, notes, n.d., ML MSS 38/24, 196–7, and June 1899, 38/27, 413.

⁴⁴Helen Irving, ‘A Gendered Constitution? Women, Federation and Heads of Power’, in A Woman's Constitution? Gender and History in the Australian Commonwealth, ed. Helen Irving (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1996), 106.

⁴⁵Various speeches, 27 January 1898, Official Record of the Debates of the Australasian Federal Convention: Third Session (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1898), 187–90.

⁴⁶Sir Samuel Walker Griffith, Notes on Australian Federation: Its Nature and Probable Effects (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1896), 30. For colonial nationhood, see Anne Coote, ‘Imagining a Colonial Nation: The Development of Popular Concepts of Sovereignty and Nation in New South Wales between 1856 and 1860’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 1 (1999): 1–37; Anne Coote, ‘Out from the Legend's Shadow: Re-thinking National Feeling in Colonial Australia’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 10 (2008): 103–22.

⁴⁷C. H. Grant and Sir John Downer, speeches, 22 September 1897, Official Record of the Debates of the Australasian Federal Convention: Second Session (Sydney: Government Printer, 1897), 1083–4.

⁴⁸B. R. Wise, speech, 22 September 1897, Official Record of the Debates of the Australasian Federal Convention: Second Session, 1079; Edmund Barton, speech, 7 March 1898, Official Record of the Debates of the Australasian Federal Convention: Third Session, 1992–3.

⁴⁹J. H. Carruthers, speech, 22 September 1897, Official Record of the Debates of the Australasian Federal Convention: Second Session, 1082.

⁵⁰J. H. Symon, speech, 22 September 1897, Official Record of the Debates of the Australasian Federal Convention: Second Session, 1083.

⁵¹Laurence Gronlund, The Co-operative Commonwealth: An Exposition of Modern Socialism (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1884); Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000–1887 (Toronto: William Bryce, 1887).

⁵²William Morris, News from Nowhere (or An Epoch of Rest) (first published in serial form, Commonweal: The Official Journal of the Socialist League, London, 11 January–15 November 1890).

⁵³David Mack, The Village Settlements on the Murray in South Australia 1894–1909: A Chronicle of Communal Life and Hardship (Adelaide: D. B. Mack, 1994), 3–5.

⁵⁴Elsie Birks to Blanche Vivian, 5 October 1894, Elsie Birks Papers, State Library of South Australia, D2861; Mack, 44–52.

⁵⁵William McMillan, speech, 12 February 1890, Official Record of the Proceedings and Debates of the Australasian Federation Conference, 1890, 53.

⁵⁶ Sydney Morning Herald, 6 September 1892, 6.

⁵⁷George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study in Provincial Life (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1871).

⁵⁸Rose Scott, ‘A Reply to Mrs Gilmore’, n.d., ML MSS 38/26, 67.

⁵⁹Rose Scott, draft speech, n.d. [1899], ML MSS 38/27, 35.

⁶⁰ Bulletin, 3 November 1888, 4; Marilyn Lake, ‘The Politics of Respectability Identifying the Masculinist Context’, Historical Studies 22 (1986), 116–31.

⁶¹ Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 3 May 1899, 4. For common sense, see Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 73–93.

⁶²‘A Young Women’ to the editor of the Empire, 16 July 1860, in Anon., ‘Women in Politics: “If it is such a bad thing, what is the reason there is so much said about it?”’, Push from the Bush 25 (April 1988): 65–6.

⁶³Alexander Clark, inspector's report, 16 March 1886, Report of the Minister controlling Education, 1885, p. 11, Parliamentary Papers of South Australia, 1886, 2; Alexander Clark, inspector's report, n.d., Report 1898, p. 14, Parliamentary Papers of South Australia, 1899, 2.

⁶⁴Mary Gilmore, Old Days, Old Ways: A Book of Recollections (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1934), 217.

⁶⁵Mrs Lance Rawson, Australian Enquiry Book (Melbourne: Pater & Knapton, 1894), 30, 37, 40; Mrs Lance Rawson, The Antipodean Cookery Book and Kitchen Companion (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1907; first published 1895), 54–6.

⁶⁶ Queenslander, 10 January 1891, 54.

⁶⁷Clifford Geertz, ‘Common Sense as a Cultural System’, in Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 73–93; Grace Karskens, The Colony (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009); Meg Vivers, ‘Female Perspectives: A Study of the Colonial Texts of Adelaide Bowler and Lucy Gray’ (PhD thesis, University of New England, 2008); James Drown, ‘An Apparatus of Empire: The Construction of Official Geographic Knowledge in the Survey Departments of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land 1788–1836’ (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2012).

⁶⁸Greene, 249.

⁶⁹Alfred Deakin to Rose Scott, 14 January, 20 February, 10 May 1907, ML MSS A2281.