The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (29 page)

The 1890s brought a dramatic change. The rapid growth of previous decades was violently checked. Having borrowed easily from London in the 1880s when City lenders were awash with money, Australian governments, banks and businesses found their credit running dry. Borrowing had outstripped (for the moment) the capacity to generate new income to service the debt. The Barings crisis in Argentina, where export growth had failed to match the rising cost of foreign loans, helped shatter confidence in Australia's prospects.
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British investors turned away. Australian banks watched their London deposits dwindle, enforcing a drastic monetary contraction in the colonies. Banks and businesses failed. Unemployment soared, throwing (the figures are imprecise) perhaps one-third of skilled workers into the street.
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With no system of welfare as a safeguard, the ‘workingman's paradise’ in Australia had become a gloomy dystopia of depression.

Partly for this reason, the 1890s were the critical phase in the making of Australian political consciousness. A tradition of labour militancy, laced with imported socialism and republicanism, had grown up in the booming eighties, most vigorously on Queensland's raw frontier of mining and pastoralism.
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Boom conditions sharpened the contrast between those with access to imported capital and the means to corner the supply of natural resources and those who depended on their labour.
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With the fierce contraction of trade, labour discontent turned to bitterness and desperation. Wage cuts and lay-offs provoked large-scale strikes among shearers, seamen and miners across much of Eastern Australia in the early 1890s.
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But direct action made little headway against hostile governments and employers who could draw on the great pool of unemployed. The real legacy of the depression was the emergence of labor parties to speak for organised labour in the colonial parliaments. In New South Wales, Labor won 35 seats out of 141 at the election of 1891.
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Elsewhere, the rise of labour as a political force produced a series of concessions to populist demands: reducing the parliamentary term to three years (in Queensland and Western Australia); abolishing the property qualification for members (Western Australia and Tasmania); manhood suffrage where it had not already been conceded; new factory legislation; new taxes on land and income; the extension of wage boards and arbitration courts to set pay and resolve disputes.
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Under the blast of economic hardship, the instinct of Australian communities was to protect, as far as they could, the living standards of more prosperous times and the egalitarian ethos inherited from the 1850s.

This defensive mood was aggravated by deepening racial anxiety. The fear of cheap ‘Asiatic’ labour willing to work for low wages was common to white settler societies all round the Pacific and even beyond. Economic rivalry, cultural difference and settler democracy were a lethal combination. The resentment of white workers was inflamed by the suspicion that Chinese immigrants, indifferent to Christian ethics, would be a source of moral, social and political corruption; worse still, that they would be pliant tools of big employers. Social cohesion and the enforcement of respectability, fragile growths in migrant societies, seemed to demand the ruthless suppression of visible distinction and a rigid adherence to ‘common’ ideals – a tendency that Tocqueville had noticed in the United States in the 1830s. The racism of white labour was fiercest in Queensland where a tropical climate, a plantation system and the arrival of Polynesian as well as Chinese labour threatened to split the colony between a ‘white’ south and a ‘black’ north.
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Depression exacerbated this race antagonism. Australia's Chinese population was tiny: perhaps 2 per cent of the adult male population in 1891.
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Chinese labour was largely excluded from agriculture, pastoralism and mining. But, in a number of trades, it made up 20 per cent or more of the workforce.
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As unemployment rose, these Chinese made an easy scapegoat for economic failure. The rights of labour mutated swiftly into the racial privilege of white workers and the demand that, at whatever cost, Australia should be reserved for the white man.

In fact, Chinese entry had been closely restricted since the 1880s. But, in the 1890s, depression-induced nightmares of a vast reserve army of Asian labour poised to rush the Australian barricade fused with the geopolitical unease set off by the French and German colonial presence in the South Pacific. This intrusion was resented in part as frustrating the ambitions of Australian ‘sub-imperialists’.
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But its underlying threat was much more serious. If the South Pacific became the scene of colonial and naval rivalry (or the horse-trading of imperial powers), the Australian colonies, so precariously dependent on sea transport for their local communications and long-distance trade, would be dangerously exposed to disruption if not invasion. Their capital cities, into which one-third of the population was now crowded, had no defence against naval attack.
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In the mid-1890s, as great power competition in China accelerated, a new factor catalysed Australian anxiety. Japan's victory over China in 1895, its annexation of Taiwan, and the rise of Japanese migration in the Pacific region signalled the emergence of an
Asian
great power and brought home the true extent of Australian vulnerability in the new fluid era of world politics.

Depression and its populist aftermath, racial panic and strategic alarm, thus formed the context in which the great project for an Australian federation was carried through in the 1890s. Together, they exerted a crucial influence on the ‘founding fathers’ and their design. The originator of the federal project was Sir Henry Parkes, the grand old man of New South Wales politics. Parkes was a long-standing advocate of federation. He regarded the non-executive ‘federal council’ set up in 1881 to encourage inter-colonial co-operation as a dead-end. In 1889, he invited the premiers of Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and South Australia and New Zealand to a convention to plan a federal parliament of two houses and a federal executive.
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Parkes evoked an Australia of ‘one people, one destiny’. He was eager for federation to promote Australian defence, control the entry of ‘aliens’, harmonise the railways and create a local Australian court of appeal. But his vision of Australian nationhood was heavily tinged with ‘Britannic nationalism’. For Parkes, Australian unity derived ‘from the crimson thread of kinship [that] runs through us all’.
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Under federation, he urged, ‘we should have an outline of empire such as we could never hope for as isolated colonies; and our place would be admitted in the rank of nations, under the noble and glorious flag of the mother land.’
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For Parkes, Australia's nationhood would rest on an affirmation of British origins and undergird her destiny as the dominant local power in the South Pacific.

Parkes’ ideas chimed with the widespread sense that the Australian colonies were too small (in population) and weak for an age of agglomeration.
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Arguments of this sort had been behind the enthusiasm for
imperial
federation shown by politicians like Alfred Deakin and Edmund Barton in the 1880s.
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By the 1890s, imperial federation no longer seemed feasible. Even Australian federation seemed a Sisyphean task. The first attempt to promote its acceptance among the colonial parliaments reached stalemate, partly because of the opposition of free traders (strong in New South Wales) who feared Victoria's protectionism would become universal, and the labour parties who feared the coercive power of a federal government in the pocket of wealth. But, with signs of wider public support (at the Corowa convention), political momentum revived. After a meeting of the colonial premiers in 1895, opposition fears were allayed by the promise of an elected convention to draw up the federal constitution. The constitution itself made large concessions to the provincialism of the colonies. The Canadian model for a strong central government was rejected.
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The separate colonies (now to be ‘states’) retained wide powers over their economic development, immigration and taxation: the centre was largely confined to defence and external relations (both under imperial supervision), commerce (trade, tariffs and currency) and the control of aliens. In what may have been a concession to radical sentiment, the new federation was christened the ‘Commonwealth’ of Australia.

Looking back from an era when the old imperial links between Australia and Britain have withered away almost completely, some historians have been tempted to see in federation the imagining of a distinctively Australian nation that had shrugged off its colonial status. Only sentimental attachment to the mother-country, and a desire not to hurt her feelings, suggests one, prevented the move to whole-hog republican independence.
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But this is a misreading of the intentions of the ‘founding fathers’ and also of the special quality of Australian nationalism. The makers of federation had no desire to ‘cut the painter’ and few illusions about the danger of doing so. Deakin and Barton had been enthusiasts for closer imperial ties, not separation. Kingston had denounced the idea that any British-born person should not have full rights in the new federation.
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John Forrest of Western Australia was to die at sea in 1918 on his way to take his seat in the House of Lords. Sir Samuel Griffiths praised the federal scheme as ‘designed by Her Majesty's loyal subjects to serve as a further and lasting bond of union between the Australian colonies and the Mother country’.
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The federalists had also been keen to include New Zealand in the new ‘nation’. Their preoccupation with defence and Asian immigration reinforces the impression that they were less concerned to assert a new Australian identity in the world at large than to exert a stronger Australian influence on the imperial centre in London, where sovereign power on immigration, foreign policy and defence ultimately resided. Australian nationalism, as reflected in the federal idea, was not so much a demand for independence as a recognition that closer integration in the British ‘world-system’ was the price of growth, and perhaps of survival.

That is not to say that Australian leaders had settled for an indefinite future of dependence. Far from it. If federation was envisaged as a new phase in the imperial relationship with Britain, it was because empire on the British model was compatible with an enlarged sense of Australian nationhood; indeed, symbiotic with it. Acceptance of federation and allegiance to the Australian nation it created grew out of a convergence between two very different traditions in colonial Australia. ‘Imperialism’ was the viewpoint of those who (apart from attachment to the monarchy, ‘British’ institutions, and cultural and social models drawn from Britain) insisted that Australia could not be a self-sufficient faraway country in the South Pacific.
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Its only imaginable future lay in a programme of social, economic and cultural enlargement. Expansion (of any kind) required a continuous transfusion of capital and labour from Britain (and thus conditions that would attract them) as well as the guarantee of strategic protection against rival European imperialisms or the ‘Asiatic’ threat. Set against imperialism was the isolationist tradition. Isolationism was endemic in settler societies but peculiarly strong (among British colonies) in Australia. Convict alienation from the imperial gaoler; the tyranny of imagined distance; the digger democracy of the goldrush era; the influence of republican radicalism imported from ‘home’; the dislike for cosmopolitan capital and the class divisions it encouraged: all these combined to diffuse a pervasive suspicion of imperial motives and truculent faith in a self-sufficient ‘island-continent’ with its promise of escape from the Old World's conflicts.
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Amidst the urban despair of the 1890s, it found expression in the myth of the ‘Bush’: an Australian nation forged in an Australian environment.
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Its loudest voice was the
Bulletin
.
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‘No Nigger, no Chinaman, no lascar, no Kanaka, no purveyor of cheap coloured labour’, it raged in a characteristic outburst, ‘is an Australian.’
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Convergence between imperialism and isolationism was possible in the 1890s because both sides accepted that the cohesion of Australian society in a period of great social stress depended upon the defence of a racially exclusive egalitarianism.
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The social and labour reforms of the 1890s which helped reconcile Labor to federation were matched by the recognition that isolation could no longer ensure racial exclusion and a ‘white Australia’. Even the
Bulletin
abandoned republicanism in 1896.
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Federation registered the fusion of imperialism and isolationism in a new ideological compound. This ‘imperial nationalism’ was not a reversion to colonial deference, but the optimal pathway up from an inadequate colonial autonomy. Empire membership left wide scope for achieving much of the old isolationist agenda. It permitted tariffs, state-control of economic development, and the elaborate apparatus of wage arbitration. It also promised greater influence over imperial decisions and the best hope of realising Australia's ‘manifest destiny’ in the South Pacific. Australia's ‘imperial nationalism’ asserted her claim on the resources and sympathy of the pan-British world, and her right to direct the local energies of the British world-system. It drew proudly on the civic and commercial self-confidence of British communities around the world and the belief that ‘Britishness’ conferred the cultural attributes of civilisational progress. Far from yielding to the primacy of Downing Street, it quietly insisted that Australian Britishness was more vigorous, manly and forward-looking than the home-grown variety
¹⁰⁴
and (in its own large sphere) the natural standard-bearer of the imperial purpose. Australian nationalism was not a repudiation of imperialism but its confident vanguard.