By Matthew Dal Santo Tuesday 18 November 2014
Photo: Tony Abbott with David Cameron, Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall at a British D-Day commemoration ceremony. (Reuters: Leon Neal)
Australians were economically and strategically among the greatest beneficiaries of the British empire, but our modern narrative of nationhood conveniently absolves us of any responsibility for its misdeeds, writes Matthew Dal Santo.
Last Friday, British prime minister David Cameron addressed Parliament, aiming to revitalise a relationship he noted had for too long fallen prey to "benign neglect".
"We may live on opposite sides of the planet," he said. "But it is hard to think of another country to which the British people feel so instinctively close."
Yet the plentiful pro-Yes commentary in the Australian press in the lead-up to Scotland's referendum only a few months ago suggests many Australians don't reciprocate the affection. Not a few of us would have celebrated a result that spelt the demise of the country Cameron represented - and often, it seemed, for that very reason.
What explains Australians' quiet reservoir of anti-British sentiment?
Omitted from Cameron's oration was any reference to the British Empire. Since his purpose was to build bridges, this was wise if ironic. Few things raise modern Australian hackles like "colonialism", and yet a century ago Australians were running up the Union Jack across German New Guinea. Coloured pink on the map, the territory would be governed by Canberra until 1975.
When we think about it at all, Australians remember the British Empire as an exclusively English enterprise, run by effete aristocrats sneering down their noses at colonials they mostly saw as convicts and cannon fodder.
But the truth is that for decades Australia prospered not in spite of the connection to Britain, but because of it. White subjects of self-governing settler colonies, Australians were economically and strategically among the greatest beneficiaries of Britain's empire.
The British Empire created the first truly global network of mass migration and free commercial exchange. For the millions who migrated to farm the rich plains of North America, Australasia and southern Africa, the Empire generated security and prosperity on an unprecedented scale. They responded by asserting not their independence from Britain, but their belonging to what was, in effect, a Greater Britain. There was even a serious push for an Imperial Federation.
Without the British Empire, at Federation in 1901 Australian living standards would not have been, as they were, among the highest in the world. Not only was Britain the overwhelming source of the capital needed to develop Australia's economy, but Britain's industrialisation stimulated demand for Australian agricultural products. And while Westminster stuck to free trade until the 1930s, Australian parliaments were free to impose tariffs on British imports to foster domestic industry. (Even then, it seems, we knew how to grab a trade deal.)
The Empire also made the world that Australians lived in safe. Sensibly, others paid for it: the burden of the Royal Navy fell on taxpayers in the Home Islands and that of the 150,000-strong Indian Army (Asia's police force until the 1930s) on Indian ones. In the 1880s and 1890s, Australian governments drove a wave of British expansion in Papua that Whitehall would have preferred to avoid.
Of course, we did our bit too. And the price paid in blood on the Western Front would not be forgotten.
Yet, in this year of centenary, it's important to remember that, rather than weakening the bonds of empire, the carnage of World War I mainly served to increase Australians' proprietary sense over it, with the regular Imperial Conferences it gave rise to giving Australian prime ministers a privileged seat at the Empire's executive cockpit in London.
Australians might today cringe at their forebears' race patriotism. But for those who identified with it, it was a source of pride and consolation. A poem by Mary Gilmore captures the spirit of this Greater Britain:
Sons of the mountains of Scotland,
Welshmen of coomb and defile,
Breed of the moors of England,
Children of Erin's green isle, […]
We are the sons of Australia, […]
No foe shall gather our harvest,
Or sit on our stockyard rail.
The poem now appears in fine print on Australia's $10 note. But it first appeared in The Australian Women's Weekly on 29 June 1940, a fortnight after the Nazis entered Paris. It's a British song of defiance - from the Antipodes.
Cameron's excessive praise for Mr Abbott and his awkward nod to the recent passing of Gough Whitlam conformed to expectations: a friendly attitude towards Britain is a silver-spooned anachronism confined to the conservative side of Australian politics. But far more than the modern Labor Party would like to admit, belief in Australia's fundamental Britishness long crossed the political divide.
Though we like to remember Labor prime minister John Curtin for his 1942 war-time declaration that "Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom", yet, as James Curran shows in Curtin's Empire (2011), throughout his prime-ministership Curtin saw Australia's place in the "Greater Britain" of Empire.
"Australians are over 90 per cent British stock," Curtin observed in his 1944 Empire Day broadcast from London, "and in every other aspect, the Australian people are a replica of Britain and the way of life in Britain":
In the southern hemisphere 7 million Australians carry on a British community as trustees for the British way of life in a part of the world where it is of utmost significance to the British-speaking race that such a vast continent should have as its population a people and a form of government corresponding in outlook and in purpose to Britain.
Far from taking Australia out of the Empire, Curtin wanted an "Empire Council" to strengthen it - and thereby guarantee Australia's parliamentary institutions and democratic way of life, both of which he thought of as "British". (And the trade unions often understood their movement's goals in imperial rather than national terms - in ethnic terms, the "nation" was in any case "British".)
To its subject peoples, the British Empire could be cruel, brutal and unjust (though it was far from all of these things all of the time). But this was a side white Australians rarely experienced.
On the contrary, as Gilmore and Curtin remind us, Australians saw the benefits of parliamentary democracy as birth rights reserved for the lucky, British-born few - a precious inheritance best preserved through the close association with other British peoples that the British Empire also was.
Today, the Empire is gone and British race patriotism redundant in the multicultural societies Australia and Britain have become. But our long commitment to Empire isn't without lessons for us today.
On the contrary, ever closer military links with the United States and a Free Trade Agreement with China are really more of the same: a century ago, Britain rather than America was Asia's maritime superpower - the Raj, so to speak, was its permanent pivot - and participation in Britain's worldwide empire the biggest FTA imaginable.
The other point is that, by leaving the extraordinarily benign international environment that the Empire created out of the story, the modern Australian narrative of nationhood conveniently absolves us of any corresponding responsibility for the Empire's misdeeds, whether on our own continent (direct and primary by comparison with London's), or elsewhere.
From the Sudan to China's Boxer Rebellion, South Africa and Tobruk, our forebears bore arms not just on behalf of Australia, but on behalf of the Empire that made them safe and, in relative terms, rich.
Like our membership of 'the West' today (including our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan), most Australians once saw belonging to a greater British world as an act of common sense - a mix of pride, strategic necessity, and calculated self-interest.
Rather than moaning about "cultural cringe", it's time we gave our ancestors the benefit of the doubt. Nothing in Australia's more recent history suggests we'd do anything differently a second time round.
Cameron noted that among the traits that mark Australians out was the "conviction that what matters in life is not where you come from but where you are going to". But what he saw as something to admire can also be an act of self-delusion.
Matthew Dal Santo is a freelance writer and foreign affairs correspondent. He previously worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. View his full profile here
Turning our backs on the Empire that made us - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
