More British than Britain itself

Monday, June 17th, 2019

Jared Diamond first visited Australia in 1964, shortly after he had been living in Britain for four years (as he explains in Upheaval):

Australia then impressed me as more British than Britain itself—like the Britain of a few decades prior, frozen in time.

[...]

Australian people were not just overwhelmingly white in their ancestry; they were overwhelmingly British white.

[...]

In 1964 the fundamental fact of Australian society was still the contradiction between Australia’s geographic location on the one hand, and its population make-up and emotional and cultural ties on the other hand. Australia’s population and national identity were mostly British (Plate 7.1). But Australia is almost half-way around the world from Britain: in the Southern Hemisphere rather than in the Northern Hemisphere, and eight to 10 time zones east of Britain. The Australian landscape of kangaroos, egg-laying mammals, kookaburras, big lizards, eucalyptus trees, and deserts is the most distinctive (and least British) landscape of any continent inhabited by humans (Plate 7.2).

[...]

However, 32 years later, in 1820, Australia’s European population still consisted of 84% of convicts and former convicts, and convict transport from Britain to Australia did not cease until 1868.

[...]

Today, one-third of the world’s wool is grown by Australia’s abundant sheep population, five sheep for every human.

[...]

Australia is a world-leading exporter of aluminum, coal, copper, gold, iron, lead, magnesium, silver, tungsten, titanium, and uranium.

[...]

In other British colonies, such as the U.S., Canada, India, Fiji, and West Africa, British colonists dealt with native people either peacefully by negotiating with local chiefs or princes, or else militarily by sending British armies against local armies or sizeable tribal forces. Those methods did not work in Australia, where Aboriginal organization consisted of small bands without armies, chiefs, or princes.

[...]

Aborigines lived a nomadic lifestyle and did not have fixed villages. To European settlers, that meant that Aborigines did not “own” the land. Hence European settlers simply took Aboriginal land without negotiation or payment.

[...]

The first substantial group of non-British immigrants began to arrive in 1836 in South Australia. That colony had been founded not as a convict dump but by a land development company that carefully selected prospective settlers from Europe. Among those settlers were German Lutherans seeking religious freedom, a motive for immigration much more conspicuous in the early history of the United States than of Australia. Those German immigrants were skilled and white, developed market gardening and vineyards, adapted quickly to Australia, and aroused minimal opposition.

[...]

More controversial was the arrival of tens of thousands of Chinese in the 1850’s, drawn (along with many Europeans and Americans) by Australia’s first gold rush. That influx resulted in the last use of the British army in Australia, to quell riots in which a crowd beat, robbed, and even scalped Chinese.

[...]

A third wave of non-British arrivals arose from the development of sugar plantations in Queensland beginning in the 1860’s. The plantation workers were Pacific Islanders from New Guinea, other Melanesian islands, and Polynesia. While some of them were voluntary recruits, many were kidnapped from their islands by raids accompanied by frequent murders, in a practice known as black-birding (because the islanders were dark-skinned).

[...]

Such labor recruitment practices continued in New Guinea long into the 20th century: an Australian whom I met in Australian-governed New Guinea in 1966 told me that he was a labor recruiter, but he took pains to explain how he recruited only voluntary laborers to whom he paid cash bonuses. He proudly insisted that he was not a kidnapping black-birder (that was the word that he still used), whereas some of the other recruiters with whom he competed still were.

[...]

In any case, regardless of whether the dark-skinned workers on Australian sugar plantations from the 1860’s onwards had arrived voluntarily or involuntarily, they did not make Australia’s resident population less white, because they came on fixed-term contracts and were expelled from Australia at the ends of their terms.

[...]

Still another group of non-British immigrants was a small number from the British colony of India.

[...]

The Australian colonies achieved self-government with no objections from Britain, and never severed their ties with Britain completely.

[...]

One is that Britain learned lessons from its expensive defeat in the American Revolution, changed its policies towards its white colonies, and readily granted self-government to Canada, New Zealand, and its Australian colonies.

[...]

The resulting slowness of communication made it impossible for the British colonial office in London to exercise close control over Australia; decisions and laws had to be delegated at first to governors, and then to Australians themselves.

[...]

In contrast, no European power competed with Britain to colonize the Australian continent, and Aborigines were few, without guns, and not centrally led. Hence Britain never needed to station a large army in Australia, nor to levy unpopular taxes on Australians to pay for that army; Britain’s levying taxes on the American colonies without consulting them was the immediate cause of the American Revolution.

[...]

Still another factor was that Britain’s Australian colonies, in contrast to its American colonies, were too unprofitable and unimportant for Britain to care about and pay much attention to.

[...]

By the late 1800’s, the only major right consistently reserved for Britain was the control of Australian foreign affairs.

[...]

The appointed British governors frequently had to resolve disagreements between the upper and lower houses of a colonial legislature, had to broker the formation of parliamentary coalitions, and had to decide when to dissolve parliament and call an election.

[...]

In fact, Australia arose as six separate colonies—New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, and Queensland—with far less contact among them than the contact among the American colonies that would later become states of the U.S.

[...]

Not until 1917 did all five of the capital cities on the Australian mainland become connected by railroad.

[...]

Each colony adopted a different railroad gauge (track separation), ranging from 3 feet 6 inches to 5 feet 3 inches, with the result that trains could not run directly from one colony into another. Like independent countries, the colonies erected protective tariff barriers against one another and maintained customs houses to collect import duties at colonial borders.

[...]

In 1864 New South Wales and Victoria came close to an armed confrontation at their border. As a result, the six colonies did not become united into a single nation of Australia until 1901, 113 years after the First Fleet.

[...]

Australians debating the federal constitution argued about many matters but were unanimous about excluding all non-white races from Australia.

[...]

In 1896 the newspaper Melbourne Age wrote, “We wish to see Australia the home of a great homogenous Caucasian race, entirely free from the problems which have plunged the United States into civil war… there is no use in protecting our workers from the pauper labor of the Far East if we admit the paupers themselves.”

[...]

The motive behind these immigration barriers was mainly the racism of the times, but partly also that the Australian Labor Party wanted to protect high wages for Australian workers by preventing the immigration of cheap labor.

[...]

Contemporary Britain and continental European countries didn’t encourage or accept immigrants at all.

Comments

  1. Alrenous says:

    However, 32 years later, in 1820, Australia’s European population still consisted of 84% of convicts and former convicts, and convict transport from Britain to Australia did not cease until 1868

    Tendentious.
    Australian population in 1868 was 1.5 million, and total convicts transported topped out at 167 thousand. The reason it could be 80% convict in 1820 was because the population was 34 thousand.
    Of note, the usual proportion of criminal families in European populations is ~10%.

  2. TRX says:

    While Australia probably got the largest number of transportees, many also got sent to other colonies, including British America.

    There are a number of documented cases of transportees sent to America who simply bought a ticket and sailed right back to England. Australia was a bit harder to return from…

  3. Bruce says:

    The British Empire made a point of sending Irish to Australia and Scots to Canada, right down to the regiments stationed there. Australia being as far away as practical and all those Doug Campbells being unlikely to team up with the Irish in America.

  4. Graham says:

    This.

    We actually have quite a large Irish ancestry population, even those who still self-identify, but the relative Scottishness of British settlement in Canada versus the relative Irishness of Australia was actually a quite long-in-use way of describing Canadian history to ourselves. I think I have encountered Australians who do the same comparison, so the idea had legs for many generations.

Leave a Reply