Australia 1901–2001: A Narrative History

Tink

Hopetoun’s blunder

So tightly packed were the crowds lining Sydney’s streets on 1 January 1901 that they resembled a dense, well-tended hedge. Early morning showers had followed a thunderstorm the previous evening and many people carried umbrellas, just in case, as they waited for the procession to begin. While the planning for this New Year’s Day had been going on in earnest for about three and a half months, after Queen Victoria had declared it to be the day upon which the Commonwealth of Australia would come into being, the most important decisions had only recently been made.

Just before 10.30 am, mounted police rode out from the Domain’s open parkland near the Botanic Gardens, followed by a procession at the tail end of which was a carriage carrying the governor-general designate. This former British politician, the Earl of Hopetoun, was scheduled to arrive at Centennial Park around 1 pm. Among the marchers were military contingents from throughout the Empire and from each of the six Australian colonies, a large body of trade unionists, and firemen aboard their gleaming horse-drawn engines. But the loudest cheers were reserved for veterans of the South African War, which was now in its second year.

As Hopetoun approached the swearing-in pavilion, located in the hollow of a natural amphitheatre in Centennial Park, spectators in their tens of thousands looked on from the surrounding ridges. On the western rise, 15 000 singers awaited their cue while approximately 7000 official guests were seated in front. Immediately around the pavilion the most high-ranking invitees were arrayed, now distinctly uncomfortable in the sticky summer heat. Among them were judges in their scarlet robes and various colonial premiers and ministers, some of whom were decked out in diplomatic uniforms. The most elaborately dressed of all was Hopetoun, whose jacket was covered in dense gold braid topped off by three orders of knighthood. However, in the middle of all this official magnificence was a private citizen dressed in a plain frockcoat, who was about to become the most powerful of them all.

Ill with typhoid fever, Hopetoun had arrived in Sydney on 15 December 1900. This slightly built 40-year-old ‘with a willowy stoop and cat like tread’ was charged with selecting the country’s first prime minister, who would in turn nominate Australia’s first cabinet. Four days later, he chose the premier of New South Wales, Sir William Lyne. But Lyne soon ran into trouble when he asked Edmund Barton to be a minister. Although Barton had only limited ministerial experience, having been the NSW attorney-general for just over two years, he was the federation movement’s leader and the man who had tirelessly pushed the ‘Yes’ case during the constitutional conventions and referendum campaigns of the 1890s. And Barton was furious that Lyne, who had strongly opposed federation, would now lead the new nation. Hopetoun’s argument, that the leader of the largest colony was the obvious choice, left Barton unmoved. ‘It would be a contradiction of my whole career’, he said, ‘if I served under a Prime Minister who … opposed the adoption … of the measure which he is now asked to be the first constitutional guardian’.

Angry, too, was Victoria’s leading federalist and a future prime minister, Alfred Deakin. ‘Who could have believed that Hopetoun would make such a blunder?’ he demanded to know. Then Deakin and the Victorian premier, Sir George Turner, ambushed the governor-general. ‘We indicated that … Sir William should return the commission to Lord Hopetoun’, they told the press, ‘and advise His Excellency to send for Mr Barton’. This brought things to a head at 10 pm on Christmas Eve when, having been granted an extension of time by Hopetoun six hours earlier, Lyne was forced to advise ‘that Mr Barton be sent for’. After receiving his commission, Barton finalised his ministry on 30 December. And so it came about that this private citizen in the plain frockcoat was sworn in as Australia’s first prime minister two days later. Among those who took ministerial oaths immediately after him were Alfred Deakin as attorney-general, Sir William Lyne as minister for home affairs and Sir George Turner as treasurer. While the wives of those being sworn in were seated around the pavilion’s dais, none was admitted to the inner circle where the oaths were administered and taken by men alone.

What had been created at this ceremony was unique in world history: ‘a whole continent for a nation, and a nation for a continent’, as Barton put it. Although others, including William Charles Wentworth in the 1850s and Sir Henry Parkes in the late 1880s and early 1890s, had worked towards this goal, it was Barton who had been behind the final push to achieve it. From the first British landing of some 1000 convicts and marines in 1788, the non-Aboriginal population of the continent had exploded to 3 800 000 by the time of federation. Of these, approximately 1 200 000 lived in the six capital cities, with Sydney and Melbourne having populations of about half a million each. Over that same period, however, the number of Aboriginal natives had shrunk from the hundreds of thousands to just 67 000. Even so, there were still large parts of Australia, like the Simpson Desert, yet to be explored by Europeans. And some Aboriginal people, such as the Pintupi, were not to have their first contact with ‘white men’ for another 60 years. Indeed it would not be until 1967 that ‘Aboriginal natives’ were officially counted as part of Australia’s overall population.

As caretaker prime minister, Barton’s top priority was to set up the machinery for the election of Australia’s first Federal Parliament, which would be based in Melbourne until a new national capital was ready. Barton later recalled that in those early days he was able to carry all the federal government’s files in his briefcase. With the election set for the end of March, the prime minister began campaigning in earnest. As leader of the middle-of-the-road protectionists, Barton was supported by manufacturers who wanted to keep overseas competitors at bay. To that extent, he had common cause on his left with the trade-union-backed Labor Party, while on his right was the Free Trade Party whose followers included chambers of commerce, importers and graziers. Barton’s principal opponent was the former premier of New South Wales, George Reid, now leader of the Free Traders. A morbidly obese mountain of a man, Reid was a shrewd politician who had a reputation for vacillation; his nickname was ‘yes/no Reid’. Despite being from the right, Reid’s self-deprecating humour impressed working people. And when an opponent asked him what he would call his massive stomach, Reid shot back: ‘it’s all piss and wind. I’ll call it after you’. Reid was not to be underestimated.

In his Hunter electorate at the West Maitland Town Hall on 17 January, Barton delivered his keynote speech promising legislation to deal with interstate industrial disputes, to extend the vote to women and to introduce a White Australia Policy. His big capital works promise was to build a transcontinental railway linking Perth and the eastern states. And after the ballots had been counted across the nation, Barton was ahead with 32 seats. When combined with Labor’s 17, he had a comfortable working majority over Reid’s 26. At the opening of Parliament on 9 May, the Duke of York officiated. The scene in Melbourne’s Exhibition Hall was painted by Tom Roberts, a leading member of those Australian impressionist painters known as the Heidelberg School. What Roberts did not capture was the diminutive future king impatiently tapping his foot, as he was kept waiting for Barton who had been waylaid by a crowd of supporters. Among the new members of parliament captured by Roberts were six future prime ministers: Alfred Deakin, Chris Watson, George Reid, Andrew Fisher, Joseph Cook and Billy Hughes.

The newly sworn federal members soon reconvened in Victoria’s Parliament House and the prime minister was allocated a small turret-like chamber into which was squeezed a writing room, bedroom and bathroom – a bachelor pad. From here, he planned the introduction of his Alien Immigration Bill, which provided for a dictation test to deter non-white migrants. A popular Australian merchant of Chinese origin, Quong Tart, proposed that the test be in English. But Barton preferred the British view that it should be in any European language ‘because it upheld the equality of all white men’. It also favoured White Australia because the language would be chosen by the testing officer, not the migrant. Despite the difficulties such a test posed to applicants, Labor wanted to go still further, proposing a blanket ban on all Asians, Africans and Pacific Islanders. This led to Barton’s first crisis when the Free Traders in the Senate supported Labor’s plan. Faced with a standoff between the two Houses, which now imperilled his government, Barton threatened to resign, whereupon the opposition crumbled.

It is fitting that the fulfilment of Barton’s next promise, to extend the vote to women, had been preceded by what has since come to be recognised as a signal literary event, the publication of My Brilliant Career. Although the author, Miles Franklin, had completed her manuscript in 1899, it was not until 1901, with help from established author Henry Lawson, that she finally found a publisher, not in Australia but in England. ‘Franklin has sunlight dancing through the veins’, a Bulletin review said. ‘The author has an Australian mind, speaks Australian language, utters Australian thoughts and looks at things from an Australian point of view absolutely’. In April the following year, the government honoured its promise and women won the right to vote in Federal elections; England’s suffragettes, for whom the vote was another 16 years away, were warm in their praise. It was otherwise for Aboriginal people who continued to be denied a federal vote unless they were allowed to vote in their home state. While Indigenous men and women in South Australia could cast a ballot, those resident in Queensland and Western Australia could not vote for another 60 years. One eccentric North American-born MP, King O’Malley, who maintained that he had been a bishop of the Redskin Temple of the Cayuse Nation, even claimed that ‘there is no scientific evidence that the Aborigine is a human being at all’.

All the while, the South African War had continued. Although the battle of Diamond Hill in June 1900 marked the defeat of the main Boer army, a vicious guerrilla campaign followed. And on 12 June 1901, 18 members of the Victorian Mounted Rifles were killed when Boers attacked their camp. Plans were already afoot to replace such casualties with Commonwealth troops and on 19 February 1902, the first federal battalion of Australian soldiers departed for active service overseas. During the course of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands would follow in their footsteps. As for the Boer War, it came to an end on 31 May that year. Just over 16 000 Australians had served, of whom 589 died and 882 were wounded. Justifying this sacrifice, the Sydney Morning Herald’s editor wrote: ‘Had a … foreign influence succeeded in establishing itself at Cape Town between Australia … on the one side and the mother country … on the other … the Empire would have been in danger of being rent in twain’.

One of the financial obligations transferred to the new federal government was the yearly contribution of £106 000 towards the upkeep of the Royal Navy’s Pacific squadron, which in 1902 was raised to £200 000. The rub was that these ships might be called to action thousands of miles away, leaving Australia defenceless. In the face of growing public pressure for an Australian navy, the Bulletin accused Barton of being subservient to Britain. However, official estimates put the price of a separate Australian navy at £2 500 000 to build, and £1 000 000 a year to maintain. Besides, there was no apparent threat. In June 1903, three Japanese warships, the Matsushima, Itsukushima and Hashidate visited Adelaide, Melbourne, Hobart and Sydney where the locals joined in the shout of ‘Tenno Heika Banzai’ (Long Live the Emperor). According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Japanese were ‘not strangers, but allies and friends’. Apart from that, Barton had little money to spare because the nation was still getting over a severe economic depression, which had devastated the country during the 1890s. Many banks had failed, ruining large and small investors alike. And this had been followed by another calamity, the so-called federation drought. So severe was the drought that the Darling River in New South Wales alongside Bourke’s massive timber wharves all but dried up, making river transport impossible. On one property in western New South Wales, the number of sheep fell from 100 000 to 40 000. And although once a wheat exporter, Australia was reduced to importing American grain.

To fulfil his third election promise, Barton introduced a Conciliation and Arbitration Bill, which covered those private-sector industrial disputes that spread to more than one state. But this upset both employers who thought it went too far, and employees who thought it did not go far enough. When a Labor amendment was passed extending coverage to state railway workers, Barton withdrew the bill altogether. But in doing so he gave the impression that he no longer cared. ‘Having done his greatest work’, his private secretary later said, ‘Barton was no longer very interested in the result’. The prime minister’s most vicious critic was the proprietor of the Sydney Truth, John Norton. ‘Of a high order intellect … Barton is lazy and a laggard in public and private affairs’, he wrote. ‘This man who can drink like a fish, and eat like a hog … is Australia’s Noblest Son!’

Such offensive barbs deeply wounded Barton, who also missed his Sydney-based family during his long stays in Melbourne. And with a bill before Parliament to establish the High Court, he decided to resign and take up one of the three judicial positions on offer. But he declined the chief justiceship, astonishing his most senior colleagues, among them Sir John Forrest, who told him: ‘you are fitted, you have earned it and you are worthy of it’. Barton, it seems, was no longer interested in any leadership role and on 23 September 1903, the new prime minister, Alfred Deakin, formally announced Barton’s appointment, with Sir Samuel Griffith as chief justice. Seven years younger than Barton, the 47-year-old Deakin looked to the future, unlike his predecessor who still lingered over past triumphs. At the December general election Deakin was returned as prime minister with the continuing support of the Protectionist and Labor parties. Women, who were voting federally for the first time, did not upset this balance. In Victoria, a 34-year-old suffragette and prominent member of the Anti-Swearing League, Vida Goldstein, stood for the Senate, receiving 51 497 votes. Representing 5 per cent of the ballots cast, this was not nearly enough to see her elected. But Goldstein was the first woman in the British Empire to stand for a national Parliament.

At the top of Deakin’s agenda was the Conciliation and Arbitration Bill, which within months would precipitate political turmoil. There would be three prime ministers during 1904, highlighting for the first time what has since become a truism in Australian politics – industrial relations can make and break prime ministers.

The Australian crawl

Of the prime minister’s 1903 election campaign, the London Morning Post’s Australian correspondent was scathing:

Mr Deakin may well view the position before him with rueful solicitude. His own party … flung away half a dozen seats and imperilled many more. If his organisation had been half as effective as Mr Reid’s he could almost have retained his numbers.

What few but the editor of the Post knew was that the Australian correspondent was in fact the prime minister himself, whose real identity was a closely guarded secret. With the election over, the country looked forward to a summer of cricket. And the leading Australian batsman, Victor Trumper, did not disappoint, hitting the English bowlers’ best ‘twisters’ all over the Sydney Cricket Ground. Although the visitors eventually won the Ashes, Trumper’s record-breaking 26 runs from one over, electrified the public. Deakin used a cricketing theme when he described the state of the parties coming out of the election as the ‘three elevens’, the leaders of which would each get a turn as prime minister during 1904. Industrial relations drove this political churn as the Free Trader, Reid, backed Labor’s Chris Watson to defeat the Protectionist, Deakin. And then, just a few months later, Deakin backed Reid to defeat Watson. While Deakin and Watson were each tall and trim with lookalike Van Dyck beards, they could not be mistaken for Reid, whose bloated, jowly face was offset by a walrus moustache. Although Deakin would emerge as the dominant prime minister of the decade, it was Watson’s short-lived government that entered the record books, as the first national Labor government anywhere in the world.

Watson, just 37, also created a personal record, becoming Australia’s youngest prime minister. Of German and New Zealand ancestry, the Chilean-born Watson migrated to Sydney when he was 19. He soon picked up a job as a Government House stablehand, shovelling manure. Offered sixpence for a beer by the governor, Watson bought a book instead. A keen self-improver, he moved rapidly through Labor’s ranks. ‘[Watson’s] soundness of judgment, clearness in argument and fairness to opponents’, the Morning Post’s Australian correspondent reported, ‘drew him ahead of them all and finally left them out of sight’.

Among the few pieces of legislation Watson was able to introduce during his four months as prime minister was the Seat of Government Bill. Prior to federation, it had been decided that the national capital would be in New South Wales, not less than 100 miles from Sydney. And in 1902, during an inspection of Dalgety in southern New South Wales, a number of MPs had swum in the adjacent Snowy River – ‘liquid ice’, according to one. As many of them slept in next morning to recover, they missed a tour of the Limestone Plains, or Canberra as it was later called. The upshot was that the House favoured Tumut as the site for the new capital, which would have placed it at the foothills of the Snowy Mountains. However, the Senate supported Bombala on the south-eastern edge of the Monaro plain. To break this deadlock, Watson proposed a 900-square-mile area centred on Dalgety for the new capital territory. But two days after the bill passed, Watson’s government collapsed. For many in New South Wales, Dalgety was too close to the Victorian border and when the issue was revisited in 1908, Watson, by then leader of the opposition, backed Canberra, which in December that year became the Federal Parliament’s choice too.

However, it was an external territory, Papua, which in 1906 had become the first to be administered by the Federal Government, giving Australia land borders with the Dutch to the west and the Germans to the north. Although Europe was over 10 000 miles away, some thought her ancient feuds might erupt on Australia’s front doorstep. As the Sydney Morning Herald put it, ‘A foreign force may collect at a port within a few hours sail of Brisbane or Sydney and deliver a stunning blow’. Such fears had helped the ‘Yes’ case for federation and had fostered a rising sense of nationalism. In June 1901, a design competition for an Australian flag, carrying total prize money of £200, had attracted 30 000 entries; features included kookaburras, koalas, kangaroos, waratahs and wattle. One competitor squeezed four designs onto a single postcard while another painted his on an opal. But five almost identical entries stood out, all of them incorporating a Union Jack, the Southern Cross, and a six-pointed federation star to represent the States. So the judges decided to split the prize money among them and the flag was formally proclaimed in 1903. The following year, this flag flew at the Olympic Games, in St. Louis, Missouri, where the two Australian competitors, both in track and field, were unsuccessful. A member of the San Francisco Olympic Club, meanwhile, had won three silver medals and one bronze for swimming, and these were duly added to the American tally. But although this competitor was acknowledged as ‘the man who introduced the Australian crawl to America’, it would be more than 100 years before the swimmer – Brisbane-born Frank Gailey – was recognised as having won the greatest-ever haul of individual medals at a single Olympics by any Australian male.

The Australian flag that flew at the St. Louis Olympics was altered in 1908 when an extra point was added to the federation star to represent Papua and the new capital territory; and later, the Northern Territory, which was to be ceded to the Commonwealth by South Australia in 1911.While it is possible that reports of this new flag fluttering impudently on Germany’s New Guinea border might have reached Kaiser Wilhelm II, it is more likely that any thoughts he had about Australia would have been about its first international superstar – Nellie Melba – a prima donna who had performed before him in Berlin, Tsar Alexander III in St Petersburg, Emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna and Queen Victoria at Windsor. Having first made her reputation as Gilda in Rigoletto, Melba’s fame was such that Peach Melba and Melba toast were named in her honour by the Savoy Hotel’s chef, Auguste Escoffier. And during a triumphal return tour of Australia in 1902 she netted well over £21 000, with the takings from one Sydney concert alone setting a new world record.

However, it was a poem composed by a homesick teenager in 1904 that is better remembered today. This young woman began writing Core of My Heart in London, while on a European tour with her father. After first appearing in London’s Spectator in 1908, the poem was later included in her first book The Closed Door and Other Verses, published in Melbourne in 1911. Retitled My Country, its second stanza, which begins ‘I love a sunburnt country’, has earned its author, Dorothea Mackellar, literary immortality by conjuring up images of droughts and flooding rains, which Australians still strongly identify with.

For writer and director Charles Tait, creativity early in the century came in the form of the world’s first full-length feature film. Premiering on Boxing Day 1906, The Story of the Kelly Gang ran for longer than an hour, the film itself being more than a mile in length. More than 60 people were employed to make it, including Tait’s wife who played Ned Kelly’s sister, Kate. The Victorian Railways Department was even engaged to reproduce the destruction of a train. Costing £1000, the film was a smashing success, screening to sell-out audiences around Australia. ‘The dialogue spoken from behind [the screen] assisted the audience in fully comprehending the meaning of the pictures’, the Brisbane Courier reported, ‘and the large audience expressed their appreciation by frequent outbursts of hearty applause’. During 1908 the film was screened in Britain, ultimately returning at least £25 000 to its producer.

Speculative investment in new technology leading to potentially huge returns was not limited to the fledgling film industry. In 1905, a 31-year-old mining engineer, Herbert Hoover, drove the formation of the Zinc Corporation, initially raising £350 000 to purchase almost 2 000 000 tons of Broken Hill zinc tailings. His gamble was that experimental technology involving a new process to separate the zinc would pay off. As much an entrepreneur as he was an engineer, this dynamic young Californian cut a swath through the more conservative British mining companies. ‘If a man has not made a fortune by 40’, Hoover said, ‘he is not worth much’. Compared to his clubby British competitors, who so often depended on their old-school-tie connections, Hoover’s leisure was work and his joy was talking about it, if his harsh staccato ‘yep’ and ‘nope’ could be called that. But problems with the experimental separation process imperilled his company until an Australian, Jim Lyster, invented a successful flotation method – the world’s first. After that, the Zinc Corporation prospered, later becoming an important part of what is now the mining giant, Rio Tinto. By 1928, Hoover’s drive had won him the Republican presidential nomination back in the United States. Among his campaign claims was this: ‘Wherever you go in the whole world if you mention Broken Hill to a mining engineer, he will think of Hoover. For Hoover saved Broken Hill [from mining starvation] with American ideas’. Although this was met with snorts of derision by Broken Hill’s newspaper, the Barrier Miner, it did not stop Herbert Hoover becoming America’s 31st president.

Unlike Hoover, who went on to be president for four years, Prime Minister Watson had lasted just four months. From the beginning, he had been tagged a socialist and one Melbourne bookseller reportedly ordered a stock of rifles, just in case Watson tried to seize his business. When Watson first entered the House as prime minister, the crusty conservative Sir John Forrest yelled: ‘Mr Speaker, what are those men doing in our places? They are our seats.’ Like Forrest, others had been astonished by the outgoing Prime Minister Deakin’s recommendation to the governor-general that the Labor leader succeed him. But as so often since, leadership changes back then were driven by personal vendettas as much as by policy differences. The Protectionist Deakin had been defeated on the floor of the House by a Labor amendment to the Conciliation and Arbitration Bill. This amendment, which extended the bill’s coverage to public servants, had been supported by many of George Reid’s Free Traders, although not by Reid himself. It was another example of ‘Yes/No’ Reid in action, someone who had hoped that in the resulting chaos, he rather than Watson would be asked to form a ministry. Staunchly anti-socialist, Reid was dismayed by the outcome. Referring to their mutual antipathy, Reid likened himself and Deakin to the two kings of Barataria in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers.

Sections of the press had predicted an alarming drop in the value of Australia’s overseas credit when ‘the socialists’ came to power and the Daily Telegraph claimed that Watson would be defeated as soon as Reid and Deakin united. But that depended on a complex cocktail of conflicting forces: tariff policy, personal rivalry and pressure from anti-socialists – these things would determine which of the two ‘elevens’ came together to defeat the third. Politically, the Protectionists were the men in the middle and Reid began working on Deakin by offering to share the opposition leader’s office. In doing so, Reid was aware that any temptation Deakin might have had to form a coalition government with Labor was offset by his objection to the way its MPs were beholden to caucus; once they had settled their party line, there was no tolerance for anyone who crossed the floor.

High noon for Prime Minister Watson came on 12 August 1904 during debate on an amendment to give unions preference under the Conciliation and Arbitration Bill. Although Watson’s concessions to the opposition were so generous that they angered some on his own side, they were not enough to placate Deakin and Reid. ‘They are looking through the keyhole like political assassins’, one Labor MP complained. ‘Those who intend to profit by this … [should] come out and show themselves’. In due course they did, defeating Watson who then asked the governor-general for an election. But His Excellency said that before making up his mind, he would have to speak to Reid. And the following morning, while the governor-general deliberated, Watson received the Italian king’s cousin, the Duke of Abruzzi. The prime minister then proceeded to Government House where, having been told that his election request had been refused, he stayed to lunch. His meal completed, Watson tendered his resignation and went off to tour the duke’s warship.

As the conservative press celebrated the removal of Watson and his ‘untried extremists’, the leader of the strongest eleven, Reid, was sworn in as prime minister. Although Deakin chose to sit on the backbench, he supported Reid. However, during the long parliamentary break, from December 1904 until June 1905, Deakin began having second thoughts. Aware that Prime Minister Reid’s top priority was taking on the socialists, Deakin addressed his constituents in Ballarat. ‘The country is committed to a settlement of the fiscal question’, he said, ‘[and] not the socialist question’. In other words, protection must come first. This, The Age said, amounted to Deakin serving a ‘Notice to Quit’ on the prime minister. And that is how Reid saw it too. In the furious parliamentary debate that followed, Reid accused Deakin of abandoning his opposition to Labor’s caucus system in the interests of self-advancement. And when Deakin’s motion censuring Reid was carried, the prime minister asked the governor-general for an election. But His Excellency declined, even though Reid was still leader of the strongest ‘eleven’. Instead, he issued a prime ministerial commission to the leader of the weakest, Deakin. ‘As Mr Watson has 25 followers and Mr Deakin only 19’, the Horsham Times said, ‘it follows that it is Mr Watson who will be in power while … [Mr Deakin] is in office’. The question now was how long Deakin would survive this second time around.

Sweat and chaff

On the top of a hill in southern Victoria, overlooking Bass Strait, two poles were erected early in 1906. Each was 162 feet high and about the same distance apart and between them was suspended a network of conducting wires to propel, receive and collect ‘the impact of electric waves travelling through the ether’, as one paper put it. This newfangled apparatus had been constructed by the Marconi Wireless Telegraphy Company to transmit messages between Queenscliff in Victoria and Devonport in Tasmania. And on 12 July 1906 a party of 200 VIPs, including the governor-general and the prime minister, travelled down from Melbourne by special train to witness Australia’s first official wireless message being sent. On a day of drizzling rain, the guests assembled in a marquee for a sumptuous luncheon. Taking pride of place on the centre table was a transmitting and receiving contraption that was connected to a sparking device. And it was from here that the first message was transmitted:

To the Governor of Tasmania, from the Governor-General – ‘The Commonwealth greets Tasmania and rejoices at the establishment of new means for uniting the people of Australia more closely together – Northcote’.

Conveyed by Morse code at the rate of 15 words per minute, this message soon generated a reply that emerged on a tape in dots and dashes. When transcribed it read ‘Rd’ (received). This was in fact a holding reply because the Tasmanian governor was in Hobart, so Northcote’s message had to be to be written on a piece of paper at the receiving station in Devonport then taken by a boy on a bicycle to a ferry. After crossing a stream, the ferryman delivered it to a telegraph office and from there it was transmitted by wire to Government House for the governor’s reply.

As wireless telegraphy had not advanced beyond a crude experimental stage in 1900, it had not been specifically included in the Australian constitution. But it sat easily under the category of ‘postal … and other like services’, making it a federal matter. And in October 1905, it had been Deakin’s minority government, supported by Labor, which had prevailed over George Reid’s Protectionists, with an act laying the legal groundwork for the nation’s first wireless transmission. Deakin’s Protectionists may have been the smallest party and Reid’s Free Traders the largest, but it was Reid who was sidelined. Turned off by the man-mountain’s anti-socialist rhetoric, Labor backed the more moderate Deakin. At a public meeting in Ballarat on 24 March 1906, the prime minister boasted about this:

Deakin: Mr Reid could be judged by his acts, and the sum total was conveyed by the word impotence … Against … [Reid’s] obstruction, the Government has passed the New Guinea Constitution Act … the Commerce Bill … the Anti-Trust Bill, the Copyright Bill, the Life Insurance Bill, the Evidence, Jurors and Wireless Telegraphy Bills … the Census and Electoral Bills [and] the Secret Commissions Bill … Mr Reid has said the Government was rushing the country into ruin.

Interjector: That is what you told us last time.

Deakin: If the gentleman cannot distinguish between the socialism I accept and that I oppose, the fault lies with him.

The trigger for the ‘socialism’ Deakin accepted, had its origins in Western Victoria where, during the early 1880s, a young farmer had struggled to harvest his family’s wheat crop. In those days such crops were cut by stripping machines that dumped the wheat heads on tarpaulins spread throughout the fields. The wheat heads were then fed into a winnowing machine, which sieved the grain while fanning away the chaff and husks. This was hard, hot and filthy work and, covered in sweat and chaff, 18-year-old Hugh Victor McKay began experiments to find a better way. Cannibalising other farm implements for parts, including the cog wheels from an ancient English mower, McKay also used kerosene tins to build a machine that would do both the stripping and winnowing – a combine harvester. Although McKay was not the first to invent such a machine, he was a canny businessman and this, combined with his technical know-how, soon meant that he was a world leader in this new technology. With fewer people needed to harvest Australia’s wheat crops, the price of grain fell sufficiently for Australia to become a major wheat exporter, the labour savings more than offsetting shipping costs to other parts of the world.

McKay’s combine harvesters were more adaptable than those built in the United States and, under the ‘Sunshine’ brand, he began exporting machines to South America in 1902. Many farm jobs were made redundant by Sunshine Harvesters but they were more than made up for by the rapidly expanding workforce required to build them. In Chicago, the home of the International Harvester Company, McKay’s success was viewed with alarm. After pirating the Sunshine technology, the Americans began dumping cheap copies in Australia to destroy McKay’s business, where profits had risen from £3000 in 1898 to £39 000 by 1905. Labelling the Americans an ‘Octopus Trust’, McKay campaigned for increased import duties. Claiming that he wanted to protect both his business and the jobs of those thousands who built his machines, McKay received a sympathetic hearing from the Protectionist, Deakin and the Labor leader, Watson.

Import duties on American machines, however, would greatly increase McKay’s profits and Deakin and Watson agreed that employees should have a share of such government-sponsored windfalls for manufacturers. So they fashioned a scheme whereby manufacturers like McKay would be charged an Excise Duty unless they paid ‘fair and reasonable wages’. Deakin called this ‘New Protection’; his Free Trade enemies called it socialism, especially when Deakin began advocating ‘justice between class and class’. But while the Commonwealth had the constitutional power to impose duties, it was the States’ responsibility to set wages. So while Deakin and Watson trumpeted the slogan: ‘We fix the duties. Why should we not also fix the wages?’ McKay had other ideas. He applied to the newly constituted Commonwealth Arbitration Court for a declaration that, as the wages he paid were fair and reasonable, he should be exempt from paying the Excise Duty. But Justice Higgins thought differently, ruling that the wages McKay paid did not provide for ‘the normal needs of an average employee, regarded as a human being living in a civilised community’. In November 1907, he held that an unskilled labourer should be paid a minimum of seven shillings a day for eight hours work; in those days a loaf of bread cost four pence (one-third of a shilling). Arguing that the Commonwealth could not sidestep the States by using its excise power to set wages, McKay appealed to the High Court, which ruled in his favour. Even so, Higgins’ ‘Harvester decision’ later came to be seen as the precedent for Australia’s basic wage.

Federal politicians, by contrast, controlled their own wages and in August 1907 they voted themselves a huge 50 per cent pay rise, up from £400 to £600 per year. Initially reluctant, the government began yielding to backbench pressure. ‘Growing bolder by the absence of outside demonstrations, and by the clamours from within’, the Launceston Examiner said, ‘it ultimately surrendered, and when it … [did] it made up for lost time by going all the way’. However, for those Australians who sought relief from politics by following tennis, there was something to celebrate when Norman Brookes and Anthony Wilding, a New Zealander, won the 1907 Davis Cup at Wimbledon against stiff English competition. With his controlled speed in ground shots and an aggressive net attack, Brookes spearheaded a narrow victory for the Australasian team, which he and Wilding were to repeat in 1908, 1909 and 1911, thereby giving Australian tennis a tremendous boost.

Deakin, meanwhile, had triggered an altogether different sort of tussle with Britain, complaining that Australia’s annual contribution of £200 000 towards naval defence was disappearing into ‘the general expenditure of the Admiralty’. Despite the name of its flagship, HMS Powerful, the largely obsolete Sydney-based Imperial Squadron seemed anything but powerful. In the Royal Navy, Sydney was known as ‘the Society Station’. In 1905, the federal government’s chief naval adviser, Captain William Creswell, had boldly proposed spending £2 000 000 to establish a state-of-the art Australian destroyer squadron. But the following year the British government dismissed this, describing a possible enemy raid on Australia as being ‘of secondary importance’. Such condescending comments were unacceptable to those Australians who remembered the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, when the Japanese Navy had routed a Russian fleet. One of the ships involved was the Russian armoured cruiser, Gromobol, which had visited Sydney for the federation celebrations in 1901. Although it was said then that she looked powerful enough to sink the Sydney-based Imperial Squadron in half an hour, this ‘happy ship’ and her 850 crew became renowned for their hospitality. So it was a devastating shock for Australians to hear that during the Battle of Tsushima, the Gromobol had been sunk with the loss of 800 men