Sarah Irving investigates 1890s Australian republicanism through the Library’s Collection Australian republicanism is in crisis. Late last year, Lindsay Tanner, one of the most intellectual of the Labor Party’s federal parliamentarians, told the Lower House that ‘the glitz and glamour republic is a celebrity plaything of the elite, the Malcolm Turnbulls of this world’. This is an understanding that perhaps many Australians have of republicanism—that it is nothing more than the absence of monarchy, and that its promoters have a formalist agenda of adjusting the Constitution with little practical significance. Contrary to the impover-ished political discourseof today, however, in the nineteenth-century republicanism was a much broader and more complex tradition. Instead of an institutional arrangement in which the monarch is replaced with a president, nineteenth-century repub-licanism was a richer and holistic tradition of political life, sustained by the active involvement of citizens in the public sphere. My research would argue that this was a civic humanist republicanism—that is, it was the classical Roman tradition of republicanism, revived in the Renaissance and refracted through the subsequent centuries. The tradition was an ethos of active citizenship, enshrining the idea that good politics depended upon the virtus (virtue) of the citizens, who participated in lively public deliberation. This civic humanist republicanism, however, is now a neglected tradition. My recent research in the National Library brought a reconceptualisation of republicanism as an ethos of civic humanism, to bear upon and reinterpret the radical texts of the 1890s. I explored radical newspapers, the texts of voluntary associations, poetry, literature and even cartoons. There are three characteristics of republicanism which can be found in the radical literature of the 1890s: suspicion of institutions and the State; republican freedom; and ‘brotherhood’.
With regard to the first of these—suspicion of institutions and the State—Samuel Rosa’s dystopia The Coming Terror, published as a pamphlet in Sydney in 1895, prefigures Orwellian fear of postrevolutionary totalitarianism. In Rosa’s tale, the poor and destitute of Sydney are betrayed by the Caesar who emerges from the revolution as a dictator. In a chapter entitled ‘The New Garden of Eden’, a group of men flee the city of Sydney to the Great Sandy Desert, where they find an Indigenous community living in a state of nature. In a style that echoes the Renaissance Utopian author and civic humanist Thomas More, and the genre of Utopian literature about the ideal communities of the New World which More inspired, these ‘dwellers in the valleys formed a number of purely democratic self-governing communities’. Rosa’s explorers had discovered Utopia in the Great Sandy Desert, and Utopia was a self-governing republic! In true Ciceronian style, the Utopian republic had no institutions, but rather, Rosa writes: ‘when anything had to be done, the people met together in public meetings and discussed the matter.’ This was public deliberation at its most effective. Importantly, these ideas were not just the figment of Utopias. Authors of the 1890s recognised the existence of a civic consciousness, and wrote about it frequently. I’m reminded of Henry Lawson’s comment in an article titled ‘pursuing literature in Australia’. He wrote: ‘I watched old fossickers and farmers reading Progress and Poverty earnestly, and arguing over it on Sunday afternoons—after a week in the paddocks.’
In Rosa’s imagined republic, no institutions mediate the business of politics. Politics is about open, free public deliberation. The prospect of federation of the Australian colonies, then, was a dangerous one because it threatened to replace the small political communities of the colonies with a Leviathan—a federated state. I would argue that when we read carefully into the radical critiques of federation, we can see a civic humanist anxiety that a federal government will mediate politics with its extra arm of bureaucracy and institutions. Various studies of socialism recognise their frequently anti-state sentiment, yet there’s no intellectual history of Australian socialism, and thus no exploration of this quite specifically republican anxiety. The prospect of federation prompted the revival of an ancient republican language of citizenship in political discourse. Used to argue against federation, republicanism thus became a positive and alternative political tradition to liberalism and imperialism. Edward Winspear, writing in his newspaper The Radical in 1897, for example, showed that federation was contrary to the ideals of ‘responsible government’. In his colourful rhetorical style, he argued:
‘what sort of national nostrils have we, that the miasmic odours of such a putrefaction of our freedom do not affect them? Have you realised that federation is going to abolish responsible government? Do you realise that the federal government can march troops into New South Wales against the wishes of our people?’ The second characteristic of 1890s radicalism I explored, is the idea of freedom as the duty of political participation. This is an idea of freedom quite different from our contemporary liberal idea of freedom meaning the absence of constraints. The republican idea of freedom is that freedom is the duty and responsibility to participate in politics. I want to suggest that the socialist and radical press of the 1890s created a public sphere which challenged the bourgeois public sphere. This counter public sphere, I would argue, was articulated in a language of civic humanist liberty, which was not the absence of constraints but rather the duty and responsibility of equal participation in politics. In February 1898, the poet Bernard O’Dowd (writing in The Tocsin, under the pseudonym ‘Gavah’) exclaimed that, with federation: ‘liberty will be lost! Buried under a hundred clauses deep with nothing but an Act of the Imperial Parliament to mark out their resting place!’ Instead, he urged: ‘let there be a free conference, to bring the principles of Federation to the minds of the people’. The editorial three months later expressed the same concern, that public debate had not played any part in the formation of the Federation Bills: ‘Do they know that this will be the outcome of failing to consult with the people?’ In an article entitled ‘Not Yet! Freedom First, Then Federation!’, the editor of The Tocsin in May 1898 had a civic humanist suspicion of institutions mediating public debate:
Why are so many of us agitating, speechifying, debating, scribbling and struggling day after day, year after year? Is it not for that full liberty which we feel we do not possess? Yes, a thousand times, and shall we not thunder … that we shall first gain that full freedom before we accept any federation which falls short of it! When that socialist author and intellectual, Samuel Rosa, wrote his own pamphlet on federation, entitled Federation: An Exposure of a Federal Conspiracy (1898), he, too, was explicit that public deliberation was central to freedom, and precisely what was missing from the Bills proposed by Henry Parks and the Federation Committee: ‘It is convincing proof of the degeneration of public life these days that this most unconstitutional act of Sir Henry Parkes attracted little attention and caused less public comment.’
The third characteristic of much 1890s radicalism was an idea of socialism as ‘brotherhood.’ Hitherto, brotherhood has been historicised in the context of the Utopian socialist tradition. I would suggest, however, that the ideal of ‘brotherhood’ also has a civic humanist inheritance. This is because the idea of brotherhood enshrines the virtue of citizens as an alternative basis of government to the institutions and state which many socialists opposed. When we read carefully, though, we can see that the language of socialist morality is a language of civic virtues. In Bernard O’Dowd’s manuscripts there lies an unpublished poem, ‘How to Rise and Create the Socialist World’. O’Dowd frames his socialist solidarity in the language of brotherhood, as a way of ensuring virtue: ‘Working Men, pity your illpaid neighbour who works from dawn till evening late … speak out against the foreign yoke, we need moral training if we are to be brothers.’ Interestingly, there is a distinct sense in which radical newspapers play the role of educator. My research at the Library explored newspapers associated with a ‘reading’ public, which is often simply labelled as socialist: The Worker, The Hummer, The Tocsin, The Pioneer, The Brisbane Worker and Edward Winspear’s Newcastle paper, The Radical. These newspapers were not like the lifestyle-focussed snippets of information we find in the newspapers of today, nor were they like the elite papers of the 1890s. The radical newspapers were conceived as educative and mobilising. They taught citizens how to be moral, self-sufficient, and independent. The National Library’s resources help to illustrate that much of the radicalism of the 1890s had civic humanist lineage, and that the ‘republicanism’ of the period was more than just an explicit doctrine of replacing the monarchy. Reviving the rich historical traditions of republicanism is particularly important today, because we live in an era when many people are disillusioned with politics. SARAH IRVING was a scholar under the National Library’s 2003 Norman McCann Summer Scholars Program |
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