Anzac, Empire and War: Australian Nationalism and the Campaign for Imperial Federation

Abstract

While Federation in 1901 failed to lodge in the popular imagination, Australians widely embraced the idea that their nation was born at Gallipoli during World War I. Despite its subsequent ubiquity, the form of nationalism that spawned the legend of martial birth was not the only kind that had currency during World War I. This article traces the ideal of Australian nationhood held by imperialist liberals, such as Alfred Deakin and members of the Round Table group, through the campaign for imperial federation. It argues that the distance between Australian and British interests that became apparent during the war and the peace process put paid to Australian interest in imperial federation, and to the quasi-mystical ideal of nationalism that went with it. Australians were left with a martial nationalism that was more strident, parochial and anxious than the imperial liberalism that propelled the Federation movement.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Rockhampton Evening News, 25 April 1935, 2.

2 For a history of how Australians have remembered World War I, see Carolyn Holbrook, Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography (Sydney: NewSouth, 2014).

3 See Gérard Bouchard, The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World: An Essay in Comparative History (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008), 19–20, for a discussion of the cost of a derivative national identity.

4 After World War II, Marxist intellectuals became more interested in Australian nationalism; see Carolyn Holbrook, ‘Marxism for Beginner Nations: Radical Nationalist Historians and the Great War’, Labour History 103 (2012): 123–44.

5 John Hirst, The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), 14–15.

6 For example, Robert Bollard, In the Shadow of Gallipoli: The Hidden History of Australia in World War I (Sydney: NewSouth, 2013); Frank Bongiorno, Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates, eds, Labour and the Great War: The Australian Working Class and the Making of ANZAC, special issue of Labour History 106 (2014); Joan Beaumont and Allison Cadzow, eds, Serving Our Country: Indigenous Australians: War, Defence and Citizenship (Sydney: NewSouth, 2018); Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1994).

7 Sunday school catechism composed by Alfred Deakin in 1877, quoted in Hirst, 10.

8 Helen Irving, ed., The Centenary Companion to Australian Federation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 382.

9 For example, Ernest Scott, ‘The Responsibilities of Australia’, n.d., MS 703/7/294–316, National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA); Ernest Scott, ‘Post-War Problems’, n.d., NLA MS 703/7/655.

10 Benjamin T. Jones, This Time: Australia's Republican Past and Future (Melbourne: Redback, 2018), 33–7.

11 Lionel Curtis, The Problem of the Commonwealth (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1916).

12 Leonie Foster, High Hopes: The Men and Motives of the Australian Round Table (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1986), 86.

13 Ibid.; Luke Trainor, British Imperialism and Australian Nationalism: Manipulation, Conflict and Compromise in the Late Nineteenth Century (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

14 For example, Stephen Alomes, A Nation at Last? The Changing Character of Australian Nationalism. 1880–1988 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988); Robert Birrell, A Nation of Our Own: Citizenship and Nation-Building in Federation Australia (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1995); David Day, The Great Betrayal: Britain, Australia and the Onset of the Pacific War, 1939–42 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988); David Day, The Reluctant Nation: Australia and the Allied Defeat of Japan 1942–1945 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992).

15 Neville Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian Identity: The Problem of Nationalism in Australian History and Historiography’, Australian Historical Studies 32, no. 116 (2001): 76–90.

16 Stuart Macintyre, A History for a Nation: Ernest Scott and the Making of Australian History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994); Hirst; Judith Brett, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2017).

17 Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 116–17.

18 Hirst.

19 Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

20 Deakin to Jebb, 29 May 1907, NLA, quoted in J.A. La Nauze, Alfred Deakin: A Biography (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1979 [1965]), 476.

21 John A. Cockburn, ‘The Biology of Imperial Federation’, British Medical Journal 2 (1903): 911.

22 See Foster, 19–20, for a discussion of Deakin's complex views regarding imperial federation.

23 W. Basil Worsfold, The Empire on the Anvil: Being Suggestions and Data for the Future Government of the British Empire (London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1916), 3.

24 Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 96.

25 Ibid., 95.

26 For detailed analysis, see Michael Burgess, The British Tradition of Federalism (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), 24–49.

27 Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 263.

28 Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 343.

29 Worsfold, 3.

30 Ian St John, Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics (London: Anthem Press, 2010), 230.

31 Ibid., 227.

32 John Kendle, Federal Britain: A History (London: Routledge, 1997), 37.

33 Ibid., 39.

34 Worsfold, 4–5.

35 Burgess, 69.

36 Ibid., 71.

37 Kendle, Federal Britain, 57.

38 Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 42; Brett, 210–11.

39 Worsfold, 19.

40 Terry Cook, ‘George R. Parkin and the Concept of Britannic Idealism’, Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes 10, no. 3 (1975): 26.

41 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man's Burden: The United States & The Philippine Islands, 1899’, Rudyard Kipling's Verse: Definitive Edition (New York: Doubleday, 1929).

42 Henry Lawson, ‘The Star of Australasia’, In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1900); Cecil Degrotte Eby, The Road to Armageddon: The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature, 1870–1914 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 2.

43 Milner to George Parkin, 24 July 1905, File Box A1: Letters 1905–6, Milner Papers, Bodleian Library, quoted in Kendle, Federal Britain, 81.

44 Foster, 8–12.

45 Ibid., 12–14.

46 Kendle, Federal Britain, 81.

47 Kerr to Brand, 1 November 1909, Box 16, Lothian Papers, Scottish Record Office, quoted in Kendle, Federal Britain, 83.

48 Amery to Deakin, 2 November 1909, copy, File Box: Imperial Union, Milner Papers, Bodleian Library, quoted in Kendle, Federal Britain, 83.

49 Kendle, Federal Britain, 83.

50 Gorman, 41.

51 Kendle, Federal Britain, 80.

52 Ibid., 82.

53 Foster, 37.

54 Macintyre, 31–2.

55 Melbourne Age, 4 March 1916, 6.

56 Hughes' speech to the House of Commons, 9 March 1916, quoted in W.M. Hughes, ‘The Day’—And After: War Speeches of the Rt Honourable W.M. Hughes (London: Cassell, 1916), 12.

57 W.M. Hughes’ speech to the British Imperial Chamber of Commerce at the Connaught Rooms, London, 15 March, 1916, quoted in Preface, Worsfold, x–xi.

58 John E. Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 98.

59 Melbourne Argus, 2 September 1916, 18.

60 Curtis.

61 See R.M. Crawford, ‘A Bit of a Rebel’: The Life and Work of George Arnold Wood (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1975), 179–231.

62 ‘Two Ideals of Empire’, Sydney Daily Telegraph, 11 November 1899, quoted in Crawford, 155.

63 George Arnold Wood, Manchester Guardian, 17 November 1903, quoted in Crawford, 240.

64 Crawford, 285–6.

65 Ibid., 311. Crawford has an excellent discussion of Wood's views on imperial federation, 308–13.

66 G.A. Wood, ‘Australia and Imperial Politics’, in Meredith Atkinson, ed., Australia: Economic and Political Studies (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1920), 402, quoted in Crawford, 312.

67 Ernest Scott, ‘The Referenda’, Round Table 1, no. 4 (4 August 1911): 500.

68 Ernest Scott, A Short History of Australia, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1918), 336.

69 Ibid.

70 Scott, ‘The Responsibilities of Australia’; Scott, ‘Post-War Problems’.

71 Macintyre, 86–7.

72 Melbourne Age, 8 December 1916, 6.

73 Woman Voter, 25 January 1917, 1.

74 Sydney Daily Telegraph, 20 December 1916, 10.

75 Foster, 63.

76 Brisbane Daily Standard, 18 April 1917, 4.

77 Chris Cunneen, ‘Miles, William John (1871–1942)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/miles-william-john-7576/text13225, published first in hardcopy 1986 (accessed 27 September 2019).

78 Barbara Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 1936–1942 (Brisbane: Glass House Books, 2005), 4; David S. Bird, Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler's Germany (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012), 55.

79 Brisbane Daily Standard, 5 February 1917, 6.

80 Socialist, 17 August 1917, 4. The reference to ‘slithy toves’ is from a poem by Lewis Carroll called ‘Jabberwocky’ in his novel Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871).

81 W.H. Hughes to William Watt, quoted in Carl Bridge, William Hughes: Australia (London: Haus Publishing, 2011), 56.

82 W.H. Hughes to William Watt, quoted in Bridge, 65.

83 Australian Worker, 25 September 1919, 23.

84 Macintyre, 85.

85 Foster, 85–6.

86 For more detail about Miles’ collaboration with Stephensen and the Australia First Movement, see Bird.

87 See Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 107–8.

88 See Holbrook, Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography.

89 Meaney, 85.

90 Sunday school catechism composed by Alfred Deakin in 1877, quoted in Hirst, 10.

Additional information

Funding

This research was assisted by Australian Research Council funding; DECRA project, ‘Australians and their Federation’, DE190100677.