By the time the first parliament closed on 10 October 1902, thirty-eight acts had been written into the statute books and sixteen bills had been withdrawn or shelved. It required sixteen thousand-odd pages of Hansard, bound in twelve volumes, to contain all the words spilled in putting the new government in motion and setting the Commonwealth on its course.1
Henry Gyles Turner, assessing the first decade of the Australian Commonwealth in 1911, argued that the Immigration Restriction Act was the piece of legislation that most directly affected the workings of the Australian community. New Zealand statesman William Pember Reeves remarked that the grant of the suffrage by the Parliament of the Commonwealth in 1902 was chiefly noteworthy for the absence of any sort of alarm, fervid advocacy, or strong repugnance.2 Feminist journalist Bella Halloran celebrated the attainment of equal rights of women in politics but observed how silently the great fact has been accomplished: she noted a distinct lack of clamour in the press. More attention was being given to the prime minister’s trip to England for the forthcoming coronation of Edward VII.
Nothing to see here.
But the Commonwealth Franchise Act had a significant impact on the international reputation and standing of the new nation. Like Teddy Roosevelt, the rest of the world had its eyes trained on Australia. For there was something to see, and it was remarkable.
Australia’s world-leading status was soon touted by woman suffrage campaigners around the world. Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s NUWSS published a propaganda pamphlet intended to demonstrate to the British public, and recalcitrant members of the British Parliament, that the female franchise was neither a passing fad nor a quixotic thing of the future. The enfranchised woman, assured contributor Pember Reeves, is a triumphant, a real, an irrevocable she!
Female suffrage is an Anglo-Saxon institution of to-day; not a story of Utopia or the planet Mars or of some coming race, but one of the ordinary, every-day matters of political life amongst people who speak your language, who belong to your blood and race, and who are the subjects of Queen Victoria and citizens of the British Empire.3
This she! was not to be feared. She was no different from any British mother, daughter or sister. Because they have become citizens, verified Pember Reeves, they have not ceased to be women; their clothes still fit them well; their manners have not lost their feminine charm. The argument went that these two venturesome colonies had done the world a great favour, putting a toe in the great Southern Ocean and finding that the whole leg was not chewed off. Pember Reeves urged not vigilance, but valour.
I feel convinced that the boundless British courage which enables the male Briton to build up empires…to confront foes, to face savages…will enable them to meet even so alive and terrible a person as the Enfranchised Woman—when she comes.
Just as President Roosevelt had wanted to meet an enfranchised woman in person—and got his chance with Vida Goldstein—now Pember Reeves, only somewhat tongue in cheek, urged British men to have the balls to confront the enemy unflinchingly.
Sir John Cockburn, in a speech to the NUWSS reprinted in Mrs Fawcett’s pamphlet, described his arrival in London from South Australia in terms of time travel back to the mediaeval ages.
I come from a country where the women have enjoyed the exercise of the franchise for some years past, and we have so got used to it that it is quite strange to come to a country where one’s wife has not got the vote. (Laughter)
Cockburn’s self-referential aside was greeted with mirth, but his remark was strategically pointed. Why should your colonial sisters be privileged to come here and parade their plumes before the women of the old country? Why should you not have the advantages which the women in the colonies possess?
If reason would not work, perhaps sheer peacock pride would inspire the women of Britain to greater action.
Other commentators were similarly bemused that it was Australia, of all places, that had breasted the tape of female sovereignty first. Edith Palliser, an Irishwoman who was the co-secretary of the NUWSS and editor of its organ WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE RECORD from 1902–04, expressed the common disbelief that America was not leading the charge.
In the new world, the English colonies have granted full political rights to women, while America, which was the first to formulate the claim of self-government for all, still denies political rights to its women.4
American pundits were just as perplexed. One Boston journalist wrote in 1902 that psychologically, it is a curious problem that a phase of evolution so natural and logical as women’s suffrage should not have been first adopted in America…
a country which is a synonym for progress, liberty and enlightenment, and where resistance to taxation without representation is a historic slogan…while in a comparatively new country, which owes allegiance to a monarchy, the emancipation from the Oriental ideas of woman’s place is established without difficulty.5
How odd that the great Commonwealth at the antipodes should turn the tables and arrive on top! The characteristically self-satisfied Americans had to concede their democratic malfunction. The United States should have been the first nation to enfranchise its women, admitted the COMMERCIAL TRIBUNE, but we failed to live up to our principles.6 Some were not so much confounded as obliged. The Californian State Suffrage Association sent a letter to the Women’s Council of Australia, expressing its profound gratitude: Australia’s recent enfranchisement of her 800,000 women with eligibility to the national Parliament has given great encouragement to those of California.7
If Australia’s advances inspired activists, they also provided data for cold hard research. The burgeoning academic field of sociology was particularly interested in the social experiment of Australia. Australian sociologist Clarence Northcott, who was educated at the University of Sydney and later did a PhD at Columbia University published as AUSTRALIAN SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT, was quick to realise that his native country would attract considerable attention and be studied by men with careful research training in the social sciences. Australia, proposed Northcott, has worked out a unique and interesting experiment in democracy, one that revealed a characteristically reckless optimism. Northcott concluded from his extensive research that, while the psychology of a people was noteworthy in determining its social resourcefulness, it was more important to understand
such concrete factors as climate, rainfall, and the quantity and distribution of minerals…Only a country with potential wealth of natural resources widely distributed and fairly accessible can afford to conduct democratic experiments.8
Northcott further determined that Australia’s world-leading standing was due to the character of its women as well as its underground wealth. They have an instinctive desire to count, analysed Northcott, somewhere in the social process as an integer; that is, a thing complete in itself, an irrevocable she. Australian women, Northcott argued from his empirical sources, and presumably his personal experience, show a general reluctance to enter into any relationship which is not free, in which they cannot stand upon a basis of economic and personal independence.9 He ascribed much of this female tendency towards autonomy to the particular circumstances of Australian girlhood, one lived in the open air, the physical environment contributing to her fearlessness, her grit and her entire absence of artificiality and diffidence. Both Australian men and women were intolerant of special privileges and consequently had transformed English institutions into ones stripped of their traditional conservatism.
Alice Zimmern, an English scholar whose research culminated in her influential 1909 book WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE IN MANY LANDS, confronted the widespread impression that American women were the freest in the world. Yes, she admitted, they were enrolled in universities, entered professions and pursued a wider range of callings than women anywhere else, but for political freedom—the ultimate goal of awakened women everywhere—one had to cast the eye south. In Europe and America we may watch the struggles and aspirations after freedom, but we must turn to the Antipodes to see the achievement.10 Australia, argued Zimmern, was reaping the reward of having responded to the unanswered appeal of justice.11 Unanswered in all parts of the world other than Australasia.
The REVIEW OF REVIEWS, a suite of monthly journals established by British liberal journalist William Stead which operated from three international offices—London, New York and Melbourne—took particular interest in the Australian precedent. Women, it reported,
now have a larger and more direct share in the public affairs of the Commonwealth than in those of any other civilised State. What may be the effect of this cannot as yet be imagined, but sooner or later the effect must make itself visible, and it may well give a totally new complexion to Australian politics.
If outcomes were not yet apparent, one thing was crystal clear: The experiment will be watched all over the civilised world with curious interest.12
Whether it was through journalism, books, suffrage networks or social science reports, intelligence of Australia’s experiment in equality was broadcast globally. Jessie Ackermann summed up the tenor of the reporting.
When the spirit of democracy seemed to seize the people of Australia…the various States became the great experimental stations of the world [and]…the world fairly stood aghast.13
What did Australia make of all this attention? Did the new nation enjoy having its name up in lights?
The REVIEW OF REVIEWS certainly held that the southern states were enjoying their day in the sun.
If there is one thing about which all Australia and New Zealand are cocksure, it is that the purest type of democracy the human race has ever known flourishes today beneath Australian skies. From the eminence of that delightful conviction we look down with wild pity upon the rest of mankind who have not yet reached our level of political beatitude.14
To Percy Rowlands, an English-born teacher who worked in Queensland as a headmaster at the turn of the century and wrote two books on the Australian nation, such ‘blow’—skiting—remains a prominent Australian characteristic.15 Rowlands observed that the Australian was particularly sensitive to criticism of his country and somewhat vain of both its physical charm and of the mental and moral excellence of its inhabitants.16 His evidence of Australia’s mental and moral excellence: its record on women’s suffrage. That, and the great national self-conscious act of Federation. It was in the Australian child that the tendency to forward behaviour, as befitting such forward thinking, was most noticeable.
They look you as frankly in the face as the stars of a Southern night—no tremor of self-distrust, no shadow of fear or doubt, marring the open glance of those alert young eyes.
Rowlands noted the humourlessness of most of Australia’s public men, a trait that was particularly remarkable given the resourcefulness and cheerfulness that was the most striking characteristic of its women. All in all, he summed up, what a nation of nations the Commonwealth has it in her to become!17
It was for all these reasons that Vida Goldstein believed that Advance Australia really was the most fitting motto for her homeland. We Australians, she wrote, have good reason to glory in the advance of our country, which, in granting women absolute political equality with men, has reached a position unique in the world’s history.18
There was no shying away from the fact. In the eyes of the world, and in her own self-estimation too, Australia was no longer merely facing the dawn, waiting expectantly for the light to shine upon her. Australia was now carrying the torch, and marching boldly forth to ignite the flames of other political lanterns across the globe.
The New Woman was now, at least where Australasia was concerned, a voting woman. She had more than rhetoric and a bent umbrella on her side. And in the Commonwealth of Australia, she could be a legislating woman too. All it would take to put a woman in parliament was to find someone with the courage to throw her bonnet in the ring.
The dawn of a new century and a new nation. Daughter Australia graces the front cover of the Sydney birthday party celebration program, January 1901.
A young Dora Montefiore. Date and place unknown.
Nellie Alma Martel, elocutionist. Sydney, 3 April 1902.
Aspiring actress Muriel Matters, c. late 1890s.
Portrait of Dora Meeson accompanying the Australian Town and Country Journal article that announced her prizewinning artwork, Minerva.
Britannia and Minerva flank the invitation to the Great Day, 9 May 1901.
