The Land of Dreams

How Australians Won Their Freedom, 1788–1860

David Kemp

• Publisher: Miegunyah Press Digital
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780522873344
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

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.

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 a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The liberal project
• 2 Ideas of the foundation
• 3 Convicts and freedom
• 4 The Liberal colonial reform project
• 5 Liberty and patriots
• 6 Chartists and free traders
• 7 Elections and the land
• 8 To share in the general freedom
• 9 Radical 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