KEY POINTS:
In a series of book extracts this week we present visions of how our history might have developed if key events had taken a different course. Today Kathryn M. Hunter imagines that New Zealand had joined Australia in 1901
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It was a hot morning throughout Australasia on January 1, 1901.
Well, it was hot everywhere except Hobart, where it was pleasant, and Wellington, where it was a little cool.
In Collarenebri, smalltown northern New South Wales, the celebrations were to be well under way before the heat of the day settled in. The procession was to be led by the mayor, leader of the local Reform League that had campaigned for federation, who would be followed by the magistrates, councillors, the Collarenebri town band and the local fire brigade. Then would follow the Australian Natives Association, which had been against many of the final concessions made to New Zealand, but who were not to be denied public prominence on such an occasion.
Finally, members of the local Kamilaroi tribe. For the Kamilaroi this was to prove in the future to be a particularly important day, the anniversary of which was worthy of celebration, but at the time there was only half-hearted participation. Their inclusion in the suffrage acts that had formed part of the legislative framework for federation had initially been greeted with some suspicion by the elders. After all, none of the other arrangements that the whitefella had brought to the community had been of particular advantage to them.
In Kalgoorlie the local Aboriginal people who were participating in the procession had been kept overnight in the jail to ensure their presence the next morning.
In this colony, this January morning dawned not on a celebration of federation, but on a national day: the second New Holland Day. The Western Australian Government, outraged by the deal reached with the New Zealand delegation, had abandoned the federation congress in 1899 to formally constitute itself as a sovereign nation - New Holland - in January 1900. It was the agreement to enfranchise indigenous people that had been the back-breaking straw for the Western Australian delegates.
The road to federation had been a long and not entirely easy one. The status of indigenous Australians and of Maori, as well as of Chinese and Pacific Islanders in all of the colonies, was to become a sticking point in the negotiations.
The question of the vote for women and for the indigenous peoples of the colonies was hotly debated. New Zealand had enfranchised white women and Maori in 1893; South Australia had similarly given the vote to their women and to the Aboriginal population in 1894; and Western Australia's white women had gained the vote in 1899. Thus, by the time of the federation conference in 1899, all the white women of the "free" colonies had the vote and the question was raised by those colonies of women's status as citizens in the new commonwealth. Despite opposition from delegates from Tasmania and Queensland, white women were to be fully enfranchised, and were given the right to stand for office.
In settling the white women's vote, the problem of indigenous votes arose to be met with much the same degree of division, if along slightly different lines.
Victoria (whose universal manhood suffrage legislation of 1856 had, technically, included Aboriginal men), New Zealand and New South Wales were willing to concede the Aboriginal vote and the Maori vote; Queensland and Western Australia, with their substantial Aboriginal populations, objected vociferously. New Zealand's motives in supporting the indigenous vote were not entirely noble: they were acutely aware that if the Maori population were not citizens - if they were relegated to official invisibility - the number of New Zealand's seats in the Commonwealth's House of Representatives (based on population) would be fewer.
The deals were duly made: South Australia (including the Northern Territory), Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and New Zealand formed the six states of the new Commonwealth of Australasia. White women, Aboriginal men and women, and Maori women and men were enfranchised.
New Holland remained outside the federal structure. In the early years, relations were cordial between the two nations: how could it be otherwise when at the turn of the century, only one third of New Hollanders were "native born" and nearly one third of the population had been born in Victoria or South Australia? Trade relations were relatively free, migration back and forth across the border (well, into and out of the New Holland ports at any rate) continued, and sporting ties were strong enough that at the 1908 Olympics New Holland and Australasia sent a combined team under the one flag.
Legislatively the two nations also remained largely in concert: even in the area of indigenous rights, Queensland's policies remained more closely aligned with New Holland than with the other states in the Commonwealth. Queensland had objected to the indigenous vote, but had economic reasons for joining the federation. Its solution was to enfranchise Aboriginal adults, excluding those receiving charitable aid (effectively excluding those living on missions), and to make enrolling to vote voluntary. Consequently there were very low levels of enrolment and participation among the state's indigenous Murri people.
Over the first two decades of the 20th century, as it became clear that the indigenous peoples were not fading away, assimilationist policies were increasingly adopted. The tensions of assimilation and segregation operated in all states.
In New Zealand, the new generation of leaders, including those of the Young Maori Party, "proclaimed the need for change within Maoridom to counteract the 'dangerous hopelessness' of retreat to 'primitive' tribalism, which seemingly led to racial extinction".
They aimed for a cultural "fusion" but maintained the importance of a discernable Maori identity. The integration of indigenous people into democracy through the vote was accompanied by increasing calls for indigenous people to assimilate. To aid this, states began to dismantle the protectionist reserves systems. This approach was not uncontested and there were debates in all states and in New Holland.
These early decades are also where nationalist historians locate the stirrings of national identity and character. The formation of national identity (that most pernicious and contested of ideas) in both New Holland and Australasia came to be formed around three things: a pioneering legend that eulogised itinerant white, male rural workers, and made note of "useful" women; sport; and, thirdly, what came to be known as the ANHAC legend: an extension, some would say, of the pioneer legend embodied variously in the "man alone" or the "Southern man", but in uniform. The "ANHAC legend" was forged in the Dardanelles during World War I. It built on pioneer stereotypes of colonials as "natural" soldiers of larrikin character.
Serving together under ANHAC bound New Holland and Australasia together with a tie of mythical proportions, but in many senses it was impermanent. There was a darker side to the ANHAC legend as well: ill-disciplined and racist, ANHAC soldiers in Egypt particularly were known as much for their riots and destruction of shops as for their exploits on the battlefield.
At the turn of the 21st century, relations between New Holland and Australasia were akin to those of siblings forced to share a room: rivalry abounded but many compromises had been reached. There were frameworks in place for Closer Economic Relations and vague murmurings about a common currency. There were spats about ownership of the pavlova - did it originate in the Esplanade Hotel in Perth, or was it brought into being in New Zealand? - but the Finn Brothers were definitely Australasian.
The populace, when asked, generally agreed that there were distinctive national characteristics that separated them, but couldn't really name any of them. Indigenous people in all states continued to fight for land rights and against the various other sorts of dispossessions of the colonial period.
* This is an edited extract from New Zealand as it Might Have Been, 15 Scenarios of Alternate History edited by Stephen Levine and published by Victoria University Press.
* Kathryn Hunter is an Australian historian at Victoria University.
