Australian remoteness from mother England shaped its colonies’ economic and hence national development through World War I, if not the 1960s. All their primary activities depended on transoceanic connections and technologies.
Aside from transportation, Botany Bay afforded England opportunity to participate in Asian piracy and smuggling, while Norfolk Island’s supply of flax was promising for sail and cord sought by the British navy. For settlers, navigable waterways surpassed arable land in value: Flinders’ locating a way through the Torres Straights unlocked a better route to India and the Cape of Good Hope. Bengali goods often went to Sydney; supply ships later went to China for tea. In 1814 Britain exported £100,000 of cotton to Indian Ocean sites plus Canton; the trade then grew eleven-fold in 7 years. Asian exchange hastened New South Wales’ transition to free settlement. Trade routes also led to military outposts, notably Hobart and Launceston in soon-to-be Van Diemen’s Land (i.e., Tasmania) and Victoria, forming the basis of Britain’s claiming the continent. Interior settlement was secondary.
By the 1830s Australia was more shipping terminus than a self-sufficient settlement, links to Europe surpassing those to Asia, the exports comprising wool and whale oil (during its ascendancy in the 1840s). The latter was a free man’s calling, but the trade was cut short by the gold rushes, which as in San Francisco lured away men on arrival in Hobart and Melbourne. (NB: Boston and Salem whalers had no tradition of grog.)
The lack of inland waterways explains the hub-and-spoke tradition later seen also in railway expansion. Wool and wheat were expensive to ship amongst the colonies, for which reason mining was initially ignored. Wool was 10 times more valuable than wheat, immediately worth sending to the UK while fostering centralization in the coastal cities. Sheep runs, stretching from Brisbane to Melbourne, a span equal to Boston to New Orleans, were often a half- or full day’s ride apart, such that few regional towns grew up. Immigrants therefore tended to look for work in the seaports because the inland cost of living was high, due to transport and lack of services for women and children. The towns also manufactured cheap goods.
Gold was the main export of the 1850s-60s, supplanting and replaced in turn by wool. The ‘circle route’, west around Antarctica, was more important in the 1850s than the Suez Canal in the 1870s (map p.180). Its debut coincided with fast American clippers, suited for the ‘high latitudes’ notwithstanding the risks of icebergs and uncharted islands. Ideal trips extended from Australia to China to collect tea for return to England. The trade fueled emigration, as Chinese ships were incapable of ocean journeys. [NB: Most Chinese immigrants to America came from the southern tea ports.] Nonetheless, Suez came to replace the circle route as gold and wool warranted the shortcut’s high charges and emerging steamships. By the 1880s steamers dominated coastal Australian shipping but not yet the European routes; mails and gold predominated as the London-Melbourne run halved to 45 days, helped by European trains.
In the 1830s Australian colonies began selling land to immigrants and by extension consolidating squatters, creating funds to subsidize immigration. Queensland was most assiduous, wishing to shun tropical (Chanak) labor. By the late 1840s freemen surpassed convicts. The undertaking was necessary to compete with cheaper migration to North America.
The first Geelong railway ran to Melbourne not the northwest goldfields, unprofitably and ultimately selling to the Victorian government. By 1860 most railways (save Melbourne’s city lines) were publicly owned. Unlike the US and Europe, Australia relied on public subsidy to build her rails, the colonies looking to unlock their interiors (but not those of rival colonies). There were three separate gauges, the narrowest being nimblest in the hills. Cargo featured imports sent inland and primary goods for export. Farming came to rely on rails: South Australia’s pair of peninsulas shortened transport of wheat, making it the Aussie granary over the 1850s-70s; the other states of the ‘southeast boomerang’ followed suit; as cost fell, Australia came to supply Europe.
The fastest steamers to Australia in the 1890s were German, a sign of her rising power or of British decline. Ships remained the primary means of alleviating Australia’s isolation as late as the 1960s, when air travel – already domestically important – and telecoms came to the fore. Shipping costs continued declining because of the Suez shortcut (hence Menzies’ interest) and the shift to oil. Cars were domestically important – holidays no longer depended on the rail terminus – and Australia surrendered self-sufficiency in transport fuel in the 1950s. Governments sought to prop up their interests in rail shipping through the 1960s via subsidized rail charges, neglecting to build or repair roads, rationing fuel, and tax; such policies were found unconstitutional in 1954.
World War I and the interwar years are treated lightly; World War II, though threatening to isolate Australia, stimulated her economy, which gained in the postwar even as British trade halved. Thus Blainey’s thesis seems to lose steam as the 20th century wears on. The final chapter detours into sociocultural discussion of immigrant waves, seemingly to point out eastern European and then Asian migration was bound to surpass British arrivals. Notwithstanding, a well-sketched view of pre-Federation Australia.
Aussie mateship, a collectivist ideal, held that men should be loyal to the others with whom they lived and worked, rooted in the idea of the country as a man’s land. The tradition ran strongest in the interior, and was taken up by the Labor Party after 1900. Education was seen as spurning mateship, as snobbery not self-improvement.