At last, in Centennial Park, under a temporary canopy, at a place now marked by an undistinguished little pagoda, the Anglican Archbishop recited the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer for the Commonwealth and a prayer for the Governor-General. The Declaration of the Commonwealth and the reading of the Letters Patent of the Governor-General, Lord Hopetoun, then occurred. The Oath of Office was administered to the new Prime Minister and his cabinet. Deakin shook with the weight of the moment. Barton was Prime Minister and Minister for External Affairs, Lyne was Minister for Home Affairs, Deakin and Turner were Attorney-General and Treasurer respectively, Charlie Kingston was Minister for Trade and Customs, Forrest from Western Australia was Postmaster-General, Dickson of Queensland was Minister for Defence—a gesture to cosset that state—and Neil Lewis the Tasmanian was Minister without Portfolio. The table on which Queen Victoria had signed the Act the previous year had been brought to Australia and was set up under the pavilion in Centennial Park. As commissions were signed by the still-sickly Lord Hopetoun, a hot wind blew some realistic grit in through the flaps to take pretension out of the moment. Papers flew off the table and officials ran around picking them up off the ground. Some of the ministers sworn in on 1 January wore the official dress of members of the British cabinet—the so-called Windsor uniform of silk breeches, stockings and braided and gold-buttoned coat. Barton wore a morning suit, however, and Deakin a normal suit of business. ‘God Save the Queen’ was sung, as was the Hallelujah chorus, ‘Advance Australia Fair’ and ‘Rule Britannia’.
Australia’s first Federal day had been hard on the Governor-General and his wife, Ethelred, and this explained their absence from the official banquet on the night of Australia’s inauguration. Even so, Hopetoun’s future would not be glittering. He would spend two and a half years in the post, annoying Barton and a number of other people, including the Australian Natives Association, by criticising Australia’s delay in sending further troops to South Africa. He would die before the decade was out of pernicious anaemia. But on Australia’s natal day he had been a presence in a cocked hat, which was all that was needed.
It was a matter of celebration, thought Deakin and others, that the Federation of Australia had been achieved without much external pressure and the lack of immediate threat. Australia was now, as one historian says, ‘a nation, but not yet a nation-state’. But it was imagined as such by its members, and subscribed to by a mass of Australians as a special combination and community, at least a potential utopia, and as a secret well-kept.
Edmund ‘Toby’ Barton was in his early fifties when he became the first Prime Minister of Australia, and he was, appropriately, native born—at Glebe in January 1849. (Equally to be weighed, perhaps, in that era, was his lack of convict background.) He had been a dazzling student in the classics at Sydney University and went on to do his Master’s, and he learned to debate at the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts. He had organised several intercolonial cricket matches and umpired in some major games, including New South Wales versus Lord Harris’s English XI, a game interrupted by a riot when the star Australian batsman, Billy Murdoch, was given out by a Victorian accompanying the English XI.
Barton was admitted to the bar in 1871 and entered the Legislative Assembly eight years later representing the seat of Sydney University. He was well read and handsome, and loved Shakespearean theatre and the opera. In 1882 Barton, with his considerable knowledge of constitutional law, was appointed Speaker of the House, the youngest yet. But he was able to control such rowdies as Adolphus Mudgee Taylor. Mudgee Taylor was a perpetual mover of points of order, was regularly suspended for abuse, and had even been removed from the floor by the Sergeant-at-Arms. To gain political advantage, Taylor was not above publishing the names of members who—so he claimed—were drunk in the House.
Payment of members, introduced into Victoria in 1870, would not be enacted in New South Wales until 1889, and even after he had become a minister, Barton went on representing clients in legal matters. He became affluent through his work at the bar until a devotion to the Federation cause depleted his finances in the 1890s.
He was a convivial man who spent much time at the Athenaeum Club, frequented by John Archibald, founder of the Bulletin, by William Bede Dalley, artist Julian Ashton, writer Louis Becke and James Fairfax of the Herald. Throughout the 1890s he set up several Federation Leagues. His allies included his secretary, Queenslander Atlee Hunt; Robert Garran, a classicist and author of The Coming Commonwealth who would act as secretary of the drafting committee of the crucial 1897 convention; and a young lawyer and future Premier of New South Wales, Thomas Bavin. It was Garran who would record Barton’s great aphorism uttered in a speech at the Sydney suburb of Ashfield: ‘For the first time in history, we have a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation.’
At last all that colonial in-fighting had ended. Barton would afterwards describe how ordinarily the government of the Commonwealth began. All the early business was done at a table in a closed-off verandah of a government building, where he was assisted by Hunt (who dressed so well that people often mistook him for the Prime Minister), Garran, who was to be secretary of the attorney-general’s department, and one messenger. The Governor-General would come over daily from Government House to keep up on the planning for elections and for the first opening of Parliament in Melbourne. When Barton moved to Melbourne the state government there gave him similarly cramped quarters to work in.
Barton’s first task was to arrange for the federal elections to be held. In the House he would represent the electorate of Hunter, and that January, as the indomitable Jeanie Barton prepared the household for a move to Melbourne, he gave his policy speech to an excited audience in the West Maitland town hall, with both Deakin and Lyne in attendance. He declared that this was ‘the first time in history in which it is allowed to one body of men to govern a whole continent’. He promised to find a site for the federal capital as soon as possible, to create a public service and a High Court, and an Interstate Commission to decide revenue disputes between states and the federal government. There must also be federal conciliation and arbitration if there was a national industrial crisis. There must be a federal railway network—he undertook to build railways to Western Australia and to Broken Hill. Female federal franchise would be legislated early, and so would a federal system of old age and invalid pensions. (As it turned out, these would not be introduced until 1908.) And, he told his enthusiastic listeners, he would introduce laws to prevent an influx of Asiatic labour and any further importation of Kanakas.
The customs department had been pre-recruited and had needed to begin operations from 1 January as the chief source of income for the federal government. ‘The power of direct taxation of the Commonwealth I agree is a power not to be lightly or rashly exercised.’ Since they had lost customs, the states could now only raise money through income tax. It would be, he said, ‘an act of insanity’ to do anything to disadvantage the states. However, it would take £700 000 to set up and run a federal government and all its activities, and therefore the Commonwealth tariffs collected by the customs department must be a high one. Within two years of the inauguration of the Commonwealth all intercolonial duties were to be dropped, and the states would immediately reap the advantage of intercolonial free trade. Western Australia could collect at a diminishing ratio over five years. In the meantime, the states should be certain that the tariffs imposed by the new government would suit their people and ‘be thoroughly liberal and at the same time of a purely Australian character. The Ministry will not take any action that will have the effect of destroying State industries, and the Commonwealth will not be issued in by the pattering of the feet of people driven out of employment.’
The first elections were held on 29 and 30 March 1901. The Free Traders—city merchants and squatters and others—did well enough, especially in New South Wales where George Reid led the charge, to be confident that it would not be possible for Mr
Barton to raise too high a tariff. A complex tariff system, involving different charges for various imported goods, according to their supposed capacity to undercut local products and manufacturers, would be put in place before the first session of Parliament ended in 1902. It would define Australia—managerial wages were in the age of tariffs no more than four or five times those of skilled craftsmen, and the skilled craftsman earned well, and even the labourer would be guaranteed ‘frugal comfort’ by the introduction in 1907, through the failure of McKay’s Harvester case in the High Court, of the basic wage. This would be all the work of liberal conservatives in combination at various stages with Labor Party blocs. It did not produce as equal a society as the visionaries wanted. It did not redeem the ratty squalor of working-class suburbs (where bubonic plague had broken out in 1900), or save all the debt-ridden farms, their walls caulked from the cold with wadded newspaper and their floors made of stamped-down termite nests. The historic irony, whose force is not to be underestimated, is that the liberal conservatism of men like Barton and Deakin, influenced by the realities of Labor’s parliamentary presence, would create better social conditions than would the more doctrinaire systems of industrial equality which came later here and elsewhere in the world.
OPENING BUSINESS
After Parliament was grandly opened at the Exhibition Building in Melbourne on 9 May by the Duke of York, the first session was held in the Victorian Parliament building and taken up with procedural matters. There were three distinct groupings in the first Parliament—Barton’s Protectionists, Reid’s Free Traders and the Labor Party led by the congenial Chris Watson. Billy Hughes was elected to the first federal Parliament as a Labor man. Alderman J.C. Beer stood against him in the West Sydney electorate, supported by local shopkeepers who disapproved of Hughes’s part in legislating for early closing. Reasonably enough he declared, ‘I’m afraid the Federal Parliament will have very little to do with fixing the hours of labour and levelling-up wages by means of minimum-wage acts—that will mostly be left to the states.’ And then, a sure vote-winner: ‘Our chief plank is, of course, a white Australia. There’s no compromise about that. The industrious coloured brother has to go—and remain away.’ Hughes polled nearly 7000 votes and Mr Beer a little over 2000. Hughes remained a Free Trade Labor man. The Labor Party was still divided along those old lines. In the meantime the tariff served very nicely as a source of finance and he would ultimately be won over by it.
There was no federal organisation yet for the Labor members who were elected to the federal Parliament in Melbourne. The caucus would come from a meeting held two days before Parliament opened and attended by eight Labor senators and fourteen members of the House of Representatives, a meeting at which the federal Labor Party was established.
None of the parties controlled Parliament on its own. And for the first but not last time in Australian history, the Prime Minister lacked the numbers to control the Senate. Whatever laws were passed came from a consensus amongst the members, but consensus was quickly achieved in May 1901 when laws were passed to create a public service for the various departments, appointment to be subject to competitive public examination. By the end of 1902 the Parliament adopted ‘first past the post’ voting as well as universal female franchise, thereby indirectly forcing those states who had not already given the vote to women to do so on the basis that those who had the right to vote federally also inevitably were entitled to exercise it at the state level. Women could also be candidates for election.
The unlimited franchise for Aborigines was debated and voted down. Only those natives already registered for voting in the states—that is, a minority—could vote in federal elections. There were grounds on which Aboriginal franchise could have been guaranteed. By the early 1890s Aborigines could exercise the vote in four colonies, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, and in the Northern Territory. Missionaries urged them to enrol. Western Australia and Queensland excluded Aborigines from voting because they were a high proportion of the population. But the Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902 originally proposed giving Aborigines the unlimited franchise, but opposition came from a number of directions. The Labor leader Chris Watson feared that if the ‘thousands upon thousands’ of Aborigines in Queensland and Western Australia were enfranchised it would lead merely to their being ‘manipulated by their employers and delivered to the anti-Labor side’. The Victorian radicals H.B. Higgins and Isaac Isaacs declared that Aborigines lacked the ‘intelligence, interest or capacity’ to exercise the vote. An amendment excluding them at federal level was easily passed.
Already and most pressingly, in that first year, the Parliament looked to achieve as soon as possible a White Australia through the framing, and passing in September, of an Immigration Restriction Act aimed at ending a Chinese presence, and a Pacific Islands Labourers Act. The states, which as former colonies had restricted Pacific Islanders and Chinese and non-Europeans in general from owning or leasing land or vessels, and from public works and railway building, were moved to impose further restrictions even after the federal government’s legislation had passed.
It was true that the federal parliamentarians had overwhelming support for their laws concerning race, including and perhaps especially the twenty-two members of Labor. The Laborites were a mixture of Protectionists like Chris Watson and Free Traders like Billy Hughes, the midget dynamo from West Sydney, but all agreed on this. One of them, Andrew Fisher, a Scottish miner from Gympie, believed passionately that white Australians could flourish in the tropics, and no other race was needed. In the Queensland Parliament he had earlier argued at length against the use of Kanakas, and now in the federal House of Representatives he was in favour of both the acts that created White Australia.
Deakin, Attorney-General, the first speaker in the immigration restriction debate, declared that the Commonwealth did not want to offend foreigners, and did not argue racial superiority. It was purely a matter of protecting the equity of white Australians in their country. Deakin confessed an intellectual interest in Buddhism and Hinduism, but he wanted to avoid for Australians the poverty he had seen in India. Deakin argued that the Chinese and Japanese immigrants to Australia were the lesser of their races, ‘the least educated and least informed of their countrymen’. Yet his arguments were contradictory; the Japanese, he claimed, ‘because of their high abilities . . . are the most dangerous because they most nearly approach us, and would, therefore, be our most formidable competitors’.
There was also the issue of shared values:
The unity of Australia is nothing, if that does not imply a united race. A united race means not only that its members can intermix, intermarry and associate without degradation on either side, but implies one inspired by the same ideas, and an aspiration towards the same ideals; of a people possessing the same general cast of character, tone of thought—the same constitutional training and traditions—a people qualified to live under the constitution.
Underlying the question of exclusion of Asians from Australia was the problem that Britain devoutly desired friendship with Japan, had already made a trade treaty with it, and that Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, had warned the Australians who attended the Colonial Conference of 1897 to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee that ‘to exclude, by reason of their colour, or by reason of their race, all Her Majesty’s Indian subjects, or even all Asiatics, would be an act so offensive to those people that it would be most painful . . . to Her Majesty to have to sanction it’.
There were in that first Australian Parliament members who wanted to try to accommodate the British by an indirect method of excluding undesirable races, a method which did not explicitly invoke racial difference but was based on the immigrant’s ignorance of English, and perhaps of other European languages. Others, John Forrest from Western Australia amongst them, thought that Chamberlain’s directions were imperial impudence and ought to be ignored, letting the Japanese think whatever they
chose to.
The government proposed in the end to adopt an indirect version, a euphemistically named natal test, under which an immigrant considered undesirable could be prohibited from entering Australia if he failed to fill out in any European language an immigration application, and to write out a passage of fifty words in English dictated by an immigration officer. The test was at the official’s discretion—British and other Northern European immigrants would in practice not be subjected to it. The Labor Party’s handsome Chris Watson, his blue eyes blazing, his height and build—which had made him a notable rower and rugby player—seeming to bespeak a model of White Australia, wanted on behalf of the workers of Australia an even stronger test—dictation to be administered in any European language. Watson’s amendment was defeated, however. As Deakin’s mentor Henry Higgins had said, ‘We feel in regard to these people—whether their skins are black or copper—that if only they had the same standard of life as we had, we would be glad to have them by our side.’
There were a minority of politicians who attacked White Australia. Henry Dobson, a lawyer and Tasmanian senator from 1901 and for the rest of the decade, declared, ‘Australia cannot be perfectly white. Is it not now white enough for anyone?’ Bruce Smith, another lawyer and member for Parkes until 1919, opposed White Australia as an hysterical policy. The federal government was there to prevent socially unsatisfactory acts by legislation, but not to legislate against cultural tendencies ‘inherent in another people, and on that account make them such great opponents’. New South Wales Senator Edward Pulsford predicted that Australia might ultimately be ashamed of the White Australia policy for ‘its brutal disregard of the susceptibilities of other nations’. He had earlier opposed Henry Parkes’ immigration bills in the state Parliament. Neither Dobson, Smith nor Pulsford were radicals. They had in common that they were all devout Federationists, and Pulsford was an expert on international trade—in 1903 he published an influential book, Commerce and the Empire, in which he argued for open markets and attacked the delusion of Australia’s ‘preferential trade’ with Britain. As he believed in open markets, he believed in open worlds. In 1905 he wrote a pamphlet supporting Japanese objections to White Australia.
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