West B.A., Murphy F.T. A Brief History of Australia
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
100
vida Jane Mary goLdstein
s
outh Australia and Western Australia granted suffrage to women
prior to federation, and in 1902 the Commonwealth and New
South Wales followed suit. Tasmania did the same in 1903 and
Queensland in 1905, but Victorian women had to fight until 1908
for the vote. One of the most important figures in that fight was
Vida Goldstein, who began her political activity in 1891, when she
and her mother helped gather many of the 30,000 signatures on the
Women’s Suffrage Petition, or Monster Petition, in favor of the vote
for Victorian women.
By 1899 Goldstein had become the undisputed leader of the
women’s suffrage movement in Australia. She became a full-time
organizer of the United Council for Women’s Suffrage in 1900 and
from that year until 1905 wrote and edited much of the content in
the feminist publication Women’s Sphere (Crooks 2008). She also
served as president of the Women’s Political Association from 1903
until 1919, when she went overseas. In 1902 Goldstein traveled to
the United States in order to represent Australia at the International
Womanhood Suffrage Conference; while there she testified before
the U.S. Congress and met and spoke with President Theodore
Roosevelt. During her time in the United States, the Australian
Commonwealth government granted women the right to vote and
stand for federal elections and President Roosevelt wanted to meet
“the only woman in the US with a right to vote” (Victorian Women’s
Trust 2008: 12).
When the vote was finally won by Victorian women in 1908,
Goldstein did not give up her political activism. By 1903 she was
already a veteran of national electoral politics, having run for a
Senate seat in that year and lost; in 1910 she tried again for a Senate
seat, then in 1913 and 1914 for federal House seats, before running
again for the last time for a Senate seat in 1917. Despite her losses
in electoral politics, Goldstein remained one of Australia’s foremost
political activists almost to the time of her death from cancer in 1949
(Brownfoot 1983) .
Source: Crooks, Mary. Foreword to Woman Suffrage in Australia, by Vida Goldstein,
1908. Reprint (Melbourne: Victorian Women’s Trust, 2008), 1–2; Victorian
Women’s Trust. Annual Report, 2006–07 (Melbourne, Vic.: Victorian Women’s
Trust: 2008); Brownfoot, Janice N. “Goldstein, Vida Jane Mary (1869–1949).”
In Australian Dictionary of Biography. Vol. 9. (Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press, 1983).
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FEDERATION AND IDENTITY FORMATION
in 2007 Australia elected its first female deputy prime minister, Julia
Gillard, and in 2009 had a significantly higher percentage of women
in both the Senate (29 percent) and House of Representatives (25.3
percent) than did the United States, with 16 percent and 17.5 percent,
respectively. Australia’s figures were also higher than those in Britain,
where in 2008 just 20 percent of both the House of Commons and
House of Lords were female.
Images
Although the seeds of a specifically Australian identity may have been
sown by such early emancipists as William Wentworth and Lachlan
Macquarie, true political nationalism is considered to have emerged in
the 1880s (Alomes 2003, 575). While this political nationalism is clear
in the Constitution, federation, and legislation, it is also evident in the
poetry and visual art of the period.
One of the clearest signs that poetry served a significant role in the
creation of Australian national identity is the number of important
politicians who took the time to write verse dedicated to the country
and its land, animals, and people. This trend began much earlier than
the 1880s—William Wentworth published several volumes of verse
early in the 19th century—and included the early work of many of the
key figures of the federation movement. For example, prior to taking
political office, Henry Parkes had poems printed in three important
publications, including the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1842 Parkes had
his first book of poems, Stolen Moments, produced by the Sydney pub-
lisher Samuel Augustus Tegg; a second volume, Fragmentary Thoughts,
appeared in 1889 just after Parkes set the stage for bridging the colo-
nies’ differences on tariffs and working toward federation. Less well
known, Alfred Deakin likewise wrote poetry, as well as drama and other
literary forms, prior to stepping into the role of elder Victorian states-
man and then Australian prime minister.
According to the Australian historian John Hirst, the best poem
written about the federation of the continent’s colonies was produced
in 1877, long before the political process caught up with the poets
“sacred cause” (2005, 198). The work, “The Dominion of Australia: A
Forecast,” was written by James Brunton Stephens when he worked as
the headmaster of a school in Brisbane, Queensland (Hirst 2005, 199).
Politicians in the late 1880s also valued Stephens’s work; Parkes cited it
at Tenterfield when he opened the door to federation there (Hirst 2005,
199). Alfred Deakin’s early foray into verse likewise contributed to his
use of other authors’ poems to highlight and emphasize points he made
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
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in his speeches. In 1898 he turned to William Gay’s sonnet “Federation”
to conclude his entreaty to the voters of Victoria to approve the referen-
dum on federation (Hirst 2005, 200–201); Deakin, Henry Parkes, and
Edmund Barton also gave their written endorsements to Gay’s work
when it was first published.
In addition to the speeches and events that contributed to the even-
tual federation, the ceremony itself on January 1, 1901, inspired a great
outpouring of verse. That day “and for the days before and after, the
newspapers gave over a large part of their space to poetry,” includ-
ing works by Brunton Stephens and George Essex Evans, who won a
New South Wales government prize for the best poem “celebrating the
inauguration of the Commonwealth” (Hirst 2005, 203). Essex Evans’s
winning entry in the New South Wales contest for best federation poem
drew upon classic imagery, such as that in these lines:
Free-born of Nations, Virgin white,
Not won by blood nor ringed with steel,
Thy throne is on a loftier height,
Deep-rooted in the Commonweal! (cited in Hirst 2005, 203)
Despite the importance of these “true, new poet[s] of the 1890s” (Hirst
2005, 2–4) today very few Australians have even heard of William
Gay or George Essex Evans. Their classical images of freedom’s fires
and white virgins failed to arouse any long-standing association with
Australia or Australian identity and thus quickly disappeared from the
public imagination.
This does not mean, however, that poetry itself was rejected by the
Australian public: far from it. Indeed, even today two of Australia’s best-
known literary figures on both the domestic and international stage are
the poets Henry Lawson and Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson. Both
men wrote about rural or “bush” Australian life and the landscape in
which it took place. Despite this similarity, the two often disagreed and
their literary feud, which took place mainly in the pages of the Bulletin
in the 1890s, attracted further public interest to the work of both men.
While the Australia that both authors wrote about was often far removed
from the experience of urban Australians, their depictions of rural life,
whether through Paterson’s romanticism or Lawson’s melancholy, struck
a cord with the reading public. Among numerous other literary works,
Paterson gave to Australia both “Waltzing Matilda,” which has become
the “unofficial national anthem,” and The Man from Snowy River, which
tells the story of an underestimated stockman who outdoes all his older,
bigger rivals to catch an escaped horse worth a great deal of money; it
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FEDERATION AND IDENTITY FORMATION
has been made into several films and television series and speaks vol-
umes of the Australian penchant for giving the underdog a chance.
While Australian authors turned to the subject of Australian iden-
tity fairly early in the 19th century, and this trend hit a crescendo at
federation, Australian visual artists were slower to take up the task of
representing the new country in their work. Prior to the 1880s, most
artists who took their craft seriously left the colonies and traveled to
continental Europe or England to study under the recognized mas-
ters and to paint traditional European subjects. The most significant
Australian national works of the 19th century emerged only in the
1880s from painters from the Heidelberg school, such as Tom Roberts,
Arthur Streeton, and Frederick McCubbin, who all worked outside
Melbourne. They “captured Australian light, the changing colours of
the bush” (Alomes 2003, 575). They produced scenes recognizable to
the Australian public and began to see themselves and their work as
part of the grand project of creating a national identity.
Despite the efforts of 19th- and early 20th-century Australian writers
and painters, the push for a unique artistic culture to represent the new
nation did not last very long (Alomes 2003, 582). The fundamental
problem was the difference between rural Australia, where very few
people actually lived or worked, and urban Australia, which resembled
the English world to such a degree that many English visitors at the start
of the 20th century commented on its similarities with home (Alomes
2003, 582). Most of the writers and painters whose works have remained
important in Australia turned their hands to rural themes, as the cited
examples show. While these have since become classics because they
are uniquely Australian, at the time most did little to awaken a national
consciousness in a population that had minimal experience with the
bush. Indeed, the centrality of these rural images led many early 20th-
century urban Australians to think of themselves as less Australian than
their rural counterparts and thus as somehow inferior to the bushman
or bushwoman, farmer, or drover while “authentic” Australian urban
identity remained somewhat problematic.
A second problem in the creation of an Australian national con-
sciousness and identity was the lack of national independence.
Although federation in 1901 joined the six colonies and provided for
a Commonwealth government, the head of state remained the British
monarch. Australia remained very much a segment of the larger British
Empire with its far-flung economic and geographic interests, a condi-
tion that resulted in a “ ‘schizoid love-hate’ for Britain” (Souter 1976,
21–22). As a result, some of the most important moments in the cre-
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
104
ation of Australian identity were the times when Australians could see
themselves in contrast to their English cousins. In the early 20th cen-
tury, the most vivid of these moments occurred during times of war and
the more friendly sporting battles that took place between Australia and
England every season on the cricket pitch and rugby field.
War
While a small number of Australian soldiers fought along with their
British allies in New Zealand in 1863–65 and an even smaller number
participated in the British war in Sudan in 1885, they did not do so
as Australians but rather as Victorians, South Australians, New South
Welshmen, and so forth. The first time Australians joined a British war as
Australians was in the Boer War of 1899–1902. The first contingents to
participate did so as Victorians, New South Welshmen, Queenslanders,
and so on, but in 1901 the new Commonwealth government sent an
army to fight alongside the British to secure their colonial hold on South
Africa. Altogether, between December 1899 and May 1902, 16,175
Australians served on the battlefields of South Africa, where 518 of them
died of wounds or fever and a further 882 were wounded; six Australian
“bushmen,” as they were known, were honored with the Victoria Cross,
the highest honor in the British army (Molony 2005, 179).
One of the rural Australian scenes depicted by the Heidelberg School painter Tom Roberts in
his 1894 painting The Golden Fleece
(The Bridgeman Art Library)
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FEDERATION AND IDENTITY FORMATION
At the start of the Boer War in South Africa, most Australian com-
batants and even the Australian public at home supported the war
wholeheartedly as their way of contributing to the strength of the
British Empire (Penny 1967, 107–108). However, the experience also
provided some Australians with an opportunity to see themselves as
members of a nation separate from Britain and its empire. This ten-
dency strengthened toward the end of the war when increasing casual-
ties, the “ ‘scorched earth’ tactics” (Welsh 2004, 331) of the British war
machine, and hardship tilted support away from the war. In a period
when Australian nationalism was floundering over the issues of inde-
pendence and the rural-urban divide, the war, which had previously
provided a way for the Australian colonies and, after 1901, the brand
new federation to “prove” their Britishness, began to serve the nation-
alists’ cause. In this context, Lt. Harry “Breaker” Morant emerged as a
powerful national symbol.
The actual events surrounding the adoption of Morant and his col-
leagues as symbols of the new Australian nation were hardly patri-
otic. Morant and his fellow soldiers in the Bushveldt Carbineers,
Peter Handcock, George Witton, Robert Lenehan, and the only non-
Australian, Harry Picton, were all charged with the murders of a num-
ber of Boer prisoners of war. In
addition, Handcock was
charged with the murder of a
missionary of German descent
who had probably seen the
murders of the others; Morant
was charged with “instigating
and commanding that killing”
(Henry 2001). At their court-
martial all of the men claimed
that they had been ordered to
kill the prisoners for having
committed atrocities against
the British and having donned
British uniforms to mislead
their enemy (Boer War 2008).
Certainly, some Boer guerrillas
had done both of these things
during the course of the war,
and there is evidence that
the British and their imperial
Lt. Harry “Breaker” Morant in his Bushveldt
Carbineer uniform, 1900
(Pictures Collection,
State Library of Victoria)
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
106
allies killed them for it, usually without recourse. In this case, however,
the presence of a German witness resulted in much greater exposure for
the case and the need for a public investigation, trial, and conviction
(Henry 2001). On a larger scale, some commentators have argued that
Morant and Handcock, the only two to have received the death penalty,
were made scapegoats for the uncivilized way the British waged war
against the Boers in general. This included the creation of concentra-
tion camps for women and children and the deaths from cholera and
hunger of tens of thousands of Boer civilians.
Since the early 20th century, Morant and his colleagues have been
used by Australian nationalists as powerful symbols of Australian vic-
timhood at British hands and thus Australian distinctiveness from the
mother country (Henry 2001). George Witton’s release from prison
shows the interest that tens of thousands of Australians took in the
case. While Morant and Handcock were sentenced to be executed
by firing squad in Pretoria, South Africa, in February 1902, their fel-
low Carbineer George Witton was sentenced to jail for life. He was
transported to England to serve his sentence but was released after
only two years, in 1904, after 80,000 Australians signed a petition to
King Edward VII; the Australian government also pressured the British
authorities for Witton’s release (Thornton 2008). Upon his release,
Witton wrote his own account of events in South Africa; his 1907
book Scapegoats of the Empire depicts the Carbineers as expedient
sacrifices for the British government. In 1980 this image of Morant, in
particular, as an Australian victim of British war policy was revived by
the Australian filmmaker and nationalist Bruce Beresford in his movie
Breaker Morant, in which many of the actual events of the case were dis-
torted to justify the idea of a republican Australia free at last of British
control (Henry 2001). In late 2009 the issue emerged again when two
senior Australian military officers presented petitions to the Australian
Parliament and Queen Elizabeth II to pardon Morant because, they
claim, the court case against them contained 10 different grounds for a
mistrial (Silvester 2009).
Not long after the release of Witton’s book, in 1914 the next chap-
ter in the construction of a distinct Australian identity began with the
launch of the Great War, or World War I. At the start of the war in
August of that year, the vast proportion of Australians supported the
idea of sending soldiers to fight on the side of the British Empire against
the Germans. Even before he was elected prime minister, the Labor
leader Andrew Fisher pledged to support Britain “to our last man and
our last shilling” (cited in Clarke 2003, 185). With few exceptions,
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FEDERATION AND IDENTITY FORMATION
most Australians agreed with him. Voluntary enlistment in the armed
services remained high through the end of 1915, with the highest
figures recorded for July 1915, when 36,600 men joined up (Molony
2005, 224). The historian Gavin Souter argues that “the prevailing
emotions in Australia . . . were sheer excitement and a surge of tribal
loyalty” (1976, 212).
The first actions taken in the war by Australians involved the navy,
which had been established only in 1911 (Welsh 2004, 360). German
ships that were in the Pacific to service the country’s colonies quickly
came under Australian fire, and several wireless stations in Micronesia,
New Guinea, and Nauru were captured by the Australians. The most
famous of these actions actually took place in the Indian Ocean when
the HMAS Sydney pursued the German ship Emden to the Cocos Islands,
where it ran aground and was destroyed (Souter 1976, 205–206). At the
time of this battle, the Sydney, along with several other Australian ships
and their Japanese convoy leaders, were on their way to Egypt. There
Australian soldiers were put through desert training before the British
attempt to capture Gallipoli, a peninsula in southern Turkey.
The British onslaught against the Turks at Gallipoli began on April
25, 1915, and the first Australians, from the Third Australia Infantry
Brigade, landed at 4:30
a.m. at what is now called Anzac Cove, after the
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. As a result of a combination
of bad planning and a total misreading of the Turkish forces’ capabili-
ties, by evening of that first day more than 2,000 Australians had died,
while a further 16,000 were dug into the Turkish hillside for a battle
that would last another eight months (Molony 2005, 223). Wave after
wave of allied soldiers were sent to their deaths in a vain attempt to
take this small coastal territory from the Turks and thus relieve the
Russians from Ottoman control of the outlet to the Mediterranean Sea.
Finally, just before Christmas 1915, the last 20,000 Australian soldiers
were removed from the trenches of Gallipoli under cover of night, with
just two deaths, and the Australian “baptism of fire” was over (Molony
2005, 224).
Gallipoli was disastrous for all the armies that participated: Australia
lost 8,141 soldiers, New Zealand, 2,431, France 9,798, the British more
than 30,000, and the Turks between 80,000 and 100,000 (Welsh 2004,
368). For the Australians, however, Gallipoli became an important
national symbol. Many historians argue that it “shocked the country
into a new consciousness of nationality, one which was unique, pre-
cious and distinct from a sense of being a distant Dominion of the
British Empire” (Welsh 2004, 368). The tremendous blood sacrifice
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
108
on the Turkish shore was seen by many Australians as having given
their new nation “equality and acceptance” on the international sphere,
where previously there had been just fear and loathing of its convict
past. The blood of Australian soldiers had “redeemed” the blood of
their convict relatives (Molony 2005, 236; also Welsh 2004, 368).
One of the most important figures in the creation of this foun-
dational national legend was Keith Murdoch, father of News Corp’s
Rupert Murdoch, publisher of the Australian and 17 other Australian
newspapers, as well as the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and
five British papers (News Corporation 2009). In 1915 Murdoch
senior was a journalist who had been sent to Gallipoli “to investi-
gate Australian Imperial Force mail services and associated matters”
(Serle 1986, 624). As part of his brief before leaving, he had to sign
“the standard official declaration to observe the rules of censorship”
(Serle 1986, 624). Despite this, after seeing the impossible position
in which the Anzacs found themselves, he broke his pledge. Rather
than submitting his article for publication, Murdoch “composed an
8000-word letter to [Prime Minister Andrew] Fisher which he sent
on 23 September. It was a remarkable document which lavishly and
sentimentally praised the Australians and attacked the performance
of the British army at all levels, including many errors and exaggera-
tions” (Serle 1986, 624). He compared the masculine “physique and
fighting qualities of the Anzacs” with the “feeble, childlike youths” of
the British army (Welsh 2004, 368). This report, as well as Murdoch’s
later dispatches from the war’s European theater, contributed greatly
to Australians’ nationalistic pride and, as did the legend that devel-
oped around Breaker Morant, provided an opportunity for Australians
to see themselves as victims of the British, who had sent Australian
soldiers to their deaths. As was the case with Morant, the early 1980s
saw the production of an Australian film, Peter Weir’s Gallipoli, which
encouraged this view of valiant Australians being sacrificed by incom-
petent British leaders.
After the massive defeat of the Anzacs and other Allied forces at
Gallipoli, hundreds of thousands of other Australian soldiers fought
for the British in World War I, and nearly 60,000 of them died (Souter
1976, 209). In summer and fall 1916, some 23,000 Australians died
just at the battles around Pozières, France, while in late 1917 another
38,000 died in a few months of fighting around Ypres, Belgium (Molony
2005, 227, 230). Altogether some 59,342 Australian soldiers lost their
lives, while a further 152,171 were wounded in action, leaving only
120,267 to return home physically unscathed from their time on the
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FEDERATION AND IDENTITY FORMATION
battlefield (Clark 1995, 235). Today this tremendous national sacrifice,
where one in five Australian men between 18 and 45 died, as well as
the centrality of this sacrifice to Australian national identity, are still
evident in the Great War memorials of almost every Australian town
Melbourne’s monumental World War I memorial, the Shrine of Remembrance, built between
1928 and 1934 to honor the memory of the 114,000 Victorians who served in the military
during the 1914–18 period
(Neale Cousland/Shutterstock)