A Free Country: Australians’ Search for Utopia 1861–1901

By David Kemp

A Free Country: Australians’ Search for Utopia 1861–1901 tells how Australians, inspired by their new democracy, attempted to use their freedom to build a society without social and economic conflict.

As the second book in a landmark five-volume Australian Liberalism series, A Free Country shows the successes and missteps in the attempt to establish the legal and moral foundations for a liberal society in Australia, examining the ideological battles of the period.

The national politics of twentieth-century Australia had their roots during this time, as utopian dreams of ‘social reconstruction’ opposed liberal ideals of individual freedom, fostering the concept of ‘class wars’ and leading to the ongoing involvement of trade unions in politics.

As emerging collective ideas of nationalism, empire, race and class challenged individual rights and threatened to seed domestic and international conflict, liberals succeeded in bringing the six colonies into one Australian nation founded on liberal principles, writing a constitution hailed as the most democratic in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Apr 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9780522873498

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Introduction

AUSTRALIA IS ARGUABLY the outstanding model of the democracies to which the nineteenth century gave rise. By 1860, liberal parliamentary institutions and democratically elected assemblies based upon male voting had been established in all the eastern colonies of Australia. When the colonial statesmen gathered to write a constitution for a new nation in 1890 and reflected on their achievements, they were proud of the free country they saw themselves building and perfecting. As Henry Parkes, leader of that first convention, said, addressing the newly assembled delegates:

We ought not lightly to disregard all the powers which the imagination can call forth, in picturing the future of these great colonies. Their destiny is assured, and their federation is assured. The union of the Australian people is a thing that so commends itself to the most far-seeing of those who have come from other lands, and which so intertwines itself with the very life of the native born, that nothing can possibly stop its progress.¹

Duncan Gillies, Premier of Victoria, told the first session of the Constitutional Convention:

There have been no peoples in these colonies who have not enjoyed the most perfect freedom to express their opinions in public, and through their representatives in parliament, on any public question of importance. There has never been any occasion when such an opportunity has not been given to every man in this country, and so free and liberal are our laws and public institutions that it has never been suggested by any mortal upon this continent that that right should be in any way restricted. On the contrary, we all feel proud of the freedom which every one in this country enjoys. It is a freedom not surpassed in any state in the world, not even in the boasted republic of America.²

Those who had women or the Aboriginal people in mind would have questioned Gillies’ generalisation, but few questioned its truth as it applied to British—including ‘native-born’—Australian men. And women, now receiving primary education equally with men, were already making their voices heard, and would soon have the vote—decades ahead of women in Britain or the United States.

As the prospective founders of the new nation reflected on the prospect to which Parkes beckoned them, they were all of the view that liberal democracy in Australia had worked well, and had produced policies and social outcomes that justified the extension of the system to the continent as a whole. Parkes, indeed, reminded them of some of their great achievements:

We have brought into existence systems of education, which, in a very short time, have been followed, and to a large extent copied, by old, powerful and renowned nations. But what is of more importance to us is this, that we have brought into existence systems of education which practically embrace the children of all the families which live under our forms of government.

We have constructed means of communication—we have carried them in all directions where they were most needed—to an extent which, if we had not done so much, would be a marvel to ourselves; and in all the other true provinces of free government we have, making allowance for the infirmities, the mistakes and the misdirected energies of all human communities, made such progress as has excited the admiration of the best of other countries.³

More than that, in the equality of the distribution of wealth Australia was foremost among the nations of the world:

In reality, we stand at the head of the nations of the world in the distribution of wealth—that is, of wealth in its grandest form, because a country cannot really be said to be in a prosperous condition with a few colossal fortunes—a few families rolling in luxury, and the mass of the people in poverty-stricken homes. The real standard in civilisation is the wide diffusion of wealth over the population to be governed; and judged by that test, Australasia stands at the head of the nations of the world; not only so, but a long way at the head.⁴

It was on the basis of democracy’s successes that Parkes felt justified in holding out to the delegates contemplating a new nation a glorious prospect: ‘We ought to look [in our task] to those who are coming in such countless thousands after us, to the higher aims which they may have, and to the higher powers of achievement which they may manifest to the world.’⁵

Yet, when the establishment of democratic government had first been debated in the 1850s, many of the new democracy’s supporters, as well as its sceptics, had wondered about its capacity to deliver good government over the longer term. It was feared that the very strengths of democracy might prove its weakness, for if there was one thing that freedom was likely to produce, it was a multiplicity of legitimate interests, all seeking advantage and security for themselves. The tendency of popular governments to capitulate to special-interest pressures for laws and regulations that had only private and no public benefits had led the French social scientist Alexis de Tocqueville, who had observed these pressures in the United States during his visit there in the 1830s, to argue that democracy contained the seeds of its own destruction, and that it might easily devolve into a tyranny of mutual regulation under the guise of popular sovereignty.⁶

The multiplication of special interests was real as communities were established and industries developed—localities, industries, unions, churches. Was it possible that democratic government could be immobilised by interest pressures? Would the most powerful interests set free by liberal laws act wisely, or would they use the power of the state to attack their enemies and stir up conflict that might erode confidence in the democratic system? Who would defend liberty and the public interest against special interests and their desire to regulate others to their own private benefit? Could a national interest really emerge from a balancing of multiple parochialisms, or would the outcome be policy paralysis and ultimately national failure?

The problem that democracies had in recruiting to government people who understood and would defend the wider public or national interests had been noted by de Tocqueville, and his concerns had been shared by the educated leaders of nineteenth-century Australia. William Charles Wentworth, author of the New South Wales Whig constitution of 1854, and the leader of Australia’s opposition to the arbitrary power of British colonial governments, thought that because the mass of the people did not understand complex issues, democracy would fail to enact sensible policies, and that the people would inevitably become disillusioned with government’s inability to secure their long-term interests. He favoured government by an educated elite of achievement.

Even George Higinbotham, the brilliant Victorian radical liberal, a man who shared John Stuart Mill’s greater faith in the mass of the people, had been concerned that in the system of popular government the educated would retreat into their private sphere from a politics that was dominated by local selfishness, leaving government to those with the loudest voices and the strongest passions. Bruce Smith, the most principled of businessmen-politicians in the late nineteenth century, thought that educating the public in economic realities was essential if sound policy was to be produced, but this was a task that still had to be done. He was nevertheless reassured by the fact that in Australia property ownership was already widespread, and that the greatest danger of mass democracy—that the propertyless would use their numbers to plunder the propertied and destroy all prospect of prosperity—would likely be avoided.

By 1890 evidence for these concerns was not altogether absent.

Governments had changed rapidly. Victoria had experienced two crises that had brought constitutional government to a temporary halt as popular forces challenged powerful interests. By 1890, utopian ideas targeting private property as the enemy were gaining support and, in Queensland, as the constitution was being drafted, there was an unsuccessful attempt at armed revolt, while the destruction of Aboriginal society proceeded almost without pause.

Most Australians would nevertheless have answered that democracy had performed well enough. Democracy in fact had fulfilled the principal aspirations of its proponents, challenging successfully the efforts of wealthy elites to entrench their power, and it had done so in ways that enhanced rather than undermined prosperity and growth. Australians who took an interest in politics finished the century still strong—even passionate—supporters of representative democratic government.

Nineteenth-century liberal democracy in Australia had had some large and memorable policy victories, although few whose benefits were unalloyed. As Parkes had said, the colonial democracies had enacted policies under which all children, boys and girls, were being educated, although the sectarian education policy settlements of the 1870s created lasting bitterness among Catholic Australians, and by century’s end sectarianism seemed to be on the rise. The first pioneers of the inland plains—brave, enterprising and ambitious though many were—had been successfully resisted in their claim to ownership of all the vast territories they had occupied, and despite their efforts to lock up their estates, farming communities and agriculture had been established, although the land laws were often evaded. Conflict between pastoralists and farmers had been in some places violent.

Unprecedented economic freedom had given Australians, including the emerging working class, the opportunity to earn the highest real incomes in the world. The development of the continent by private enterprise, supported by massive British investment, proceeded apace. The foundations for civil society in rural as well as urban society had been laid, without the huge imbalances in wealth of Britain or America. This very success in establishing civil society, however, meant that the roots of an intensely parochial politics, based on strong local loyalties, were growing fast, and demanded political expression in a way that did drive such men as Higinbotham out of parliamentary politics.

The debates of the young democracies were already being distorted by ideas that fed on this powerful parochialism. One was race. The Britons who had come to the other side of the world were determined to defend their settlement against any other nation and culture, and, frightened by the ease with which Chinese were arriving, were in the process of shutting the doors. In Queensland sugar-growers were kidnapping Pacific islanders to work on their plantations and beginning to agitate for a separate colony that would allow them to continue doing so.

Again, while the political elite generally held liberal ideas, these ideas were not universally accepted, and many did not share the views of the great champion of the abolition of slavery, William Wilberforce, about the common humanity of all people. Attacks on Aboriginal people were widespread and persistent. By century’s end the original inhabitants had been decimated and their rights restricted. The failure of America—saving only Britain, the principal model for the Australians—to deal satisfactorily with the freed slaves after a devastating civil war, and their adoption of policies of segregation, encouraged the Australians, in their passionate search for social harmony, to seek racial homogeneity. Ideas of a multiethnic Australia were given short shrift, and the new nation chose as its first priority the erection of walls against the world based on race. It was a choice that could not last in a world of many peoples, but it fed prejudice, fear and irrational policy while it did.

A second set of ideas that increasingly gripped the popular imagination concerned the economic relations between Australia and the rest of the world. Early nationalism and parochialism fed the belief that Australia could build up its own industries and employ its people better if it excluded the competing products of other countries, or at least handicapped overseas producers in the competition with domestic enterprises through tariffs. John Stuart Mill, the leading economist of the second half of the nineteenth century, had given some comfort to those who thought so, but had emphasised the importance of such policies being temporary. The politics of democracy, however, ensured that once producer interests had obtained ‘protection’, they were empowered to defend it, and the politics of democracy in which all were to be treated equally made resistance to further restriction of trade in the interests of domestic producers almost impossible. Parochialism once again gave victory in the policy debate to those who wanted trade—as well as racial—walls against the world. The new nation’s growth, competitiveness and employment opportunities suffered as a result.

Australian democracy was not unique in seeking to establish an industrial and ethnic isolation by restricting access to its society from Asia and to its economy from international competitors. The Americans had gone down the same road, although with their larger population and huge internal market, the apparent economic costs were less. The Australians, however, set off down another road, untravelled by the North Americans, in a bold but utopian search for a solution to the greatest political issue of early capitalism: industrial conflict.

As Wentworth had foreseen, the Australian electorate was swept by ideas that promised simple solutions to complex problems. Among the immigrants of the 1880s were numbers who believed that the main source of unhappiness was private property—that it was the main cause of social conflict and immorality. Such people saw the possibility of constructing a new kind of society that would finally overcome the conflicts, prejudices and inequalities of the old world, provided that they could gain the power in the new to realise their dream. In the aspiration to establish a utopian society in Australia, free of industrial conflict and the immorality of materialism, lay the seeds of political conflict that would go far to corrupting the dreams of all.

Populist leaders proved especially receptive to the idea that the main cause of social conflict was private property and that, by a reconstruction of society on a more ‘cooperative’ model, industrial conflict and all the supposed ills resulting from private property (which in the narrative of the times embraced crime and corruption as well as conflict) could be swept away. Even more moderate leaders attracted to the idea of social cooperation as an alternative to free bargaining came to believe that judges could determine ‘justice’ in the workplace and regulate industry in the interests of fairness. The more radical were tempted by the idea of reconstructing not merely industrial contracts but also society as a whole. Utopian socialism, arriving in Australia in the 1880s, received more widespread and influential support than in any other English-speaking country.

Australia’s vulnerability to this utopianism was principally an outcome of three forces. First, freedom of association, favourable laws and a pervasive democratic ethos had facilitated the emergence of the world’s strongest trade union movement. Second, the decision of this union movement to pursue its aims through its own political party subject to direction by union-based executives who were liable to capture by the utopians; and third, the absence of a profession dedicated to the economic analysis of policy proposals in Australia at the time. The openness of Australia to reform attracted radical leaders with ideas of industrial and class war from Britain and North America, and labour politics, far from abolishing strikes, paradoxically began to produce a drum-beat of support for continuing industrial conflict.

A liberal political culture

The utopian push was ultimately turned back as a result of the strength of the liberal tradition in Australia. By the time of Federation, this tradition had already established deep roots, notably through a national culture emphasising the right of people to pursue their own values and to construct their own lives.

The immigrants who had poured onto the continent during the 112 years from 1788 to Federation in 1901 were overwhelmingly in search of personal empowerment, which they framed as ‘independence’—financial and social. They wanted personal and financial security for themselves, and freedom from the class-based deferential culture and strictures of the established Church in Britain and, in the case of the Irish, from the British ‘ascendancy’. They wanted the right to chart their own destiny in life, and they saw the opportunity to do so in the new land. They believed that their happiness could best be secured by themselves, by their own actions.

The overarching ideas that had governed Australian politics and culture from its beginnings were principally those of Britain’s liberal intellectual culture stemming from such thinkers and reformers as John Locke, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wilberforce, Edmund Burke, Richard Cobden, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, and of radicals and democrats such as the Scottish poet Robert Burns, the journalist William Cobbett, the novelists Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell and others. Many of the Britons who came to Australia as newspaper editors, church leaders, political activists, entrepreneurs, writers, educators and academics were participants in (and frequently contributors to) this liberal culture.

Australia from its origins as a British settlement had thus been both an imperial and a liberal project, and many of the those who came, including the liberal governors such as Richard Bourke and George Gipps, in the 1830s and 1840s, had seen the continent as providing an exceptional opportunity to implement the most advanced social and economic policies of the day: freedom of the press in the 1820s, universal education, humane reform of the convict system and its final abolition, a wide distribution of land ownership, the separation of Church and State, secular universities and all the institutions of the liberal economy, from readily transferable landed property and free trade to limited liability companies, stock exchanges and legal trade unions. By the second half of the nineteenth century, a liberal and democratic individualism had established its cultural and policy dominance.

The political leaders of colonial Australia, inspired by the example of British liberalism, which they adapted to their own circumstances, were also the main carriers of the political tradition of reasoned debate and reform—a tradition exemplified by the most influential liberal thinker of the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill.

The Australian Liberals had been the main advocates for the establishment of the British constitutional framework designed to check arbitrary power and to secure the liberty of the individual, of freedom of speech and the press, and of the right of all to associate freely in churches and unions. Insofar as the rational policy insights of the economists from Adam Smith through Ricardo and Mill had a voice in Australia, it was particularly through the free trade Liberals. But the colonial Liberals were also the main carriers of the humanitarian values that had become powerful in the British political culture following Wilberforce’s successful campaign to abolish slavery, and while Australia was a land that seemed pre-eminently suited to the pursuit of happiness, they were finding that achieving the happiness of all was not a straightforward matter in a complex world.

By the late nineteenth century, Australia had acquired a political class of well-educated leaders, a public with almost universal literacy, a lively free press and high hopes for democracy. Observing the social and industrial conflicts in the rest of the English-speaking world, Henry Parkes, George Reid, Edmund Barton, Alfred Deakin, Samuel Griffith, Joseph Cook, Billy Hughes, Andrew Fisher, and many supporters of these men, aimed to provide a better future for their country, debating the possibilities in a political language derived from this wider intellectual climate. Australians embraced a rich array of ideas for social reform, but with diminished regard for economic realities.

As the end of the nineteenth century approached, and industrialism and the growth of cities brought new social problems to the fore, the dominant liberalism was tempered by a variety of ambitious plans for the improvement—and even the refashioning—of society put forward by humanitarians, romantics, idealists and utopians. The free trade political economy that had been responsible for the rising living standards in Britain and its colonies was being subjected to influential criticism by English, German and American historical protectionists for its lack of a nationalist focus. The intellectual way was cleared for attempts to implement the ideas of the proponents of radical solutions to the problem of poverty amid wealth in Britain and America, including a variety of English socialists, the followers of Karl Marx, and the Americans Henry George and Edward Bellamy.

Reason and faith

The individualist culture of the Australasian colonies centred on the idea that the new society should reflect the individual purposes of the immigrants who had come seeking personal empowerment through economic independence in the flexible and open society that liberal ideas fostered. Political institutions protected minorities, sought to balance conservative and reforming interests, provided universal schooling and universities and, in the last decade of the century, began to give women the vote. Organisation of voluntary associations and business enterprises could be freely undertaken within the law, and freedom sparked innovation in engineering, the sciences and technology.

One of the main cultural developments of the British Empire in the latter half of the century was the flowering of the idea of a common humanity into a broader humanitarianism aimed at the relief of all human suffering. Expressing this, in part, prisons were reformed, institutions for the physically and mentally disabled were established, mine and factory acts were passed to protect first women and children, then men as well, cities were planned and sewered and other public health measures implemented.

Gold, wool, economic freedom and humanitarian policies ensured that by 1890 the Australians enjoyed perhaps the highest real incomes in the world and one of the world’s most peaceful, egalitarian and humane societies, where citizens (except for the Aboriginal people, who had been forcibly dispossessed, decimated and swept aside) could confidently live under the rule of law and where workers enjoyed a middle-class standard of living.

The 1880s had been a decade of unprecedented optimism in, and migration to, Australia, creating a climate of opinion in which all seemed possible. During these years immigration reached new highs, and among the immigrants were many of high leadership potential determined that the country they had now chosen as their home would not replicate the troubles of the lands they had left behind. Future prime ministers Watson, Fisher, Cook and Hughes all arrived at this time. They and other immigrants brought with them from Britain, Europe and North America painful memories of industrial, racial, religious, national and class conflicts from which they were keen to escape, and they were influenced by new ideas—many of them utopian—about how society might best be organised to avoid them.

The Australasia that had been a field for liberal innovation now became a laboratory for experiments in nation-building, industrial organisation and racial purity that fitted uneasily at best with the liberal principles of its foundation and with the ideas of political economy that had provided the framework for its policy prescriptions, economic institutions and material prosperity. A philanthropic liberalism emerged that needed an activist government for its expression and that clashed repeatedly with the older, laissez-faire, Gladstonian variety. The politics of the new nation began to be consumed by conflicts over the role of the state and what more it could do to secure human happiness. Stemming respectively from the established liberal and populist appeals, alternative visions for the development of the new nation were advanced: one of an Australia of individual liberty and free markets, competitive, innovative and open to trading with the world, the other based around a state-protected industrial base and the restriction of trade and immigration, both arguing their validity as expressions of humanitarian values, patriotism and true liberalism.

During the 1890s, the liberals had cooperated with each other in the writing of a national constitution to unite the former colonies in an ‘indissoluble Federal Commonwealth’, successfully bringing into existence the long-held dream of one Australian nation. The great constitutional authority of the day, James Bryce, thought that the Australians had written for themselves the most democratic constitution in the world. Alfred Deakin, one of the architects of its devolution of powers, had called the Constitution a ‘charter of liberty and peace’. It was a charter, however, opposed by the new union-based labour party, and those who had voted for the new nation in the labour party in New South Wales had been expelled, while many of the founders were prepared to compromise their classical liberal principles for the sake, as they saw it, of their new nation’s success.

1

Education and religion

IT WAS THE issue of education, more than any other, that brought colonial liberalism directly into conflict with the religious denominations in general and the Catholic Church in particular. The liberals, focused on community and nation-building, believed that the churches, without financial support from the state, would not have the resources to provide schools with wide coverage and that even with state aid, there was a growing risk that many of the colony’s children would not have access to a school with trained teachers, for whether a school was established or not would rest mainly with the churches.

Those most concerned by the liberals’ determination to educate the whole population were the Catholics, many of whom saw liberalism as a secular philosophy that would lead to the destruction of faith among their flock, and to the replacement of Catholic social norms with those of a rationalistic, materialistic and un-Christian society. The Protestant churches were deeply uneasy at the prospect that the Catholics would receive more aid from the state to build up their schooling even further.

Despite the suspicion of the Catholics, the liberals were by no means irreligious as a group. Many of the leading figures of liberalism in Australia in the nineteenth century identified with one or other of the religious denominations. Some of them were Catholic. Many of the liberals, not all, were thus religious themselves, but it would be true to say that they, just like the founders of the American republic, were not principally men of faith but men of reason.

Although the liberals became at times angrily critical of the churches, they still generally accepted that the moral order of society had a religious basis. William Ewart Gladstone, the greatest figure of the age in world liberalism, was a deeply religious High Church Anglican, and his political liberalism had been born not of any weakening of faith but of his realisation that ‘the transcendental purpose to which his life was dedicated could only be realised in freedom’.¹ A modern writer, T.L. Suttor, from a Catholic perspective, on the other hand sees ‘secular’ liberalism as ‘human autonomy sanctioned by religious agnosticism’.² John Stuart Mill helpfully provided a definition of ‘secular’ with which most of the liberals would have been comfortable:

Secular is whatever has reference to this life. Secular instruction is instruction respecting the concerns of this life. Secular subjects are therefore all subjects except religion. All the arts and sciences are secular knowledge. To say that secular means irreligious implies that all the arts and sciences are irreligious, and is very like saying that all the professions except the law are illegal.³

The liberals generally did not see religious faith as inconsistent with the rule of reason, but as existing in a different realm. Their views had evolved out of the Reformation, and as heirs of the Enlightenment and the debate on Catholic emancipation, the colonial liberals were determined that the intense conflicts over religion of earlier times should not be resumed in the new world. Such Catholics as Charles Gavan Duffy and such Protestants as George Higinbotham agreed on this.

The liberal view was that reason and science, not faith, should lead education in particular, and this was exemplified in the conditions of appointment of the foundation professors to Melbourne University in 1854: that they must not be ministers of religion nor lecture on religious topics either inside or outside the university.⁴ In this the colonial universities were closer to those of Scotland than England, where, in the latter case, Anglican faith was a condition of entry. The university in Australia was to be the expression of, and an instrument for, Enlightenment liberalism. To those who believed in the redemption of the world through faith, and held it as a matter of faith that reason would not save humanity, this was a false road.

The colonial liberals grappled again and again in parliamentary debates with the issue of reconciling their commitment to enlightenment with their belief in a moral order. They found it difficult to understand the intensity of the conflicts of theology that exacerbated the religious differences in the community, and their reasonable moderation told them that it would be desirable if the agreed common elements of Christian belief and observance could be established and made the basis for an education based on values behind which the community could be united. They wanted a harmonious society, hoped that it might be possible to get rid of religious conflict, and saw schooling as a possible means for doing so.

In the liberal view, education was not only necessary to support the new democracy. The colonial liberals also believed that if government provided the framework for individuals to pursue their values, develop their talents and exercise their adventurous initiative, there would be extraordinary material progress. Universal education in the basic skills needed for the exercise of reason—literacy and numeracy, grammar and geography—were essential to the realisation of this project. The denominations had a different view. Not surprisingly, for them, the differences between them mattered, and both the Catholics and the evangelical Protestants saw the concept of a common religious curriculum as a ‘lowest common denominator’ option and a threat to a society in which religious faith and knowledge of Christ played a large part in people’s lives. A common religious curriculum was little better than a ‘secular’ curriculum.

The ‘elephant in the room’ was the Catholic Church. The liberals seemed baffled by the Catholics, for the Catholics were genuinely involved in a different agenda and moreover, and paradoxically, it was the Catholics who were foremost in confronting the liberals with arguments drawn from liberalism to demand their minority rights.

The Anglicans and other denominations were intensely aware of the potential strength and social role of the Catholics in Australia. The adherents of Catholicism were relatively much more numerous than in England as a result of the high proportion of Irish immigrants. The Catholic Church had features that aroused their suspicion. It had international links beyond the British Empire to the Vatican in Rome; the Catholic clergy were perceived to be highly influential with adherents; and the Church seemed increasingly determined, as mid-century was passed, to intensify its resistance to liberalism and to the rationalism of the Enlightenment. From the Protestant perspective, there was a risk that the Catholic Church would become the stand-out defender of the Christian faith as the other denominations were gently absorbed into a liberalised and rationalised curriculum in government schools. The Protestants were determined that this would not happen. They were not, however, arguing from strength, for liberalism, as Suttor describes it, had continued to increase in influence.

Now Australia, even more than de Tocqueville’s America, was a country where newness, the absence of institutionalised traditions, the retreating frontier and its premium on up-to-datedness and adaptability, all singularly favoured the religion of liberty and progress. From the very first months of democracy in Australia, the words of Europe’s great debate were bandied about on the hustings—this man stood for the happiness of the greatest number, another was ‘no wordy theorist, but a practical utilitarian’. The Idea, as Victor Hugo called it, never ceased to claim that it was neutral in regard to religion, or not hostile to true Christianity.⁵

After the failures of Bourke and Gipps to establish universal primary schooling, there was a sense of desperation about the liberals’ determination that this time the churches would not be allowed to stand in their way. In 1847, under Governor FitzRoy, government-funded schools had been at last established after more than a decade of debate, and these began the provision of schooling to those areas (mainly country) where the religious denominations had not established schools. This dual system of provision still did not, however, satisfy those who held the view that in a democracy all children were entitled to a basic level of education.

Once the Port Phillip District had became an independent colony, with a rapidly growing population as a result of the gold discoveries, it provided fresh opportunities for liberals and the churches to debate the needs of the new society. It was in Victoria that the debate over education became for a time the central issue in the building of that society.

In Victoria the Common Schools Act of 1862, passed under a government led by the Catholic O’Shanassy, had established a common schools board to provide funding for both government and denominational schools, and spent substantial amounts of money to employ teachers. Some thought the system was working, but the more reformist among the liberals were concerned that the teachers were not well trained and, more importantly, that almost half the children in the eligible age groups were still not attending school. These liberals concluded that the new system was still not up to the task of providing an educated populace for the new democracy and set up a Royal Commission to report on how to fix it.

In New South Wales, the Public Schools Act 1866 provided for non-sectarian public schools and continued support for denominational schools, provided, among other things, that they employed teachers with comparable levels of training to those in the public schools, used the same textbooks, and were subject to the same inspection and discipline. An hour a day was set aside in the government schools for denominational religious teaching. Henry Parkes, who was responsible for this legislation, placed considerable emphasis on teacher training, with the objective, among others, of preventing the churches inserting into schools on other grounds people who were inadequately trained as teachers. He claimed that it would ‘put a stop forever to the interference of the clergy in school management’.⁶

The New South Wales Public Schools Act of 1866 was at first condemned by both Protestants and Catholics, but the Protestants, and, most significantly, the Church of England, seemed prepared to reconcile themselves to the legislation. The Catholics, however, maintained a continuing opposition to the Act. The Act was also criticised by those whom Parkes was to characterise as the ‘extreme’ secularists, and Parkes found himself defending it for some fifteen years against opposition from both sides. Among the wider public, the Act seemed to be generally accepted.

The man who carried the liberal argument in Victoria was George Higinbotham, himself an Anglican, albeit somewhat unorthodox. Like his philosophical guide, Mill, he detested sectarianism, but his disgust at interdenominational rivalries among the Protestant churches was ultimately to determine his attitude and push him towards a secular solution. As a liberal, Higinbotham had initially sympathised with Mill’s view that parents should establish schools and government should help.

Higinbotham was also an early apostle in Australia of the reforms to the civil service in England, flowing from the Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854—a vision of government-provided services free of patronage and political bias in which entry was on the basis of examination and promotion on merit. This vision of a new kind of government service took decades to implement, but it exercised a powerful influence on the minds of the colonial liberals, who came to see government services as comprising essentially technical operations that should be entrusted to appropriately trained and skilled people. For Higinbotham, it was a short step to a vision of a teaching service very different from the one that existed at the time.

Higinbotham was an emerging political giant in the new parliament of Victoria. One who knew him described a unique political leader:

If Higinbotham had not lived in a remote colony he would have been an important figure in the history of democracy. He combined the fanaticism of Loyola with the chivalry of Bayard. He had an intransigence, an inability to compromise, which made him a difficult colleague and rather impracticable as a statesman. But these qualities themselves attracted the passionate loyalty of the typical citizen. High-minded and selfless, his sense of duty kept him at work on non-controversial subjects in which he accomplished much of enduring value. As a Parliamentary orator he has seldom been excelled; his voice was like a sensitive musical instrument; his delivery and manner were faultless; perfect in arrangement, his handling was logical, his language nervous; great ideas were balanced by flashes of self-revealing passion.⁷

Higinbotham was not anti-Catholic, although like many Protestants—and like Mill—he believed the Catholic Church was organised on illiberal authoritarian principles. His views about the role of the churches in education were more influenced by his contempt for the divisions and conflicts among those who ran the Protestant denominations in the colony. Their inability to agree had frustrated him beyond measure. His lack of tolerance for their differences had been intensified by his experiences in trying to reach an accommodation with them in the course of the 1867 Royal Commission. The following year, during the visit of Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Alfred, Orange and Catholic tensions had flared, and a Catholic Irishman had attempted to assassinate the prince in Sydney. Liberal scepticism of the churches, and Protestant suspicion of Irish Catholics, was reinforced.

Higinbotham argued that the conflicts between the Protestant denominations were insubstantial, and with a certainty born of anger he advised that it would be desirable if they ‘would consent to their own extinction, and merge into some common form of Christian society’—but that would be too much to hope in the foreseeable future. ‘At present we are concerned only with the question of the education of the young, and not with the imparting of common sense and of rational conduct to the old,’ he declared.⁸ Dispute and free debate had worn him down, and his solution was neither tolerant of diversity nor one of which Mill would have approved.

Higinbotham had concluded that the tradition whereby the state had provided the churches with land grants and financial support for their schools had been deeply misguided. The Protestants had become fixated on their property as a matter of status, and little concerned with theology and religion:

They do not know, and they will not learn, that they have not and cannot have as sects—for sects they are—anything of the organic life of the Christian community, of which they are the self-dismembered fragments. Their proceedings are not only injurious to the cause of education, but a disgrace to our social and political system; and the matter of education, which does concern the State, these sects must not be permitted to regard as their exclusive property. This is the problem we have to consider: how we may get rid of the sects in dealing with education.⁹

Doubtless conscious of his position of present political power, he echoed the remarks of King Henry II and said the problem was ‘how to get rid of these turbulent intruders upon the peace and welfare of the State household?’¹⁰ He reminded the Legislative Assembly of Victoria: ‘The commission were unanimously of the opinion that, until the connexion which now exists between the religious sects in this country and the State is absolutely, finally, and for ever put an end to, you cannot establish in this country a sound or successful system of public education.’¹¹

Higinbotham’s central concern was that as a result of the failure of the system, the new democracy was not receiving the public instruction it required. Instruction was still not reaching enough children. He estimated that less than half of the 170,000 children in the ‘ages of instruction’ were in either the common or the private schools. He believed that this compared poorly with England (which, he argued, was then making great progress), and that, unless a higher proportion of children could be brought into the school system, ‘[t]he next generation of Victorians will not be so well instructed as the existing generation, because at present, as far as regards primary instruction, the people of Victoria are better instructed than the present generation of Englishmen’.¹²

He had come to the opinion that the Victorian Common Schools Act (1862)¹³ had been a failure. Although his analysis was not accepted by Edward Langton, proprietor of the free trade journal Spectator, Higinbotham had developed an evangelical determination to do away with the existing system of schooling. He argued ‘that the present system of education is inadequate in its scope and extent, that it is inefficient in kind, and that, considering its inefficiency, it is enormously and disgracefully expensive’.¹⁴ Higinbotham’s arguments ultimately provided the rationale for reform that was accepted by the liberals. The democracy needed an educated people. There was no other way to provide this in the context of the time, because the churches could not agree to a solution.

Henry Wrixon, another product of the law school of Trinity College, Dublin, and a radical land reformer, had argued in 1869:

… the State has a duty beyond the mere duty of educating people so as to escape the [prisoner’s] dock. It is bound to educate them so as to make them fit for the ballot box, and the political duties which in after life they may be called upon to perform … we know that when they grow up they may have to determine the most vital questions that can affect the welfare of their country.

He concluded:

… if you have a wealthy upper class and a mere ignorant lower class I imagine that whatever political institutions you may have, you will find growing up outside your political institutions a power which will be greater than they … Unless we determine resolutely to take in hand the education of the great mass of the people, as a whole, I think that the future of the country will greatly belie the ideal of the political institutions which you have established.¹⁵

This meant that all children needed to receive basic instruction in the skills necessary to support citizenship. Since the churches could not guarantee that all children would receive schooling, and there was no other way to guarantee it, a state system of schools open to all (even if not attended by all) children was essential. This was a pragmatic argument, but one that was grounded in the liberals’ determination to build a democratic society in Australia that had no equal in the world. David Blair, now a member of the legislature, with his characteristic radical utopian flourish, argued that the Victorians had it in their grasp to establish ‘the most splendid and effectual system of national education that any country on the face of the civilised earth can boast’.¹⁶

The Subjection of Women

Among the influences that swirled around the reformers as they considered the future schooling of the democracy was the question of women’s role in society. John Stuart Mill in 1869 published his brilliant polemic The Subjection of Women, supporting complete equality between the sexes. Mill asserted ‘that the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on one side, nor disability on the other’.¹⁷

Mill’s book expressed his lifelong adult views, reinforced by his relationship with the inspirational Harriet Taylor. His case was not only passionate but also logical. The philosophical heir of Bentham could see through the traditions and customs that dominated current attitudes to the underlying principles that should govern policy in a liberal society: the equal rights of all human beings, the importance of liberty and the ‘corrosive power of dependency’.¹⁸

Mill’s argument went beyond the removal of legal disabilities. Women should have full representation in parliament so that their true interests could be heard. In 1869, with his active support, the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage was founded. He rejected the constant effort to mythologise women as polite, submissive and intellectually inferior to men. The purported ‘evidence’ for these myths, he argued, had no standing because women had been culturally forced into their position, and deprived of the opportunities that would allow them to demonstrate their equal capacities. He expressed his disgust at the tendency of the law to overlook male violence against women.

Mill expected his latest work to be hugely controversial, and it was. He had reached a stage in his life, however, where this was more a matter of satisfaction than pain. A review in the Argus described Mill’s book as ‘a vain, pragmatical, and ridiculous attempt to reform human nature’.¹⁹ Yet it conceded a large part of Mill’s claim that legal prohibitions on women should be abrogated: ‘That there should be no prohibition to women merely because of their sex to engage in any pursuit they please, we are quite willing to allow. Let there by all means be female physicians, female barristers, female auctioneers, female cabdrivers, even female politicians. Whatever law or custom there is forbidding these employments to women, let it be abrogated.’²⁰ Yet surely, the reviewer asked, human nature and the differences between women and men, would prevent any dramatic social change following such changes to the law? Who, after all, will court a potential chairman of committees? Who will marry a possible attorney-general? What flirtation will we carry on with a student in midwifery? Conceive the wife of one’s bosom developing into a Higinbotham …?

Higinbotham himself was probably not so sure that this would be a bad thing. In 1869 he had moved to bring into the Victorian parliament a replica of the bill that had been sponsored by Mill in the British parliament to secure the title of married women to their property in, and earnings from, any business of their own or if they were separated from their husbands.²¹ The Australian liberals were far ahead of Gladstone in this regard, who retained to the end traditional attitudes to women that Mill deplored. The education legislation in Higinbotham’s mind would also strive for equality of educational opportunity between the sexes. Gladstone, however, had demonstrated his inspirational radicalism in another matter. In 1869 he had successfully had the Anglican Church in Ireland disestablished, removing one of the bleeding sores that gave pain to Ireland’s Catholic majority.

Higinbotham and the liberals in Victoria finally achieved their grand objective of a system of schools accessible to all children through the Education Act of 1872. The Act established a system of ‘free, compulsory and secular’ education that was universally available to all children in the colony. Girls and boys were to be educated equally. It was a decisive victory, at least in the short term. But would it achieve the aims for which the liberals hoped? Would it provide the future citizens of the new democracy with the skills and democratic values they needed, and would it produce the social harmony they sought?

The Catholic Church had fought for legal equality with the other denominations and succeeded. But Higinbotham and the liberals took the view that it should not be allowed to assume a more than equal position, and under his legislation the position of all the churches had been substantially weakened. The liberals were unsympathetic to the Catholic complaints and unmoved by their opposition. The Protestant denominations were prepared to accept, for the time being at least, that their role in laying the moral foundations for their congregations was not fatally compromised by the 1872 Act, and that attendance at church and Sunday school could be separated from the teaching of the secular disciplines. The Catholics, however, continued to dissent from this opinion.

Catholic arguments for state aid

While the Protestant denominations were prepared, on the whole, to accept the Act, and the more than 400, generally small, private non-religious schools had little voice in politics, there was a powerful backlash in the Catholic community against the 1872 legislation. For a number of years after the Act was passed, Catholic leaders in parliament made successive attempts to overturn, or at least modify, the secularism of the state system. In an effort to change the balance of opinion in parliament, Catholic clergy urged their laity to support only candidates who would commit to separate grants for Catholic schools. The McCulloch government’s defeat in 1877 might possibly be in part attributed to Catholic opposition to the Act, although Alfred Deakin was to say that the influence of the Catholic vote was always difficult to trace.²²

The Catholic case in Victoria was put most influentially in parliament by John O’Shanassy (Premier 1857, 1858–59, 1861–63), and he threw back at the liberals their own principle of liberty, mobilising the arguments of Lord Macaulay and John Stuart Mill in his cause.

The Catholics, O’Shanassy pointed out, over a long period had carried the fight for ‘perfect religious liberty and equality’ in England against the laws discriminating against them, and had done so ‘until the principle was thoroughly embodied in the law of the land’.²³ By contrast, the 1872 Education Act had driven the Catholics of Victoria ‘to a position below that which their brethren in Great Britain occupied when they were emancipated by the Imperial Parliament’. The Catholic schools ‘were not exactly exterminated, but the plan was rather to feed them out of existence’. The Catholics were in fact the victims of a majority that would not recognise a legitimate minority interest. O’Shanassy argued:

It is a disgrace to the legislature of a country that boasts of its democracy and its democratic feeling, knowing that these poor labouring men have no choice between violating their convictions by sending their children to state schools, and submitting to a straitening of their scanty means, to force upon them the present system of public instruction. It is a proceeding altogether unworthy of the nineteenth century.²⁴

O’Shanassy also refuted the claim that state aid had been excessively expensive. It was in fact the establishment of the state school system that was involving huge cost and waste, because schools were being established in areas where there were already Catholic schools. ‘There has been a multiplication of schools in neighbourhoods where they are not absolutely required’, and he was blunt about what he believed the motivation to be. These schools, he said, had been established ‘simply in order to substantially damage Catholic schools by inducing parents to withdraw their children from them’.²⁵ In fact they had failed, and when Catholic schools were established in areas where state schools had been erected, Catholic students had departed in large numbers for the schools of their own denomination.

The clincher argument on cost, however, was that under the system of state aid the state did not contribute as much to Catholic schools as did the parents. Catholic schools were cheaper for the state to support than state schools, although they provided secular as well as religious education. When the state system had been in operation for some time, however, its defenders were able to point to the costs inherent in closing state schools to accommodate the establishment of new religious schools.

Although the logic of O’Shanassy’s argument was that all denominational schools should receive assistance, he felt it necessary to reject the argument that if some financial assistance were given to the Catholic schools, other denominations necessarily would also seek to take advantage of it: ‘If such is the case, is it not a proof that they are now under a coercive system which they do not like, and from which they will escape whenever they get the opportunity of doing so?’²⁶ In fact, however, he noted, there was little interest in the Anglican Church in establishing more schools beyond the forty-seven they currently had, nor were the Presbyterians, at the time almost as numerous as the Catholics, likely to establish additional schools beyond the four they currently ran.

Higinbotham recognised the danger to his reform in this argument. He was fully aware that what he had concluded about the Protestants did not apply to the Catholics. They did teach religion in their schools. But he knew as a political certainty that he could not have one rule for the Catholics, as they had requested, and another for the Protestants:

I believe it to be a fatal objection to that proposition, that, if it were granted, a similar demand would be made by all the other religious sects. So intense is the bitterness and rivalry, especially of the Protestant bodies towards the Roman Catholic body, that if you grant anything to anyone, you must grant everything to anyone. I say that as a matter of policy only, the acceptance of this suggestion would be equivalent to the re-establishment of the denominational system in full force.²⁷

Where the Catholics differed, it seemed, from the other denominations was in their assertion that it was necessary to integrate religious teaching with the secular curriculum if the moral basis of society were to be maintained. Religion ‘after hours’ was not sufficient. Gavan Duffy stated this Catholic perspective:

I assert that no system of education which puts religion outside its pale will make a child a good citizen, or cause him to grow into an honest man. That which brings the State most return for the money it spends on education is good morals on the part of the person educated. But it so happens that, as the world is constituted, the principles of morality can only be imparted through the medium of dogmatic religion. No schoolmaster has devised, or can devise, any other method. Moreover, not only cannot morality be taught without religion, but it cannot be taught perfectly unless religion goes hand in hand with the other points of education with which a child is brought into contact.²⁸

Embedded in Gavan Duffy’s argument were two distinct points that would reappear often in the years ahead. One was the significance of teaching values as part of education, and the danger, even impossibility, of ‘values-free’ education. The other was the extent to which values could be taught without a religious basis. A hundred years later the points were still being contested.

The debate at the time was conducted in the knowledge that most of the community believed in the importance of religious education. Most, although not all, probably conceded that the moral and values element of society was especially linked to the teaching of religion. The issue was whether the secular and the religious elements could be separated, or needed to be integrated. The Protestants believed that the separation was possible, and in the following decades they established a large and successful Sunday school movement. The Catholic argument at the time implied that the latter was the case, and that the failure to integrate religious and secular education would lead to an observable deterioration in the moral character of social life.

A Catholic primary school system

The principal response of the Catholics to the 1872 Act was to press ahead with the building of a separate system of Catholic schools. Why did they do so? Patrick O’Farrell sees the system of Catholic schools as both the expression and the underpinning of the growing pride and distinctiveness of the Irish communities in Australia, especially from the 1880s onwards. The early colonial communities had been strong in ecumenism. There was little alternative. As the prosperity of the free economy took hold, the potential for distinctive expressions of Catholicism (and Irishness) expanded:

So it was that for the bulk of the Catholic Irish their church in Australia was not only the road to salvation, it was their social centre, their defiant possession of a separate identity, their claim to recognition and status, and their avenue to self-esteem, in this world; it was a classic immigrant church. Its increasingly intransigent and triumphalist tone from the 1880s, its eagerness to enter sectarian battle, reflects the aggressive self-confidence of a self-made community rising rapidly in the world, no longer willing to accept any inferior role. This temper was fed by the remarkable success of the Catholic education system. The refusal, from the 1860s, to accept the state’s secular education proposals, was a symbolic protest, but also a test—of will, capacity, resources … Small wonder Catholic education was an enormous source of Irish pride.²⁹

The liberal supporters of the Act sometimes justified their position on the basis that, if the Catholic clergy had not taken such a strong stand, the Catholic laity might well have accepted the state system, but whether or not this was the case, the reality was that the Catholic leadership was not willing to accept the Act then nor the principles of the Act at any time in the next hundred years, and this was a matter of profound social and political consequence.

In the second half of the nineteenth century in England a Catholic who was also a Liberal was a rare person, and Gladstone—himself a devout High Church Anglican—had parted company with some of his close friends politically when they converted. The preparedness of prominent people such as John Henry Newman to convert to Catholicism was a standing threat to the Anglicans of which they were very conscious.

The Catholics mounted a number of arguments. Some of these were rejected out of hand, and have been rejected by every government since, such as the claim that there could be conscientious objection to the payment of taxes where the object of the expenditure of those taxes was disapproved. Conceding this would have undermined the basic principle of the tax system, although it is an argument that has reared up on many occasions in political debate when citizens have deeply disapproved of government policies. Government with the consent of the governed, it was explained, did not mean consent to every piece of legislation, but a system of government whose decisions are legitimated by the fact that that it could claim to represent, and is ultimately dependent on, the votes of the citizens. Even democracies can take decisions that significant portions of the people might not accept, and not even majority votes can guarantee legitimacy when more fundamental basic loyalties and identifications seem threatened. The legitimacy granted by the new democratic institutions, however, was more than powerful enough to secure compliance in the circumstances of the day.

Other arguments, however, were more difficult to dispose of within a framework of liberal principles, and spokesmen for the Catholic case were quick to return to the debate with a proposal that Catholic schools should receive state aid but based on their academic outcomes. There were at the time more than 530 private schools in the colony, including some 164 Catholic schools, which had more than 15,000 students enrolled in 1877.³⁰

In defending their right to state support as a legitimate minority serving the interests of the democratic state, the Catholics found themselves voicing liberal ideas that had been deliberately subordinated by the colonial liberals in the Victorian Education Act of 1872. They were to become the most powerful minority in the country, and steeled by the long fight they were to have over education, a key force in securing the eventual defeat of sectarianism in Australian politics in the twentieth century.

The Catholic Church’s greatest political burden was that it was perceived by many of the Protestant liberals still to be authoritarian in matters of conscience. Many of the liberals saw its claimed authority to direct adherents in matters of conscience as precisely the kind of oppressive conformity that Mill had inveighed against in On Liberty. This complaint had special resonance among those Protestants who were opposed to the organisation of churches on the basis of an episcopal hierarchy, and preferred the control of churches by democratic congregations. But it was also a complaint of the secularists, who saw the Church as opposed to Enlightenment values of reason and freedom of conscience, and as a purveyor of superstition