Chapter 10
Work, Play and Politics During the Long Boom
In This Chapter
Watching colonists at work as the long boom continues
Choosing leisure over pay and developing new pastimes
Busting the myth of the Australian ‘bushie’
Developing distinctive colonial politics
In the 1850s, Australia acquired the nickname ‘the workingman’s paradise’. It had a great climate (although arguably, compared to Britain, this wasn’t the toughest competition), good work and high wages.
Most of the middle- and working-class immigrants who made the move to this paradise in the 1850s and beyond were full of the rhetoric of self-improvement, personal liberty and free enterprise. Generally, their great ambition was to set themselves up as economically independent, with their own business, farm or enterprise. In this they largely failed: Most ended up earning wages rather than paying them.
But the desire of the immigrants to be treated better than they had been in Britain was a strong one, and the intention of enjoying markedly better conditions at work and in life (and, eventually, politically) didn’t go away. In this they did succeed, thanks partly to very favourable conditions caused by the long boom that lasted from the 1860s to the 1880s, caused directly and indirectly by the massive gold finds of the 1850s (refer to Chapter 8). Their success was also partly due to their own attitudes and political leanings, and partly to the pre-existing colonial culture where arrivals of ‘humble’ and ‘obscure’ origins found little impediment to making a newly upward way in society.
In this chapter, I cover the distinctly Australian attitude to work and play that emerged during the sustained growth of the 1870s and 1880s, as well as the distinctly Australian political force that emerged, which became known as Colonial Liberalism.
The ‘Workingman’s Paradise’ Continues
The majority of people arriving during the 1850s inrush stayed on in the colonies even after the gold yield peaked in 1856 and began to decline. Unemployment and a relative drop in wages occurred in the 1860s, as miners went from digging for gold to other areas of work and industry, but in the 1870s things picked up as new parts of the economy grew strongly.
During the 1870s, full employment was approached in Australia, with little in the way of inflation to eat away at the good wages. Conditions were so good that the colonies began to attract significant and steady streams of labourers and workmen from Britain, who often chose Australia despite getting here being so much more expensive than passages to Canada or the US. The ‘workingman’s paradise’ might have in part been hyperbole (any place that touts itself as paradise is probably not telling the whole truth), but compared to conditions for workers in the rest of the world, life for the working man and woman in Australia was about as good as it gets.
Growth brings jobs
Largely, the agreeable working life that was created in Australia had to do with the great economic diversification that had followed in the wake of the gold explosion. With a massively enlarged population, plenty of new industries became viable, and it was these burgeoning industries that ex-gold miners moved into after they gave up looking for gold.
The railway industry had an intense demand for labour (for more on the growth of this industry, refer to Chapter 9). Workers were needed for the construction of lines, the manufacture of steam engines and carriages, and the maintenance of the lines and stations once the trains were up and running.
In the pastoral industry, increasing amounts of work on sheep stations had to be done — fencing was replacing shepherds and someone had to build them, ditto the dams and artesian bores that began to be constructed. Seasonal work such as shearing and harvesting was also lucrative.
Another big growth industry as the initial gold boom faded was the construction industry — busy both in building and rebuilding the cities and townships that had sprung up everywhere, and in the building of private residences.
In the gold rush 1850s, Melbourne and gold townships had the appearance of various shanty metropolises — jerry-built, thrown up overnight, with people living and sleeping in tents, huts, lean-tos, sheds or wherever else they could. By the 1860s, those who were still here had decided they were here for the long haul. The original assumption of only being in the colonies long enough to score a fortune and make off home to Britain, Europe or America had faded. And they figured that if they were going to live here they might as well live in semi-decent houses. House-building numbers shot up by 50 per cent in the early 1860s as a consequence. Then there was manufacturing — clothes, shoes, hats, metal and leather goods, coaches, wagons, carriages and furniture all began to be produced for the local market.
Workingwomen’s paradise too
An odd thing happened to working women in late-19th-century Australia. They stopped being servant girls. And those who did stay dropped much of the obedient and subservient air that had long been expected of servants.
Young working-class women during the 1870s and 1880s far preferred work in the factories and shops that the new manufacturing industries were establishing in the inner-city areas. They preferred the freedom of not being cooped up and under orders and supervision 24 hours a day, as they were as servant girls. They liked that they could take their pay at the end of the week and go off to do what they chose with their evenings — often mingling freely with plenty of young men. Shocked respectable moralists thought this was outrageous — young girls meeting up with men after work and hanging out on streets and beaches, in pubs and parks? Unheard of! Two kinds of culture were at war here — the respectable and the rough — and many working-class women voted with their feet to show why Australia could also be a bit of a working woman’s paradise.
Like working men, the freely available work meant working women could pick and choose, as Richard Twopeny highlighted: ‘There is a feeling in existence amongst them that in some way or other household labour is menial occupation, and that to undertake it is to lose caste in the class to which they belong’. Being in domestic service was degrading, while ‘the sewing girl or the shop-woman has certain business hours, outside of which she is as independent as her employer, and as little amenable to control’.
Workers’ Playtime
One of the distinctive things about the workers in colonial Australia was their clear choice of leisure over pay. Time and again it was made evident that those earning good wages preferred to earn enough to pay their necessary living expenses, but not much more. Instead, the extra hours were used for leisure — sports, games, drinking, sleeping, eating and talking, play.
Pubs, streets, back paddocks and front yards, and music and dance halls all featured various pursuits of the mass of colonists, but the development of cricket and the various codes of football casts most light on the distinctively Australian traits that were emerging in the colonies. In cricket, Australians had the opportunity of pitting themselves against England, to prove that they were still made of ‘the right stuff’. In football, they made the most of a relative abundance of leisure time in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s to develop a code of their own.
Beating the English at cricket
Like many pursuits, cricket took off in Australia in the 1850s, with different colonies forming teams to play against each other as well as taking on touring English outfits.
In 1868, a team of Aboriginal cricket players toured England, making them the first organised tour by Australian cricketers. The two big ‘proto-national’ moments came in 1877 and 1880, when Australia’s best 11 beat England’s best at first the Melbourne Cricket Ground and then the Oval in London.
Colonial Australians were thrilled about beating the English at cricket because it helped deal with that nagging doubt many still had about the questionable origins of Australia as a convict dump. Beating the English at their own game helped dispel insinuations about ‘bad stock’ and was, given that Britain was the global superpower at the time rather than a funny little island in a chilly part of the world, a big deal.
The way Australians played cricket against the English also reveals something distinctive about colonial society. In England, two categories of players existed, which mirrored the class system — the workers and their ‘betters’. In cricket, the workers, those who were paid professionals, were classed as ‘players’. And their betters, who were wealthy enough to not need to be paid and were amateur, were ‘gentlemen’. Everyone who played for Australia, or for the colonies, was ranked the same (as long as you were white, of course) — the English categories of ‘gentleman’ and ‘professional’ had collapsed in the colonies. In Australia, the place you occupied on the social and economic ladder was far more fluid and mobile than in Britain. Further, practically everyone had come out to Australia with ‘professional’ rather than ‘gentlemanly’ aspirations — that is, to make a fortune or at least set themselves up in life.
New codes of football
Australian Rules Football was first developed in the late 1850s in and around Melbourne (and was then called Victorian Rules), and from there it spread to the colonies of South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia. New South Wales, meanwhile, adopted an English code of play — rugby — in the 1870s, as did Queensland (and across the Tasman Sea in another British colony, New Zealand).
It’s telling that Victoria developed its own game of Australian Rules Football in the 1850s while NSW opted for the British importation of rugby. In the second half of the 19th century, thanks largely to the gold rush and the enormous economic and social kick it delivered, Victoria was renowned as the ‘Yankee’ colony — ambitious, pushy and independent-minded. NSW, meanwhile, was seen as more staid and traditional, and more likely to follow English precedent. This is an almost exact reversal of the reputations that Victoria and NSW, and Melbourne and Sydney, would occupy in the 20th century (see Chapter 11 for more on how this role reversal occurred).
Victoria, with its independent ‘Advance, Victoria!’ attitude developed its own structured football code early, while in Britain other codes — soccer, rugby, Gaelic football — were still in the planning stages of drawing up their own particular rules and practices. In the 1870s, NSW finally settled on the full book of rugby rules, adopted straight from Britain.
But the codes adopted in both colonies shared a preference for a more flowing game style. From its development, the Victorian game showed an emphasis on an open free-flowing contest. NSW also adopted the more open and flowing form of rugby — on the whole opting for ‘league’ rules over union. And the spectators loved it. In the mid-1860s crowds showing up to watch a Victorian Football League game numbered about 1,500. By the mid-1870s this was closer to 10,000, and by the mid-1880s it had doubled to 20,000.
The crowds at sporting events in the colonies were vociferous and fierce — they became known as ‘barrackers’. Originally, ‘to barrack’ was a term used to describe someone hurling abuse, but in the Australian context it simply came to mean vocally offering support, and regular spectators became known as barrackers. And from the beginning players and crowds were a freely mixing lot. As in cricket, no ‘professional’ and ‘gentleman’ distinction for the players existed, and in football crowds men and women of all classes mingled easily — bankers, larrikins, clerks, laundresses, shop owners and factory girls all jostled together. The Victorian Football League, emerging in the 1890s, took as its motto the Latin Populo Ludis Populi — ‘the game of the people for the people’.
The Big Myth of the Bush: Not So Rural Australia
The pattern of urban and suburban living was laid down very early in Australia. It was a distinctive trait of colonial life well before it became the norm in other parts of the world, and still holds true today. Australia is a big country, but that doesn’t stop most of its people clustering in and around the major cities.
In 1850 colonial Australia, 40 per cent of people lived in towns of 2,500 people or more. (By comparison, at this time, the US had an urban population of 14 per cent and Canada 12 per cent.) On the face of it, this seems bizarre. The major industry was wool production, a rural sector. Yet it was a rural industry with a minimal workforce — some station hands, some shepherds, some shearers in the right season, that’s about it. The bulk of people lived and worked in or near the port towns where the wool got taken to and shipped from, where the imports arrived, where business exchanges took place and where the money got spent. All the service industries (everything from brothels and hotels through to tailors and haberdasheries) clustered around the main port towns in each colony, encouraging a concentration in urban living.
The growth in population during the gold rush of the 1850s (refer to Chapter 8) only served to continue the trend of highly urban living. The capital cities continued to be the port conduits of all export and import industries and, with the acquisition of self-government, became serious administrative capitals as well. The productive goldfields soon had large and thriving townships growing up around them.
The only real exception was Brisbane, wedged in at the bottom south-east corner of Queensland. A far smaller urban outpost in a large colony with a whole series of port towns up its coast, the Queensland capital was about a tenth the size of Sydney and Melbourne, and in 1871 held only 13 per cent of the overall population of the colony.
By 1891, even Brisbane was showing the same classic colonial capital expansion signs — it contained just under a quarter of the Queensland population. Melbourne, meanwhile, had reached an astounding 41 per cent of Victoria’s population, Adelaide touched 37 per cent and Sydney reached 35 per cent.
Partly these urban rates point to the fact that railways in all the colonies except Queensland had fanned out from the central capital cities, increasing the hold of the urban centres over their respective rural hinterlands. ‘The mighty bush’, wrote Henry Lawson, ‘with iron rails is tethered to the world’.
Moreover, most new arrivals tended to go to where surroundings felt most familiar. Rural Australia continued to be something of an alien landscape, whereas the towns and cities were remarkable in their similarity to urban areas of Britain and America. An English arrival in Melbourne remarked it was as if ‘a slice of Liverpool has been bodily transplanted to the Antipodes, that you have landed in England again by mistake’. Plenty of new arrivals got off in the port city capital, found work in the port city capital, and stayed in the port city capital. The majority of colonial Australians never saw a bushfire or an Indigenous Australian.
The urbanisation of Australia also helps explain why bushrangers and explorers so quickly acquired such a strongly romanticised edge, to be followed later (from the 1890s on) by shearers, jackaroos and other bush workers. People tend to naturally romanticise what seems alluringly strange and different to their common experience, and the bush heroes and outback pioneers were people who lay largely outside the everyday experience of most colonials.
Marcus Clarke, the English-born author of For the Term of His Natural Life (a novel set in Van Diemen’s Land and taking in most of the more gothic aspects of Tasmania’s convict past), was aware of Australia’s tendency to urban clusters when he said in the 1860s that future Australians would be a ‘fretful, clever, perverse, irritable race’. And visiting London journalist Francis Adams saw it too. In Melbourne, he said that ‘the look on the faces of her inhabitants is the metropolitan look. These people live quickly; such as life presents itself to them’.
Rearranging the Political Furniture
In the decades from 1850 through to the 1890s, colonial life was dominated by a new breed of politician and political ideas. The political movement of the newly emerging middle classes in Britain — Liberalism — encountered the radical working-class movement that had in Britain been violently suppressed — Chartism (refer to Chapter 8 for more discussion of what Chartism is, and how it had an effect on the gold rush politics of the 1850s).
Out of this encounter was born a distinctive new thing — Colonial Liberalism — which was unlike anything in either Britain or America. This hybrid was the dominant movement and political creed until the 1890s. It dominated most colonial governments, and instituted often quite radical and distinctive changes to education, trade, workplace relations and economic development.
Charting new colonial directions
In Britain in the early 1850s, Liberalism, the political theory favoured by the middle classes, and radical Chartism, favoured by the tradesmen and working classes, were often at variance with each other (see the sidebar ‘Liberals versus Chartists’). Middle-class Liberals argued for the pre-eminence of the individual, fearing the unreasoning mob and a bloody revolution if the vast mass of workers were given a direct say in running the country. The Chartists, coming from the ‘lower orders’, didn’t have quite so much faith in the free play of market forces. They preferred the power of ‘the people’, bonded together with a common charter, over separate, freely associating individuals.
During the gold rush, the upwardly mobile elements of the working classes and the aspiring lower middle classes formed the great mass of arrivals to Australia, and within a few short years they had self-government and near-universal male voting rights (refer to Chapter 8 to find out how this revolution came about).
In these conditions, Chartism and Liberalism began to meld and fuse in unexpected ways, producing a distinctive new progressive political philosophy. Called Colonial Liberalism, or (later, by its detractors) Colonial Socialism, it soon overpowered the more established elements in colonial governments, taking root in most popularly elected governments in Victoria, NSW and South Australia, with other colonies following later.
Creating Colonial Liberalism
Colonial Liberals believed, like Liberals in Britain did, that established hierarchies and authorities — aristocrats, the established church, the military officers and the standing army — shouldn’t be allowed to maintain a monopoly on power. But, unlike the British Liberals, they also came to accept political rights should be granted to more people, and to believe that government should freely interfere with the economy and people’s lives in order to make things fairer and to encourage growth and prosperity.
The Colonial Liberalist view was cruder than the classic Liberal vision, but not without its own logic — government exists for the people; if the people need something and government intervention could help that need be realised more quickly and easily, then government should go right ahead and do it. Colonial Liberals believed that
Land should be made cheaply available for the people rather than used in an industry (such as wool) that was highly profitable only for a select few.
Railways should be built that offered cheap freight costs.
Agrarian industries, such as wheat and dairy, should be developed and encouraged by state involvement on the part of smallholders.
Customs duties should be levied against most imports to ensure that local manufacturing industries develop and non-rural jobs on offer continue to diversify and grow.
This made Colonial Liberals almost a contradiction in terms for ‘classic’ Liberals in Britain, who believed fervently that the market should be allowed to freely operate and, through this freedom, would find the most efficient ways of getting things done. The chief exponents of this new contradictory form of Liberalism were found in the gold rush colony of Victoria.
In NSW, which had been less overwhelmed by 1850s arrivals, they stuck with free trade. But voters in the other colonies, the main powerhouse of Victoria especially, proved on the whole to be more than happy with this turn of events. Partly due to the mass arrival of disaffected British chartists in the 1850s, classic Liberalism had less traction — the new arrivals were much less attached to arguments about unsullied free trade and markets. The idea that government was there for them began to dominate, and many progressive and radical Liberals began to follow this new direction being taken in the colonies.
Taking on the squatters, but not the conservatives
When Liberals arrived in Australia in the 1850s, they arrived accustomed to fighting against the established conservative forces of society — only to find in Australia that these conservative forces were practically non-existent.
In an electioneering speech in 1856, the Victorian Colonial Secretary contrasted the situation with England. There, ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ actually meant something. There were things — institutions, practices, established protocols and hierarchies — to preserve. In Australia, however, ‘we have nothing to preserve, and nothing to destroy. We [have] landed on a naked shore to form, to found, to create. Nobody could possibly be opposed to progress here.’ Thirty years later, another colonist wondered ‘what could we ever have done at home with a dead weight of wealth and privilege hanging over us?’
To be a conservative in the Australian colony seemed to be a contradiction in terms. Everything was so new; traditions belonged to the mother country. In Australia the golden age was widely thought to lie not in the past but in the future, and the old clamps on society had been taken off.
The squatters, pastoralists and banking men who were the elite and who expected to become the big political power with the advent of self-government (but who didn’t — refer to Chapter 8 for why) weren’t what you could call ‘conservatives’. No established traditional institutions existed for them to conserve, and they themselves were upstarts who had seized land and made money in the 1830s and 1840s.
With the granting of self-government and almost universal manhood suffrage through the 1850s, the crucial lower houses of colonial parliaments were controlled by liberals, radicals and workers. The upper houses, which maintained a more restricted franchise, were mostly controlled by the men with big money, and these became the main reactionary force the Colonial Liberals had to take on. (Refer to Chapter 8 for more on the granting of self-government and manhood suffrage, and its effects.)
Gaining power for the Colonial Liberalists
During the 1850s, near-universal manhood suffrage was granted throughout the Australian colonies (refer to Chapter 8). For these newly enfranchised voters — workers, radicals and the lower-middle class — the Colonial Liberals were speaking their language.
Colonial Liberals were in charge of governments in NSW, Victoria and South Australia by 1860, and the movement would remain dominant until the 1880s and 1890s. Individuals like John Robertson, Henry Parkes and George Reid in NSW, George Higinbotham, Charles Pearson and Graham Berry in Victoria, and, later, Charles Kingston in South Australia were politicians who helped develop various strands of this distinctive new political movement, promoting the continued development of prosperity for the working and middle classes, which constituted the vast bulk of the colonial populace.
Under the influence of Colonial Liberal politicians, Australian governments
Established state schools for all
Happily took on the role of raising money to invest in and build big infrastructure projects
Passed laws to try to establish small-scale farmers on the land, allowing them to pay less than market prices
Established customs taxes on imports to encourage the growth of local industries and raise crucial revenue without using income tax
Colonial radicals and Liberals who seized power and tapped into mass public support through the 1870s and 1880s were the people who laid down the planks of a newly emergent dynamic society that would eventually become the Federation of Australia, with its democratic institutions, its aggressively egalitarian streak and its insistence that a decent society owed everyone a ‘fair go’ in life — a good education and a chance at decent work with good wages.
The political hacks and visionaries — grocers, drapers, wine merchants, bankrupts, toy makers and radical lawyers alike — who grappled with new democratic life and self-government from the 1850s on were at least as extraordinary and unique a colonial phenomenon as the bushrangers and explorers (which you can read about in Chapter 9), but are nowadays less well known.
Intervening in the economy
One of the key debates in Australian politics, even in the mid 1800s, was how much say the government should have in the economy. If government could be made to raise money in London to build railways with extra-cheap freight costs, to create land departments that would try to engineer and oversee the mass settlement of ordinary people on small farm selections (see the preceding section), then why not use government intervention to build tariff walls to help build local industries and keep everyone in a good job?
Classic economic theory that was accepted in Britain in the mid 1800s held that the market could flourish if you eliminated state interference, and allowed the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces to realise the most effective and intelligent outcomes for all concerned. In Australia, that orthodoxy largely went out the window. Instead, the state began intervening extensively in the economy.
Colonial governments began to supervise land settlement, irrigation projects, the construction of public works and the implementation of tariffs. These governments secured half of the total foreign investment of capital into the colonies, investing it in rail and communications (telegraphs and post), water, funding education for all children and (eventually, when the smell and cholera deaths got too bad) on sewerage and sanitation. By 1900, the largest enterprises in the economy were held by the colonial governments.
Trains — Colonial Liberal style
With government involvement, railways expanded rapidly throughout the long boom decades. Unlike America, which had a similarly vast interior without much white settlement, the expansion of the railways was not handed over to private companies. In Australia, colonial governments were the big sponsors and organisers of railways in Australia — for most of the colonial period the biggest governmental department, and certainly the biggest source of contracts and jobs, was the Railways Department.
Workers at manufacturing companies, foundries and railway workshops found themselves gainfully employed producing engines and carriages. On the government payroll were
Administrative staff
Attendants
Conductors
Drivers
Maintenance crews
In the 1880s, railways began to fan out through newly developing suburbs in the major cities and into the surrounding rural areas. One classic (and notorious) example was the Victorian Railway Act of 1882 initiated by Thomas Bent, which boasted 52 lines — one for each electoral constituency! (For more on the expansion of the colonial railways, refer to Chapter 9.)
Tariffs
One of the best examples of the way the free-trade Liberals of Britain had to change their stripes when they adopted Colonial Liberalist ideals was in their adoption of customs barriers and excise taxes. Beginning in Victoria in the mid-1860s, and followed subsequently by most of the colonies apart from NSW, these tariffs were brought in to protect and encourage local industry, and to raise revenue.
Called ‘Protection’ (as opposed to free trade), one of its earliest proponents was David Syme, the owner and editor of The Age newspaper in Melbourne. Syme was later given the moniker ‘Father of Protection’, and it’s highly unlikely the protection movement would have ever have been translated into colonial legislation and law if Syme hadn’t devoted the energies of the cheap newspaper (only one penny a copy! Even in the 1860s that was remarkably cheap) with its vast circulation.
The argument made by Syme was that the conditions of colonial economic life were very different to those of established European societies, and therefore should be treated differently. Free exchange might be the best philosophy in the wider context, but on the colonial periphery where new societies and even newer industries were struggling to emerge, different rules should apply. In his 1876 book, Outline of an Industrial Science, Syme went further, arguing not just for protection but for active state intervention in economic life.
Syme’s argument was pitched to appeal to the working men and women who wanted jobs in the cities, in manufacturing and other related trades. And in Victoria it worked. In 1871, the tax rate in Victoria was lifted by then-Treasurer Graham Berry to 20 per cent on imports to encourage local manufacturing — boots, clothes, shoes, furniture, coaches and wagons, metal and leather goods. Victorian farmers were also protected from cheap produce arriving from other colonies or countries.
The protection argument didn’t work as well in NSW. This is because NSW had an alternative that Victoria locked. The other purpose of the tariff was to gather revenue to fund the big projects colonial governments were often involving themselves in. No tax on incomes or property was levied in colonial Australia, and if governments were going to continue to pour investment into infrastructure projects and public works programs, they needed the money to come from somewhere. Often the money came from large loans raised by colonial governments on the London money market, but the loans had to be paid back. In NSW, they could gather revenue from selling Crown land, but Victoria, being much smaller, had much less land to sell. They needed another revenue source, and no-one liked the idea of an income tax, so tariffs it was.
Protection’s long-term social impact was probably best described by James Service, a Victorian politician who had actually stayed an advocate for free trade. In 1889, 25 years after protection laws had first been brought in, he said that free trade produced more wealth, but protection meant it was distributed more evenly throughout the community. The preference of most colonies for protection over free trade showed the emerging attitude that would become known as egalitarianism. An equal share for most people seemed a better deal than cheaper goods for everyone combined with no attempts to establish and expand new industries.
The historical impact of the protection argument begun in the 1860s by David Syme — one newspaper editor in Melbourne — was prodigious. The policy of tariff protection against external imports was adopted after Federation by the Commonwealth Government, and the rules surrounding it were actually made more rigorous so that the benefits of industry protection were passed on to workers in the form of sufficiently high wages. This became part of the Australian Settlement, which you can read more about in Chapter 12, and made the country a kind of economic fortress until the tariffs finally began to be dismantled in the 1970s and 1980s. That’s one very long shadow cast by one newspaper editor!
Education – for everyone
The movement to refashion education tapped into a desire to make a new society in Australia that abolished the old class distinctions: ‘This being a new and free country, let us leave behind us all the superstitious nonsense of the old world’, declared Edward Cohen to the Victorian Parliament as it finally passed the ‘Free, Compulsory and Secular’ Education Act in 1872. South Australia followed in 1876. Henry Parkes’s Public Instruction Act in 1880 did the same thing in NSW. State assistance to denominational (or religious) schools ended.
Not everyone was impressed with the new education laws introduced in Australia in the 1870s. The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney attacked Parkes’s Bill, saying the new schools were ‘seedplots of future immorality, infidelity and lawlessness, being calculated to debase the standards of human excellence, and to corrupt the political, social and intellectual life of future citizens.’ But others were enthusiastic. In Victoria, future Premier Graham Berry enthused that ‘under the present system undesirable social distinctions are being annihilated. . .’ and the abolition of old class distinctions was more important than any potential religious divisions that might open up, because it was the class differences ‘which are the great barrier to true democratic progress’. Another future Victorian premier, James Service, stated emphatically ‘Let our motto be, Equal rights to all, Special privileges to none!’
The schools were not just for those who couldn’t afford private schools, but for children of all classes. Middle-class children, working-class children, and even some of the few upper-class children who lived in the colonies, all passed through the same school gates together, producing a strong sense of shared identity for the generation of ‘native-born’ Australians who were growing up as children of their largely immigrant parents.
To begin with Catholic parents (mostly Irish) were quite willing to send their children to the local state school, but the Catholic hierarchy felt strongly otherwise. Even though space in the curriculum was set aside for separate religious instruction for children of different denominations, Catholic prelates and bishops found this dangerously secular. They demanded that Catholic children go to separate schools and continue to receive state aid. The colonial governments flatly refused this, and an impasse ensued . . . which lasted another 90 years, until 1964, when state aid to private schools was resumed.
While the bishops and parliamentarians dominated the newspaper headlines, another, more profound, revolution was quietly taking place. With the institution of compulsory education for school-age children throughout colonial Australia, child labour largely came to an end — although it wasn’t until the 1890s that the compulsory attendance clauses were implemented strongly enough to eliminate all forms of child labour in the colonies. As children had to be in school, it was no longer permissible for young boys and girls to go straight into jobs. This alone gives the Acts a significance beyond simple education.