But in the meantime there was already extant the question that would bedevil all Australian politics for another half-century or more—to what extent was Australian policy to be a mere echo of imperial policy? It is sometimes believed that Australians did not push independence in this area until the fall of Singapore in 1942. But already in Deakin’s young manhood, the colonials wanted in many areas, not all of them praiseworthy, to live by their own policies. And one of the problems would always be that the British, from Salisbury to Churchill, could never understand why they just didn’t go along with the Empire.
In 1886, the British Colonial Secretary was Lord Stanhope, a trim Conservative dandy, a former cricketer, and—above all—a man interested in saving imperial expense by encouraging the Australian colonies to federate (particularly on defence) and create a centre for their own combined strength. He called an Imperial Conference for the coming year, and Deakin, the young native-born Liberal leader in a Coalition in which he served as Chief Secretary, was nominated as the leader of the Victorian delegation. When appointed, his wife, Pattie Brown, had recently given birth to a second daughter, and their house in Walsh Street, South Yarra was being built. Despite all, he must go.
The conference met from 4 April to 9 May in 1887 in Whitehall. Other delegates were Samuel Griffith from Queensland and John Forrest of Western Australia, who had travelled on the same ship as Deakin and had discussed their own feelings on issues including Federation. The Victorian delegation was backed by Graham Berry, retired Victorian statesman and agent-general in London.
The 1887 conference was opened under Stanhope’s successor Sir Henry Holland, who invited Tory Prime Minister Salisbury to attend. The occasion provided, said Sir Henry, with a touch too much of the schoolmaster, ‘a good opportunity of mixing a little wholesome bitter with the sweet, by pointing out that cases must arise in which strict colonial views clashed with the necessities of imperial policy, and that in such cases, H.M. Government, with every desire to uphold colonial interests, have a right to expect concession from the Colonial Governments’. Holland begged Salisbury to attend sessions to do with the Pacific Islands and point out ‘that the colonists must not try and set up the Monroe doctrine over all the Pacific islands’, seizing them for the sake of creating a defensive wall.
On 26 April Prime Minister Salisbury made a speech which was particularly aimed at the Australian colonies and provoked a hostile response from them. The speech told the Australians not to try to interfere with imperial intentions for the Pacific. Salisbury knew a little about the Australian colonies. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, Salisbury—Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne—had made a sea voyage in the 1850s to cure a nervous debility and had visited Australia and the diggings, wearing a jumper because he had been warned the diggers would laugh at him if he dressed like a gent. At Castlemaine and Bendigo he was treated with respect, approved of the observance of the Sabbath by miners and said that there was less crime on the diggings than in a large English town. But his Australian experience seemed far away from him by the time the colonial conference took place. At one stage during it, he thought the colonists ‘the most unreasonable people I have ever heard or dreamt of’.
Deakin himself disagreed that ‘for reasons of imperial policy’ a colony had to sacrifice its aims. But for colonial politicians the trap was always baited with honey, and Deakin was treated, like the others, to dinners and visits to country houses—that is, he went through the process of being ‘duchessed’, as Australians called seduction by the British establishment. He was immune to it. He was offered a knighthood but refused. In his own time he ran off to Edinburgh and heard Annie Besant speak on Theosophism, saw Oxford and Cambridge and visited the graves of his grandfather and grandmother in Witney in Oxfordshire. He also took former Premier Berry’s children to see Buffalo Bill’s version of the Wild West.
Far from being overawed, Deakin’s opening speech was the antithesis of Salisbury’s. He said he intended to raise matters that challenged imperial policy, including the presence of French convicts in the Pacific. The wishes of colonial people, he said, no matter how many thousands of miles away from Westminster, should move the Colonial Office, the Foreign Office and ‘that mysterious entity, the Cabinet’. In that way there would be no difference between colonial and imperial interests—Australian interests in the Pacific islands should, he implied, also compel the interest of the imperial government in the exact same way, not in a different way.
The Earl of Onslow, undersecretary to Holland, remembered later that on one side of the table were the rulers of England, and on the other the representatives of the colonies, ‘grave and reverend signors’ who delivered themselves of many platitudes, in excellent language—particularly in regard to loyalty to the Empire. ‘But Deakin was different. He told us at once what Australia thought of England. He said that when he took up the paper [at home] he learned that Mr Gladstone had a cold, or Lord Salisbury the gout—but when he took up the . . . papers in England he could find nothing from Australia except that one man had won a sculling race, or a pugilist had beaten another.’ He complained with total frankness about how the British had given the islands of the Pacific to the French, and Samoa to the Germans, and ‘he told it with such bonhomie that we could not help realising that we had before us a real live man’.
It is said that in secret session Salisbury, prime minister and foreign secretary at the same time, chastised the Australian delegations for their anxiety about French designs on the New Hebrides, and declared that France might be allowed to annex them, and if so, the Australians should accept it. The New Hebrides were far from Australia he said, and if France could not be dissuaded from occupying the islands, Britain could not go to war over it. Therefore the colonials should let Salisbury do a deal: if the French would agree not to introduce convict transportation to the New Hebrides, they could have the islands in return. This was a settlement the French had already offered Salisbury, and Salisbury thought it a jolly fair thing. According to Deakin there was humble acquiescence by one New South Wales delegate and implied acceptance by Griffith of Queensland, but Berry and Service, the Victorians, both spoke out. Deakin himself followed with an angry, passionate and rational rejection of every point.
Though no transcript exists, we know that Deakin and others raised the matter of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries in Vanuatu who had appealed to the Victorians in particular for help in the face of a French occupation. Both Premier James Service, who in his Scottish youth combined zealous lay preaching with progressive politics, and his successor Duncan Gillies, a successful Ballarat miner in the 1850s but again a devout Presbyterian, had been galvanised by their pleas. The Australians believed too that France could be a potential enemy in the Pacific. Already French colonists and British colonists, or more exactly Scottish Presbyterian colonists, were locked in a battle to get their home governments to settle the issue. And now, in 1887 in London, it was largely settled by Deakin’s vehemence. The Foreign Office was at least edgy if not angry that the Australians wanted them to frighten the French, a valued neighbour, over obscure little islands which men in Whitehall and at Westminster had never seen before, were never going to, and might even be hard put to find on a map. But as a result of Deakin’s protests official instructions were given to the British Ambassador in Paris to say that no concessions would be given to the French in regard to their taking over the New Hebrides.
The most significant decision arising from the conference was the recognition by Salisbury and his cabinet that on Britain’s behalf the Australians should take responsibility for administering British New Guinea, the south-eastern coast of that huge island, along with the whole of vast New Britain, now Rabaul.
In other matters, the British also wanted financial contributions from the colonies to the Admiralty for their naval defence. The Admiralty would provide an auxiliary squadron of cruisers and torpedo boats for the Australian station in return for a payme
nt by the colonies towards maintenance and the interest on the cost.
Deakin would come back from the colonial meeting in London a definite promoter of Federation, chiefly because he had been appalled at the timidity and disunity of the various Australian colonial delegates. They went to London without any preparedness to speak with one voice. If disputes were ever to arise between Australia and Great Britain, they would be much more quickly settled and in accordance with the approval of the people ‘when we are united in voice and in aim, if our representations went home [to Great Britain] backed out by the high authority of a Federal Parliament and a Federal Government’.
THE TRAIN TO TENTERFIELD
Parkes would suggest that what further sparked him to campaign for Federation in the late 1880s and early 1890s was the 1899 report of Major General Sir James Edwards, a British officer who made a tour of inspection of Australian defences and fortifications and argued that the Australian colonies could create a basis of defence only if the colonies agreed to a federal system to organise it. But in a visit to Melbourne in 1889, down the railway line to Albury in his fine-fitted saloon carriage—in part to see another great exhibition in a Melbourne not yet fallen to rags and ashes—Parkes lambasted Victorian politicians who wanted union between the colonies but who put fierce taxes on imports from New South Wales and other states. The attack was sincere but also motivated by a heightened sense of destiny. The Governor of New South Wales at that time, Baron Carrington, had suggested to Parkes that it would be a climactic act of Parkes’ life to lead the colonies to Federation. It was the sort of talk Parkes found inspiring. Bereft of all economic success, he had also recently lost Clarinda, the immigrant girl from Birmingham who had suffered a steerage passage and bouts of poverty with him before and after their arrival in Australia in 1842. He had his eye on another woman, Eleanor Dixon, but he also had intimations of bad health and mortality. However, a great destiny could compensate for all.
Duncan Gillies, the Victorian premier, former goldfields partner of Peter Lalor, Eureka rebel, was suspicious of Parkes. Why should New South Wales pose as the great Federation state when men like Service had made the running until now? And if Parkes was so keen on Federation, why didn’t he join the Federal Council? ‘Honest Tom’ Playford, a former market gardener from South Australia, attacked Parkes in Melbourne for not having belonged to the Federal Council and thus not being sincere and loyal to the idea. Western Australia also suspected Parkes’ motives. Parkes would soon advance the issue, however. On a visit to Queensland to speak to the cabinet and legislators there he received a more sympathetic hearing. Then, returning home, he spoke at a banquet at the Tenterfield School of Arts on 24 October, urging that the colonial leaders should be summoned to a convention to devise a federal constitution.
It is interesting that, although his speech had a potent impact, there is no grand ringing phrase remembered from it. He asked ‘[w]hether the time had not now come for the creation on this Australian continent of an Australian government’, as reported in the third-person in the manner of nineteenth-century news reports. ‘Australia,’ he said, ‘had now a population of three and a half millions, and the American people numbered only between three and four millions when they formed the great commonwealth of the United States. The numbers were about the same, and surely what America had done by war the Australians could bring about by peace, without breaking the ties that held them to the mother country.’
The Australian Federation Conference was convened and met in Parliament House, Melbourne, for eight heat-frazzled days in February 1890. ‘Parkes too ill’, said Deakin’s diary. But he had been well enough to frighten some delegates with the fact that his resolutions did not include the words ‘under the Crown’ and to create suspicion that his old republicanism might be rearing its head again. New Zealand sent two representatives, but it became apparent to the Australians even as early as this that while New Zealand would not be opposed to federation of the Australian colonies, it would not yet be considering joining itself. Parkes was not so ill either as not to give the conference his broader thoughts on the Federation issue. ‘Make yourself a united people, appear before the world as one, and the dream of going “home” would die away. We should create an Australian home . . . we should have “home” within our own shores.’ (Two years before that appeal to fraternity he had led attacks on Irish Catholics and raised the bogey of their potential disloyalty. Did he consider them part of the ‘Australian home’?)
It was proposed by Parkes and seconded by Deakin that the next step should be a National Australasian Convention, to be held in the following year, at which the first complete draft of a constitution was to be written and adopted.
At the end of February 1891, Deakin, out of office, occupying the back bench and secretly tormented by the part his overconfidence might have played in his own losses, his father’s and Victoria’s, had just returned from a journey to India, where he had been commissioned by Syme of the Age to study irrigation projects and where he went as a student of religion. He was suffering from carbuncles and was run down and took a holiday in the Blue Mountains, spending a lot of time in the company of an urbane American he had met on the train from Sydney, Josiah Royce, a Harvard don who was on a Pacific voyage to aid recovery from overwork. Deakin was well placed to attend the National Australasian Convention in Sydney as a delegate appointed by the Victorians. Beginning in March 1891 the convention ran for five weeks. Although Parkes was in the chair, he did not take as active a role as others, in part because of a recent carriage accident. But he emphasised the name ‘Commonwealth’ to an extent that it became the accepted title of the proposed Federation. Over those five weeks, to the astonishment of many including themselves, the delegates came up with a draft constitution not far from what would be adopted later in the decade by the Australian people. The House of Representatives, Senate and High Court to interpret the constitution were all created by various sections of the document. Most delegates did not want to follow the American model of a cabinet separate from the legislature. The House of Representatives, the lower house, was to be the House the cabinet was responsible to, though senators could be cabinet ministers. The big argument was on the question of whether the Senate could alter money bills, bills passed in the Lower House to finance government itself, or could merely recommend changes. The smaller states wanted the Senate to have more control over money bills, since they would have the same numbers in the Senate as the large states would. And underlying everything, even the Victorians—such as Deakin, to whom protectionism was the map of a just society—were nervous about giving up customs and tariffs to a federal government who might lower them.
Between the conference of 1890 and the convention of 1891, the air had gone out of these seemingly limitlessly expanding colonies. Many formerly middle-class men were contemplating suicide rather than the culminating glory of Federation. And the leading Federationists, Parkes, Deakin and Samuel Griffith of Queensland, had all been sworn in special constables to thwart the unions during the strikes of 1890. Griffith, in the midst of drafting the constitution in 1891, was directing the movements of police colonial troops armed with—amongst other weapons—Nordenfeldt machine guns to protect strike-breaking, non-union shearers and the properties they worked on. The cry of many, including members of the Labor Leagues and the nascent Labor Party, was that the governments could readily arrest and gaol strikers but were unwilling to arrest the speculators and fraudsters who had left Australian homes desolate. Thus Federation became at best a sideshow to Labor men and women, a distraction from the main issues, a toy of the privileged.
Anti-federalists were formed at the other end of the political scale too. ‘Dickie’ Haynes, a cranky individualist and member of the Legislative Council of Western Australia, declared that being a British subject was a higher calling than being Australian. As well as these problems, Federation would have to occur without external pressure. In Canada it had been sti
mulated by the Irish Fenian invasions of Ontario in 1866 and 1867, after which confederation and a federal defence system seemed wise. Despite hysteria to the contrary, it was unlikely that the Yankee Fenians would oblige by invading Australia.
Parkes would write of the early period of the Sydney convention, ‘Poor Mr Playford came to our good city evidently bent on mischief. His dominant idea was to pick a quarrel . . . there will be more Playfords and more Lees [Lee Steere of Western Australia], and we shall be fortunate if we do not meet more awkward creatures than either.’ Deakin wrote back saying that he expected Steere, who was dubious about Federation for Western Australia but whose amiable spirit made him what Deakin would call ‘a general favourite’, would be more cooperative when the process got going. That it would get going, Deakin never doubted. Sir Samuel Griffith, a leading draftsman of the first constitution bill and a Queensland premier, declared, ‘Every lesson of history teaches us that the manifest destiny of Australia is to be one people . . . those who oppose union are opposing an irresistible force.’ But in 1891 it seemed more a gentle tide than an irresistible force.
THE FEDERATIONIST WALTZ
There had been another Federation movement. The imperial Federation movement was in force throughout the late nineteenth century from the mid-1880s onwards. The aim of imperial Federationists was to make Australia one state amongst others in a federation of the English-speaking Empire. Radical nationalists such as the Australian Natives Association thought imperial Federation a conservative plot against Australian nation-making. The imperial Federationist movement would always be a minority enthusiasm. There were, despite the slowness of the pace, many more harbingers of Australian than of imperial Federation. Not only did Edmund Barton utter the famous and memorable adage that Federation would create ‘a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation’, but there had been, as narrated earlier in this account, a development of culture that was purely Australian and sometimes republican by impulse. And sometimes there was a crossover between the cultural and the political ideas of Federation, which did not occur with the imperial Federation cause. Price Warung, an author of stories from the convict era published in the Bulletin, the populist and national journal, was really William Astley, organising secretary of the unofficial Bathurst People’s Federal Convention in 1896. Constituted of citizen enthusiasts, Bathurst would be significant in that Cardinal Patrick Moran spoke there in favour of Federation, thus bringing many of his flock with him into that camp. Robert Garran, secretary of the Drafting Committee at the 1897 Federal Convention also published in the Bulletin, and John Quick, who with Garran would later write the exhaustive Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, had tried to write a history of Australian literature. The native population of artists also tended to cement the colonies. Arthur Streeton, the artist, declared later that it seemed to him ‘as though federation were unconsciously begun by the artists and national galleries’.