The negative Commonwealth: Australia as ‘laboratory’,then and now

Abstract

Federated Australia was seen for a long time as a significant social ‘laboratory’. The Commonwealth itself was seen as an ‘experiment’. This widespread metaphor relied on a particular pattern of perception: the country was ‘new’ (it was not), and the country was allegedly isolated (it was not, at least not completely). Many believed that its social environment could be controlled, like that of a scientific laboratory. A laboratory is designed to shut all disturbances out – the value of the data and experiments depends on it. This article outlines this metaphor in the context of Australian history during the 20th century, its rhetorical power and what made it discursively possible.

Introduction

This work appraises settler-colonial Australia’s strategic contribution to the transnational political traditions of what James Belich (2009) seminally called the global ‘settler revolution’. Specifically, this article discusses settler Australia’s self-appointed role as socio-political ‘laboratory’ during the early decades of the 20th century, after the settler revolution had entered a period of crisis elsewhere. The federal Commonwealth took this role seriously. The Torrens title, a mode of registering and transferring real estate that systematically erases all traces of prior ownership, the ‘Australian ballot’, identifying a specific settler-colonial form of democratic governance impervious to ‘Old World’ patronage, the constitutionally enshrined exclusion of Indigenous and exogenous alterities through the White Australia policy and the Court of Arbitration were all institutional devices tested in Australia before being exported elsewhere. A cluster of interlocking political experiments, some older, some more recent, would coalesce in what Paul Kelly (1992) in another seminal intervention defined as the ‘Australian Settlement’. The Australian imperial nationalists loudly lamented the ‘Tyranny of Distance’ (see Blainey, 1966), but in crucial ways ‘Australia’ was imagined as a globally relevant laboratory of socio-political experimentation precisely because of its assumed isolation. There is no laboratory without a controlled environment.

In our respective work we have focused on the political traditions of the ‘world turned inside out’, and on those of Australian settler-colonial nationalism (Tout, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2020; Veracini, 2021). If Christopher Hill (1972) had referred to the ‘world turned upside down’ as a project of emplaced transformation, the political traditions of ‘the world turned inside out’ advocated displacement as a response to social upheaval. They were an alternative to revolutionary transformation. The former envisaged new polities arising in the place of the old ones, the latter envisaged new polities established elsewhere. These new polities struggled to assert autonomous cultural and political traditions, as they negotiated complex, continuing relations with both European and Indigenous antecedents/authorities, alongside a range of exogenous alterities. These polities’ responses were contradictory, often incoherent, and in their complexity reflected and revealed the contradictions inherent to the settler-colonial condition. Australia contributed significantly to the global political tradition of settler colonialism; in this article we focus on the consequences of simultaneously appraising a global political tradition and its Australian reverberations. This reappraisal is especially important now, as Australian publics debate the possibility of finally ‘recognising’ the ‘First Peoples of Australia’ and adding an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

The colonies that would federate into the Australian Commonwealth had consolidated politically during the age of the global ‘settler revolution’ (Belich, 2009). A number of ‘neo-Europes’ (see Crosby, 2004 [1986]) in various continents had rapidly coalesced and prospered during the 19th century (see Osterhammel, 2014), but eventually the settler revolution had run out of steam. Belich has focused on the economics of the developing neo-Europes, but there were important ideological dimensions to this revolution too (a point Belich did not neglect, even if he mainly focused on flows of goods, capital and labour). In the imagination, the neo-Europes were supposed to be ‘other’ places, not simply new places; communities determined and able to steer away from the social and political contradictions that were generally seen as defining features of the ‘Old World’. The Australian colonies had actively contributed to the settler global revolution, but the newly federated Commonwealth became a veritable (and for a while globally relevant) ‘laboratory’ during the revolution’s crisis. ‘Laboratory’ was a powerful metaphor – testing progress in a controlled fashion seemed safer than experimenting with revolutionary transformation (the ‘settler revolution’ in Australia was fundamentally non-revolutionary, founded on and couched in the language of ‘reform’; see Veracini, 2016). Clare Wright (2016: 208) noted that by 1910, Australia had become known around the world as a "social laboratory" celebrated for its pioneering welfare legislation’; but settler-colonial New Zealand also contributed to this global tradition, competitively developing a related yet separate, and somewhat more radically utopian tradition of liberal-democratic political ‘experimentation’ – this transnational exchange should not be neglected (see Beilharz, 2015; Reeves, 2011 [1902]).

It was in many ways a self-appointed role in the context of a contested process of national and nationalist self-fashioning. This was, however, also a project that could draw on a long-lasting tradition of metropolitan attention to Australian developments – European interest in Australia as a site for social experimentation goes back to the very beginning of colonisation and was reliant on travelling intellectuals. Both Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, for example, had been supportive of ‘systematic’ plans for settling immediately ‘progressive’ communities in Australia in previous decades (Bell, 2010; Pitts, 2003; for the view of Australian possibilities from the USA, see Giles, 2014). It seems significant that Bentham had presciently seen that the originary exclusion of Indigenous peoples and sovereignties from the national community-to-come would prove settler Australia’s ‘incurable flaw’ (see Schultz, 2022: 198).

The newly erected and federated antipodean laboratory had to face two challenges. First, it had to embody the world turned inside out where once a world turned upside down had been perceived. This shift, from ‘Commonwealth of Thieves’ to prospective ‘new Britannia in another world!’ represented Australia’s own ‘settler revolution’ (see Veracini, 2016). This required the inversion of an established antipodean imaginary (National Library of Australia, 2000): from ‘prison society’ and ‘global effluvia or white trash’, to ‘new age, new world social laboratory’ and ‘the civilisational blossoming of a New Britannia in the Southern Seas’ (Beilharz, 2015: 33). Because of this shift, because of this radical negation, beginning sometime during Macquarie’s governorship, ‘Australia’ became a carefully managed brand – as Richard White (1981: 31–2) insightfully pointed out, transitioning away from ‘Botany Bay’ and towards an image of Australia as ‘an idealised Arcadian society, a rural Utopia, an Eden before the fall’, was both a political and a marketing exercise. Second, ‘Australia’ had to embody a world turned inside out when similar traditions and structures of political feeling had already been largely superseded elsewhere (see Veracini, 2016). A convict foundation and representations of an intractably ‘alien’ landscape would epitomise the first challenge; the need to settle marginal lands (a global phenomenon involving a ‘pioneering fringe’; see Bowman, 1931), and what Belich (2009) has dubbed ‘recolonisation’ informed the second. These challenges produced an especially anxious sensitivity – a structure of feeling aptly condensed in the notion of the ‘cringe’ (see Phillips, 2006 [1950]).

The first set of anxieties required that the nationalist political imagination adopt a radical version of settler-colonial ‘indigenisation’ (Tout, 2017a, 2020; Veracini, 2016). Responding to the second set of challenges required an increasingly interventionist state – the state’s direct involvement would make settling the land possible again, and the state could be interventionist because in many ways the state preceded society itself (see Clark, 1906; Davidson, 1991; Lake, 2019). Both innovations were crucial departures in the context of the global political traditions of the world turned inside out: previously, the ideal-typical settler had to remain themself as they moved across space (i.e. they must not ‘go native’ or degenerate in other ways, away from civilisation). The aim had been to establish immediately progressive polities, models that could even be re-exported to the ‘Old World’. This had been the Wakefieldean proposition, but ‘systematic’ colonisers had been active in the USA as well – it had been a global phenomenon (see, for example, Van Atta, 2014). This had required controlling the settlers, spatially, and relatedly, managing their aggression against Indigenous peoples in distant ‘frontiers’. Irrespectively, the settlers of the antipodes and those of other continents, including the settlers ostensibly organised in accordance with the Wakefield model and those operating under legislation designed to implement his ‘system’, had spatially escaped the state and its sovereign claims – in New Zealand in 1839, in Victoria via Tasmania, where they independently negotiated a ‘Treaty’ in 1835 and, even before, ‘squatting’ beyond the officially endorsed ‘Limits of Location’. That was before; now the settlers relied on the intervention of the state. Then again, in Australia the state had always been interventionist (on the peculiarities of the Australian settler state and its historical development, see, for example, Davidson, 1991, 1997).

Ideologically, these moves, radical settler indigenisation and the interventionist state required an ability to exclude. Exclusion was deployed strategically in multiple directions: the Indigenous polities were denied, their sovereign capacities disavowed; ‘race’ and ‘class’ were to be shut out and kept out (religious divides, a legacy of Anglo-Celtic foundation, had to be managed – they were already in). ‘Fragmentation’ (according to Louis Hartz’s (1964) rendition of this process) happens when a specific segment of a society departs from a particular locale at a particular time and thereafter develops in isolation while leaving ‘history’ behind. Hartz included Australia in his seminal comparative analysis, but there was a later phase to the Australian process of ‘fragmentation’ that he and his collaborators did not appraise. Fragmentation in Australia was protracted through a sequence of exclusions after ‘the fragment’ had entered a crisis. It was renewed. Australia was thus for decades an experiment in exclusion conducted on a continental scale. ‘Recolonisation’ (see Belich, 2009), the re-subordination of the settler polity to metropolitan cultural standards and economic priorities, beginning in the 1890s, and then hegemonic, especially since the 1920s, later interrupted an intense period of social and political experimentation (a legislative and judicial activism that was also characterised by significant transnational exchanges of ideas; see Lake, 2019). But the Australian ‘settlement’ remained as legacy and the tradition survived.

Each section of this article outlines a specific exclusion. We see the Commonwealth as defined by a complex of concomitant, coordinated exclusions and propose that the Australian polity could be productively conceptualised as the negative Commonwealth: a polity defined by a succession of negations.

Indigenouslessness

Prerequisite for any controlled environment, even a social laboratory, is the absence of disturbing elements interfering with experimentation. In the case of the negative Commonwealth, a primary negation required that there should be no Indigenous peoples possessing a political counter-will. In the absence of any such presence, Australia would be imagined as a tabula rasa, as unfolding from an original void (Rose, 2004; Veracini, 2016). Premised on a settler ‘contract’ (see Pateman, 2007), a contract the settlers signed between themselves and no-one else, a developing world-turned-inside-out imaginary presupposed the possibility of founding a new political order without conflict or obstruction. This required the ready availability of land, a land with no prior ownership, history or political sovereignty. The penal colony out of which settler Australia would eventually emerge was seen as founded on precisely such conditions (Reynolds, 1992). The pre-colonial imaginings of James Matra, in the wake of his evacuation from an America-turned-upside-down by a victorious settler revolution, centred on dreams of ‘free yeoman farmers’ provided with ‘small grant[s] of land and the tools for its cultivation’ (cited in Pybus, 2006: 66). These dreams rested on Matra’s testimony that among the continent’s advantages was that it was ‘peopled by only a few black inhabitants, who, in the rudest state of society, knew no other arts than were necessary to their mere animal existence’ (cited in Behrendt, 2010: 175).

Terra Australis had long been taken to epitomise a state of nature, sparsely inhabited by ‘uncivilised’ peoples who allegedly did not cultivate the land. This perception was long lasting. Obvious and conspicuous Aboriginal agricultural practices were not recognised by Europeans (see Gammage, 2011; Pascoe, 2014). During his voyages in 1642 and 1644, Abel Tasman ‘found nothing profitable, only naked beach-runners without rice’, concluding that the ‘vast land of New Holland’ seemed to offer nothing of value Princeton University Library (2010). Sir Joseph Banks had judged Terra Australis ‘thinly inhabited even to admiration’ and proffered his conjecture that the inland would be ‘totally uninhabited’, and Cook concurred, writing of Indigenous peoples’ small numbers, apparent technological primitivism and lack of interest in trade, relatively peaceable natures, and judging that ‘the Natives know nothing of Cultivation’ (both cited in Banner, 2007: 16-17). If this was so, ‘taking possession’ would not require Indigenous peoples’ consent (Moreton-Robinson, 2015).

As Nichols (2005: 48) explains, in Lockean thought ‘“no property” equates to non-political, or “no sovereignty”’; ‘because indigenous peoples did not till the soil or enclose the land, they could not exist in a civil society properly defined and thus could not claim political sovereignty’. The various proposals for a colony in New Holland that precipitated invasion in 1788 made ‘little if any mention…of the Indigenous inhabitants, who seem to have been assumed to be too few to rate a mention’ (Buchan, 2008: 55). By the time Arthur Phillip was making his preparations to set sail for the new penal colony he was to govern, he felt confident in the ‘general opinion’ that he would find ‘very few Inhabitants in this Country’ (cited in Banner, 2007: 16). In his early dispatches, Governor Phillip described the original inhabitants as ‘living in a “state of nature”, and having no conception of private ownership’ (cited in Buchan, 2008: 56). These presumptions were and remain persistent (see Buchan, 2008). If North America had been judged to possess some ‘empty places’, Australia ‘sounded like an empty continent’ (Banner, 2007: 17). The settler contract could be enforced without obstruction or negotiation.

Indigenouslessness was a precondition for the peaceful, unimpeded acquisition of land, but also for the incipient assertion of the political autonomy of the settler colonists of Australia. In 1819, Barron Field had defended the colonists against the imposition of taxes by the Crown (Banner, 2007: 26–7); Australia had not been conquered, he reasoned, and as a result could not be governed from afar. Field was the ‘first to sketch out a coherent structure of governance premised counterfactually on the non-existence of Aboriginal peoples’; he was also the first ‘to have assumed the task of originating a national poetics’ (Ford and Clemens, 2023: 5). In a collection of bad poetry, in both quality and effect, Field ploughed the fields misperceived as barren for the ‘first fruits’ of an Australian tradition, an unending quest in Australian cultural and political production (see Ford and Clemens, 2023; White, 1981).

When explorer-surveyor Thomas Mitchell (the conflation is significant) travelled through what would become Victoria, in 1838, he perceived an empty landscape. Even though he relied on Aboriginal guides and knowledge, their presence was spectralised in the form of ‘camp-smoke’. Despite visiting Aboriginal dwellings, he saw only ‘two natives at a distance’. The potential for colonisation was obvious: ‘[t]his territory, still for the most part in a state of nature, presents a fair blank sheet for any geographical arrangement whether of county divisions, lines of communication, or sites of towns’ (Mitchell, 1836). As Veracini (2016) noted, this perception exemplifies the ‘settler gaze’: Mitchell simultaneously disavowed the actual Aboriginal presence and imagined a settler body politic ‘to come’. He was seeing things, but only things that were not (yet) there. Critically, the polity to come that these fantasies evoked could be envisaged as free from the strife of the Old World and the older New World too. Indigenouslessness implied conflictlessness, but it also, and relatedly, led to chronic culturelessness and historylessness as well (see below).

Despite all evidence to the contrary, and against numerous objections from multiple quarters to the continuing application and implications of terra nullius for both Aboriginal and settler polities (see Banner, 2007), the Australian imaginaries of Indigenouslessness and associated structures of feeling persisted (see Rifkin, 2014). The legal and poetic fiction furnished by the image of terra nullius was, as Henry Reynolds (1992 [1988]: 32) emphasised, ‘too convenient to surrender lightly’. To bring into question the foundational Indigenouslessness of settler-colonial Australia would have been to undermine the originary Crown claim to sovereignty and every grant in land deriving from it, which is to say the very basis for ‘settlement’. It was too important. When Indigenouslessness seemed untenable, alternative patterns of perception emerged to reimagine it in alternative fashion. Future Indigenouslessness was projected, and significant settler investment in absorption and assimilation followed. And when even that fantasy was abandoned, functional Indigenouslessness took hold in the shape of ‘repressive authenticity’ (see Wolfe, 1999).

Racelessness

Another negation held that there should be no ‘racial’ diversity. ‘Race’ was in the 19th century used in ways that covered what we now see as ethnicity. The ‘White Australia’ policy lasted for most of the 20th century. It opened federal proceedings, and its promoters understood it as a fundamental exercise in self-definition. The Australian Commonwealth-to-be would be federal, and also a continental polity – a ‘nation for a continent and a continent for a nation’, in Edmund Barton’s famous phrase. That it should have no borders was once believed to be momentously significant, as no territorial dispute would then arise – but it would not be a new America. The neo-Europe across the Pacific had been torn apart by civil war and revolutionary transformation; many saw that it was dealing with the consequences of a racially divided population (that the Civil War in the United States had been followed by an ‘unfinished revolution’ was suggested at a later stage, see Foner, 1988; that it had been an instance of revolutionary upheaval had been clear to most contemporary observers). Many in the neo-Europes of the antipodes realised that their experiments must stay clear of that contradiction, and the Australian Federal Parliament opened proceedings by approving two crucial exclusionary measures: the exclusion of all ‘nonwhites’, and the deportation of ‘Kanakas’ from Queensland. It was a future-oriented decision, it would have momentous consequences, and yet it was confirming what most self-governing colonies had already practised for decades. Exclusion already had a long colonial history by then (see Curthoys, 2003). The other neo-Europes took notice (see Lake and Reynolds, 2008).

The policy and its proponents declared that its aims were to keep Australia white; they framed it as a pre-emptive measure, but the policy was one result of anxieties concerning a polity that they feared – despite proclamations that Australia was ‘98% British’ – was not that white or British after all. The declared policy objective was to establish and perpetuate what was declared to be a racially homogenous socio-political body, but the policy could also be seen as designed to assuage an anxious perception. In many ways, ‘White Australia’ the policy was meant to make Australia white again. The New Zealand Commissioners who attended the Federation conventions and advised against joining the federating colonies, for example, thought that Australia was not that white (they believed that settler New Zealand across the Tasman was extraordinarily ‘White’ only because they assumed that Maori were either ‘honorary’ Whites or would soon disappear; see Mein Smith, 2003). Settler Australians expressed a similar belief that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would also disappear (see McGregor, 1997), but the New Zealand delegates remained unconvinced about Australia’s prospects in that regard (McGregor, 2011).

Irrespectively, whether the White Australia policy was a reactive or a pre-emptive development, the Australian federation leaders had looked with dismay at recent developments across the Pacific (see Lake, 2003, 2007; Tyrrell, 1999). War had devastated the USA only a few decades earlier, and racial terror and Jim Crow was not that appealing either. The immigrating ‘multitudes’ from southern and eastern Europe that were entering the USA at the time looked unsavoury too – too poor and possibly red too. Racial exclusion was to produce a conflictless social body in a specific locale because a lack of exclusion had produced a conflict-ridden social body elsewhere.

Whereas the nativist journalist Randolph Bedford in 1911 reflected that ‘Australia had been handed a sacred duty of breeding a pure race in a clean continent’ (cited in Evans, 2004: 111), others feared that the Indigenouslessness on which the nation had been constructed might yet come back to haunt them. At the inauguration of the negative Commonwealth’s future capital, future Prime Minister Billy Hughes declared that the nation was developing ‘without the slightest trace of that race we have banished from the face of the earth’ but warned: ‘[w]e must not be too proud lest we should, too, in time disappear. We must take steps to safeguard the foothold we now have’ (cited in Evans, 2004: 108).

White Australia, a crucial negation, sought to shore up Australia’s defences. It was one of the central pillars of the ‘Australian Settlement’. Paul Kelly (1992) also singled out industry protection, wage arbitration, state paternalism and imperial benevolence. The ‘settlement’ was one result of the ambition to imagine a fundamentally conflictless political body (for an analysis of the pillars of the ‘settlement’ and of their origins, see, for example, a 2004 special issue of the Australian Journal of Political Science edited by Geoffrey Stokes).

There was no explicitly codified programme, but there was a coordinated system. White Australia was a settler-colonial mechanism underpinning a closely supervised population economy (see Veracini, 2010), like state secularism was a settler-colonial mechanism designed to displace ethnoreligious conflict. Arbitration was designed to minimise class conflict. The ‘settlement’ was thus a means to an end: creating a permanently self-regulating polity. Conflictlessness would beget a truer settlement of settlers.

Classlessness

Another crucial negation was that there should be no class strife. The Romantic notion that a nation was normally based on cultural homogeneity was amplified in Australia by the prophecy that cultural and ‘racial’ homogeneity would be complemented by classlessness. The existence of class could not be denied, of course, but was displaced: classlessness was underpinned by the notion that no fixed borders between the classes would emerge. The fateful Harvester Decision offered in 1907 a definition of what a ‘civilised life’ looked like. It had to, as it was in the business of mandating it. That fateful decision, a crucial pillar of the ‘Australian settlement’, also implicitly defined what an ‘uncivilised life’ may be: political and industrial conflict, permanent economic struggle, and the subsequent organisation of an industrial proletariat in the cities (as well as the reorganisation of rural labour).

The consolidation of a settler ‘social-democracy’, and various ‘state experiments’ testing a cluster of related industrial and labour reforms (Clark, 1906), were meant to restore a conflictless social body (even if they were framed, like White Australia had been, as pre-emptive measures). The 1890s had been years of increasingly tense industrial confrontation in the Australasian colonies. Prominent US journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd had visited New Zealand in 1899 and approved greatly of the system of conciliation of labour disputes he witnessed. He wrote two books about it (A Country without Strikes in 1900, and Newest England in 1901). Arbitration was a shared Australasian development (the trans-Tasman cross-cultural traffic was always intense, and only much later would a nationalist fetish take over). But it was not about keeping Australia and New Zealand peaceful, it was about making these countries peaceful again, an institutional device designed to reconstitute industrial peace after years of bitter struggle. Class struggle and revolutionary socialism were therefore to be excluded. Having acted to legislate Indigenouslessness and entrench racelessness (see Cahir and Tout, 2018), Alfred Deakin explicitly defended arbitration as an instrument to prevent ‘Old World’ class struggle from infiltrating the body politic (cited in Lake, 2019).

And like White Australia, arbitration and associated minimum wage legislation were shaped in the context of a transnational exchange of ideas. As well as Old World class struggle, arbitration was meant to pre-empt the development of American-style neo-European class struggle too (see Lake, 2013, 2019). The Arbitration Court and its operation have traditionally been seen as a search for the ‘middle ground’ between labour and capital and an attempt to manage incipient ‘class antagonism’ (see Lake, 2013: 173, n. 8), but could also be seen as part of a radical attempt to shape a conflictless polity (and to project it internationally). JB Higgins, the author of the Harvester decision, sounded convincing vis-a-vis his American Progressive interlocutors because arbitration in one locale was a response to a conflict-ridden industrial landscape elsewhere. Neither capital nor organised labour in the USA at the beginning of the 20th century, however, embraced arbitration; the former demanded ‘freedom of contract’, the latter pursued ‘manly independence’ (see Lake, 2013: 177).

The Arbitration Court was eventually discontinued during Prime Minister Hughes’ tenure. This was during a later ‘recolonising’ phase, when socio-political experimentation with exclusion was abandoned and conservative reaction enthusiastically embraced. ‘Hughes is ruining our Australian experiments’, Higgins had commented (cited in Lake, 2013: 186). But exclusion would remain: class struggle and revolutionary socialism were therefore to be excluded by other means – and they were.

If industrial struggle could not be entirely eliminated, it might at least be displaced. Higgins had defined the minimum wage on the basis of the ability to reproduce (a home, wife and three kids for all workers – a mandated minimum wage that was to be associated with the first eight-hour working day). But in this context, a ‘civilised life’ was also and importantly about displacing conflict: about relocating it to the courts and away from factory floors. Once conflict had been transferred elsewhere, the minimum wage was meant to keep it away. Two generations earlier, a ‘civilised life’ had been legislated through the ‘Free Selection’ Act (1861). It allowed settlers to select up to 320 acres of land and to purchase freehold title. The ‘selectors’ were Australia’s ‘homesteaders’, but their properties were never large enough, never wet enough, never insured enough, never connected to markets enough, never sustainable.

That ‘civilised’ life had also been about displacement – of both the settlers and the Indigenous peoples whose lands they were to ‘settle’ – but back then the settler had to displace to the land, now it was strife itself that was displaced away. Either way, industrial conflict, like the possibility of racial or ethnic ‘antagonism’, was understood spatially. If the White Australia policy was meant to keep the racial contradiction out, compulsory arbitration was meant to keep revolution out. ‘Out’ was key. Other conflicts, or potential conflicts, were displaced too, and understood spatially. ¹

Culturelessness

Many in Australia rejected modernism and high culture. This was yet another negation. Modernism was welcomed decades later than in other places, and always somewhat hesitantly. Humphrey McQueen’s (1979) Black Swan of Trespass focuses on the Australian modernists in the context of a comprehensive rejection of all revolutionary possibilities. McQueen sees outright reactionaries, false modernists and against this trend pits selected bits of Margaret Preston’s art. Not much. McQueen sees ‘modernism’ as a response to ‘modernity’, a notion that in his representation includes monopolistic capitalism, mass production, fascism and revolution, including the international proletariat. Australia in the 1920s, McQueen emphasises, was founded on isolationism: tariffs, deportations and a refusal to engage with new artistic trends were all part of a pattern (see McQueen, 1979: 18). The logic in this instance too was spatial: keep it out.

There was great physical distance, but this particularly anxious settler nationalist project now felt that a continent and an ocean was not enough, especially considering that distance was being annihilated by technology. Distance thus had to be shored up – deprecations against what Geoffrey Blainey (1966) would condense into The Tyranny of Distance (see Blainey, 1966) were now often paralleled by the anxious consideration of a shrinking world. PR Stephensen’s work can be seen as one anxious response, for example, and so too the works of Rex Ingamells and the Jindyworobaks (see Tout, 2017b, 2017c). The response to crisis – the response to all crises, including the First World War and subsequent revolutionary crises – was to keep Australia ‘free of the Old World’s contagion’ (McQueen, 1979: 59). In the years 1918–20 the world had witnessed a devastating global pandemic. ‘Contagion’ became a paradigm: for the next two decades Australia was to observe social distancing on a continental scale.

A rejection of modernism demanded a return to the pastoral, as Raymond Williams has perceptively argued, itself a form of displacement. McQueen (1979: 114) remarks that New South Wales Gallery Director James S MacDonald approved of Arthur Streeton’s ‘pastoralism’ because it depicted ‘the way in which life should be in Australia, with the maximum of flocks and the minimum of factories’. A rejection of conveyor-belt industrialism and a generalised dislike of machines epitomised Australia’s peculiar mix of reaction and exclusion, a form of pre-emptive reaction. McQueen (1979: 114) sees Australian modernism as shaped by a set of problems, including the increasing influence of world revolution and the rise of the Australian Communist Party, and concludes that ‘Streeton’s paintings pointed to a way out of, or rather a way around, war, revolution and depression, by a return to the soil’.

McQueen (1979: 112) also detects during this phase the end of a tradition of socio-political experimentation: the ‘prospects for creating a new social order were fast disappearing’, he observes; if:

social relations were to be changed, the changes would have to be made within established countries, and not in Utopian colonies [like Australia]. Revolution in Europe moved up the agenda as explorers, technology and migrations reduced the size of the earth. (McQueen, 1979: 112)

This shrinking brought Australia into dangerous proximity with conflict – the Hartzean fragment was ‘reconnecting’ (an awareness of global reconnection after the Second World War had indeed been the origin of Hartz’s own work). The logic, however, was still spatial; more exclusions were needed, and even cultural influences from a conflict-ridden world were to be shut out. The already mentioned ‘cringe’ was one outcome of a pattern of deliberate cultural exclusion as well as one result of an anxious pattern of perception.

DH Lawrence had sensed this refusal, this negation, and approved, even if he had remained ambivalent about Australia and Australians – he profoundly disliked its ‘emptiness’, and had noted that the Australians ‘haven’t got any insides to them’, that they are ‘hollow’, and that ‘one could never make a novel out of these people’ (cited in Holbrook, 2022). Still, in many ways his 1923 Kangaroo embraced the negative Commonwealth – Australia’s ostensible rejection of modernism enabled Lawrence to ponder the possibiloity of a new world entirely detached from the degeneration that he worryingly perceived everywhere else.

If Lawrence had approved, at least in principle and with some reservations, the English Professor of English, JIM Stewart, in his famous if inaccurately recollected Commonwealth Literary Fund lecture, derided (see Butterss, 2015). For Stewart, Australia was, and would remain, intractably cultureless. Both Lawrence and Stewart were in Australia, they were visitors, but from outside of it: they looked with very different sensitivities and yet similarly perceived a negation. They assessed it differently, but the two versions of the cringe – anxious embrace and anxious deprecation – had external referents. Australia was indeed, and still, a social laboratory.

Historylessness

The new polity would have no history as well as no conflicts (see Veracini, 2007). Like a Hartzean fragment, its history would be a mere unfolding (Veracini, 2016). This negation would be predicated on conflictlessness: no dialectical progression, no non-evolutionary transformation and no revolution would be conceivable in the new polity because revolution would not be necessary in the first place. If revolutions emerge from conflict, a conflictless social body cannot embrace revolutionary transformation. McQueen’s (2004 [1970]) New Britannia is primarily dedicated to answering why there was no revolutionary movement in Australia (see also Beilharz, 1994; Macintyre, 1989).

History was especially a concern. Australians made history, they were keen to prove themselves on the world stage, but they made history elsewhere (for example and most famously at Gallipoli). It was negation by displacement. Always at the outer limits of geography, the settlers’ Commonwealth would opt out of history too. History was happening elsewhere – it had to happen elsewhere because it could not happen in Australia. History itself was understood spatially.

The notion that Australia was a country ‘still to make’, a country whose history was in the future and not the past, that it was a ‘new beginning’ for humanity, and a country that would be spared the troubles of the Old World was widespread, almost commonplace. CEW Bean and JS MacDonald equally submitted to it. Bean’s 1907 description of the ‘coming man’ emphasised a rejection of history: this man lived in the future as he disregarded history by taking ‘everything on its merits and nothing on authority’ (see White, 1981: 67, 76–84, 125–30; cited at p. 126). As accumulated experience, authority is by definition emanating from the past. Nothing happened in the ‘quiet continent’, as Douglas Pike (1970) had summarised. The place, the whole continent and Tasmania too (Pike worked at the University of Tasmania), had been settled once and for all (see Roberts, 1968 [1924]).

Settlement, the act of occupying the land, was indeed understood as coterminous with political settlement. Pike’s work constituted a dialectical counterpoint to the radical historiography emphasising struggle. Pike is the bard of sedate settler Australia, and The Quiet Continent (1970) espouses a narrative of the sober, hard-won progress of the secure freeholder, not the epic of The Australian Legend types (see Davison, 1978; Ward, 1958). Pike (1962) and reasserted the respectability of Australian history and pitted ‘the North’ and the pastoral nomads against ‘the South’ and the freeholders (barracking shamelessly for the latter). Respectability was to be found in a negative rendition of history: there is nothing to see here people, move along. It seems significant that the Australian 'legend’ was brought to the fore during a phase of cultural renewal after a few recolonising decades. That legend is almost completely forgotten now.

‘Historylessness’ (see Veracini, 2007) is in a sense the place all settlers and ‘fragments’ are moving to. If the sovereignty and property of Indigenous collectives is to be foreclosed, the history of their dispossession cannot be told; if it is told, it is because it can no longer be denied, as has been increasingly the case since the 1960s. So, the contemporary implications of this history, finally acknowledged, must be foreclosed – ‘blemished chapters’ are acknowledged precisely in order that ‘new pages’ might be opened. These ‘pages’, presumably pages of a history book yet to be written, are in the future. History is thus still displaced (and therefore, paradoxically, negated).

This was also Louis Hartz’s (1964) insightful conclusion: in his reconstruction, the settler ‘fragments’ had left contradictions behind and therefore history (and revolution) too. Again, Hartz was especially interested in declaring the end of historylessness after the conclusion of the Second World War and the subsequent reconnection between the ‘fragments’ and the ‘Old World’ (see Bruyneel, 2013). For Hartz, the brave new post-conflict world was whole again – the unfolded fragments had re-joined contradiction and history. In Australia specifically, this realisation had come in the guise of an existential panic after the fall of Singapore. Too close for comfort, Singapore’s fall had demonstrated that the ‘Tyranny of Distance’ was actually something one could become complacent about.

Voicelessness

The ‘quiet continent’ was also to be essentially voiceless. This is yet another negation, but we should focus on it because it is now (we write at the beginning of winter in 2023) a pressing concern. There always was a cacophony of voices, but it was typically deemed meaningless – even the birds could not sing in Australia, and silence prevailed everywhere. The settler’s axe was presumably ringing in otherwise silent valleys, and the quiet achievers achieved quietly. Politically, the same: the settler ‘contract’ was concluded between the settler and himself; no treaties were signed; no entreating (there is entreat in treaty), no conversation. The laboratory would be a quietened – a settled – environment. Noise reduction: Australia was the only settler colony that foreclosed all treaty traditions. Nothing to say or register – Indigenouslessness beget voicelessness since the beginning. John Howard’s late rehearsal of this foundational voicelessness, and his droning on about nations not signing treaties with themselves, discounted that every single nation of his beloved Anglosphere embraced treaty traditions, including the UK. Ten centuries of a vociferous and global constitutional practice, while all constitutions, including those that are not written, are treaties a nation has signed with itself. Howard was criticised for his deafness, but no one said at the time that his defence of voicelessness was very peculiar.

Voicelessness could be seen as a blessing and as a curse. Apologists and bemoaners could agree. This was so culturally as well as politically. Publisher and polemicist ‘Inky’ Stephensen could not permanently follow Lawrence ‘home’ to England. After trying and failing and eventually returning to Australia, he had hopes of inspiring an incipient cultural nationalist movement to fill the silence Lawrence (and others) had perceived. In 1936, he published his powerful and highly influential settler nationalist manifesto: The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay towards National Self-Respect (Stephensen, 1936). In it, he worked through and against a succession of negations to clear the ground for the emergence of the settler national culture: a voice. A voice needed publishers, and he knew there weren’t any. Stephensen was an outspoken critic of the voiceless Commonwealth who ended up being physically silenced.

Colonisation happened, he argued; it was violent and destructive; but it was not Australian, it was British; Australia was founded as a penal colony, but convictism in Britain was more widespread and brutal, and the penal system in Australia was British. Correspondingly, the celebration of ‘convictism and criminality (bushranging)’ in Australian literature belonged not to Stephensen’s true Australians, but rather to the ‘immigrant writers’ to whom such themes appealed (60). This was not a voice; it was an exercise in ventriloquism. For Stephensen, Australia was neither colony nor nation, but something ‘betwixt and between’ – and yet ‘Australia’ was almost ready to emerge (18). Stephensen’s new nation would not be colonial, and nor would it be colonising. It would not be European, nor would it follow America’s lead. It would inherit the best of all worlds – metropolitan and ‘Indigenous' (for him, this would involve an Indigeneity that could dispense with actual Indigenous peoples) – but belong to none. Europe was on the verge of destruction; America would soon follow suit; Australia might become ‘the sole repository of what were once European culture, ideals of decency, and civilisation’ (88). Tellingly, however, its arrival was both imminent and incipient. Australia was not yet ready and settler national culture remained a ‘culture of the future’ (162). A cultural voice was still missing, imagining a future one was part of a pattern of negation by displacement.

In search of Australia’s foundations, Stephensen railed against the ventriloquism of those he decried as ‘imported English professors’ and looked forward to ‘a new nation, a new human type’ he saw ‘being formed in Australia’ (140, 11). The imported English professors had to be negated too. Australia’s British origins were clear; its future less so: ‘We go on--to what?’ (12) Following in Stephensen’s footsteps, Manning Clark, the first Australian Professor of Australian History, someone who would become one of the Australian voices Stephensen had looked forward (not backward) to, also perceived the negative Commonwealth – the ‘Kingdom of Nothingness’ (Clark, 1990). Clark was referring to chronicler of settler-colonial political traditions Alexis de Tocqueville, was also searching for foundations, like Stephensen had, but could not find them. In his self-appointed role as national and nationalist ‘prophet’, Clark sought then to fill the silence. The ‘great Australian silence’ WEH Stanner would detect regarding Aboriginal peoples went beyond the need to sustain the polity’s Indigenouslessness (Clark later acknowledged that he had contributed to the silencing of Aboriginal presences, a stance he would regret). He had found himself ‘set[ting] out on a journey without maps’ (quoted in McKenna, 2011: 250). In a lecture given at Stephensen’s alma mater, the University of Queensland, Clark (1990) took the seminal essay of its ‘distinguished if somewhat storm-centred son’ as ‘a springboard from which to dive into [the] deeper waters’ of his titular topic: the continuing quest for an Australian identity. ‘We Australians’, Clark concurred, ‘have trouble’ in positively ‘identifying ourselves, in saying what we are, and what we are coming to be’ (3-4). Despite his own – and others’ – decades of searching, Clark could only conclude that the question: ‘What is an Australian?’ remained unanswered. Answering is still a going concern; the quest for an Australian national culture and identity became, and remains, a ‘national obsession’ (White, 1981: viii). Attempts to appropriate the voices of First Nations peoples for national purposes (see, for example, Schultz, 2022) can be seen as maintaining a negation.

Whereas Stephensen proposed to give the settlers of Australia a distinctive voice, the question of an Indigenous one was eventually brought to the fore. It should be heard, finally, an admission of voicelessness; and it should be enshrined in the nation’s contract. The Australian constitutional document was and is a negative document; it lacked a ‘unifying and uplifting idea of the first new nation of the new century’, and it lacked a positive inventory of rights and freedoms. It was ‘a prosaic, working rulebook’, not the ‘eagle’ of America, but a ‘small brown bird’ (Schultz, 2022: 233-4). It explicitly mandated the voicelessness of Indigenous peoples: they could not be counted, which, as Murray Goot and Tim Rowse (2023) remind us, was about a prohibition of using data about this population for the purpose of representation. They proceed to note that to count is to matter: to ‘“count” is not only to “enumerate”; it is also to be significant’. True, but not the whole truth. It is telling indeed that ‘to count’ in English comes from medieval French and is about being taken to account, usually by a judge, to recount, to narrate. In short, to have a voice. The Constitution had mandated Aboriginal voicelessness, but the 1967 referendum had been concerned with being represented (note the passive voice), not with having a voice.

The 1967 referendum was about an ‘absent negative’ (McGregor, 2008), and a positive campaign towards the negation of exclusion, the negation of a negation. The outcome was that Aboriginal peoples would be counted, and for the purpose of representation too, but they could still not recount. Calls about ‘completing the journey’ have become commonplace as the prospect of a 2023 Referendum takes shape. The Australian Settlement is long gone. The current business of reforming the Commonwealth includes the establishment of an Indigenous Voice to parliament: a negation of Indigenouslessness, and a potential negation of voicelessness, for Indigenous if not for settler Australia. The referendum is thus about finally negating the last vestiges of the negative Commonwealth.

Conclusion: What is left of the negative Commonwealth

The other neo-Europes often took notice of Australian developments. The ‘laboratory’ gained an audience, especially with progressives in the United States (Lake, 2003, 2013, 2019; Wright, 2016). For a few decades around the turn of the 19th century Australia exported new ideas and practical models for progressive social reform. It was widely understood that social and legislative experiments developed in ‘Australasia’ would be of interest in the United States and indeed beyond.

One result of a common history of nation-building on Indigenous lands ensured that Australia and the USA, as President Theodore Roosevelt would remark, shared a ‘fundamental continuity of feeling’ (cited in Lake, 2019: 72). Feelings of settler-colonial fellowship carried important political implications, and early 20th-century Australia and New Zealand had become self-fashioned laboratories of a new political formation: the settler-colonial state. The expertise developed through the ‘state experiments’ during a period of intense legislative and judicial activism was then offered (and sometime solicited) as a contribution to overcoming stalled reform across the Pacific during the Gilded Era. So, the ‘experiments’ were carefully considered but, if many of the concerns were shared – electoral reform and women’s suffrage, for example – a tradition of state interventionism was not embraced. Better said: there was a significant lag. Deakin had enthusiastically upheld the ‘free use of the agencies of the state’ (cited in Lake, 2019: 70), but it was only in the 1930s and with the New Deal – a few crucial decades after the Australasian experiments had been conducted – that state intervention was finally normalised in the USA.

Then again, irrespectively of its pillars and their function, it is significant that the Australian Settlement was premised on a succession of exclusions; that the polity was defined by way of a succession of interrelated negations. The polity to come, the home of Australia’s ‘new man’, was a fundamentally conflictless social body, an exceptional Commonwealth in the context of a political sensitivity that assumed that conflict fundamentally defined social relations elsewhere (whether Australia was actually conflictless, and of course it never was, is somewhat irrelevant to this analysis of the negative Commonwealth as a political idea). Thus, the Australian state, a state formation that relied on the judiciary more than other branches (Davidson, 1991), was designed to perpetuate the settlement by way of spatial exclusion. Exclusion was underpinned by anxiety but resulted in an exceptionally stable political framework. The eventual undoing of the ‘Australian Settlement’ in the 1990s resulted in an age of ‘uncertainty’, which is again a negative definition.

This negative definition relied on a spatial imagination. Physical distance offered effortless distanciation. The ‘tyranny of distance’ has often been seen as a typically Australian category, something ‘Australian Britons’ and ‘imperial nationalists’ resented and lamented. But in many ways the Australian Settlement was designed to maintain and shore up the distance between Australia and the ‘Old World’ (closeness to the largest of the North American neo-Europes was progressively emphasised as the century unfolded). Socio-political uniqueness (i.e. a pervasive conflictlessness) was also understood spatially. Australia’s contribution to the world turned inside out during the early decades of the 20th century was not about the possibility of displacing somewhere else to transform the world (what Bentham, Mill and Wakefield had suggested), but the other way round, about the possibility of maintaining distance and transforming the world by staying put while socially (and politically) distancing.

When Prime Minister Paul Keating announced that Australia was to finally join the regional ‘neighbourhood’, what he meant was that Australia was to denounce the ‘settlement’ that had insulated it for most of the 20th century and distance with it. Now Australia was close again, but the laboratory metaphor was raised, again – this time, Australia (and New Zealand) would be laboratories of radical neoliberal experimentation (they had been testing grounds at least since the mid-1980s; see Cox, 2006). Instead of an experiment in quarantining and contagion avoidance, however, this time it was an experiment in exposure. Belich (2001: 46) remarked that by the 1980s–90s the Antipodes were again ‘the world’s white rat’.

Australia had been an island, an island-continent (significantly, isolation and islands may share a common etymology); its imperial nationalists had ostensibly lamented distance as they proactively endeavoured to maintain it. Previously, the Australian national settler project in its various configurations had opted out of a world it had seen as ridden with contradictions and revolutionary upheaval, now it was embracing globalisation, the great annihilator of distance (this openness did not last long, of course, and after Keating came Howard). But when Australia joined the neoliberal globalising world at the end of the ‘settlement’, it was a polity entirely devoid of any ambition to be otherwise.