Federation and An Australian Republic

Increasingly, in this the Centenary of Federation, parallels are drawn between the modern Republican movement and republican sentiments circulating at the time of the Federation of Australia. These theories appear to draw a natural, logical and democratic progression through-out Australian history that tends toward an eventual and inevitable, nationalist Republicanism. In the abscence of Nationalism as we know it, however, the republicanism of 1901 was of a vastly different character.

Prior to 1901,

from the Boomerang, 6 July 1889.
"the Australian colonies each had an intimate constitutional - and cultural - relationship with Great Britain but... [were] no more closely tied to each other than to the dozens of British colonies elsewhere." (De Garis, 1999, pp.11).

from the Boomerang, 2nd March 1889.

Australian identities were tied up with the individual identities of the colonies as well as their membership in the British empire. To think of one's self as being an 'Australian' referred geographically to a continent and not politically to a nation. Indeed, the first time in Australian History that an Author even claimed an Australian identity was in 1891 when William C Wentworth signed his book

"A native of New South Wales"

It is significant that this refers only to the colony and not to the nation. Even in subsequent claims to Australian-ness, Wentworth signed

"by W.C Wentworth, an Australasian."

a title that clearly owes more to a geographical area than a cultural or national classification.

Some type of Federation had been talked about before to 1891. The colonies, however, had only recently achieved the independance of self government from Britain and the idea of signing this over once again to another power higher than the colony was a dubious one to say the least. This reinforces the idea that, previous to Federation, it was state loyalties, and identities, that mattered.

A popular conception of allegiance to, and the independence of, an as of yet non existent 'something' larger than the colony (and yet not of the Empire) was still to be born.

The Republican protests to the Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubileein 1897 were therefore working class protests against British sovereign control of the colonies and not advocacy for the creation of an Australian Nation. Instead they were seeking only to halt British influence over the colonies.

"...nineteenth-century republicans...saw the Queen as a symbol of aristocratic privilege, inequality and superstition. It was not Australian nationalism that had carried them to republicanism." (Hirst, 1999, pp.294)

In light of this it seems plausible that the modern republican movement and the republican sentiments of 1901 are vastly different in character and not naturally connected.