Born to be mild

Wayne Smith follows the path that led to nationhood and finds it was a journey punctuated by debate and deliberation, not the bullets and bloodshed typical of other great democracies.

AUSTRALIANS all let us rejoice, for we are 100 years young and free.

In history's page, few countries have advanced to their formation as fairly nor – it must be said – as unhurriedly as did the nation officially proclaimed in Sydney on this day a century ago, the Commonwealth of Australia.

Indeed, perhaps it was all a little too smooth for Australians to fully appreciate how fortunate they were, a little too neat, right down to the new nation's launch date, the first day of the 20th Century.

Australia was not a country forged on the battlefield or on a blood-drenched Place de la Concorde. There is no heroic Garibaldi figure of Australian history, no Oliver Cromwell and, thankfully, no Robespierre either. Almost alone among the major Western nations, it is unscarred by civil war, unless, of course, one attributes to the events of December 3, 1853, at the Eureka Stockade a far wider significance than did the actual combatants in that short but bloody skirmish.

The heroes of Australian Federation were, rather, men of ideas, not men of action or warriors. And even their ideas were not entirely their own. The Commonwealth of Australia they devised drew on the best of what had gone before it, emerging as a "Washminster" system of government – its parliamentary structure based on Britain's Westminster model, its federal characteristics and even the names of its two Houses of Parliament borrowed from Washington.

'If you want to hurry up Federation, you ought to make a syndicate to hire a few German cruisers to bombard Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane for 20 minutes' – Rudyard Kipling

Yet perhaps if the American colonies had possessed a few Bartons, a couple of Henry Parkes, one or two Samuel Griffiths and even a single Alfred Deakin, there might have been no need for Henry to deliver his courageous ultimatum in Virginia's House of Delegates, no need for John Paul Jones to shout his defiant "I have not yet begun to fight" from the deck of his burning ship during the War of Independence.

Every man and his dog, but no women, turned out to vote in the
1899 Federation referendum.

Granted, Australia's founding fathers were not confronted with the same obstinacy and greed from Queen Victoria that the Yankees encountered in George III. In fact, as early as 1847, Earl Grey, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, breathed life into what was to become the Federation movement when he suggested the creation of a "central legislative authority".

No, if there was any obstinacy and greed at work blocking unification, it came not so much from the Mother Country but from the colonies themselves.

Jealousies, petty and otherwise, reared their ugly heads. New South Wales became a free trade zone in 1873, while Victoria remained fiercely protectionist. The two colonies rubbed each other the wrong way, particularly along the Murray where every trip across the border entailed the tedious opening of bags for the Victorian customs officers to inspect. And if they found anything of value, there were customs duties to be paid.

When the referendum on Federation eventually was held in Queensland in September 1899, Brisbane and Ipswich voted overwhelmingly against entering the new Commonwealth, fearing its infant manufacturing industries would be swamped by competition from Victoria and NSW.

And in the opinion of Professor Ross Fitzgerald, chair of the Centenary of Federation Queensland, they had every right to be afraid. "That's precisely what happened," said Fitzgerald. "Those industries were swamped, which is why Queensland today has nowhere near the manufacturing base of Victoria, NSW or even South Australia."

It might have focused the minds of "Australians" – a term that was not technically correct in the 19th century – had there been a serious external threat to the continent. But there wasn't.

For all the periodic alarms about German, Russian and even Japanese expansion – Queensland, impertinently, actually announced its annexation of New Guinea in 1883 to head off a German "invasion" – the colonies were never genuinely menaced.

"I fancy her very safeness from external attack is one of the reasons why Australia has taken its time over Federation," renowned English author Rudyard Kipling wrote in a letter to a friend in Adelaide. "If you want to hurry up Federation, you ought to make a syndicate to hire a few German cruisers to bombard Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane for 20 minutes; there'd be a federated Australia in 24 hours."

... Pommy cricketers the only enemy: Part 2