Both of these men were elected delegates to a Federation Convention which was about to meet in Adelaide, though very few of the convention’s other venerable members could have joined them in this sport. Isaacs had other gifts few delegates had. He could speak Russian, French, German, Italian and Greek to varying degrees. As Solicitor-General he had insisted on pursuing those associated with the failed Mercantile Bank for conspiracy to defraud. Forced to resign from the Victorian Parliament over it, Isaacs won back his seat overwhelmingly in the next election, and became attorney-general in the Turner Liberal ministry which he held from 27 September 1894 till the end of 1899.
Isaacs was, however, not as trusted or respected as Deakin, for he did not have an appeasing temperament and he possessed the naked ambition instilled in him by his mother. He had also to suffer anti-Semitic attitudes of the kind so popular with the Bulletin, yet had much public support because of his interest in reform. And he had told the Australian Natives Association that he looked forward to the day when he could say, because of Federation, ‘I am an Australian.’ He had the broadest knowledge of other constitutions of anyone who was about to meet to finalise the Australian version.
Deakin saw that there was a plot in place to keep Isaacs off the Drafting Committee of the Federal Convention, but that was not to do with his Jewishness as much as his propensity to lecture other members on constitutional minutiae. Isaacs did not think that the future Senate should have equal membership for all states and wanted to exalt above all the House of Representatives. He did not want a broad right for those whose claims were defeated in the High Court to appeal to the Privy Council in London. And he was opposed to a Bill of Rights. On the Senate issue he would be defeated, but on the other two he would have some success.
Deakin saw Federation as an urgent task. How close was Federation to God’s will in the mind of Alfred Deakin? Much closer than it was for the sensualist George Reid. ‘Grant O God,’ went one of the prayers Deakin composed, ‘that I may have sufficient clearness of vision or sufficient antagonism to failure to avoid injuring the cause of true progress towards Thee and Thy kingdom on earth.’ The way to the kingdom on earth lay through a federal Australia. In a speech to the Australian Natives Association at Bendigo towards the end of the three 1897–98 conventions, in March 1898, Deakin strove to express the piety he felt for Federation.
A Federal Constitution is the last and final product of political intellect and constructive ingenuity; it represents the highest development of the possibilities of self-government among people scattered over a large area . . . Do not every year and every month exact from us a toll of severance? Do not we find ourselves hampered in commerce, restricted in influence, weakened in prestige, because we are jarring atoms instead of a united organism?
He answered these questions by quoting the poet William Gay, with whom Deakin had corresponded and who was already dying of the tuberculosis he had come to Australia in 1888 to cure. His nurse, Mary Simpson, was a schoolteacher and also a familiar correspondent of Deakin’s and burned with the same order of flame as William Gay himself, sustaining in him the visionary fire. Gay had, however, died late in 1897, but he cast his shadow forward over the coming Federation.
Our country’s garment
With hands unfilial we have basely rent,
With petty variance our souls are spent,
An ancient kinship underfoot is trod:
Oh let us rise,—united,—penitent,—
And be one people,—mighty, serving God!
The crucial Federation conventions were held in Adelaide in March 1897, in Sydney in September the same year and in early 1898 in Melbourne. Ten delegates from each state were elected to travel to the three connected conventions, but Western Australian attendance was erratic, and the Queensland Parliament had not passed the legislation to make the election of their delegates possible. New Zealand decided not to send delegates. In Sydney the ascetic Cardinal Moran stood as a delegate for New South Wales to represent Catholic interests, but Protestant bodies campaigned successfully against him. The Adelaide and Melbourne meetings were characterised by heatwaves, the Melbourne meeting coinciding with bushfires which caused the Englishmen facing the Australians led by Harry Trott at the Melbourne Cricket Ground to complain that the smoke was making things impossible for them in the field. All this was endured also by the delegates to the convention, men wearing formal suits, having travelled a great distance by train and ship, and slipping off some afternoons, still in those fustian clothes, to get a little of the last session of play. (Australia won the Ashes, four Tests to one, another omen of Federation.)
The fact that the first of these serial conventions was held in a smaller state was a success for the South Australian premier, Charles Kingston, a rambunctious fellow whose character seemed at odds with the ‘city of churches’. When he was admitted to the bar, a young man opposed his accreditation on the grounds that he had seduced the young man’s sister. Kingston, an Australian Rules player for South Adelaide, beat up the brother and married the girl, Lucy McCarthy. When in 1892 a conservative member of Parliament, Sir Richard Baker, attacked him as a disgrace to the legal profession, Kingston sent Sir Richard a pistol and an invitation to meet him for a duel in Victoria Square, Adelaide. Sir Richard told the police, who arrested Kingston. A magistrate bound him over to keep the peace, and he was still keeping it when elected premier as a popular radical in 1893. His reform program included arbitration for industrial disputes, the legitimisation of children born out of wedlock, the creation of a state bank, and the extension of the franchise to all adults—to women, that is. After lambasting the South Australia Co., Adelaide’s foundation company, as premier he was attacked with a horsewhip by its manager, an assault which occurred in the street and drew blood. Kingston asked, who could now deny he had bled for South Australia?
The delegates who travelled to the first session in Adelaide by way of Victoria—the New South Welshmen and Tasmanians—were impressed by the welcome they received along the way. Ballarat honoured them, and a crowd at Albury had greeted the blasé and unreliable George Reid. It was in Victoria that the interest in Federation was most intense, but Deakin saw New South Wales as dominant at the convention, since its premier, Sir George Reid, Free Trader and politicial opportunist, was hostile to Protectionist Victoria, lukewarm about Federation and suspected New South Wales might lose economically. Despite the presence of Edmund Barton, the Sydney lawyer and true successor of Parkes in the Federation campaign, New South Wales had the most power to destroy the whole plan. Victorian delegates were treated by Reid as ideological enemies, at best dreamers and at worst plunderers of New South Wales by the customs they collected from goods flowing between the colonies in the gimcrack Victorian customs house along the Murray and in the grander ones in larger ports. Though under the draft constitution the collection of customs duties was to be awarded to the Commonwealth and the states were to lose the power to collect them, Reid was uneasy about it all, foreseeing a Victorian-dominated Federal government soaking up most of the customs revenue raised by the Federal government, driving up prices through high tariffs, rewarding the obedient smaller states with more than their fair share of revenue and starving New South Wales.
‘The chief and almost the sole offender was Reid,’ wrote Deakin, ‘who, having failed in all his attempts to induce the Victorians to wrestle with him upon their several rivalries, turned upon the South Australians, the Tasmanians and the Western Australians in turn with studied offensiveness and vulgar jibes until he who had entered the Convention at Adelaide its most popular, most influential, and most generous leader, left it the most unpopular, the least trusted and least respected of all its members.’ Reid, said Deakin, ‘was neither federal nor anti-federal but either at need and as far as possible both at once.’
Deakin thought the men who brought home Federation at that convention sitting serially in three cities were Barton, Bar
ton’s fellow New South Welshman Richard O’Connor, Charles Kingston and Frederick Holder of South Australia, George Turner and Isaacs of Victoria, and John Forrest of Western Australia. Reid nonetheless let the Constitution Bill be drafted, the clauses which explained it and the sections themselves, and committed himself to present the bill, as did the other premiers, to his parliament and, if accepted by them, to the people of New South Wales at a referendum. This was the process devised by Dr John Quick at an earlier people’s convention in Corowa. Quick was respected by all for watching over the bill in its infancy, ‘as if it had been his own child’. He was not an Australian native but had been born in Cornwall of one of those mineral-divining Cornish families who had emigrated to Victoria in the 1850s and gone to the Bendigo goldfields. He began work at the age of ten in industrial mining, became an adolescent reporter on two Bendigo news-papers, then moved to Melbourne and by twenty-five had graduated in law. His concern would always be that the public should be informed enough to be able to vote at referendum on the Federation issue. He had no doubt that to be an informed citizen would be to vote Yes.
Not everyone in the smaller colonies was as informed as Quick would have wished, but saw instead a number of reasons to be nervous of having their economies swamped by those of Victoria and New South Wales. Sir Edward Braddon, Premier of Tasmania, proposed in Adelaide that the Commonwealth return to the states three-quarters of the customs revenue it raised. Edward Nicholas Coventry Braddon had spent many years in India, where he had run indigo factories and plantations, before moving to Tasmania and ultimately becoming Premier. In his youth he had served in a volunteer force to fight the Indian mutineers. As well as admiring his distinguished looks, Deakin would say of him that ‘he was a most amiable cynic, an accomplished strategist and an expert administrator . . . Beside the massive Kingston, the podgy Reid . . . and the bluff Henry-the-Eighth appearance of Forrest, he looked like an attaché from Paris surrounded by the fat burghers of a Flanders city.’ But Braddon saw the small states as potentially the poorer owners in an apartment block whose wealthier neighbours might embark on communal extravagances which could ruin their less affluent brethren.
Reid and Barton both opposed Braddon’s idea that a guaranteed sum be raised by the federal authorities. New South Wales threatened to walk out over it. They were Free Traders and if Braddon had his way the Commonwealth would be prevented from going Free Trade, and would be forced to raise tariff barriers just to make enough revenue to run itself. Braddon’s motion ultimately having been carried after midnight on the last Friday of the Melbourne session, it was blasted as ‘the Braddon Blot’. Having the states rely on the Commonwealth for funds violated the central principle of federalism, it was argued: the principle that each government should be independent in its own sphere. Largesse on one hand, begging and haggling on the other, should not characterise the relation between federal and state governments. In the end, Section 87 of the constitution, Braddon’s proposal, was amended before Federation so that the arrangement was to last only for ten years.
The constitution as framed had now to be accepted by the colonial houses of parliament and submitted to the people for acceptance at referendum. In New South Wales the sturdy-hearted Barton had backing from Bernhard Ringrose Wise, Oxford graduate and an exemplar of the Victorian-era man, being scholarly, passionately interested in the arts—he entertained Robert Louis Stevenson during the famed Scottish writer’s Sydney visit—and a member of a number of sporting bodies, such as the Harriers Athletics Club. Another ally was Richard Edward O’Connor, Irish Australian, a rare New South Wales Protectionist like Barton and a Catholic of broader interests than those of the Cardinal.
Bernard O’Dowd, nationalist poet and Labor man, was an early opponent of the bill because, like others, he believed it undemocratic and a distraction from the struggle for justice.
They daze us with ‘Our Destiny’
With blare of ‘War’ and ‘Fame’:
To part us, shriek out ‘Unity’
And drug us with a Name.
Nonetheless, Barton, O’Connor and Wise, wrote Deakin, ‘though poorer in funds and richer in scruples than their antagonists, travelled New South Wales getting out the Yes vote’. There was hostility to them, but above all, a yawning Australian apathy. But there were also a pleasing number of enthusiasts. In New South Wales most of the opposition still came from business, the Labor Party and so-called New South Wales patriots. Federation, said the Nays, meant New South Wales would be plundered to pay for the benefit of its neighbours, and dictated to by senators from small states. The Senate issue—that little Tasmania and under-populated Western Australia would have the same number of senators as New South Wales—was an important argument for the ‘anti-Billites’, as the opponents of Federation were called.
When the New South Wales Parliament voted for the bill and passed enabling legislation for a referendum, their stipulation was that the Yes vote, even if greater than the No, must total 80 000 or more. Voting was not compulsory, and many would declare it all bloody nonsense and stay away from the poll. Were there 80 000 enrolled Federation enthusiasts in New South Wales? The politically engaged gathered outside the Sydney Morning Herald office on referendum day, 3 June 1898, where the voting figures delivered by telegraph were posted on a sort of scoreboard. Many of the No party, however, preferred to make a crowd outside the Telegraph office, since the Telegraph was so furiously anti-bill. That morning the Telegraph’s headlines had read: The Momentous Third, The Bill Should Die Tonight, Killed By An Outraged Democracy . . . Vote For The Bill And The Step Is Irretraceable. At eight o’clock that night, the Herald posted the Yes vote at more than 80 000, and Barton emerged from the hotel where he had been waiting and was carried shoulder-high through the streets. The Federation flag, a white ensign with the Union Jack in one corner and with a blue cross punctuated by the stars of the Southern Cross, was broken out.
But the numbers were wrong; the Herald revised them, anti-Federationists yelled at Barton that he’d been a little too previous, and the Telegraph mocked. The final figures were 71 595 Yes, and 66 228 No. The Yes vote did not reach the 80 000 required for success. The anti-Billites rejoiced that Federation was stymied. That same day Tasmania and Victoria had voted powerfully in favour. The next day, so did South Australia. In South Australia the Yes vote had been 67 per cent, in Tasmania 81 per cent, and in Victoria 82 per cent, so that the mere technical failure to reach 80 000 Yes votes in New South Wales seemed a tragedy at the time. There would need to be another series of referenda, and New South Wales could again spoil it! And all the Federationists knew who to blame, that walrus-moustached George Reid who was seen as having interposed his enormous body between the hope and the realisation of Federation.
The Federalists of New South Wales, led by Barton, kept fighting. Reid also came to realise that if he fell from power in New South Wales, and another Federation referendum was held and, under the influence of what had happened in other states, was won, he would be handing to Barton and his crew all credit. He would be giving them entitlement and moral claim to represent New South Wales in a national house of Parliament. Besides, the majority who had voted Yes had shocked him. He began to see himself as history might see him—a pure spoiler. Mr Barton, Mr O’Connor and Mr Wise might achieve a triumph in which he had no share. He therefore plumped for the idea of the bill, with appropriate amendments.
Barton stood against Reid in his own seat in July 1898, advocating three changes to the constitution bill: the federal capital to be located in New South Wales, the Braddon clause to be removed, and the necessity of three-fifths majority at a joint sitting of Parliament to resolve a deadlock should also be excised. He was narrowly defeated in a campaign which Reid made vicious. But in September Barton was elected for the Hastings and Macleay in a by-election and became leader of the opposition. His supporter, the larrikin politician William Crick— racegoer, alcoholic and defender of Dean
O’Haran of St Mary’s Cathedral, who was, wrongfully it seems, accused of having had sex with a married woman in the confessional—carried on a fierce campaign against Reid in the New South Wales Parliament. A desire to replace Barton as both potential future prime minister and leader of the Federal movement led Reid to conduct a second referendum campaign with energy and his normal populist wit. A new referendum was to be held on 20 June 1899.
The Bulletin concentrated what Deakin called ‘its unrivalled wealth of ridicule against the opponents of the bill’. The Telegraph was still the opposing voice. On the day, however, 107 420 New South Welshmen voted for Federation by a majority of nearly 25 000. So other colonies, except for Western Australia, passed new enabling acts for a second referendum, and Queensland for a first one. In South Australia Federation was reaffirmed by an even greater vote than before. Victoria and Tasmania voted in July, and in Victoria over 150 000 people voted for the bill and less than 10 000 voted against. In Tasmania the No vote was less than a thousand.
In Queensland, as in other parts of Australia, to the despair of democrats, plural votes still existed—that is, as well as having a vote as a citizen where he resided, a propertied man also had a vote in every electorate in which he possessed property with an annual value of £10. On top of that, in the enormous Queensland hinterland there was a large population of nomadic bush workers who were not registered as voters. The Queensland Federationists proposed that every man over the age of twenty-one should be allowed to vote, whether registered or not, but the Queensland opposition voted it down, just as they did the proposal that each citizen should vote once only. Various politicians wanted to amend the bill but the leaders of all the parties pointed out the futility of taking a vote on anything but the same constitution as the other states. So the referendum in Queensland was set to be held on 2 September 1899.