Australia: A New Political Geography?

Abstract

Some of the most eloquent advocates of Australian Federation in the 1890s imagined that there was nothing more natural than “a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation”, as the first prime minister, Edmund Barton, put it. The reality was more complicated, as the difficult process of achieving Federation revealed. Differences between colonies, and then states, really mattered. There was a gulf between north and south, east and west that was economic, political, physical and psychological. Above all, the settler ideal of a White Australia ignored Indigenous belonging and was made meaningful only through exclusion of Asian and Pacific peoples. This lecture explores recent transformation of the nation imagined by Barton into something that would likely have dismayed him and fellow Federation founders. The pandemic reminded Australians that soft state borders could quickly turn hard, that differences between states still mattered, and that state and territory government was embedded in everyday life in ways Australians had overlooked or underestimated. Meanwhile, Indigenous sovereignty offered a different kind of challenge to conventional understandings of settler sovereignty and national space. Australians, settler and Indigenous, have received a crash course in a new political geography inhabited by First Nations peoples, each increasingly recognised by name and Country, and each with culture, language and stories it proudly calls its own.