Celebrating Australia's First Birthday

Australia celebrated the birth of the federal state on the first of January 1901. The celebrations themselves illustrated many of the contradictions which ran through the new polity. There was the complex relationship between colonial nationalism and loyalty to Queen and Empire. There was also the fact that the new nation was at war both in South Africa and China. Underlying the contemporary enthusiasm for war was the important question of how democracy and militarism would be able to co-exist.A New NationThe first of January 1901, the opening day of the twentieth century, was an important moment in many parts of the world but nowhere more so than in Australia. The birth of the new Federation was celebrated in all parts of the country while Sydney hosted a week of processions, dinners, concerts and conferences. The hotels were overflowing with politicians, judges, senior bureaucrat, bishops, military officers and business leaders from all parts of the continent. It was the ideal occasion for the new federation to display itself to the world, to reflect on the past and speculate about the future. Hyperbole flowed in the torrent of speeches. But there was much to be reasonably proud of. Late nineteenth century Australia was a remarkably successful society.Australia and New Zealand had the highest global per capita income, and wealth was more evenly distributed than in comparable societies in Europe. The literacy rate was among the highest in the world and the courts, parliaments and bureaucracies worked efficiently. Male suffrage had been implemented in the major colonies for many years and federal female suffrage was impending. Precocious trade union development had stalled during the depressed 1890s but by 1900 organised labour had successfully forced its way into the colonial parliaments. The Federal Constitution had emerged from a series of conferences and had been approved by referendum. It merged the traditions and customs which had grown from the experience of the six colonial parliaments and the federal system of the United States. The process of referendum was adopted from Switzerland. But, the borrowing notwithstanding, the Constitution was above all a home grown product and a political achievement of the highest order.A popular trope of the time was that federation had created a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation. The rhetoric did not quite match the reality. The new Federal Parliament was not to have the full powers of a nation state. External sovereignty was retained by the Imperial Government. Australia had only one foot on the edge of the international stage. In Australia itself there were large numbers of Aborigines who were beyond the reach of the government. In parts of Cape York, Arnhem Land, the Kimberley and the vast Central deserts there were thousands of men, women and children who had never seen a white man. They were neither governed nor protected by the Australian state. Frontier warfare persisted in many parts of the north although not referred to in Sydney's celebratory rhetoric. But memories were still fresh in rural New South Wales about the fear evoked by the murderous rampage of Jimmy and Joe Governor, called the 'Breelong Blacks', during the winter and spring of 1900. While Sydney celebrated, Jimmy Governor waited on death row in the prison in Darlinghurst and was finally hanged on the 18th of January.The failure to refer to Aboriginal Australia during the week of celebrations was only one of what, in retrospect, appear to be strange and even portentous anomalies. Australia's achievements were above all those of nation building, of creative political development and social and economic progress. They were the cumulative result of several generations of colonists, and increasingly of Australian born men and women. They often looked overseas for guidance but the institutions, enterprises and customs that emerged were distinctively Australian. But in all the public events, which were held to mark the first weeks of the federal state, the national was overwhelmed by the Imperial and the civil by the martial. …