Bound with the Empire:
The Australian Labor Party and Empire Nationalism, 1901-1921

By Mark Hearn*

Note: The following paper was presented to the 13th conference of the Australasian Modern British History Association, “British Imperialism and the British Empire”, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, 8 July 2003.

Andrew Fisher, Australian Prime Minister 1908-1909, 1910-1913, 1914-1915. ‘Australians will stand beside our own to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling.’

In August 1914 the Australian Labor Party issued its manifesto for the federal elections to be held on 5 September. Reported under the heading ‘Australia Safe’ Labor’s federal parliamentary leader, Andrew Fisher claimed, as Australians faced an imminent test of war, that it was his 1910-1913 Labor Government that had developed a strong and self-reliant Australian defence policy. (1) Overlooking the non-Labor parties role in defence planning, the manifesto asserted that Labor had implemented compulsory military training; established the Royal Military College, Duntroon, for the training of an officer staff corps; and had also established the Royal Australian Navy, the Australian Flying Corps, cordite manufacture for high explosive munitions and a small arms factory. A chain of wireless stations ringed the continent, ensuring that news of any attack on the Australian mainland could be rapidly conveyed to the seat of government. Australians were now faced with a choice – between the Labor Party, ‘…who foresaw and provided against War and all its disastrous consequences’; and the present Liberal government led by Joseph Cook, who, Fisher charged, had ‘…denounced every one of those measures, without which to-day Australia would be an object of derision to the outside world, a burden to the mother country, and a humiliation to herself.’ In September 1914 the people accepted Fishers’ appeals: Labor was elected with a majority in both houses of parliament.

Fisher’s 1914 election appeal linked Labor’s defence initiatives to an independently-minded Australian nationalism. Australia would no longer entirely rely on Great Britain for its defence. Labor’s defence initiatives also reflected a strong attachment to Britain and the British Empire, based in sentiment, kinship ties and pragmatic policy. The attachment that Fisher placed on sentiment and kinship was memorably expressed earlier in August 1914, when he declared at the outbreak of the First World War that Australia would defend Britain ‘…to our last man and our last shilling.’ We must pause over that famous phrase, and note how Fisher ambiguously mixes subject: ‘Australians will stand beside our own and defend her to our last man and our last shilling [my emphasis]’. (2) Fisher blurred empire and kinship, an ambiguity reflected in the practical needs of Australian defence. Having outlined his government’s achievements in establishing defence self-reliance Fisher frankly declared that Australia’s ‘…interests and our very existence are bound up with those of the empire.’ With 12,000 miles of coastline to defend and a scattered population of only five million Australian armed forces could not protect the continent. ‘We must co-operate with the British Navy.’

The manifesto also reflected Labor’s sensitivity to Australia’s geographic isolation. ‘Australia is an island continent set in a waste of waters…only the thin and vulnerable cable and land telegraph lines link us with the outer world.’ That was a world, in the Australian imagination, beyond the Asia-Pacific region. Many Australians refused to concede that they were a part of that region, an evasive habit of mind that Billy Hughes, Fisher’s successor as Prime Minister, challenged two years later, as Australia was gripped with a crisis over conscription for overseas military service. In August 1916 Hughes warned Australians of the consequences of the British Empire’s defeat by Germany. If they looked at a map, they would find that far from being in a waste of waters in a remote reach of the world, Australia was surrounded by ‘a coloured ocean’, a nation of five million ‘…within coo-ee of a thousand millions of coloured people, who jostle one another for want of room. It is well that we should remember this and comfort ourselves accordingly.’ (3)

By the First World War the ideal of White Australia was a key element in the narrative identity embraced by most Australians. The Immigration Restriction Act 1901, providing a dictation test to exclude non-European immigrants, was the centrepiece of an elaborate architecture of racial exclusion legislation enacted by the Commonwealth immediately following Federation. (4) White Australia did not simply exclude the foreigner; it defined who Australians were and the nature of the Commonwealth that they were attempting to create together. (5) The labour movement embraced the White Australia ideal; a nation in which the colonial white worker – ‘an ambiguous, in-between figure’, as Lake observes, could secure economic and citizenship privileges, and secure an identity. (6) White argues that narrative is central feature of nationalism, facilitating ‘collective identities through narrative practice.’ (7) White’s formulation of narrative nationhood echoes Anderson’s notion of an imagined community. (8) Narrative theory reminds us that collective identities, the imagined community of the nation, is a contingent phenomena that must be constructed as an active, ongoing process of social exchange, passed on as exemplary lessons and repeated and rehearsed. (9) In August 1916 Billy Hughes did not surprise Australians with a warning of the threat that lurked just beyond the nations’ northern borders. As Walker observes, Australians in the period 1890-1914 were frequently alerted to their proximity to a populous and dangerous Asia. (10) Hughes repeated and exploited a long-established lesson of racial anxiety in an attempt to link conscription to a shared, communal sense of nation – a community united by its fears.

The Call, journal of the Australian National Defence League, May 1907: ‘Are you in favor of maintaining the integrity of the British Empire? Are you in favor of a White Australia? Is it not necessary, then, that every able bodied young Australian should be trained in arms?

Securing a white identity in Australia not only meant fair wages and conditions for workers; it also required, in the minds of many leading Labor figures, an urgent need to develop a strong defence policy, and rapidly increase Australia’s white population. While Labor supported the nation building program pursued by the Liberal Protectionists in the early Commonwealth Parliaments, Labor also acknowledged that Australia remained in the British Empire, an ambiguity that reflected Australia’s empire status as a self-governing dominion. Recent historiography has emphasised the enduring ties of empire, in contrast to a traditional tendency to stress the precocious Australian nationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (11) Imperial ties with Britain were, as Trainor argues, reinforced rather than diminished by the trials of economic depression and industrial unrest of the 1890s. ‘The blunting of the Labour challenge and the renewed concern about Asian immigration or conquest, now concentrated on Japan, helped lay the basis for a federation quite easily accommodated within the British empire.’ (12) Federation intensified empire loyalty, as McKenna observes: ‘Loyalty to Britain was the common bond which united a group of suspicious and distrustful colonies.’ Imperial propaganda ‘flooded’ the nation’s communication networks at the turn of the century, providing ‘…the vision, the grandeur and the glorious past that Australians were not able to find in their own beginnings.’ (13) Labor, like their Free Trade and Liberal Protectionist counterparts in Parliament, recognised that the young nation would have to rely on the British Empire for its defence, an acknowledgement driven by pragmatic need and idealised bonds of identity. E. M. Andrews, in his important revision of the Anzac legend and Anglo-Australian relations during the war, argued that the empire was ‘an illusion’ cherished by both Britain and Australia:

[T]he British dreamt of an Empire which would strengthen them on the world scene at a time when the great nations of Russia, Germany and America seemed to threaten their predominance: the Australians dreamt of an international brotherhood of free “British” nations across the seas, who, led by Britain, would defend them against any threats, especially from Asia. (14)

Privileging white Australia, with its stress on anglo-celtic cultural roots, intensified the bonds of empire. The White Australia policy, as Jupp observes of the demographic impact of high rates of British immigration to Australia in the 1901-1914 period, both literally and figuratively made Australia more British than it had ever been. (15) Meaney argues that by the early twentieth century Britishness, which may be defined as an allegiance to a sense of national identity, empire loyalty and race, was ‘the dominant cultural myth’ in Australia, and Britishness was perhaps ‘more pervasive in Australia than in Britain itself’. (16) Meaney does not define “Britishness”, nor engage with Colley’s conception of Britishness, defined ‘…against a real or imaginary Other’, an identity formation in which possession of the British Empire, and its hierarchies of difference, significantly featured. (17) Meaney also argues that Britishness ‘never had the same resonance’ in Britain as in Australia. (18) Empire Day, for example, was introduced in Australia in 1905 as an expression of ‘imperial brotherhood’, a decade before it was introduced in Britain, and, Meaney argues, ‘…was always celebrated more widely and more devoutly in Australia than in Britain.’ (19)

Labor’s empire nationalism evolved from the ambiguities of empire status and Australian identity. From federation in 1901 and into the First World War Labor attempted to manage the competing tensions of nationalism, empire loyalty and a White Australia, the trinity of dreams that characterised Labor’s empire nationalism. By following the narrative trail of empire nationalism from 1901-1921 we can trace its influence on Labor policy and the Party’s triumphant return to office on the eve of war, and its disastrous split two years later. In August 1916, when Hughes invoked the ideal of White Australia to justify the need for conscription, he repeated the linkages between nation, racial identity and defence that had shaped Labor’s policy platform since Federation. By 1916 Labor was confronted with the need to abandon or reinvent the terms of its empire nationalism.

Linking Nation, Race and Defence 1901-1914
Labor’s support for immigration restriction of non-whites and a strong defence policy evolved simultaneously from 1901, compelled by a need to define and protect an Australian identity. This mission was given dramatic expression as the first principle of its policy objectives, adopted by the Party’s Commonwealth Conference in 1905:

(a) The cultivation of an Australian sentiment, based upon the maintenance of racial purity, and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community. (20)

John Christian Watson, Labor’s federal leader between 1901-1907, was a principal architect and advocate of the 1905 platform. The platform’s wording reflected Watson’s passionate support for immigration restriction, which in the minds of many Labor figures reflected not only a concern to protect the jobs and wages of white Australian workers, but also reflected potent fears of the threat Asian migration posed to national identity. In the debate on the Immigration Restriction bill in 1901 Watson characterised this threat as the ‘racial contamination’ of the ‘heathen Chinee’ and the ‘Baboo Hindu.’ (21)

The defence of a White Australia required a large population and sufficient manpower to develop strong military forces. As Watson argued in 1906:

The pressure of population in the older parts of the world, and the awakening of what is colloquially known as “The East”, constitute at least a potential menace to any people situated as we are. Our wide areas of unpeopled territory, rich with unrealised possibilities, must inevitably prove an attraction to nations confined within boundaries too small for the natural expansion of their populations. (22)

Labor was also concerned about the intentions of Britain’s imperial rivals, but superpower rivalries tended, as Watson’s statement indicates, to assume a secondary significance. The emergence of Japan as a strong naval power after the Russo-Japanese war 1904-5 excited greater racial alarm than the threat Japan might pose to Britain and the empire. As Watson argued a few months after the war, ‘For the next 20 years, no doubt, China and Japan would be taken up with their immediate difficulties with Russian reprisals and revenge. But in any case Australia could not be prepared too early. The vast areas must be filled up.’ (23)

Watson resigned the Labor leadership and left Parliament in October 1907. He remained an influential figure in the Party; a few months after his resignation he took a leading role in the defence debate at the Labor’s 1908 Commonwealth conference. Watson moved that Labor adopt the principle of compulsory military training for all males, ‘irrespective of class or condition’, as the only effective means of establishing a Citizen’s Defence Force. Watson invoked fear of the ‘sleeping giant’ of China to argue that ‘…peace could only be secured by being prepared for war – by having every male trained and ready to take up arms in defence of his native land.’ Some delegates baulked at the idea of compulsion; the future federal Labor minister King O’Malley worried that Labor had ‘…gone mad with militarism’ and NSW delegate Kate Dwyer, one of only two women delegates at the conference, ‘bitterly regretted’ the resolution, and disputed the ‘urgency’ of making a decision on such a contentious issue. But the view, as expressed by one delegate, that ‘the man who voted for a White Australia should be prepared to carry his rifle in support of that principle’ prevailed. (24) Racial fear played a strong role in prompting Labor to support compulsory military training, a measure not adopted in the pre-war years by either Britain or any of its other dominions. (25)

There was barely a reference in the debate to superpower rivalry; Senator Needham dismissed fear of Japanese invasion as ‘a bogey’. Needham was more concerned by Germany’s colonial expansionism. Australia, as ‘an outpost of empire’, was open to attack from the sea. In defence of that frontier the development of an Australian Navy was more pressing than the establishment of ‘a land force’, although Needham supported Watson’s proposal, amended to commit Labor to compulsory military training and to reaffirm Labor’s support for the establishment of an Australian Navy. (26)

The establishment of the Royal Australian Navy reflected Labor’s dual allegiance to Australian nationalism and the British empire – and also reflected the subliminated ambiguities of these competing loyalties. Labor came to federal office in April 1910 under the leadership of Andrew Fisher, and the Naval Defence Act, establishing RAN, was promulgated in November. The Act had been intitiated by the Deakin Liberal Protectionist Government but Labor, in office until 1913, presided over RAN’s birth and early development. Labor now worked to build ‘…an Australian owned, manned, and controlled navy’, as Fisher claimed in 1914. (27) By 1914 RAN had one battle cruiser, the Australia, four light cruisers, three destroyers and two submarines. (28)

Some historians have accepted the establishment of RAN as a plain expression of Australian independence by Labor. McMullin observes that Fisher resisted an alternative scheme of funding a dreadnought for the British Navy. ‘The pressure was intense, but Fisher was unperturbed: Labor’s policy was to create an Australian navy, not send money to England to strengthen theirs, and that was that.’ (29) However Fisher also argued in 1909 that ‘…Australia should be the naval base of the Empire in the South Pacific.’ (30) The RAN would represent a strategic integration into empire defence that could suit both the mutual interests of protecting Australia and the Empire’s interests in the Asia-Pacific region. Fisher seemed to be particularly concerned that Australian fighting ships could be offered to Britain ‘…as something made and paid for by ourselves’, presumably so that, as he said in the 1914 manifesto, Australia would not be ‘a burden to the mother country, and a humiliation to herself.’ (31) A precocious claim of nation building tied to the relationship with Britain.

Fisher rehearsed these themes when he welcomed, as opposition leader, the arrival of the newly-commissioned Australian naval squadron in October 1913. Standing before a large crowd gathered by Sydney Harbour Fisher specifically acknowledged the RAN’s ‘dominion fleet unit’ status, and its dual function as an Australian and empire fleet. RAN would give effect ‘…to the policy of the country, which was that in every water and in every sea they should maintain the honour and integrity of the Empire whenever necessary.’ The sight of the fleet coming through the heads of Sydney Harbour stirred ‘patriotic, strong men’ to the conviction ‘…that if ever the occasion arose they would give everything they possessed, and every effort they could make to maintain the honour of this country and the honour of His Majesty’s authority anywhere in the world to the last breath and the last ship. (Applause.)’ (32) A form of words that suggests Fisher had, at work in his mind, the rhetorical and emotional patterns of his famous declaration of August 1914, not from cool calculation but as a heartfelt pledge, stressed in its repeated rhythmic and almost biblical patterns of every effort and possession, last breath and last ship, last man and last shilling, of the final sacrifices patriots would render in service to the empire.

Labor’s ambiguous attitude to the allocation of Australia’s naval resources was apparent at the outbreak of the First World War. Fisher told the Melbourne Argus in August 1914 that ‘…his idea of patriotism was to first provide for our own defence, and then, if there was anything to spare, offer it as a tribute to the mother country.’ He also observed in the same interview that Australia would be prepared to offer the Australian Navy for Britain’s use ‘…in Australian seas or any part of the world’. (33) By August 1914 the Empire had insidiously secured its hold on RAN. As Andrews noted, equipment purchases and the recruitment of British officers tied the fledgling RAN closely to the Royal Navy. Australia’s naval squadron in the First World War served, for the most part, far from Australian shores in the Empire’s cause and under Royal Navy operational control. (34)

Labor also implemented the program of compulsory military training set out under the Deakin Government’s Defence Act of 1909. Between 1910 and 1913 the compulsory drilling of all boys and young men aged up to 25 resulted in the number of militia and volunteers rising from 22,000 to 34,000 and the number of cadets from 10,000 to 89,000. (35) Labor’s Defence Minister George Pearce argued that Labor’s ideal of a Citizen Defence Force reflected a spirit of democratic duty; ‘every adult male citizen’ should take part in the defence of the country. An obligation intensified by the fact that in Australia ‘…we are nearing the realization of our industrial, political and social ideals so long as we are undisturbed by a foreign foe.’ Yet as Pearce acknowledged, participation in the empire, and Labor’s own policies, threatened the realization of the Party’s ideals. Connexion with the British Empire ‘…carries the possibility of our being involved at any time in war with countries which have no immediate designs against ourselves.’ Australia’s Immigration Restriction Act also raised the possibility of conflict with Japan and China. ‘We say that the [Immigration Restriction] Act is there, and is going to remain there. They may not want it to remain there.’ (36)

Despite Fisher’s 1914 claims, the defence policies that Labor embraced from 1910 reflected bipartisan support with the Liberal Protectionists; the Liberals also shared a commitment, as Deakin’s Defence Minister, Sir Joseph Cook acknowledged, to honouring Australia’s ‘Imperial and local’ defence responsibilities, and as part of those responsibilities, upholding the ‘White Australia ideal’. (37) Labor’s position was distinguished by its claim to speak on behalf of the working class. Labor had overcome its initial resistance to Federation to support the liberal Australian Settlement of compulsory arbitration, immigration restriction, tariff protection of industry and jobs and a national scheme of old age pensions. The Fisher Labor Governments of 1908-1909 and 1910-1913 sought to develop the benefits of nation or state building project for the working class, expressed through the establishment of the Commonwealth Bank, the ‘peoples’ bank’, attempts in 1911 and 1913 to extend Commonwealth control over corporations, trade and industrial relations via (unsuccessful) referenda proposals, and a Land Tax to break up wealthy estates and make Australia’s ‘sparsely settled’ land available for small-scale selectors. (38) Although Irving downplays Labor’s role ‘as the leading party in the construction of the national state’ in the period, there is little doubt that Labor claimed such a role. (39) In June 1908 the Sydney Worker, the leading labour movement journal, personified Labor in a full front page illustration as ‘THE BUILDER’, hammering out the foundations of the Commonwealth beneath the flag, and stones etched with Labor’s achievements – ‘old age pensions’, ‘citizen defence force’ and ‘uniform industrial legislation’. The commitment to White Australia provided the foundation stone. Labor was prone to claim credit for many of the liberal reforms, particularly defence initiatives. (40) Labor’s embrace of a strong defence policy was explicitly nationalist, although complicated by its attitude to empire and intensified by its preoccupation with safeguarding a white Australia.

In that context, George Pearces’s claim that Labor was realizing its ideals was not simply an exercise in political hyperbole. Notwithstanding the frustrations of the referenda defeats, Labor believed it was bringing the working class within the nation, recognised as citizens. The working class seemed to respond to Labor’s appeals: Labor’s success in capturing control of both Houses of the Commonwealth Parliament in 1910-1913 and 1914-1916 was a feat Labor was only able to repeat in the years 1944-1949, and inconceivable without strong working class support. (41) Labor’s leaders believed working class citizens could be summoned in service of both national and imperial defence needs. As Watson argued in 1908, ‘rights involve obligations’ and if young men expected the security of a pension in old age they should be willing to serve in the defence of the Commonwealth. (42) Indeed, Watson believed that compulsory military training was a benefit offered to the working class, taking Australia’s ‘military system’ from the control of ‘people of privilege’ and making ‘training in arms’ available to all. (43)

Watson’s declaration of the obligations of the working class was expressed in The Call, the journal of the Australian National Defence League. The League was established in 1906 to push the cause of compulsory military training and attracted support from both sides of the political divide and a wide range of public figures – judges, university professors and clergymen, from the professions and the military. Watson was a vice-president of the League’s NSW division; other Labor supporters and contributors to The Call included federal MPs Billy Hughes and J.H. Catts, NSW MLA W. A. Holman, and the editor of the Sydney Worker, Hector Lamond. (44) It is not difficult to understand why the League appealed to these Labor figures; the League blurred together the categories of nation, empire and race in its campaign. Voters were urged to lobby federal parliamentarians with a series of leading, if not intimidating questions: ‘Are you in favor of maintaining the integrity of the British Empire? Are you in favor of a White Australia? Is it not necessary, then, that every able bodied young Australian should be trained in arms?’ (45)

In their contributions to The Call the Laborites enthusiastically took up these themes. In 1907 Catts argued that ‘The Responsibility of Nationhood’ meant that ‘A “White Australia” must have the force of arms behind it’. National responsibility also meant duty to empire: ‘…it may even become necessary for us to actively aid England to maintain her policy – that no foreign flag shall float from Indian ports and no foreign guns dominate Indian harbours.’ (46) Watson also argued that ‘Australian Defence’ meant that ‘as true citizens of the Empire we must be ready to assist in maintaining its integrity.’ (47) Hector Lamond offered a definition of empire nationalism when he identified, in 1906, an ‘urgent’ need to establish an Australian Navy:

The truest Imperialism consists in giving to the various portions of the Empire the fullest citizenship that is consistent with the unity of the whole. Nothing is more natural than that patriotic Australians should desire to have their part in the Naval Defence of their country, and that they should take pride in providing the ships as well as the men to defend their own hearths and homes. And wise Imperial statesmanship will encourage that spirit. (48)

Through their participation in the League these Labor figures moved from the class-based politics of the labour movement to a cause that crossed the class divide in the name of nation and empire. In the conditions of peace and nation building that prevailed before 1914 labour movement tensions over League participation by labour figures could be subliminated; there was little community or labour movement opposition to compulsory military training. (49) The outbreak of war in 1914 fundamentally shifted labour movement perspectives of national and empire duty, and perceptions of the appropriate participation of the working class in war.

1916 anti conscription literature urges Australians to preserve the white race by voting “no”.

Conscription
The labour movement was gripped by tension about the prospect of conscription - compulsory military service for overseas duty - from mid 1915. (50) The need to maintain a high rate of recruitment was identified as an increasing problem by the Labor government of Prime Minister Billy Hughes, who had succeeded a careworn and anti conscriptionist Fisher in October 1915. A significant section of the Labour movement believed that Australia must fulfil its military duties, a matter of both empire loyalty and national prestige. The Universal Service League was established in September 1915, a broadly based lobby group that agitated for the introduction of conscription in much the same way as the National Defence League had campaigned for compulsory military training. (51) Hector Lamond became the USL’s secretary; John Christian Watson and William Holman, by now the NSW Labor Premier, also emerged as active supporters of the USL and of the “yes” case in the October 1916 conscription referendum, championed by Hughes at the cost of deep Party dissent. (52)

J. H. Catts became the organising secretary of the anti conscription campaign in New South Wales. (53) Catts, who had contributed to The Call as a good empire man and supporter of military training, could readily identify as an ardent anti conscriptionist because both the pro and anti conscription campaigns sought to attract support to their respective causes by appealing to the principles of nationalism, empire loyalty and a White Australia. The issue of compulsion divided the two camps - intensified by class consciousness. Predominately working class Australians would be compelled to fight in Europe on behalf of the nation and empire. The Labor supporters of conscription were seen by their opponents to have chosen to do the bidding of the ruling class. When Watson joined the USL it was said that he had ‘…joined a league of the privileged classes’, and the NSW Labor Party attacked the USL as a coalition of employers and ‘high placed officials’ who themselves would be exempt from the call-up. (54)

Class consciousness emerged in 1916 to prompt a re-definition of what the labour movement meant by empire nationalism. The pro conscriptionists tended to stress the duty nation and empire were owed; the anti conscriptionists emphasised the need to protect Australia’s defence and industrial interests, and the democratic nature of voluntary military service. This process of re-definition did not comprehensively subvert the ideals that had nurtured empire nationalism. The anti conscriptionists insisted that Australians remained willing to fight and die for the empire; as the Worker observed in October 1916: ‘the proof that Australia places a high value upon her citizenship as part of the British Empire is found in the blood and treasure which she has voluntarily poured out in defence of that citizenship.’ (55) Moreover, both pro and anti conscription advocates stressed that they were the true defenders of a White Australia.

In August 1916 Billy Hughes toured Australia to rouse community support for conscription. Hughes argued that Australia would be left in a state of ‘utter helplessness’ if Germany triumphed. He claimed that Australian’s owed their safety to the British Navy, ‘…under whose widestretched wings we have been lain safely sheltered from the horrors of war these two years.’ Hughes stressed that ‘…our safety depends on the unity of the British Empire’. If Germany succeeded in breaking up the British Empire, Australia would perhaps be exposed to German invasion; but as Hughes observed, the really troubling source of invasion, if the empire collapsed, lay to Australia’s immediate north in Asia. ‘We have nailed White Australia to the top of the mast’, Hughes ominously reminded his audience, ‘…but we are but a tiny drop in a coloured ocean.’ A month after Hughes’ speech the anti conscriptionist Labor Senator John Mullan quoted Hughes White Australia declaration back at him. The Prime Minister’s words were ‘…worth a thousand speeches against conscription.’ Mullan claimed conscription would denude Australia of its manhood, exposing the nation to Asian invasion. (56) The Melbourne Labor Call declared that ‘…conscripted white labor must be replaced by other labor’. (57) In a No-Conscription campaign poster Catts warned that by bleeding Australia dry of its home defenders and industrial workers, conscription would result in ‘race suicide.’ (58)

Racial rhetoric is far too persistent in the conscription debates to be dismissed as merely opportunistic scare-mongering. References to White Australia in conscription literature reflect its central place in the narrative of Australian identity that had developed from the 1880s to the First World War. The crisis of war and its sacrifices drew tension about Australia’s place in the world to the surface. It is hardly surprising that deeply felt racial fears would be rehearsed and enflamed in conscription discourse.

A clue to the linkages between White Australia and conscription may be found in a speech Hughes delivered on ‘the Menace of Syndicalism’ at a recruitment rally in January 1916. Hughes defined radical “syndicalists”, by which he meant the activists of the Industrial Workers of the World, as ‘parasites who have insidiously wormed their way into the ranks of organised labour’, and who were trying to prevent men from joining the army. These syndicalists ‘…sneer at patriotism’. By contrast, ‘Australian unionism has responded nobly to the call of country.’ The Waterside Workers had over 4,000 members in the armed services; the Australian Workers Union had over 20,000. Hughes declared that syndicalists ‘…have no nationality, religion, or principle, and in the name of unionism and labour I cast them out.’ (59)

Syndicalists, with no country and no patriotism, could be exorcised and consigned to the same outer darkness as the “heathen” Chinese. For Hughes and other Laborites, Asians and radicals both occupied the same illegitimate category of foreignness; radicals on the fringe of the labour movement like the Industrial Workers of the World were often vilified as representatives of foreign or alien ideas. (60) The repudiation of outsiders was made in direct contrast to the familiar kinship claims of nation and empire that characterised the exchange of identity between the mother country and its Australian dominion. For its supporters, conscription was an instrument for binding shared ties of empire identity; for its opponents, conscription was a threat to life, culture, work and nation – everything that had seemed to be promised by Labor’s mission to cultivate an Australian sentiment, based upon the maintenance of racial purity, and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community.

The gulf between the ideals of the pro and anti conscriptionists proved too great: in October 1916 Labor expelled its conscriptionists, and Hughes, Pearce, Watson, Holman and Lamond responded by forming the National Party, and joining with Labor’s opponents in order to continue in government. On 17 February 1917 Billy Hughes introduced his new National government to the parliament and the people of Australia. He declared that ‘the Government stands for the development of Australian national spirit on the foundation of Imperial ideals.’ He also reassured the nation that ‘the Government strongly believes in, and will maintain in its entirety, the White Australia policy.’ The White Australia policy was the only specific policy initiative Hughes felt obliged to acknowledge in his speech, otherwise concerned with a commitment to vigorously prosecute the war. (61)

The experience of war tempered Labor’s taste for militarism – at least of the orthodox variety. By 1921 Labor had abandoned compulsory military training and supported a radically democratic ideal of defence, including the election of officers, the abolition of the salute and military oaths, and civilian review of court martials. (62) In a gesture that recalled the French Revolutionary ideal of the people in arms, Labor also declared that ‘Citizens, on completion of training, to retain arms delivered to them during training.’ Nonetheless some of the old ambiguities persisted. Labor also advocated, as the second plank of its ‘fighting platform’, ‘Complete Australian self-government as a British community’, although the distinction between Britishness and Australian self-governance was now more specifically defined. Labor rejected any idea of ‘imperial federation’; Australian ministers would ‘assent’ all federal legislation, ‘except such as appears inconsistent with Imperial treaty obligations’; the High Court of Australia would be the final court of appeal, as opposed to the Privy Council; imperial honours would be abolished. (63)

At the 1921 Commonwealth conference the Labor Party adopted a commitment to socialisation (qualified by reluctance to abolish ‘private ownership’) and the creation of an elective ‘Supreme Economic Council’ to administer nationalised industries. (64) These radical measures, part of an effort to ‘reinvigorate’ the Party and shake free of the shadow of the conscription split, were the initiative of Jim Scullin, the future Labor Prime Minister. (65) Scullin also moved that Labor recommit itself to the maintenance of a white Australia. (66) The conference restated its allegiance to the form of words adopted in 1905, and its privileged position as the first plank of the fighting platform. Scullin said Labor would be ‘foolish’ if it jettisoned White Australia, despite the urgings of some on the fringe of the labour movement (by which Scullin presumably had in mind the recently established Communist Party, challenging Labor’s claim to represent the working class). Just as Hughes had declared syndicalists illegitimate in 1916, Scullin urged Labor to reject ‘cosmopolitan’ radicals and their un-Australian ideology. In service to his argument, Scullin offered a tortuous defence of ‘Australian sentiment’:

Australian sentiment was not in any degree opposed to internationalism. Those who sneered at internationalism were cosmopolitan. They should retain that principle [Australian sentiment], if for nothing else but an antidote to Imperialism.

Even as Labor seemed to embark down a radical path, it reasserted the familiar appeal of a White Australia, now apparently to be understood as a rejection of imperialism. Given its attachment to an insular racism, Labor could only seek an Australian sentiment in an anglo-celtic and primarily British culture. In order to decisively break with the ethos of empire nationalism, Labor had to abandon the ideal of a White Australia. In a conference marked by sharp disputes and votes taken to divisions, Scullins’ resolution was unanimously carried, with no more debate than his own remarks.

Conclusion
Billy Hughes, Andrew Fisher and John Christian Watson were among ten of the twenty-four members of the first federal parliamentary Labor caucus to find their way to Australia from the heart of the empire or its diaspora. (67) There is little indication that they felt a need to draw a distinction between a sincere Australian nationalism and their loyalty to empire. They did not inhabit a culture of polarised ‘Australians’ and ‘Australian-Britons’, as Manning Clark’s History of Australia suggested in his opposed symbols of Alfred Deakin and Henry Lawson, (who, in the war, both embraced the cause of nation and empire); nor did either Hughes or Watson suddenly and uncharacteristically begin to refer to England as “home” after the conscription split, as both Clark and Grassby & Ordonez claim. (68)

True Believers, a history of the Federal parliamentary Labor caucus, suggests that the careers of the pro conscriptionists should be reduced to their function as Labor ‘rats’, cast against a romanticised identification of ‘true believers’, a reductionism that obscures the complexities of motive and consequence. (69) By contrast Dickenson sensitively explores ‘the language of betrayal’, observing that the term ‘rat’ may be used by Labor as ‘a way of dealing with differences and preserving the integrity of the party’. (70) The mark of the ‘rat’ may also be employed as a rationalising mechanism, intimidating dissidents with the threat of anathema and cloaking the believers with an insular comfort of loyalty, resisting renewal of program or reform of organisational practice. True Believers does not sufficiently interrogate caucus as an ideological or ethnographic phenomena, or explore the narratives that circulated amongst its members, forging bonds of common purpose and identity – or prompting alternatives to those identifications, and inciting division. True Believers suggests Hughes offered the caucus a simple choice between empire or Australian loyalty; neither the caucus nor the party made such a resolute choice during the 1916 split or in the period of confused “reconstruction” that followed. As Meaney has demonstrated, Labor’s attachment to ‘race nationalism’, to White Australia and Britishness, persisted well into the post Second World War years. (71)

The mingled affiliations of empire and nation that many Laborites cultivated, and accepted as representing their identities, is suggested by a letter sent from the Australian High Commissioner in London to Mrs. Margaret Fisher on 24 October 1928. The letter set out the funeral arrangements the High Commission made on behalf of her deceased husband, the former Prime Minister Andrew Fisher. The Australian High Commission would pick up Mrs. Fisher from the Fisher family home in 57 South Hill Park, Hampstead, in time for the memorial service to be conducted at St. Columba’s Church of Scotland. The letter also acknowledged that the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs had conveyed a sympathy message to the Prime Minister of Australia. (72)

Andrew Fisher had served as Australian High Commissioner in London from his retirement from politics in 1915 until 1921. Together with his family Fisher lived in Hampstead until 1928. Fisher barely spent more than a year in Australia between 1915 and 1928. The condolence correspondence sent to Mrs Fisher suggests that the Fishers’ were well assimilated into London life and their Hampstead community.(73) In the funeral procession, Fisher’s coffin was draped in an Australian flag; the governor and staff of the Commonwealth Bank sent ‘a huge wreath fashioned like a Union Jack in everlasting flowers, with a branch of wattle diagonally across it.’ (74) Fisher’s fellow Scot, the British Labour Party leader Ramsay Macdonald, presided at a dedication service for a headstone over Fisher’s grave, paid for by friends as a tribute to Fisher’s ‘services to the empire.’(75) Macdonald unveiled the headstone dedicated to the former Australian Prime Minister by drawing aside a Union Jack; an Australian flag was draped around the base of the headstone. The chiselled text succinctly expressed Fisher’s empire experience: born Crosshouse Ayrshire, died London, Privy Councillor and Prime Minister of Australia. (76) Fisher’s memory was also honoured in Australia: Tom Brown, the secretary of the Australian Labor Party’s branch in Coogee, Sydney, was instructed by the branch, ‘with members standing’, to offer Mrs. Fisher its condolences, and to express the members respect for this ‘…ideal leader who did so much for the Labor movement.’ (77)

Did Fisher’s long absence from Australia diminish his Australian nationalism? There was little doubt that the Fisher family identified Hampstead as home, just as Fisher had once thought of Crosshouse as home, or that he and his young wife raised a family with reasonable contentment in Gympie in Queensland. (78) Fisher was certainly a prominent Gympie citizen, and his communal participation reflected his heritage: a leading Presbyterian, temperance worker, labour activist and member of the local unit of the Colonial Defence Force. (79) Throughout his voyages across the empire it is unlikely that Fisher’s sense of self, as an ambitious lad from Scotland, ever substantially changed, although as Colley suggests, it adapted to new, albeit reassuringly familiar British, contexts:

In practice, men and women often had double, triple, or even quadruple loyalties, mentally locating themselves, according to the circumstances, in a village, in a particular landscape, in a region, and in one or even two countries. It was quite possible for an individual to see himself as being, at one and the same time, a citizen of Edinburgh, a Lowlander, a Scot, and a Briton.’ (80)

A multi-layered Britishness that could also be transferred across the Empire, and in Australia Fisher found a chance for that identity to flourish. He appreciated the opportunities that Australia had provided; as Fisher explained in an address to a London audience in 1911, ‘the free self-governing Dominions…[have] greater opportunities to experiment in legislation than you have. The entanglements are fewer and, if you will permit me to say so, the liberty and freedom of all the people is a little greater.’ (81)

The claim of free experimentation was no more boldy expressed than in the policy of immigration restriction. White Australia was the vital element of Australian empire nationalism. White Australia provided the focus on Australian exceptionalism in a far more potent way than the general appeals of nationalism or empire kinship. Australians were building ‘a great white democracy’, as Watson declared in 1914; they had been able to declare a white and British identity in a way that Britain felt unable (or felt perhaps was unnecessary) to make. (82) The capacity for freedom and experimentation had reinforced rather than diminished the ties of empire. As Fisher explained to his Imperial hosts in 1911,

Speaking for the Commonwealth of Australia we have found…that the more we are allowed to manage our own affairs in every department of government and of life, the more attached do the people of that country become to the people of the mother country and also to the British Crown. (83)

The emotional investment in White Australia, clarifying the essential Britishness of its people, meant that there was little need to distinguish between loyalty to the empire or loyalty to the emerging Australian nation. The tensions that arose from time to time in the Imperial-Dominion relationship were insufficient, in the period before World War One, to profoundly destabilise white Australian identity or Labor’s empire nationalism. As Andrews observes, the experience of war weakened the bond between Australia and Britain, although the relationship remained ambiguous, and the ties of empire and kinship continued to find support in Australia. (84) Labor’s post-war attempts to revitalise its program reflected this ambiguity. Labor may have been willing to jettison imperial honours, but it clung to the dream of a great white democracy within the British Empire.

Footnotes

1. Australian Worker, 27 August 1914.
2. Neville Meaney, Australia and the World, a documentary history from the 1870s to the 1970s, Longman Cheshire Melbourne 1985 p.217.
3. ibid., p.236.
4. As Jupp observes, this legislative program also included the Pacific Islanders Labourers Act 1901, the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902, the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1902 and the Naturalisation Act 1903. James Jupp, “Ethnicity, Race and Sectarianism”, in Marian Simms (ed.), 1901: The Forgotten Election, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia 2001, p.148.
5. Richard White, Inventing Australia, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1985 ch.7; Luke Trainor, British Imperialism and Australian Nationalism, Cambridge University Press Melbourne 1994, ch.13; Marilyn Lake, “On being a white man, Australia, circa 1900”, in Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White, Cultural History in Australia, University of New South Wales Press Sydney 2003.
6. Lake, “On being a white man”, p.101.
7. Geoffrey White, “Histories and Subjectivities”, Ethos, Vol.28 No.4 December 2000 p.501.
8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso London 1991 pp.6-7.
9. Polkinghorne argues that narrative is a process of ‘purposeful engagement’ between the individual and the public sphere, drawing together ‘…diverse events, happenings, and actions of human lives into thematically unified goal-directed processes.’ Polkinghorne quoted in Brian Roberts, Biographical Research, Open University Press UK 2002 p.117; see also Margaret R. Somers, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing Class Formation Theory: Narrativity, Relational Analysis, and Social Theory” in John R. Hall (ed.), Reworking Class, Cornell University Press 1997; Peter Poiana, “Narrative Identity”, Literature and Aesthetics, Vol.9 October 1999. For the relationship between national identity and contingency see Linda Colley, “Britishness and Otherness”, Journal of British Studies, Vol.31 November 1992 p.311.
10. David Walker, Anxious Nation, Australia and the rise of Asia, 1850-1939, University of Queensland Press St. Lucia 1999 p.229.
11. Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend, Oxford University Press Melbourne 1958 and Robert Birrell’s Federation, the Secret Story (first published as A Nation of Our Own), Duffy and Snellgrove Sydney 2001 are two classic works of the ‘Radical National’ School critiqued in Neville Meaney, “Britishness and Australian Identity, the problem of Nationalism in Australian History and Historiography”, Australian Historical Studies, No.116 April 2001 p.77; See also E. M. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion, Cambridge University Press Melbourne 1994, pp.1-3.
12. Luke Trainor, British Imperialism and Australian Nationalism, Cambridge University Press Melbourne 1994 p.4.
13. Mark McKenna, The Captive Republic, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne 1996, pp.206-7.
14. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion, p.5.
15. James Jupp, “Ethnicity, Race and Sectarianism”, p.148; Frank Crowley, Modern Australia 1901-1939, a documentary history of Australia, Thomas Nelson Australia Melbourne 1978 p.203.
16. Meaney, “Britishness and Australian Identity”, p.79.
17. ibid.; Neville Meaney, “Britishness and Australia: Some Reflections”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol.31 No.2 May 2003; Colley, “Britishness and Otherness”, pp.311, 324-325. See also Linda Colley, Britons, Yale University Press, New Haven 1992 pp.5-9, 369-375; Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation, Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867, Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2000 pp.37-49.
18. Neville Meaney, “Britishness and Australia”, p.126.
19. Meaney, “Britishness and Australian Identity”, p.79; Crowley, Modern Australia, p.74.
20. Official Report of the Third Commonwealth Political Labour Conference, Melbourne 1905 p.10.
21. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 6 September 1901 pp.4633, 4636.
22. The Call, 8 August 1906 p.6.
23. 1905 Labor conference report, p.16.
24. Official Report of the Fourth Commonwealth Political Labour Conference, Brisbane 1908 pp.16-18.
25. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion, p.23.
26. ibid., pp.18, 20.
27. Meaney, Australia and the World p.218.
28. ibid., p.212.
29. Ross McMullin, “Leading the World, 1901-16”, in John Faulkner & Stuart Macintyre (eds.), True Believers, the story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, Allen & Unwin Sydney 2001 p.39; Birrell, Federation, the Secret Story, pp.249-251.
30. Meaney, Australia and the World, p.180.
31. Meaney, Australia and the World, p.218; Australian Worker, 27 August 1914.
32. Sydney Morning Herald, 6 October 1913.
33. Meaney, Australia and the World, p.218.
34. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion, pp.27-28, 103, 115.
35. Fisher papers, MS2919/3/544 National Library of Australia.
36. Meaney, Australia and the World, pp.191-193.
37. Crowley, Modern Australia, p.150; Meaney, Australia and the World, pp.184-185.
38. Birrell, Federation, the Secret Story, chs. 6&7; Crowley, Modern Australia, pp.158, 181. For the labour movement and the Australian Settlement see also Mark Hearn & Harry Knowles, One Big Union, a history of the Australian Workers Union, Cambridge University Press Melbourne 1996 pp.12-14.
39. Terry Irving, “Labour, state and nation building in Australia”, in Stefan Berger and Angel Smith (eds.), Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity, 1870-1939, Manchester University Press Manchester 1999 p.202.
40. Worker, 11 June 1908; aside from the evidence concerning Labor and defence policy presented in this article, the “Defence and Party” editorial is also typical of Labor’s claim to have planned and secured Australian defence. Worker, 23 October 1913.
41. Irving has identified a need to distinguish between working class and Labor nationalism in the pre 1914 period, although he acknowledges that ‘the working class felt the impact of nationalist ideas’ through Labor’s participation in liberal state building. Irving, “Labour, state and nation building in Australia”, pp.194, 202-5.
42. The Call, August 1908 p.10.
43. 1908 Labor conference report, p.17.
44. The Call, list of office bearers, frontispiece November 1906; L.L. Robson, The First A.I.F., a study in its recruitment, 1914-1918, Melbourne University Press 1970 pp.11-14.
45. The Call, November 1906, p.15.
46. ibid.,February 1907 pp.12-13.
47. ibid., August 1906 p.6.
48. ibid., November 1906 p.12.
49. McMullin, The Light on the Hill, The Australian Labor Party 1891-1991, Oxford University Press Melbourne 1991 p.75.
50. Robson, The First A.I.F., pp.62-66; Patrick Weller (ed.), Caucus Minutes 1901-1949, Vol.1 1901-1917, Melbourne University Press 1975 p.426. Fisher expressed his opposition to conscription to a trade union delegation in September 1915. Sydney Morning Herald, 25 September 1915.
51. Sydney Morning Herald, 11 September 1915.
52. Robson, The First A.I.F., p.70; Universal Service League, ‘Case for Universal Service”, William Brooks & Co Sydney 1915 State Library of New South Wales; Universal Service, 10 November 1916 pp.2, 4.
53. Australian Labor Party, Political Labor League of NSW, The Official History of the Reconstruction of the Labor Party, 1916, Worker Print Sydney 1916 p.10. SLNSW.
54. Mary Lloyd, Sidelights on Two Referendums 1916-1917, William Brooks & Co., undated, p.35; Official History of the Reconstruction of the Labor Party, p.4.
55. Australian Worker, 19 October 1916.
56. Meaney, Australia and the World, pp.236-237.
57. Crowley, Modern Australia, p.271.
58. ‘Wholesale Slaughter’ No-Conscription Campaign poster, 1916, in ‘Australian Labor Party, Pamphlets and Handbills’, SLNSW.
59. Hughes Papers MS1538/20/6 NLA
60. See Australian Workers Union leader W.G. Spence on the IWW, Hearn & Knowles, One Big Union, p.21; Queensland Labor Premier E.G. Theodore on IWW and Russian revolutionary influence on Labor’s Left, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 October 1921.
61. Crowley, Modern Australia, p.282.
62. Many of these measures were first adopted at the 1918 Commonwealth Labor conference; a 1919 special Commonwealth conference pledged Labor to oppose compulsory military training. Australian Worker, 27 June 1918, 26 June 1919; Manifesto of the Labor Party to the People of the Commonwealth, Sydney 1919.
63. Official Report of the Ninth Commonwealth Political Labour Conference, Brisbane 1921 pp.iv-v.
64. ibid., p.iii.
65. McMullin, The Light on the Hill, p.126.
66. 1921 Labor conference report, p.21
67. Faulkner & Macintyre, True Believers, p.17; Jupp, ‘Ethnicity, Race and Sectarianism’, p.144.
68. C.M.H. Clark, A History of Australia, Vol.5 Melbourne University Press 1981 pp.307-308; 418; Clark also iconically established the theme of ‘Australians’ and ‘Australian-Britons’ in portraits of Deakin and Lawson reproduced in the frontispiece of the volume. Al Grassby and Silvia Ordonez, The Man That Time Forgot, the life and times of John Christian Watson, Australia’s first Labor Prime Minister, Pluto Press Sydney 1999 p.151.
69. John Faulkner, “Splits: Consequences and Lessons” and John Iremonger, “Rats”, in Faulkner & Macintyre, True Believers.
70. Jacqueline Dickenson, “Chasing the Rat: the Language of Betrayal in Britain and Australia”, Labour History Review, Vol.68 No.2 August 2003 p.176.
71. John Faulkner, “Splits: Consequences and Lessons” in Faulkner & Macintyre, True Believers pp.204-206; Meaney, “Britishness and Australia”, pp.125-133.
72. Fisher papers MS2919/1/593 NLA.
73. For example, Fisher papers MS2919/1/597, 600 NLA.
74. Sydney Morning Herald, 29 October 1928.
75. Times, 27 November 1928
76. Fisher papers MS2919/12/315 NLA
77. Fisher papers MS2919/1/627 NLA.
78. D.J. Murphy, “Andrew Fisher”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol.8 1981 Melbourne University Press p.502.
79. W.K. Anderson, ‘Andrew Fisher: “a proud, honest man of Scotland”’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol.87 part 2 December 2001 p.193.
80. Colley, “Britishness and Otherness”, p.315.
81. ‘Reception and Luncheon given by the Eighty Club to the Prime Ministers of the British Dominions,’ 27 May 1911, published by the Eighty Club 1911, p.11. SLNSW
82. J.C. Watson, “The Labour Movement”, in British Association for the Advancement of Science, Handbook for New South Wales, Edward Lee & Co. Melbourne 1914 p.134. SLNSW
83. Eighty Club reception, p.11.
84. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion, pp.185, 217-222.

Mark Hearn Post-Doctoral Research Fellow,
Work and Organisational Studies,
University of Sydney.

Copyright. Do not cite without the permission of the author. m.hearn@econ.usyd.edu.au

Back to Working Lives Homepage