Lily Tardent was an intrepid girl. At eleven years of age, she convinced her father to let her accompany him on his last hike of the year. Mr H. A. Tardent and his friend Mr J. E. Vance—both members of the Biggenden Alpine Club—were planning a climb to the top of Biggenden Bluff, 3000 feet above sea level and overlooking the rich plains of Queensland’s North Burnett. The climb was a five-hour round trip up a steep, winding goat track: arduous for adults and certainly gruelling for a child. But Lily had her mind set. The party reached the top by evening and, as the QUEENSLANDER reported, there they saw the setting sun of the 19th century.
But Lily, her father and Mr Vance had not made this trek to watch the orange and crimson bruise of the sunset. After dark—they were to spend the night on top of the mountain—they lit huge bonfires and hoisted on the top of an improvised cairn the Australian Federal flag. Next to it, Mr Tardent raised the flag of the Swiss Republic, his mother country by birth. According to Lily’s dad, these were the two freest and happiest flags in the world.
The party woke as the sun, like a huge ball of melting gold, emerged from the billows of the Pacific Ocean, and shed the first rays of its glory on the friendly flags of the oldest and the youngest confederation in the world.
This was no ordinary day and no ordinary sunrise. This was a sunrise for poets. A sunrise for patriots. Today was Tuesday 1 January 1901—and Little Lily Tardent was later credited with the honour of being the Australian who has first seen the rising sun of the Australian Commonwealth and of the 20th century.1
It fell to New South Wales, the ‘Mother Colony’, to host the official celebrations for the eventful trinity of the birth of a year, a century and also a nation.2 From New Year’s Day, there would be a whole week of rejoicing, with processions, pageants, illuminations, milestone events and a great deal of bunting. There would also be the swearing-in ceremony of the first governor-general, Lord Hopetoun. The crowning and final act of half a century of political evolution and of national aspiration,3 played out before tens of thousands of people in the sweltering January heat.
Elsewhere across the new nation—everywhere across it, in fact—Australia’s five million citizens came together to witness what one enthusiast called one of the most momentous events in human history. In his letter to the editor of the SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, New South Wales member of parliament E. W. O’Sullivan explained that the Commonwealth of Australia was destined to be the greatest power in the Southern world, the leader of liberty and progress, and the creator of a state of civilisation that all the world will be glad to follow.4
The BATHURST ADVOCATE was more sober, but no less confident in reflecting on how far the young nation had come: at the beginning practically an unknown land…mostly criminals…a few tribes of blacks, it had achieved a progress which is one of the chief marvels of the age.5
Australia’s federal unity was considered exceptional by world standards for one key reason: it had come about without slaughter. In other, older, countries the wavering corn has sailed over sunlit fields once red with blood, but with Australia it was not so.6 In Australia, to unite the colonies, to draft a constitution, to elect a provisional government—all this had occurred, it was said, without conflict, division or enmity. One may truly say, boasted the ADELAIDE OBSERVER, that never a drop of white man’s blood has been spilt in a white man’s war on the Australian Continent.7 (According to the OBSERVER, the Eureka Stockade, when the British military turned its rifles and bayonets on a community of white men and women refusing to pay their mining licence fees until such taxation afforded representation, was but a trifling exception to the rule that settler Australians were too busy with the hard practical duties of colonization…to think of flying at each other’s throats. The OBSERVER didn’t bother to reflect at all on the most basic process of colonisation: the murder, through dispossession and ‘dispersal’, of tens of thousands of Indigenous Australians.
All around the new nation in the optimistic summer of 1901, newspapers harped on the same story. Australia was the fairest of Britain’s daughters fair.8 On 1 January 1901 Dawn’s white Fingers now disclose the Day! Night has departed on her starry way.9 The miners of Broken Hill were treated to a lecture by the Reverend Angwin, who reassured them that Australia’s clean national life would provide an example to the entire world of that righteousness alone which can exalt a nation.10 The forces of right were white, and, like the dawn of day, they eradicated the darkness that lurked in the shadows.
The Adelaide CHRONICLE published a poem by Will X. Redman, alias Will Scarlet, titled ‘The New-Born Nation’. While fashionably turgid, it neatly captured the spirit of the age.
On a snow-white wild war-horse Australia sits on high…
In her strong right hand she holdeth, with a grip like the grip of Thor…
The flag of Federation, whose shaft is of glinting steel;
Ah! See, now the sun uprises with a glow like firelit gold,
With glory flooding a country where never a slave was sold.
With her new-born flag saluting, Australia greets the sun—
The bright sun of Federation, whose day hath at last begun.11
The virtue of a free birth, untainted by a history of bondage. A wild, untrammelled freedom. A white-hot glistening future, waved in the faces of a world shackled to the past. A new dawn.
The metaphors for purity and danger, for a bright future emerging from a dark past, came thick and fast, communicating something that generally went unspoken, but which the OVENS AND MURRAY ADVERTISER articulated in its coverage of the ‘Dawn of Australian Unity’: very few of the aboriginals are left to witness this our crowning day, to witness the triumph of the white race.12
It was, of course, demonstrably untrue that Australia’s First People had all but ‘died out’. But why let the facts get in the way of a good origin story?
The cover image of the New South Wales government’s official program for the inauguration events in Sydney draws on all these strands of artfully curated symbolism. The beautiful young Minerva, crouched on the shores of a wide brown continent, peeking out from behind the federation flag and the British flag. At her feet, the bounty of the Australian soil, native flora cradling the shields of the former colonies, now states. Minerva peers into the distance, where the rays of the dawning sun illuminate the shimmering Pacific Ocean. She is heralding the rise of Truth, Justice, Peace and Charity: the idealised woman embodying the idealised nation.
Australia was the Daughter Land represented by Minerva the virgin goddess, speaking to the civic virtue of nationhood and the morality of good government.13 As a self-consciously modern nation, Australia paradoxically drew on the tropes of antiquity to tell her story, knowing her citizens readily understood the visual code.14
But lest today’s readers confuse the imagery of patriotism with the ideology of republicanism, a further verse of Will Redman’s poem complicates the narrative.
I swear to be loyal to England, the mother that gave to me birth;
All the while she is Mistress of Ocean, until she is Queen of the Earth.
This is why Minerva shelters behind the dual flags of Britain and Australia as she watches the dawn of a new era. Australia’s freedom rested on her place in the British Empire, her security assured by ‘sharing the twin benefits of parliamentary democracy and imperial military protection’.15 The family of empire was a tight one. The new nation was now part of a British imperial cluster that included the colonies of South Africa, Canada and New Zealand as well as other territories under direct Crown rule, such as India. Minerva could do all the banner-waving she wished: she could not loosen the apron strings with the mother country. These daughters of the imperial mother, observed one contemporary, will share in the greater conclave of the nation and make manifest in counsel the blood-tie and common racial instinct.16
So there was no ambivalence about whether Australia was still part of the family circle—but had nationhood changed her kin status? What becomes of the daughter when she is no longer politically nubile?
Rudyard Kipling expressed the status anxiety in his wildly popular poem ‘The Young Queen’, first published in THE TIMES in October 1900 and syndicated in publications around the world, including the NEW-YORK TRIBUNE. Kipling’s Old Queen—England, but also literally Queen Victoria, who in 1901 was eighty-two and had been on the throne for sixty-four years—receives her daughter mounted on a ‘red-splashed charger’. (The blood is a legacy of the Boer War, not Australia’s frontier wars.) She asks:
How can I crown thee further, O Queen of the Sovereign South?…
Daughter no more but Sister, and doubly daughter so—
But lest it appear that Daughter/Sister Australia, in reaching her constitutional majority, may now enjoy an equality with Mother England, Kipling makes it clear where she stands in the hierarchy of empire:
And the Young Queen out of the Southland kneeled down at the Old Queen’s knee
And asked for a mother’s blessing on the excellent years to be.17
Australia was not a sovereign state. She could not make war or peace with foreign powers. To enter into treaties or even communicate with the leader of a foreign country, she required the consent of the Colonial Office. According to the wonderfully titled ‘doctrine of colonial repugnancy’, no Commonwealth laws could be at odds with British legislation. Australia might be classified as a self-governing dominion, but Kipling was quite accurate to depict her kneeling for her mother’s blessing—notwithstanding the fact that the old girl wasn’t quite what she used to be.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the British Empire was past her prime. Despite having 398 million subjects, she had been overtaken militarily by European rivals, and outdone industrially by the United States and Germany.18 With the empire in geopolitical decline, it was more important than ever to keep up appearances. On big family occasions, each member knew exactly where to sit and how to behave at the imperial table. And there was no bigger festivity than the Commonwealth of Australia Inauguration Day. Future prime minister Alfred Deakin dubbed 1 January 1901 the birthday of a whole people.19
It was a moment for anticipation and expectation. In her autobiography, Thirty Years in Australia, the novelist Ada Cambridge remembered the occasion of Federation as a turning point:
On the last day of 1900 I sat at my writing window to watch the drop of the time-ball that regulates all the government clocks…I cannot describe the state of tension we were in, the sense of fateful happenings that possessed that day…Australia believed herself on the threshold of the Golden Age.20
Indeed, the turn of the twentieth century was a watershed moment for the women’s movement the world over. English suffragist Alice Zimmern described a universal awakening of women and a universal appeal to the world to recognise that women as well as men are people.21 The theme of women waking up to the wonders of their own potential, and the horrors of their debasement, would inform suffrage art and literature around the world. Political ignorance and self-effacement were to be relegated to the dark, cocooned days of the past. In 1899, the popular American writer Kate Chopin titled her new novel THE AWAKENING. It is the story of a woman’s journey of self-discovery as she struggles to reconcile the constraints of motherhood with her desire for freedom and sexual independence—symbolised by learning to swim—and ends with her suicide in the ocean. That may all sound trite to modern ears, but at the time of its release, THE AWAKENING was explosive, panned by (male) critics and adored by young fans.
If women were waking to their own power, they were doing so in the illuminating rays of a new era of hope and optimism. The arts and crafts of the period—jewellery, ceramics, stained glass and graphic art—all draw on a common visual language: a bugler heralding the dawn; a sun rising on the horizon, the words Votes for Women encircling it. Sunrise over the sea became a significant feature in feminist iconography reflecting the aspirations of international womanhood.22
The cover of the literary journal SHAFTS featured on its cover a girl goddess before a rising sun. Light comes to those who dare to think, was the journal’s motto, and a poem appeared on the cover:
Oh swiftly speed, ye Shafts of Light,
All round the shadows fly;
Fair breaks the dawn; fast rolls the night
From Woman’s darkened sky.
Speed, light, forward motion: such were the characteristics of the Coming Woman.
Not that you would know it from the popular characterisations that appeared in the press. Louisa Lawson, mother of the famous bard Henry, wrote an article called ‘The New Woman’ for her newspaper THE DAWN in May 1899, summarising the vilification to which this archetype was subjected. Of the limited number of stock-butts for the funny man’s witticisms, Lawson wrote, perhaps the New Woman is the most profitable.
It should be easy to recognise her, with her hard face, big feet, spectacles, and the ‘gigham’ [umbrella], which she flourishes as she talks and bangs over the heads of men when they do not agree with her. Although unsexed she has a husband and numerous family, which she systematically neglects, particularly the baby.23
Australian publications such as the BULLETIN (to which Henry Lawson contributed his verse), painted modern women as hysterical, malicious liars with diseased imaginations and an innate desire to harm men.24 They were the winter-faced women and the flat-chested sisterhood.25 Puritanical. Irrational. High on rhetoric; low on logic. At once childlike and animalistic. More akin to ‘the servile races’ than upstanding Anglo-Saxon men.
Real new women, as opposed to the cartoon or allegorical version, were encouraged though publications like SHAFTS and THE DAWN towards affectionate parenting, companionable marriage, higher education, outdoor exercise and ‘rational dress’—the abandonment of whalebone stays and crinolines in favour of gowns tailored for a natural figure and, in some cases, the bifurcated skirts and tunics known as bloomers.
Women were also emboldened to take their newfound social confidence into the domestic sphere, and particularly the bedroom, in order to protect themselves from men’s perceived and legal sexual entitlements. At the turn of the twentieth century men could and did take their wives to court to enforce their conjugal rights, obtaining judicial orders to ‘return’ non-complying wives to the waiting arms of their husbands.26 Sexual freedom, however, was not a widespread feminist goal at this time. The feminist line on the body was rather: self-government for women and self-control for men. At the time of Federation, sovereignty in Australia was both a national and a women’s issue. The political has always been personal.
But if the New Woman was ridiculed, the suffragists had a few satirical tricks up their own sleeves. Feminist artists depicted the anti-suffragists as the folk character Dame Partington, trying ‘in vain to sweep back the tide of New Dawn pro-suffrage women blessed by the rays of the rising sun’.27 In England, a humorous postcard by suffragist Ernestine Mills appropriates Mrs Partington and her mop, the folkloric symbol of futility: like Sisyphus, only female. Here The New Mrs Partington is repelling waves whose crests are labelled professional women, mothers, working women, medical women, liberal women, conservative women, taxpayers, factory workers, writers, civil servants.28 A tidal wave of change threatening to wash away the worn-out footprints of custom.
In Norway, suffrage activist Gudrun Drewson predicted that On the whole, we begin to see the glory of the rising sun, which will give us, within a little while, the bright, clear day. It was in Australia, noted American journalist Jessie Ackermann, where the twin tides of feminism and federalism surged together, that women could most feel the dawn of conscious power which has come upon them.29
The national birthday cake being served in Sydney on 1 January 1901 wasn’t an appeasement. As we shall see, for Australia’s white women, it was sweet reward for timely effort.