The Land of Dreams: How Australians Won Their Freedom, 1788–1860

By David Kemp

The Land of Dreams: How Australians Won Their Freedom, 1788–1860 tells the story of how Australians became a free people, gaining the liberties they desired to take control of their own lives, the right to govern themselves and the capacity to address their own political problems through democratic institutions.

As the first book in a path-breaking five-volume Australian Liberalism series, it tells the story of how Australians laid the foundations for one of the world’s most successful countries, with unprecedented levels of personal liberty and social equality.

Australians did not have to fight a war for their independence, but neither did they gain it without a struggle against policies imposed by a British government in which they had no part. It required a brilliant political campaign that walked to the edge of violent resistance and from it Australia gained a national identity and political leaders who would write their constitutions, introduce democracy and later lead the successful political fight for one Australian nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780522873344

Book preview

This is number one hundred and eighty

in the second numbered series of the

Miegunyah Volumes

made possible by the

Miegunyah Fund

established by bequests

under the wills of

Sir Russell and Lady Grimwade.

‘Miegunyah’ was the home of

Mab and Russell Grimwade from 1911 to 1955.

THE LAND OF DREAMS

HOW AUSTRALIANS WON THEIR FREEDOM

1788–1860

DAVID KEMP

Other volumes in the Australian Liberalism series cover the years

1860–1901

1901–1930

1931–1966

1966–2018

William Charles Wentworth (1790–1872) was the first Australian-born political leader, and campaigned successfully to bring constitutional self-government and civil liberties to Australia.

THE MIEGUNYAH PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[e-mail]

www.mup.com.au

First published 2018

Text © David Kemp, 2018

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2018

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Text design and typesetting by Cannon Typesetting

Cover design by Philip Campbell Design

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

For Anne Marie

‘I am an optimist, for I believe that the human mind, if it accepts responsibility and is allowed to be free, will always evolve a better social order. This is the root principle of Liberal philosophy.’

F.W. Eggleston, Reflections of an Australian Liberal, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1953, p. 258

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

1The liberal project

2Ideas of the foundation

3Convicts and freedom

4The Liberal colonial reform project

5Liberty and patriots

6Chartists and free traders

7Elections and the land

8To share in the general freedom

9Radical reform agendas: Marx and Mill

10 The Anti-Transportation League

11 Independence within the empire

12 Libertarian liberalism

13 A Whig constitution

14 Radical democracy

Notes

Select Bibliography

Biographical notes

Index

Illustrations

Frontispiece: William Charles Wentworth, Sydney Living Museums

Adam Smith, artist unknown, date unknown, National Galleries of Scotland

Jeremy Bentham, Henry William Pickersgill, 1829 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Edmund Burke, studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds, c.1769 © National Portrait Gallery, London

William Wilberforce, Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1828 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Mary Wollstonecraft, John Opie, c.1797 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Eliza Darling, John Linnell, 1825 © National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Caroline Chisholm, Angelo Collen Hayter, 1852, Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales

Alexis de Tocqueville, Théodore Chassériau, 1850

Edward Smith Hall, artist unknown, date unknown, NSW Benevolent Society

Bennelong, artist unknown, date unknown, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aboriginal People, unknown artist, c.1830, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Truganini and two other Aboriginal Tasmanians, photographer unknown, date unknown

William Barak, photographer unknown, 1866, State Library Victoria

Sir Richard Bourke, artist unknown, date unknown, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Francis Forbes, artist unknown, c.1860, State Library of New South Wales

John Jamison, artist unknown, date unknown, New South Wales Parliamentary Library

Henry Lytton Bulwer, Giuseppe Fagnani, 1865 © National Portrait Gallery, London

The People’s Charter, 1838, British Library

Great Chartist Meeting, photographer unknown, 1848

John Bright and Richard Cobden, Giuseppe Fagnani, date unknown, private collection

Anti-Corn Law League, illustrator unknown, 1846

George Gipps, Henry William Pickersgill, date unknown, State Library of New South Wales

Richard Windeyer, artist unknown, 1840s, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Robert Lowe, George Frederic Watts, c.1874, National Portrait Gallery, London

James Macarthur, artist unknown, date unknown

Australasian League Flag, date unknown, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston

John West, John Cochrane, date unknown, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Earl Grey, photographer unknown, 1860s, National Portrait Gallery, London

Henry Parkes, Fowler Family photograph album, date unknown, State Library of New South Wales

Charles Cowper, photographer unknown, date unknown, State Library of New South Wales

Richard Dry, artist unknown, date unknown, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, photographer unknown, c.1869

John O’Shanassy, artist unknown, date unknown

Charles Gavan Duffy, artist unknown, 1843

George Higinbotham, artist unknown, date unknown

Peter Lalor, Ludwig Becker, 1856, State Library Victoria

Preface

THIS BOOK IS the product of both academic study and a career as a practising politician. It has been provoked by a long awareness that much of what is important about Australian politics and government remains either untold or distorted to fit certain intellectual or political agendas. We all have agendas of course, but when almost half of the participants in our political life struggle to locate the story of their politics—its historic contributions and traditions—there is clearly a gap to be filled.

The story of liberalism in Australia that I recount in this book contains much that is unfamiliar even to well-informed readers, yet it is the product principally of drawing together information widely spread among many secondary sources, together with extensive searches of contemporary newspapers and other primary sources. Among the secondary sources, the superb Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) is foremost, while for primary newspaper sources the National Library of Australia’s Trove system has been indispensable. For much of the period, parliamentary and public speeches of political leaders were published verbatim or in indirect speech in newspapers, which also contain much relevant context in the form of reporting and commentary.

I want to thank the University of Melbourne for appointing me as a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow, and its Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis for encouraging me in that role to undertake the research project from which this book has emerged. The research support offered by the University was a key incentive to beginning the work, and Glyn himself devoted considerable time to reading and commenting on the text. I also want to acknowledge the Australia and New Zealand School of Government, and especially its founding Dean, Allan Fels, and his successor, Gary Banks, for supporting this work and providing me with office space for myself and my books throughout the writing of this account. It was my association with ANZSOG that especially encouraged the emphasis on policy that informs the whole study. Peter Allan also provided both interest and good advice in helping to advance the book to its final stages.

I owe a particular debt of gratitude to my former colleague in the Faculty of Economics and Politics at Monash University, Denis White, for his engagement and encouragement with this project throughout the writing of it. Denis shared his great understanding of ideas and their history from a philosopher’s perspective and thereby helped me to better formulate my treatment of key moments in the development of liberal thought. My brother Rod also showed stamina and enthusiasm, and made many useful comments.

The late John Hirst, a wonderful historian of Australian life, Professor of History at La Trobe University, read the text and drew my attention to events and interpretations from his fund of knowledge and insight. Andrew Norton, a self-identified ‘classical liberal’, commented helpfully, as did my son Andrew.

I thank David Furse-Roberts for his assistance in reading and checking the text and footnotes for publication, for his support for this project, and for his useful comments. Without the support and efforts of Nick Cater at the Menzies Research Centre, the publication of this book would have been long delayed. Its publication would not have occurred at all without the support of Sam Lipski and the Pratt Foundation, and John Roskam of the Institute of Public Affairs.

I thank the editor Cathryn Game for her skilled and helpful reading of the manuscript, and John Nethercote for his engaged, knowledgeable and detailed assistance.

Cathryn Lea Smith has overseen the design of the book, kept the whole project moving and has contributed substantially to the quality of the illustrations. She has my deepest gratitude.

Finally, I thank my wife Anne Marie for her love and support over the years that this project has consumed, and her enthusiasm for the publication of the results of my labours. Her faith has buoyed me up and encouraged me to believe that this book was indeed possible.

Introduction

THIS VOLUME TELLS the story of how Australians became a free people, gaining the liberties they desired to take control of their own lives, the freedom and right to govern themselves and the capacity to address their own political problems through democratic institutions.

It is therefore the story of how the Australians laid the foundations for one of the world’s most successful countries, which has achieved unprecedented levels of personal freedom and social equality.

Australians did not have to fight a war for their independence, but neither did they gain it without a political struggle against policies imposed by a British Government in which they had no part, and without a massacre by  British government forces that claimed more victims than the Boston massacre of 1770. Indeed, a brilliant political campaign was required that walked to the edge of violent resistance, and from it Australia gained national identity and political leaders who would write their constitutions, introduce democracy and later lead the successful political fight for one Australian nation.

Almost all the features of the American campaign for independence at the end of the eighteenth century occurred in Australia, but seventy years after losing the American colonies, Britain ultimately, and wisely, capitulated to a stunning, and at times threatening, cross-colonial campaign by the Australians  for an end to imposed and demeaning policies (especially the transportation of convicts) and for self-government. Through this campaign the Australians won support from a small but growing band of British Liberals and increasing support from the British public.

Australians’ success in gaining what the Americans had wanted but failed to achieve—self-government within the British Empire—meant that self-government in Australia commenced with much higher legitimacy and popular support than in America. Where the young United States suffered from major instances of treason, another war with Britain (in 1812), and a civil war over slavery in which more than 600,000 lost their lives, Australia was the beneficiary of a foundation that from the start had prohibited slavery and soon sought to implement the most advanced social and political ideas of the time. Its people by the 1840s were increasingly optimistic about the future of their homeland, provided the challenge to its freedom from British policy could be removed.

The main ideas that motivated the early Australian patriots were derived from the Britain of the day, and it was a Britain in the throes of an historic debate about the principles against which good government should be judged—both in terms of its process and its policies. In Britain these ideas began to fall under the now well-known labels of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, and in the course of the nineteenth century each of these was forced to adjust to the powerful stream of humanitarian thinking that emerged from the campaign against slavery. Australia came to have a particular relationship to this debate: it was to become the venue for the world’s pre-eminent liberal experiment in a new land.

During the seventy years following the failure of Britain’s policy of repression of the American colonists, Britain internally went through a largely peaceful transformation to become the strongest voice for liberal policies in the world. Although conservatives wanted to translate to Australia the British class system based on social deference to a landed aristocracy, a distribution of wealth and land ownership favourable to the elite, to be upheld by governments appointed in Britain and supported by an established church and a controlled press, British liberals conversely saw Australia as the ideal place to experiment with such radical ideas as broad individual liberty and equality, universal education, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, a new land without slavery, the rule of law, the classless society, private enterprise, and later the political and social equality of men and women.

But liberal ideas were one thing. Getting to the point where Australians could govern themselves, and decide what their own policies would be, was quite another.

This book places the development of Australia in the context of the ideas that gave it meaning to the Britons and Australians of the time. Seeing Australia only through the lens of the convict system, as in The Fatal Shore, risks omitting much that is needed to understand Australian development. As one writer has put it, ‘The Fatal Shore says many true things about early Australia, but it leaves many true things unsaid.’¹ In particular, what is omitted is a much larger and important cultural and intellectual context within which emancipists and immigrants, governors, legislators and political activists understood their world and its prospects, and through which the future of Australia was to be defined.

In telling this story the book therefore becomes an account of the liberal (and Liberal) political tradition in Australia, and its clashes with conservatism on the one hand and (especially in later volumes) utopian socialism on the other. Liberalism’s achievements were the establishment of liberal democratic institutions of government, a humanitarian and reformist culture, and a nation that, alone in the world, spans a whole continent. The most important outcome of this history is a country in which people could find opportunities to realise their dreams.

A land for dreams

Dreaming and Australia have been linked from time immemorial. The culture of the Aboriginal people who first settled the land and nurtured it for perhaps 60,000 years centred on the Dreaming, the era when the land was laid down and the salutary lessons for life had been exemplified by its mighty creatures. From 1788 this storied land received a multitude of newcomers with their own hopes and dreams: dreams of personal independence, of control over their own lives, of freedom from servitude, class and religious prejudice, of a moral and Christian commonwealth, and of utopias the world had never before experienced. Among these were some who came and made it their personal project to promote ideals and construct institutions that would allow the personal freedom that most craved to flourish. The liberal ideal was for many the most inspirational dream of all.

Australia has indeed been a liberal project since its foundation. Australians can scarcely begin to understand the country in which they live without a grasp of the nature of this project, and of those who originated it, developed it, and sought to apply its ideas to the government of a nation. Ideas and dreams shared across generations have been expressed through the country’s institutions and the policies of its governments.

Ideas, as the English economist John Maynard Keynes once said, direct the actions of ‘practical’ men, whether they are aware of it or not. Yet often in discussing politics we pay little attention to the ideas guiding and directing action, choosing instead to focus on the more observable behaviour and actions of politicians, lobbyists and the media. When we do discuss the role of ideas, it is often just to refer to them, without examining their content in any detail.

I take the view that the content of ideas is an inextricable part of any meaningful historical account of politics and that we can hardly understand what is happening without knowing about these ideas, who is using them and where they direct our attention. The ideas are not an incidental part of the story, to be ‘boxed’ or referenced, but are an essential element in a satisfactory historical account that should be identified and analysed in sufficient detail to engender understanding of their influence. In the first part of this book I attempt to dig deeply into the liberal political tradition and provide a framework to help understand how it has shaped Australian politics.

The course of Australian liberalism has been profoundly affected by the people who have led opinion and governments, and by the way in which its institutions have functioned. An account of Australian liberalism centrally embraces the stories of individual people and their organisations, and the ways in which they have understood liberal ideas and attempted to apply them. The continuity of this effort, and the embedding of liberal ideas in our culture, enables us to talk usefully about a cross-generational liberal project. It is a project that has had great successes and some failures, and whose future remains unknown, as the liberals of each generation struggle with the consequences of their predecessors’ legacies and with an uncertain world.

The central values, to the realisation of which this cross-generational project has been dedicated, are the worth and dignity of each individual person and the equal rights of all to define their destinies in life and to work to achieve the happiness or fulfilment they seek. Liberalism derives these values from the universal desire of people to control their own lives. The main obstacle to the achievement of this objective is the matching desire of people, as the economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill pointed out a century and a half ago, to control and interfere with the lives of others in the interests of improving their own. The central issue for liberalism has been the balance to be struck between the individual and the social, a balance that can seem to change over time and from circumstance to circumstance.

Liberalism therefore is a tradition of thought that acknowledges both the general goal of individual liberty and the possibly contradictory desire of people to control others. The central question for political liberalism has been the place of government in these contradictory currents of social life. Protecting the individual against the exercise of arbitrary power by others lies at the heart of the liberal project. To achieve its central goal the liberal project has constructed institutions designed to protect each person against such power, while seeking policies that will empower people in their quest. The balance has not been altogether easy to find, and achieving a balance acceptable to most is a continuing task of liberal politics.

Once the worth and inherent dignity of each person is acknowledged as a goal, the idea of actively using the state to achieve this has attracted reformers, and the last century has seen massive experiments in designing such a positive role for government. Such attempts have ranged from practical and limited reforms to the utopian use of government to effect the reconstruction of whole societies. The most difficult issue has been attempting to arrive at a role for the state that, in positively attempting to assist people, does not inadvertently subject them to the arbitrary power of government officials and other citizens, undermining their ability to achieve what is personally important to them.

The design of the state and finding the appropriate definition of the role of government to empower people to clarify and pursue their dreams remains perhaps the single most pressing issue on the agenda of liberalism in the first half of the twenty-first century. It is a search in which—in one way or another—we are all as citizens engaged.

The greatest dilemmas of liberalism arise from the widespread desire to use the authority of government to advance human happiness, not merely by protecting individuals against others but also by restricting the capacity of individuals to pursue their own values (restrictions purportedly imposed in the interests of others). To the extent that this has involved increases in the demands of government, through taxation and the exercise of power by government officials (including courts), to take discretionary decisions about many aspects of people’s lives, the damage caused to people’s dreams by their subjection to arbitrary power continually reappears in a different guise.

The liberal project has not occupied an otherwise empty political field. It has had to contend with illiberal ideas that subordinate the individual to supposedly ‘greater’ causes (which are just extreme expressions of the desire to control others in the interests of one’s own values). Liberalism’s main enemies in the field of ideas have been prejudice, special interest, and illiberal ideologies. Alongside liberalism’s successes there have been policy failures and misconceived policies, arising from lack of knowledge and understanding of the workings of society and human nature. Policies have often had unintended consequences, and required trade-offs among values, the necessity for which is part of the human condition.

As a result, this account of the history of Australian liberalism gives considerable attention to the ideas that have motivated the behaviour of individuals, and influenced the programs of the organisations through which they have pursued their political objectives. I believe ideas are a much more important part of the story than the manoeuvrings that often are mistaken for the substance of political activity. Accounts of key ideas are in chronological order with the other elements of the story, even though their major influence might not occur for some decades. Once formulated and published, ideas at some level have an immediate influence, and their story begins at that point.

Much that Australians today read about their history pays little attention to what has just been said, notwithstanding that the pursuit of the liberal project constitutes the main stream of the political history of the country. Much Australian history writing since World War II has been focused not on the main story within which all others have meaning but on selective aspects of our national story. It is significant that the liberal project and liberalism, despite its vast significance for the Australian story, received almost no mention in the Australian National Curriculum initiated by the Rudd government. If such a curriculum is implemented, there will continue to be a substantial loss of national memory about some of the most significant ideas, debates, people, organisations, events and developments that have produced our liberal democracy.

The ‘liberal project’ is not a program, nor is it the exclusive possession of the side of politics that for some 180 years has called itself ‘Liberal’. Involvement in the project extends across the major political parties, because the demand to control one’s own life and realise one’s own goals is deeply embedded in the Australian culture, and probably in the human psyche itself. Moreover, while the Liberal parties have been the main carriers of the more elaborate and sophisticated cluster of liberal ideas in Australian politics during the last hundred years, liberal ideas have not been uncontested within those parties nor in the coalitions they have formed.

Within the Labor Party those referred to as ‘moderates’ have most commonly been more or less liberal in their outlook, but that party is an outgrowth of a powerful special interest, and the liberalism of special interests—union, business or otherwise—is usually quite circumscribed. The absence of any structural links between the Liberal parties in Australia and organised business interests (although these parties have been the target of such interests, and have looked to them for financial support) has sometimes given these parties the capacity to consider liberal ideas broadly, and as matters of principle. Within the Labor Party, parliamentarians have generally had to work to free themselves from the excesses of special-interest demands from their trade union base, balancing these against wider opinion.

The reality is that all political parties are constantly targets for special interests seeking benefits for themselves or on behalf of the values they pursue. Liberal parties have been targets for socially conservative, economic or religious special interests, which have sometimes defined their interests in illiberal terms. The Labor Party has been the main—but not the only—target for those with philosophical or ideological anti-liberal ideas over the years, as such interests have sought to use that party to gain influence for their goals. Liberal ideas, such as checks and balances, separation of powers, freedom of enterprise, decentralised government or parliamentarians as representatives rather than as delegates of interests, which have been accepted within the Liberal parties, have been challenged and often unvoiced elsewhere. Nevertheless, without a substantial and general bipartisan support, the liberal project was unlikely to have been as successful as it has been in Australia, and Australia would not today be the peaceful liberal democracy that it is.

This book is in a sense a biography of liberalism in Australia, and if one accepts that politics is a battle of ideas, the question arises: where do the ideas in the main political debates come from? Political debate in Australia has never been isolated from debates elsewhere in the English-speaking world, and beyond. The principal thinkers, philosophers or theorists (including economists, lawyers, political scientists and historians) whose ideas have been influential in political debates in Australia have lived in England, America or Europe, as well as in Australia. Consequently, it is not possible to give an account of Australian liberalism without treating it as one expression of a tradition of thought that exists throughout the West. It is for this reason that I have at various points invited into the story those highly influential thinkers who have shaped this debate, and demonstrated how they have influenced Australia. An Australian history that is not set in its international context is incomprehensible, and in no case is this truer than in a history of ideas and their influence.

Note

In the text that follows big-L Liberalism indicates organised political forces that called themselves Liberal. Small-L liberalism refers to liberal ideas. Big-L Labo(u)r similarly refers to the Labo(u)r Party as an organisation, while small-L labour refers to the labour movement, to organisations that support Labo(u)r members of parliament before the formation of the Labo(u)r Party, or simply to labour in the workplace. Big-R Radical refers to a member of the political grouping known as the ‘Philosophical Radicals’. Small-R radical refers to ‘radical’, as opposed to ‘conservative’. Big-C Conservative refers to a member of the Conservative Party.

1

The liberal project

THE IDEA THAT each individual human being is equally valuable and worthy of respect regardless of their beliefs, religion, social class, gender, nationality, race or ethnic group—and that society can and should be organised and governed to recognise this—has not been a widely accepted idea in human history. Even less common has been the associated idea that each person has an equal right to pursue happiness or fulfilment in this world according to their own desires. Throughout most of history, and in much of the world today, these have been radical and, for many, almost absurd, unimaginable and unachievable ideals.

The principal underlying condition that has made the pursuit of the recognition of human equality—let alone of the liberty to find fulfilment—impossible-sounding ideas to most people has been the challenge of surviving in a world of conflict. The security of the individual, the tribe, the community, the regime, the people, the nation has been an ever-present purpose of government and political leaders, and the sacrifice of the interests and objectives of some to save the remainder has been a dominant feature of the organisation of human societies, around which cultures and belief systems have been developed. To the ancients and in some denominations and religions, personal fulfilment is a goal to be achieved not in this life but in the next.

Much more common have been ideas that have assessed the worth of people—including their right to life and liberty—according to their place in society, their contributions to the regime, and—in more diverse societies—their beliefs, race or nationality. Organising security generally has been seen to be best achieved not by policies in which all are treated equally but in the subordination of some to others.

History has been largely portrayed as the story of conflicts to establish the supremacy of one category of people over another: Greeks and Persians, Romans and Barbarians, freemen and slaves, Christians and pagans, Catholics and Protestants, English and Irish, Serbs and Croats, classes and masses, Nazis and Jews, Proletariat and Kulaks, black and white, Buddhist and Moslem, Islamist and unbeliever—the list goes on and on. In the many wars and conflicts based on these and so many other loyalties or identifications, the individual person has been used and crushed, often deprived of liberty and even of life, to satisfy some greater ‘good’—the survival of a group and of the ideas that define it, hold it together and motivate it.

The ideal of inherent and equal individual worth, and the belief that this entitles each person to the liberty to pursue their own course in life, I will call ‘the liberal idea’. Liberals are those who acknowledge this as an ideal and seek to make it the organising principle for human society. Liberalism is the attempt by such people to justify their ideal, to spell out how they intend to achieve it, and the policies they adopt to make progress towards it. Liberalism as a set of policy ideas is an attempt to provide an answer to the basic problem of politics faced by individual people: how to lessen or remove uncertainty in the pursuit of the values that are most important to them.

In this form the liberal ideal is mainly a product of eighteenth-century thinkers during the period known as the Enlightenment. It is captured explicitly in Thomas Jefferson’s words in the American Declaration of Independence (1776): that ‘all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. With Jefferson’s help, such an idea was also included in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). It is embodied today, and an attempt made to develop its implications, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1946). But while the formulations we recognise might be historically recent, central elements of the liberal idea have roots reaching deep into Western culture.

The Roman historian Tacitus described the love of freedom of the German tribes outside the Roman Empire and their dislike of domineering leaders. Jesus told his followers that the Kingdom of God was in every person, and extended this radical enunciation of human equality to the idea that people should love their neighbours as themselves. Slaves, peasants and the oppressed across the years, from ancient Egypt through to Wat Tyler and the Warsaw rebels, have fought for the acknowledgement that they are entitled to respect and equality with others.

No country on earth can claim to have achieved in practice the levels of freedom, human dignity and mutual respect between people that the liberal ideal promotes, although it is possible to assess—and even attempt to rank—countries according to the extent they recognise and protect human freedom and dignity. While we understand more about the potential of human beings than was common two centuries ago, we are also aware that the unrealised potential of people is still substantial.

The complexities of human nature and the human condition will trump any attempt to realise a specific expression of the ideal encompassing all people and all circumstances. Yet liberalism is neither utopian nor simply ideological. The liberal tradition has placed a high value on reason in the attempt to find the most effective ways to implement liberal ideals, and the attempt to achieve the liberal ideal has generated an unprecedented intellectual enquiry over the last three centuries into the nature of people and their societies and how they work, into philosophical analysis of the ideal itself and its implications. Proponents of liberalism, moreover, have developed institutions to guard against arbitrary power, inspired intellectual disciplines such as economics, and given rise to political movements. Leaders in many lands have attempted to develop policies that seek to honour the liberal ideal more closely.

The ‘liberal project’ in Australia

The five volumes of which this is the first comprise a history of attempts to give reality to the liberal idea in Australia from 1788. They give an account of the ‘liberal project’ and, in telling the story, seek to be part of a conversation about the meaning of the Australian political experience.

I describe the history of liberalism in Australia as a ‘project’ in order to signal that this is not simply an account of abstract or philosophical ideas but of ideas expressed through the actions of real people, as they attempted to apply the intellectual and cultural thought of their time to the task of solving the political problems they faced. The term ‘project’ is intended to emphasise the purposes and actions of people as they seek to give effect to the ideas that guide them. One might as validly discuss a ‘Christian’ project, an ‘Islamic’ project, a ‘Socialist’ project or perhaps today a ‘Green’ project.

Australia provides an especially compelling and important example of the attempt to establish a liberal society, because liberals in Australia have had a remarkable opportunity to realise their ideals in practice.

First, the settlement of Australia by the British and by later waves of immigrants occurred in the age when liberal ideas were reaching the height of their influence on politics and society in the West. Liberalism has been the source of the dominant political ideals in Australian politics for most of the country’s history, and of the guiding ideas that have motivated the policies of the men and women and of the political parties that have most frequently governed Australia and its states (and, before them, the colonies).

Second, the European settlement of Australia occurred relatively recently in an historical sense—in 1788, the year before the United States adopted its Constitution and before the French Revolution broke out—and liberals in Australia have had an opportunity to pursue their ideals relatively free from the constraints of the entrenched social structures and pre-modern cultures of the Old World (and even of their surviving remnants in the New World of North America). With some of the impediments of history removed one might therefore expect Australian liberals to have been more successful in pushing towards the achievement of a society based on liberal ideals than other nations.

Third, Australian liberals have had a whole continent on which to construct the new society and its institutions. They were not, with limited exceptions, engaged in conflicts for possession with other occupying powers. They did, however, face one inescapable human challenge to their liberalism. As with North America, the Australian continent had already been settled before the British arrived. When the British First Fleet arrived and hoisted the Union Jack on 26 January 1788 at Sydney Cove, the estimated 300,000 to 750,000 Aboriginal people (the exact number is not certain) constituted the oldest continuous human society in the world—a settlement made by some of the first modern humans to emerge from Africa, by way of India and the Indonesian archipelago, some 60,000 years before. Indeed, Australia’s occupancy by modern humans possibly pre-dates that of Europe and almost certainly that of the Americas. Coming to terms with this fact has been a tormenting experience for Australian liberals, as it has been in all the major immigrant nations of the modern era in relation to the people who were there before: the United States of America, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia in the English-speaking world.

One important cultural context for the Australian settlement preserved it at least from one great humanitarian crime measured against liberal values. Britain was already turning against slavery when Australia was first settled and, unlike the United States, Australia never experienced slavery (although it came close on occasion), and therefore does not have the legacy of social division and prejudice that slavery left in North America.

Fourth, Australia, since the original British settlement, has not been invaded (although it has been attacked), and the later arrivals among the Australian people have never known in their new homeland the distrust and division experienced by many European nations that have been invaded and conquered or the pain of collaboration with, and resistance to, the conquerors. Consequently, with perhaps the exception of the ideologically riven interwar period of 1919–39, social trust in Australia has generally remained high, and social capital has been available to support the effort to build a society founded on liberal principles.

Fifth, Australia was founded at a moment in time when rapid communication across the world—by steam and later coal- and oil-powered ships, by telegraph and telephone, by air travel and through the Internet—became possible for the first time. Australia’s foundation and growth has coincided with the industrial and post-industrial revolutions and has been able to take advantage of multiple new technologies that have permitted the rapid development of industries and trade, both domestically and internationally.

One of the promises of liberalism was that individual freedom would enable for the first time a whole people to break out of poverty and the opportunity to seek on earth a pathway to personal fulfilment. Delivering on this promise meant establishing a more productive economy than had ever previously been achieved.

In the later nineteenth century a small but rapidly expanding immigrant population found itself with access to some of the richest goldfields in the world, and with more fertile agricultural land per head than the more numerous settlers in the United States. With its predominantly male population and its trading capacity as technology developed, Australians developed on the basis of wool and wheat production (in particular) the then most highly productive agricultural sector in the world.¹ The combination of natural and demographic advantages with an enterprising population under conditions of economic freedom secured for its inhabitants the highest per capita income of any people. This in turn provided an historically unique opportunity for a well-educated national community to attain unprecedented leisure and a standard of living up to World War I that was higher than that of Britain, America or Europe. How the Australians used this opportunity—and inadvertently wasted it—is part of our story.

Apart from its highly productive agricultural industries, the elements of society that have taken greatest advantage of these developments towards a truly worldwide culture have been the participants in the world of ideas: those with higher education who were newspaper editors and journalists, campaigners for humanitarian causes, philosophers and social theorists, scientists, economists and professionals. Australian liberals have been well placed to take advantage of developments in liberal thought and in the understanding of how societies work that have occurred elsewhere, supplementing conclusions formed from their own experiences.

From 1788 liberal campaigners in Britain for legal reform, for the abolition of slavery, the protection of native peoples, the alleviation of poverty, for civil freedoms and democracy, took a close interest in Australian developments. As the most British of all the major settlement colonies, the ‘Australias’ before Federation became the focus of economic and social experimentation on an unprecedented scale, as British reformers attempted to realise ideals that were still impractical in Britain itself. William Wilberforce, the Christian evangelical whose anti-slavery campaigns helped to entrench humanitarian and moral concepts in the British elite, along with other members of his Clapham Circle, took a keen interest in Australia. The philosopher and institutional reformer Jeremy Bentham and his circle of philosophical radicals were intimately involved in the politics of Australia in London, and conceived the idea of their own ideal colony in South Australia. Australia did not just ‘borrow’ liberal ideas being developed on the other side of the world; in a very real sense it was at the cutting edge for the implementation of these ideas, and an important part of the process by which the proponents of these ideas sought to convert them into reality.

Among the ideas that were integral to Australian liberalism were the ideas of the political economists, from Adam Smith, through John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall to John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The understandings of how society and the economy worked developed by these men transformed Australian public policy, and ultimately enabled the avoidance of circumstances that had seemed endemic in the liberal system: periods of mass unemployment and prolonged periods of minimal economic growth.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Australia for a variety of reasons—notably its early convict experience, the influence of religious dissenters, and particularly the Scots with their intense personal morality and work ethic, the huge expanse of its frontier and the effect of the gold rushes in rapidly increasing the population—has taken the idea of democracy and public morality to its heart, and developed a generally high level of integrity in its government and a profoundly egalitarian culture that takes as a given the idea that one person is as good as another. In Australia this went well beyond the philosophical notion that all men were naturally equal in rights, to the strong cultural belief that everyone is entitled to respect, even if it has also fuelled Australia’s famous ‘tall poppy syndrome’, which tends to diminish regard for achievement. If any society was to be based on the recognition of the equality of each individual person, Australia’s historical circumstances and culture gave it the best opportunity to achieve such equality.

The attempt to establish and secure democracy in Australia, and to discover the policies that would build the liberal society, was therefore much more straightforward than in other countries. As a result, Australia’s democratic institutions were established very early in an international context, often before similar institutions were inaugurated in the United States, Britain and Europe. In mandating votes for all men, and later for all women, in the establishment of the secret ballot, and in its faith in democracy and the equality of all people, and in its use of government to equalise conditions and open the doors of opportunity, Australia (with New Zealand) was the cutting edge of the English-speaking world.

Challenges of the liberal project

Despite these advantages, it would be wrong to see the history of liberalism on the southern continent as an obstacle-free pathway to success. Ignorance, prejudice, parochialism and selfish interest have been enemies to the achievement of equal rights and respect for all since the beginning of human history. Nothing has changed, but the ambition of liberalism has been to confront and defeat these powerful forces of illiberalism. Ambition is of course one thing; achievement is quite another.

The European imperial expansion of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, viewed from the perspective of other civilisations and of the native peoples of Africa, South-East Asia, Australasia and the Pacific, was a cultural and political tsunami, sweeping across shorelines, submerging entire societies, inflicting enormous damage on what was there before, and costing the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. This happened whatever the constructive purposes of the imperial powers and the benefits of their rule might have been. While often the loss of life attendant on imperial expansion, especially in Asia and Africa, was the result of the deliberate use of armed force to subdue pre-existing political orders, in many instances the loss of life was, from a governmental point of view, inadvertent, although predictable.

In the control room of the single most powerful of these empires, the British leadership saw the spreading of their institutions to control arbitrary power and their flexible social structure based around free association and the rule of law, as a benefit to the world (as well as to their own political power). This global British liberal project had remarkable success, particularly in the settlement colonies of North America and Australasia, while at the same time raising intractable moral issues for the settlers and their governments.

Native peoples

Despite official policies based on the rights and humanity of native peoples, the tsunami of British settlement, particularly on the frontiers, involved a huge human cost in the abuse of and violence against the aboriginal peoples with whom it came into contact. Many of the settlers themselves did not share the moral codes of the leaders of their governments, and the governments, although liberal in principles, were unable for many decades to control the forces they had unleashed. This presented great moral dilemmas for the liberal project in which they were engaged.

In Britain, imperial aggression divided the Liberals, many of whose leaders from the mid-nineteenth century were strongly anti-imperialist for precisely these reasons. Yet even the most powerful of the anti-imperialist Liberals such as Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone could not stop the tide of empire as it flooded across the world, and British Liberalism ultimately reconciled itself to attempting to civilise the imperial mission, fearing all the time that the endless conflicts and violence might come home and erupt in Europe itself, as they eventually did in 1914.

The Australian liberals found themselves agonising from the start of settlement over the best policy framework to handle the human issues of frontier settlement. Arthur Phillip carried with him in his instructions the substance of Wilberforce’s implacable Evangelical opposition to slavery, and all succeeding governors, and the representative governments that followed from mid-century, maintained this principle and its underlying value, derived from their Christian heritage, of the common humanity of all people. Out of the anti-slavery campaign came action against the ‘white slavery’ of the convict assignment system and the international movement led by the Aborigines’ Protection Society, founded in London in 1837, to protect native peoples.

In Australia, a land uniquely able to be moulded by fire, the Aboriginal hunting and gathering culture had shaped the flora and fauna of the continent into park-like grasslands and maintained forest boundaries, unrecognised by the newcomers as the product of the human hand.² The people were intimately linked to the land and to each other by communal bonds, mythologised and sanctified by the continent-wide stories of the Dreaming. These first people were puzzled, frightened and angered by the new arrivals and by the rules of their society, and there were many violent incidents as British settlement expanded and the Aborigines, at first often welcoming, were forced to defend themselves, suffering further aggression for doing so. Aboriginal people, however, were also intrigued by the newcomers and their culture and goods, but adaptation was for many an insurmountable challenge. As in America, even the most liberal of the governmental leaders could not control the violence and sometimes hatred visited on the original inhabitants by numbers of the settlers, nor could they prevent the spread of disease.

From the start of British settlement, the Aboriginal people were regarded by the government as British subjects, and were therefore entitled to the protection of the law, but the reality was that the instruments of law enforcement available were too weak to impose the law beyond the settled areas, and the moral rules accepted by the settlers among themselves very frequently were not extended by them to the Aboriginal people, whose humanity or natural rights were not accepted by many. Among the broadly liberal leaders of the new society there was intense debate over how the moral strength of the colonial culture could be reinforced and the ignorance and hatred of some of the settlers controlled. Even goodwill among the leaders of the new settlers struggled to find the policy that would bring the two peoples harmoniously together (or let them live harmoniously apart).

Ethnic diversity

In the light of their observations of the American experience of slavery, Australian liberals in the nineteenth century were also wary of introducing further national and ethnic diversity into the largely British and European society they were building. They feared submergence of the new British society by people of other nations, especially from China and later Japan, and were fearful that more cultural and ethnic diversity would add further sources of conflict to class and religion—the two main lines of social division with which they were familiar. Australian politics was already struggling to cope with existing powerful identifications and accompanying prejudices in relation to the Aboriginal people. The dominant English were also concerned about the Irish, although the Australian Irish rapidly took advantage of the early establishment of democratic political systems to prise open doors of opportunity that remained closed in Britain, while providing leaders in a wide range of fields. Chinese, Japanese, Afghans, Malays and Pacific Islanders were another matter.

In the last 150 years Australian liberals have tried two quite different and contrasting strategies to address the issue of ethnic diversity. The first was to reduce diversity by deporting non-European immigrants (much as Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and later American presidents had believed was the solution to the problem of freed African slaves) and excluding newcomers of different races. It came to be assumed that the Aboriginal people would ‘peacefully’ die out or become absorbed. A ‘white’ Australia would become a bipartisan ideal.

When the exclusion of people of other ethnicities became impossible to sustain in the face of liberal democratic values (‘all men are created equal’) and fair dealing with other nations, and the society was slowly weaned by large-scale immigration from its parochial culture of exclusiveness, the opposite strategy was adopted: immigration free of ethnic discrimination combined with the offer of early citizenship and an intensive effort to make immigrants feel welcome. As the popular culture responded to liberal leadership, this proved remarkably successful.

Social class

Only some of the settlers after 1788 were liberals in the sense that they had a personal and self-conscious commitment to substantial elements of the liberal ideal, although many accepted as a matter of course some of its central concepts such as individual liberty to build their own lives, and almost all sought the freedom to realise the dreams they had brought to the new land. The first instinct of many of the new society’s leaders was to translate the class structure of England, or its established church, to the new country. Had the British Government not seen fit to transport to Australia many of those who were most antagonistic to class and church in Britain, and to encourage the immigration of many whose main objective was to get away from such a status-ridden society, those who aspired to perpetuate the culture of social deference might have been more successful. As it was, the British class structure could not survive the equalising influence of pioneering in a new land, which called on qualities of leadership and effectiveness that were unrelated to status and birth. The majority of emigrants who came were indeed also determined to resist the re-establishment of the British class system, which they had detested at home.

From the early days of the convict settlement, the issue of the reintegration of the convicts into society once they had served their sentences was a pressing one and, not surprisingly, the children of convicts, exemplified by the first Australian-born political leader, William Charles Wentworth, quickly came to the view that they were as good as anyone else. Reinforced by rebellious immigrants, many of whom from the 1830s were adherents of the democratic Charter, the ethos of democracy gripped the Australian colonies, and the ideal of a classless society became a driving goal of the colonial liberals, which they expressed in their policies to regulate gold-mining, land settlement, participation in political life, education and the management of industrial conflict.

The ideal of the classless society was not a new one. It stretched back at least to the Levellers of the seventeenth century, to the Quakers, to the democratic movements in the Protestant churches, especially in the Scottish Presbyterian Church, and in Europe had found extreme expression in the violence against the upper class and the church during the French Revolution. The dream of freedom from these social and intellectual constraints achieved the status of a seemingly realistic goal in nineteenth-century colonial Australia.

A number of political movements in the nineteenth century were inspired by the dream of a classless society—not only the Australian liberals but also socialist, communist and even anarchist movements. These movements differed partly in what they meant by classlessness, but their differences primarily lay in their assessment of how to dismantle the old order. Where the anarchists in Russia saw the way to the classless society by means of terrorism and violent attacks on the state, and communists, following Marx, saw the road as lying through the violent revolution of the masses, American and British socialists saw the route in a peaceful and legal overturning of the institution of private property, which they concluded was the basis of the inequality of power that sustained the exploiting classes and aristocracy. Liberals saw the road to a classless society through the promotion of an egalitarian democratic culture, broadening the ownership of private property, universal education and policies that secured the equal freedom of all to pursue their own goals in life.

The argument over the meaning and the politics of achieving a classless society was to lie close to the heart of the political debate in Australia for more than a century. Whether such a society has now been achieved remains a matter of contention, although this contention itself is telling. The main issue is whether a society with an unequal distribution of wealth can be classless. The liberals have argued that it can—that the crucial issue is social and economic mobility across generations and the existence of an egalitarian culture to replace the culture of deference that sustained the British class system. Socialists have argued that economic inequality itself must be eliminated. Nevertheless, what was once obvious—that there were classes—is now less so, as money and office provide the main sources of social status, shifting substantially according to individual achievement and across the generations. As the issue has greatly diminished in political importance, it is probable that the aspects of class that humiliated and angered people in the nineteenth century have largely been abolished.

Religion

Class division was only one of the sources of conflict that the colonial liberals wanted to eradicate. The fight against the establishment of the Church of England had been won by the 1830s. In many ways just as pressing and in some respects even more difficult to deal with was the sectarian division between Protestants and Catholics, and later conflicts between secularists and religious groups. Religious conflict was more difficult to address because, while few really supported the continuance of a class system, most people willingly and proudly incorporated their religious denomination or beliefs about religion into their personal identity, and most saw religion as the main source of the moral framework on which personal relationships depended for their orderly and sensible conduct.

The political battles between religious denominations and militant secularists, and the theological and sectarian ideas that corroded relations between the Christian denominations, were significant factors in the debates on education, and in the regulation of social life at least to the middle of the twentieth century. By the end of the twentieth century, liberal immigration policies were increasing the diversity of religions in society, and the debate about the appropriate party structures and cultural, media and education policies to address this remains alive.

Women

When Australia was first settled by the British, the position of women in society was already a matter of debate. In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft published her feminist treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Robert Burns was warning that these rights ‘needed some attention’, and in America, Abigail Adams was informing her husband, the second US President John Adams, that women might need to have their own revolution in America to secure their rights. In colonial Australia, such women as Eliza Darling and Caroline Chisholm rapidly assumed important leadership roles. Education was seen by the colonial liberals as the principal means for achieving the emancipation of women from oppression by men in a society where the law was heavily skewed towards male authority in the home and in the workplace, enforcing a concept of society in which men were the income-earners and women were responsible for homes and the voluntary sector. Securing equal opportunity for men and women was to be a long project in its own right.

Equal primary education for boys and girls in the 1870s (and later equal secondary and tertiary education) unleashed female political involvement on a large scale, and universal voting rights (for women as well as men) were firmly established in the years around Federation, two decades ahead of Britain and the United States. Liberal political movements were supported by large female campaigning organisations from around 1904, and women were entering parliament from the 1920s. Legal disabilities of women in the workplace persisted until the 1970s.

Imperial conflicts

Nor was the effort to construct a liberal society in Australia taking place in isolation. The settlement and development of Australia was a key element of the British imperial project, and Australian liberalism was drawn into the many boundary conflicts between competing empires, and inevitably became embroiled in the crisis of European civilisation precipitated by the war between the imperial powers in 1914–18.

Distance protected Australia but also made it vulnerable. Australia’s isolation in the southern hemisphere from its cultural parent in Britain, and its cousins in Europe and America, meant that the threats from other European empires and from a militaristic Japan weighed heavily on Australian governments and affected the policies and institutions of the new nation. Australia has had to organise to fight wars, and to survive when trade has been impeded, neither circumstance favourable to the building of an open and free society.

Australians have struggled to remain free in war. In the Great War of 1914–18, fought by Australians to defend the country against the expansion of the German Empire into the Pacific, Australia’s was ultimately the only volunteer army. It suffered more casualties in proportion to population than that of any other nation and, since the bulk of the fighting was in Europe, there also did the casualties lie. The human trauma of this tragedy affected Australian society and politics for a long time.

The ideological division of the world into blocs of communism, fascism and democracy that resulted from the war between the empires penetrated Australian politics as it did those of other nations, and liberalism found itself under unprecedented ideological assault on its home ground.

Liberty and democracy

If world events, and Australia’s place in the world, challenged the liberal project, the very strength of Australia’s democratic ethos presented it with a unique policy dilemma. Two of the greatest of the nineteenth-century liberal social scientists—the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and the Englishman John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)—each warned that democracy could itself challenge the achievement of the liberal ideal. Mill feared that the prejudices of democratic majorities might oppress minorities. De Tocqueville feared that the very depth of the cultural belief in democracy might lead people to accept from democratic states a level of regulation of their lives that they would resist to the death if imposed by a monarchy or dictatorship—that democracy itself might ultimately extinguish the right of people to control their own lives in the pursuit of equality. If ever there were to be a test of the validity of these fears, Australia would provide it, for no nation had a more democratic culture nor has pursued the ideal of equality in freedom using the authority of government so vigorously.

Humanitarianism

The pursuit of happiness had been identified by the Americans as an inalienable right. The nature of happiness, and the process by which it could be attained, remained a subject of intense debate throughout the nineteenth century. It was a debate in which the liberals participated with the churches and with the socialists. The liberals not only found themselves engaged in debates with non-liberal and illiberal forces but also found that they themselves were deeply divided on the matter.

What at first had been a recognition of common humanity had, by the mid-nineteenth century, developed into a broader political motivation, known, at first contemptuously and only later positively, as humanitarianism: dedication to the welfare of mankind at large, and the advocacy of the practice of humane action.³ While most liberals had concluded by mid-century that personal ‘independence’ was at least