Australia and the United States: Comparisons and Conjunctures Between Settler Societies in the Pacific World

David Neumann

     In the midst of numerous centennial commemorations of World War I, tributes to the veterans of the Battle of Hamel on the Western Front have provided an opportunity for Australia and the United States to celebrate a "century of mateship."¹ The Australian embassy touts this relationship, which has continued since the war and has extended beyond military alliance to include trade and cultural exchange.² The American State Department also affirms the deep bonds of affection the two nations have long shared.³ More than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement, the secure relationship was recognized through the practical expedient of a special visa category that enabled Australian professionals to easily work in the United States. But even as both acknowledge the reality of a connection of long duration, the tone of the discussion bears the unmistakable earnestness of a pleasantly-surprising recent discovery.⁴ In reality, the links between the two began well before 1918 and are rooted in fundamental realities that transcend comradeship-in-arms.         

     These connections, however, have been obscured by robust cultural traditions of exceptionalism in both Australia and the United States that have placed emphasis on the ostensibly unique development of each since the nineteenth century. Comparative historians have sometimes noted the irony that these "unique" features, such as the formative influence of a frontier setting, are strikingly similar.⁵ Indeed, few nation states have a more remarkable combination of similarities than Australia and the United States. Both states emerged from English-speaking British colonies with a population base that, while primarily English, was ethnically diverse. Both developed a strong ethic of independence shaped by distance from the metropole and the migration of commoners and the "middling sort" with few if any members of the nobility. Both have a tradition of hardy character shaped by white farming and grazing in the western frontiers, sometimes with the government's permission and often simply as squatters. This aggressive settlement, along with cultural and religious notions of superiority, led in both cases to troubled histories of racial violence and the displacement of indigenous populations. Various forms of unfree labor, often justified by the race and supposed civilizational development of laborers, facilitated economic expansion.⁶

     More importantly, upon closer inspection, many of these similarities actually reflect historical intersections. As Richard Bulliet observed long ago, connections are as important as comparisons. Bulliet described "conjunctures" as "points in time and place when circumstance leads different parts of the world to become connected or to change their relationship in significant ways."⁷ Conjuncture with the United States has been a feature of Australia's history since its beginnings as a European settlement.

     Though aspects of each nation have long been compared, their many similarities—and, more importantly, their intersections—have rarely been systematically investigated. Australia and the U.S. can be analyzed within the historiographic categories of two major bodies of ocean-basin scholarship. Ocean-basin scholars see large bodies of water not as barriers but as water-based highways of connection or exchange—primarily economic, but also cultural, social, and biological. ⁸ The similarities between the United States and Australia, largely shaped by their heritage as settler colonies, fit heuristically within the bounds of Atlantic World scholarship.⁹ This rubric is not generally applied to Australia, inasmuch as it did not develop historically within the Atlantic circuit. But the patterns of settlement in British North America fit Australia remarkably well. Both were deeply shaped by their foundations as English colonies, by ongoing connections to the metropole—and by the distance from the metropole that fostered tension and a sense of autonomy.

     Conversely, the conjunctures between the two largely reflect the emergence of an integrated Pacific World, the last of the major sea or ocean basins to develop, roughly two centuries ago.¹⁰ Within the Pacific World, connections between the United States and Australia intensified—from gold rushes and immigration, to concern about modern Japan's growing power, to alliances during and after World War II, to robust trade. As the United States became a major economic and increasingly industrial power in the nineteenth century, it played a central role in the emerging Pacific World, gradually drawing Australia into its orbit. A central part of this story is the way similarities became conjunctures. From the early nineteenth century, Australians noticed similarities to their older cousins and often intentionally imitated them, which in turn deepened the family resemblances between them.

     This begs the question of why these similarities—and, more importantly, the conjunctures—often go unnoticed. There are two reasons for this. First, despite the many similarities explored in the article, profound differences in environment and location have nevertheless deeply shaped subsequent relative population size and global influence. Second, a process of historical forgetting has helped to blunt recognition of similarities and conjunctures. At the very moment in the late nineteenth century when increased American power was drawing Australia more deeply into its orbit, Australians joined the rest of the world in formulating a sense of national identity rooted in a unique landscape, history, and culture. In this identity formation process, Australians ignored and sometimes intentionally buried their earlier admiration for the U.S. and cultural borrowing from it.¹¹

     This article will explore comparisons and connections between the two in five periods. These periods reflect significant turning points in the history of each, as well as key points of contact between them: (1) Foundations: Race, Empire, and the Formation of Neo-Europes, to 1820 CE, (2) Contested Democracy: Manifest Destiny, Modern Economy, and Reform, 1820–1860, (3) Forging Nations: States in a Global, Industrial Era, 1860–1900, (4) Global Connections: World War and Depression,1900–1945, and (5) Globalization: 1945–present. The end of the article will examine the major differences and divergences between the two that help explain why the likenesses between them are often not readily apparent; this will include a brief foray into environmental conditions in Australia and North America that prompted divergences millennia before European settlement began in either location.

Foundations: Race, Empire, and the Formation of Neo-Europes, to 1820 CE

Parallel Origins

     In both Australia and North America, indigenous groups settled the continent by migrating across the Asian landmass and over a land bridge exposed by lowered sea levels as a result of an ice age. Aborigines first arrived in Australia around 50,000 years ago; Native Americans migrated across the Bering Strait perhaps as far back as 13,000 BCE. As sea levels rose, those land bridges eventually disappeared, isolating both landmasses from the Afro-Eurasian landmass long before dramatic transformations took place there, including the development of agriculture, the formation of complex societies, and the emergence of Axial Age religious traditions. For each indigenous population, there were few animal candidates for domestication, except a species of dog used for hunting, protection, and as a beast of burden.¹²

     In the early modern period, new societies in North America and Australia shared several features as British-sponsored colonial ventures on their respective edge of each continent.¹³ Colonists often viewed themselves as sharing an Anglos-Saxon identity, which included a bounded set of religious and legal traditions.¹⁴ In the age of sail, both colonial settlements experienced the "tyranny of distance" from England,¹⁵ a distance that inevitably fostered a sense of distinctiveness from the motherland.¹⁶ Anglo-Christian culture shaped the reaction to these unfamiliar environments, eliciting a combination of awe and fear at the landscape, alternately envisioned as a howling wilderness or a new Eden, both rooted in biblical tropes.¹⁷ Visions of paradise were aided by the parklike conditions Europeans experienced thanks to regular burning of the underbrush by Native Americans and Aborigines.¹⁸ As the English established their footholds, they used quasi-legal concepts to claim sovereignty over large portions of each landmass, finessing the rights of prior inhabitants through specious legal claims, including the principle of terra nullius.¹⁹ Native peoples, who viewed land and resource access from the perspective of usufruct rather than ownership, contested the worldview and legal tradition of their new European neighbors.²⁰

     Despite grandiose claims, initial outposts in the Chesapeake and Massachusetts Bay, in Port Arthur and Hobart, proved woefully inadequate, with settlers lacking both the skills and resources to thrive in the new land. Settlers often relied on native peoples, soliciting their aid or stealing their food. Such theft often soured relations that had shown early potential for mutual benefit with routine trade and diplomatic exchanges, cemented with sexual partnerships between indigenous women and European men.²¹ British intellectual traditions predisposed settlers to view native peoples with contempt as uncivilized. Paradoxically, however, settlers also expressed grudging admiration for "savages" untouched by the enervating effects of civilization.²² Indigenous people sometimes viewed newcomers as otherworldly visitors, but always as invaders. The parties exchanged both goods and sporadic acts of violence, which broke into outright warfare within a few short years of British settlement.²³

     Shortly after European settlement, the importation of domesticates contributed to tensions with native peoples even as it began a transformation of the landscape.²⁴ For settlers in America, it was initially hogs that destroyed Native crops and then sheep and cattle,²⁵ while sheep were the primary villains in Australia, eroding river banks, eating native grasses, and fouling water supplies. Rabbits, carried by the First Fleet for food, became an invasive species first in Tasmania and then in New South Wales, destroying crops and desertifying grassland areas.²⁶ Much more significantly, the relative isolation of native peoples from the majority of the world's population had shielded them from endemic diseases that resulted from routine close contact with domesticated animals. In the wake of European settlement, indigenous peoples were afflicted by "virgin soil epidemics."²⁷

     Aided in part by the weakened resistance of Native peoples, British settlers gradually migrated from their respective footholds on the Eastern seaboard of the continent and spread westward into the foothills and low mountains. In part by exploiting existing indigenous footpaths, around the turn of the eighteenth century settlers carved out rough trails across the mountain ranges that had previously functioned as barriers to settlement.²⁸ Native peoples resisted encroachment and exploitation, sometimes violently, often employing similar strategies against pastoral and agrarian settlers, such as raiding farmhouses and burning crops.²⁹

     Bound labor was common in the premodern world, and English workers were the primary initial labor force, though enslaving fellow Englishmen had long been forbidden and the "rights of Englishmen" included a theoretical expectation of fair treatment.³⁰ Novel forms of bound labor for Englishmen made economic development possible in both colonial regions. In mainland North America and the Caribbean, indentured servitude was essentially invented to solve a dual need to pay for the costs of transport and to meet labor demands.³¹ In Australia, a penal colony based on convict labor was an innovative solution to the problem of overcrowded English jails and Thames hulks, as well as the need to people a remote outpost to keep it out of the hands of rival European powers.³²

British Empire as a Conjuncture

     These two British colonial regions were decisively shaped by a key conjuncture: the Seven Years War. Parliament's taxation policy, enacted to finance the war and maintain the peace afterwards, created the rift between Britain and her mainland North American colonies that led to American independence. The contest with France also fueled a desire for control of the Pacific Ocean.³³ It was to explore this vast and, for the time being, uncontested region that James Cook undertook his 1770 Endeavor expedition, which led to the establishment of an Australian colony. The year 1788 was of fundamental significance for both. It marked the arrival of Sydney's First Fleet, which deposited more than a thousand convicts, soldiers, and sailors at Botany Bay before the group resettled thirty miles north at Port Jackson, among the best natural harbors in the world and, seemingly, a more conducive location for settlement. The same year also represented a new start for the United States: ratification of the Constitution created a strong national government and thereby put an end to the loose federalism that had threatened the nation's dissolution under the Articles of Confederation. This moment also represented a conjuncture in a more direct way. Transporting convicts to Sydney Cove replaced North American colonies as a dumping ground for criminals. More importantly, Parliament's determination to found a colony in Australia was partly a response to the recent loss of its mainland North American colonies in the Revolution, prompting a pivot away from a reduced Atlantic empire and toward a prospective Pacific one.³⁴

     Australia and the United States were both children of intellectual modernity. The late eighteenth century in which they were born marked the culmination of the age of Enlightenment. Both future nations were deeply shaped by this context and its discourse of rationalism, science, improvement, and the assumption of natural rights for citizens. It was in part the scientific quest of James Cook's earlier expedition in 1770 that had led to British exploration of New Holland's east coast.³⁵ The young United States was deeply shaped by Enlightenment principles as well, reflected in Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson's love of science, and in the notion of limited government and the rights of citizens, enshrined in the Constitution's architecture and in the Bill of Rights.

     Despite independence for the U.S. and Australia's vast distance from the metropole, both societies remained in the grip of the British economy. Britain's consumer revolution fueled colonial Americans' desire for coffee, tea, and porcelain, as well as the consequent resentment over taxation that limited access to those goods.³⁶ American thirst for these goods did not end when political ties to the motherland were cut. Australians, too, began to crave those consumer goods just as soon as they earned enough to begin to afford them.³⁷ The desire to emulate metropolitan culture drove consumption, giving rise to "middle-class gentility," an attempt to present oneself to friends and acquaintances as a respectable individual common to both places.³⁸ Though gentility was the "common currency of an international, English-speaking middle class,"³⁹ the anxiety of colonies and former colonies drove this aspirational imitation with a similar frenzy.

     If the young United States faced west toward the continent's interior, it already had one toe in the Pacific through whaling and trade with China. Whale oil was essential to the smooth operation of textile machinery and factory lighting, as well as a host of products from corsets to perfume. Before long, enterprising Australians would also take part in this Pacific World circuit, plying the same waters and calling at the same ports. By the time Sydney was founded, American vessels were stopping by Port Jackson for provisions.⁴⁰

Contested Democracy: Manifest Destiny, Modern Economy, and Reform, 1820–1860

Similar Democratic Impulses

     In early nineteenth century America, a nation born out of a rebellion and lacking an inherited nobility, "democracy" began to take on a positive connotation for some, though for conservatives it retained its earlier associations with anarchy.⁴¹ Even more, elites in convict-based Australia remained suspicious of an ideology that might foment mob rule. In many American states, criteria for election to the legislature became more egalitarian, for example, through removal of property requirements for officeholders.⁴² From the early nineteenth century, New South Wales inched toward local representative government, gaining momentum after transport of convicts effectively ended in 1842. In 1850, British Parliament paved the way for not only New South Wales, but South Australia, Tasmania, and Victoria to draft constitutions that created individual parliaments with bicameral legislatures.⁴³

     In both countries, the democratic impulse was narrowly circumscribed. Lobbying for the franchise was assumed to mean universal male suffrage; despite the later fame of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, women's rights remained a distinctly minority concern.⁴⁴ Rights were also typically articulated in racialized and ethnoreligious terms.⁴⁵ By mid-century, English majority populations in both places were being joined by increasing numbers of German and Irish immigrants. The majority of Irish immigrants as well as some Germans were Catholic.⁴⁶ Protestants in areas of high immigration panicked at the prospect of a wave of Popery overtaking the country, particularly through the ballot box.⁴⁷

     Westward migration furthered democratic and individualistic beliefs and sometimes realities. A series of overland expeditions, led both by private citizens and government agents, sought to map out the interior of each continent, often with the assistance of native peoples. They hoped to identify viable transportation routes, natural resources, and possible locations for settlement.⁴⁸ Parties in both regions were disappointed by their riverine discoveries: the Rockies prevented a viable northwest passage to the Pacific, while the Australian continent lacked a water-borne route to the continent's lamentably arid interior.⁴⁹ Nevertheless, inland settlement advanced. By 1850, nearly fifteen percent of the colony's population was squatting in districts outside the established counties of New South Wales, while one third of the American population lived west of the Appalachians by 1840.⁵⁰  Each settler group established a rough demarcation between white settlement and native lands that fueled romanticized notions among later scholars and others of a national character shaped by the frontier experience.⁵¹

     Settlement often ran ahead of government policy and squatters claimed the right to settle on land in the federal domain. Agricultural and pastoral lands expanded with settlement, serving primarily a commercial role, though some subsistence farms were also established. In Australia, wool became the most productive primary export staple, while in the American South, cotton served that role. However ambivalent government agents may have felt about unsanctioned settlement, they simultaneously facilitated it by investing in road construction and military expeditions against native peoples. Both frontiers saw bloody clashes and massacres, from the Black War and the Pinjarra massacre, to Tecumseh's uprising and the Seminole Wars. Indigenous peoples, often suffering catastrophic population loss, made peace with former enemies in common cause against white encroachment.⁵²

     In these rapidly-changing societies, the ideal of equality (at least of opportunity) as the ethos of self-made men took hold in both societies. Social and physical mobility created status anxiety and the need to assert one's value, as traditional measures of status disintegrated.⁵³ But reality belied the rhetoric of equality and opportunity. American wage labor, which began to replace family-based systems of apprenticed bound labor, often amounted to "wage slavery." Australian convicts who received a ticket of leave or outright freedom as an incentive for improvement typically found limited opportunities, as their former status continued to haunt them. And despite the gradual emergence of modern industrial work regimens, preindustrial work rhythms—and forms of entertainment—persisted.⁵⁴

     Often inspired by democratic and voluntaristic evangelicalism, middle-class reformers sought to remake their social institutions, destabilized by rapid economic and demographic change, in more godly ways.⁵⁵ Women led the effort to achieve "respectability" through temperance laws, compulsory Sabbath breaks, and public education, though reform was slowed in Australia in the first decades of the early nineteenth century by the relative paucity of women, particularly middle class Protestants.⁵⁶  In both places, the diversity of Protestant denominations and the resistance of Irish and German immigrants, who saw public schools as subtly-veiled attempts at Protestant indoctrination, hampered the establishment of public education. Alongside social improvement efforts through education, humanitarian approaches to often brutal physical punishments for crime took hold in both locations as well.⁵⁷ And evangelical humanitarians, however paternalistic, protested the mistreatment of indigenous people and their displacement while attempting to evangelize them.⁵⁸

     On a larger scale, South Australia, chartered by Parliament in 1834 as a "paradise of dissent," in the words of one scholar, was launched with the hope of being "a land free from political patronage and the evils of a privileged church."⁵⁹  The colony was a model of a planned, orderly, moral society—a non-convict settlement built on Christian principles, a contrast to Sydney as well as a latter-day echo of Puritan Massachusetts as a "city on a hill" free from Anglican domination.⁶⁰

The Global Market as Conjuncture

     Early nineteenth-century parallels in development between Australia and the U.S. were not lost on some contemporaries. Indeed, American democracy often served as a model (or a warning) to Australians. In 1819, William Wentworth, a leader of the pioneering expedition over the Blue Mountains, published a study comparing Australia favorably with the United States—and warning the Colonial Office of another Tea Party if New South Wales was denied political autonomy.⁶¹ Wentworth was not alone in seeing the US as a significant analogue. The Australian governing classes regularly associated republicanism with American democracy.⁶² Australian radicals also saw direct parallels to their own experiences, albeit with a less jaundiced eye than their elite counterparts.⁶³ Victorian miners outraged by license fees for digging and other issues constructed the Eureka Stockade in 1854 and read their own "Declaration of Independence."⁶⁴

     The economic transformations that caused upheaval in both regions—and the religious responses to them—were largely conjunctures as well. Reform efforts in both countries were inspired in large part by the explosion of evangelicalism, a transatlantic flow between Britain and the U.S.; British colonies in Australia were drawn into this stream as well.⁶⁵ In the U.S. evangelicalism merged with burgeoning democratic values, spurring a desire to uplift common people.⁶⁶ Some Australian reformers wanted to see American reform models for themselves. George William Rusden, for example, admired Horace Mann's school innovations in the Boston area and visited the U.S. to learn about them as a guide for Australian reform.⁶⁷

     If evangelicalism was in part a reaction to the dramatic economic transformations being wrought in each country, those transformations were each significantly driven by British industrialization. American cotton production and Australian wool production primarily fed the ravenous English mills of the era. The emergence of a market-based economy produced dramatic economic growth as well as sharp economic downturns in cyclical boom-bust cycles that would become a regular feature of capitalistic societies. Economic upheaval prompted demographic upheaval as Europeans relocated around the globe. In a world increasingly characterized by global migration, many in Australia also had family members in the United States, helping to deepen ties of sentiment between the two.⁶⁸

     Another economic development fueled this economic growth. While the Gold Rushes that took place in California, New South Wales, and Victoria seem merely serendipitous, they represent a conjuncture, as Australian veterans of the California Gold Rush returned home looking for mountain streams similar to those flowing out of the Sierra Nevadas.⁶⁹ When these hunches bore out, the same phases of panning, sluicing, and strip mining employed in the American West were often adopted in Australia, with comparable exploitation of native peoples and degradation of mountains, streams, plants, and animals. The nearest ports—San Francisco and Melbourne—swelled quickly into full-blown cities. For California, this meant a remarkably quick shift from territory to state—which quickly embroiled it in national debates over slavery—and in Australia a growing sense of independence from Britain. Gold also increased both countries' buying power and flooded the global market.

     Chinese laborers came to work the goldfields as well and in the same configurations: gangs, indentured laborers, and free people. Indeed, some migrated from California to Australia. White intolerance of Chinese "degeneracy" (gambling and opium smoking), communal mining techniques, strange language and dress, and non-Christian religion often flared into outbreaks of violence. The gold rush circuit created similar cultural effects as well. In both places, key figures warned about the dangers of the unrestrained pursuit of wealth and the lack of order in overwhelmingly male-dominated societies detached from domestic connections and dependent on imported food. Reformers attempted to restrain the most violent and licentious behavior.⁷⁰ Holding a more optimistic view, many Americans in the goldfields encouraged their Australian counterparts to believe that the prospect of wealth apart from inheritance promised Australia a republican future.⁷¹ Even popular entertainment was shaped by cross-Pacific currents. Bret Harte's descriptions of mining in the American West influenced Australian writers' depictions of gold rushes, while popular entertainers helped to create a common culture through vaudeville and minstrel shows.⁷²

Forging National States in a Global, Industrial Era, 1860–1900

Parallel Continental Conquests

     In the late nineteenth-century, a growing awareness of the physical scale of each continent prompted renewed efforts to chart—and eventually to settle—their vast interiors. Mapping the terrain facilitated infrastructure creation, first roadbuilding and later telegraph and railroad construction. Such communication networks connected each continent, encouraging a sense of shared identity, as well as strengthening ties to the outside world in what was quickly becoming a global market.  While fostering national pride, expeditions also led perceptive explorers to an understanding of the ecological limits of each continent, though their similar advice was often ignored. John Wesley Powell explored the American West on behalf of the future U.S. Geological Survey, famously rafting the length of the Colorado River and providing information that became useful not only to the government but to mining investors as well. His Hundredth Meridian, the North-South line west of which was too arid to sustain farming, found a remarkable parallel in Surveyor-General George Goyder's line running east-west above the Great Australian Bight.⁷³ The warnings of both were ignored by farmers who believed that "rain follows the plow" and attempted to farm wheat beyond the lines. And both surveyors were proved tragically correct when long-term droughts devastated crops in both regions.⁷⁴

     But before this happened, producers enjoyed a few decades of abundant harvest. Farmers and pastoralists often competed over the same areas on the great plains, though Australian sheep farmers played the role typically adopted by cattle herders in the United States. Both groups of pastoralists were engaged in large-scale commercial ventures. So were the grain farmers, whose crops were often destined for distant markets in Europe and increasingly competed with each other. Through the Homestead Act and Australia's Crown Land Acts, both governments upheld a yeoman farmer ideal as they sought to end squatting, regularize settlement, and promote land improvement.⁷⁵

     Expansion fueled violent conflict with indigenous people who were increasingly relocated to reservations. Massacres of indigenous peoples, recounted to the public as pitched battles against savage resisters, became national news.⁷⁶ Governments also intervened to promote settlement while ostensibly protecting indigenous peoples at the same time. The Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria in 1869 sought to confine aborigines to reservations with support provided for by the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines.⁷⁷ The Queensland Act, a combination of humanitarianism and racism, represented the "contradictory aims of protection, removal and exploitation" ⁷⁸ It had its parallel in the Dawes Act of 1887, which promised support for Native Americans if they would agree to sedentarism and family farming allotments.⁷⁹ American reformers attempted to assimilate Native children through removal to boarding schools, as educational institutions were seen as the fundamental instruments of American republicanism.⁸⁰ The 1886 Half-caste Acts in Victoria and Western Australia, premised on similar justifications, set up comparable policies enforced by governmental bureaucracies.⁸¹

     In a period of rapid industrialization, popular traditions emerged that romanticized rural areas as fundamental shapers of national culture. It was in this setting that Frederick Jackson Turner articulated the significance of the frontier for American cultural development, a theme retroactively applied to Australia as well.⁸² "Home on the Range" eventually became the state song of Kansas, but could not hold a candle to Andrew "Banjo" Paterson's "Waltzing Matilda" in popularity. Outlaws were also a key part of this national mythology, including Ned Kelly and Billy the Kid. Both were Irish Catholics in a normative Protestant culture, viewed as romantic heroes who rejected social conventions—and who, coincidentally, died a year apart from each other. Despite the heavily masculinized sentiments of popular entertainments and outlaws, settlement of frontier areas depended heavily on the hardiness of homesteading women, who were rewarded with ballot locally ahead of the national right to suffrage.⁸³

     Characteristic of industrializing societies with improved food supplies and increased general health, mortality rates slowed and so did fertility rates, from roughly 6 to 3.5 in the U.S. between 1840 and 1900, and from 7 children per couple on average in 1840 (though 20 percent had eleven or more) to 2.7 in Australia during the same period, as both nations underwent a demographic transition.⁸⁴ Population declines from native citizens were offset by immigrants. Reactions to immigrants were characterized similarly by scientific racism, efforts to pass anti-miscegenation laws, and discourses about disease as a race-based phenomenon that required "quarantine."⁸⁵ Growing cities in both places were increasingly populated by immigrants. Though Western Europe also experienced urbanization, the patterns in Australia and the U.S., both geographically large locations with low overall relative population density, were distinctive. "New Urban Frontiers," characterized by entirely new cities where rapid population growth frequently produced sprawl through massive suburbs, typified growth in both locations.⁸⁶

Converging Global Industrialism

     The upsurge of immigrants in each location was more than a coincidence; it was the convergence of a larger global phenomenon. The growth of industry and the commercialization of agriculture disrupted peasant production throughout Europe, making millions rootless in the late nineteenth century.⁸⁷ Many circulated throughout Europe, but others tried their luck overseas. The majority went to the United States, but significant numbers also went to South America and Australia.⁸⁸ Anti-immigrant sentiment was part of a larger pattern of white national identity in both locations. In gold rush areas, anti-Chinese sentiment by whites was virulent.⁸⁹ Social Darwinism and scientific racism provided justification for discriminatory actions towards Aborigines in Australia and African Americans in the U.S., and towards Chinese in both places.⁹⁰Agitation by Australians demonstrated ongoing awareness of the American situation and forms of pressure applied there: random mob violence, anti-Chinese leagues and unions, and legislation.⁹¹ The language of race and infection, of inoculation and protection, was used in both places well into the early twentieth century.⁹²

     The periodic boom-and-bust cycle of capitalist economies proved especially devastating to both regions in 1893, causing the greatest recession to that point. Banks collapsed, businesses failed, and many lost their farms.⁹³ In the contentious world of industrial production, the labor unions that were most prominent—and controversial—among American workers were emulated by their fellow Australians: the Knights of Labor, the Socialist Labor Party, the International Workers World. In an agrarian context, the Farmers' Alliance also inspired Australian counterparts.⁹⁴

     Reformers were disturbed by the effects of capitalism and its social effects on periodically unemployed, mobile populations. Some reform efforts were focused specifically on economic inequities produced by capitalism. Edward Bellamy's popular novel Looking Backwards criticized the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Often associated with him was Henry George's pitch for a tax on the unearned income in land wealth from speculators, which had become prominent throughout Australia long before George visited there in 1890. But as in the early nineteenth century, the inflection of reform was much moral as economic. The 1882 visit of Women's Christian Temperance Union leader Mary Leavitt to New South Wales spawned the formation of the first Australian branch of the organization, which addressed saloons, brothels, and other social vices.⁹⁵ Anne O'Brien's observation that reform efforts in Australia were often "grounded in an ideology of maternalism," could equally be said of the United States at the time.⁹⁶

     Degradation of the landscape from large-scale mining and lumbering prompted the organization of environmental movements in both places. Managing drought in the arid interior became a government concern as well, with efforts to dam rivers and build reservoirs, often evoking biblical rhetoric.⁹⁷ Lobbying by environmentalists led to the creation of national parks; Yellowstone in the U.S. was established in 1872, the first in the world, followed by Royal National Park in Australia as the second seven years later.⁹⁸ The national park movement dovetailed with the emergence of leisure time, disposable income, rail travel, and concerns about health that contributed to a middle-class tourism industry in both locations.⁹⁹

     Modern industrialism also drove Australians and Americans to imitate the European scramble for colonies. Both looked across the Pacific Ocean, seeing opportunity as well as menace. They justified imperialism as a defensive measure—the need to jump in and claim colonies in their backyard before other European powers and Japan—preempted them. Such a claim was more plausible for Australia, once Germany established a foothold in Papua New Guinea, than for the U.S., which formally annexed Hawaii and the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish-American War.

     In this age of expansionism, a deep sense of national cultural identity was crucial. The crucible of the American Civil War ultimately forged a deeper sense of nationalism, while in Australia a growing sense of shared identity culminated in the formation of the Commonwealth.¹⁰⁰ Establishment of a national literary culture in Australia, ironically, took cues from American publications and recruited American artists.¹⁰¹ By the late nineteenth century, mostly urban dwelling Australians had created a unique sense of identity, a patriotic, emotionally-laden image of Australia linked to the bush.¹⁰² Ironically, much of the sense of unique national character that developed in Australia at the time—which proved vital to its unique sense of identity—was in fact borrowed directly from the U.S., though adapted to local mythology and popular culture.¹⁰³ According to Australian historian Richard White, "almost every aspect of Australian life was, in hope or despair, at some stage compared to its American equivalent."¹⁰⁴        

Global Connections and World Wars 1900–1945

The Conjuncture of the Commonwealth

     Capping several decades of negotiations, Australia became an independent commonwealth by act of British Parliament on New Year's Day in 1901. Given that there was no practical necessity for union, one key factor that explains this development is the growing nationalist mythology that emphasized Australia's uniqueness. It was an island nation that God had set apart, or "girdled" "with seas," in the words of poet Henry Parkes, a people whose distinctive needs could no longer be met by a distant metropole.¹⁰⁵ Like the American founding fathers, the Australian founders viewed their nation-building task as a "sacred" undertaking while still expressing some ambivalence about the role of religion in politics. Their constitution invoked God in the preamble, but, inspired by the American Bill of Rights—and in contrast to Great Britain's constitution—promised the separation of church and state. Australian founders' commitment to a written constitution was also indebted to the American tradition.¹⁰⁶ Originating as separate colonies that had long functioned autonomously, the federation Australia's founders created allowed individual states to retain significant power. Having taken the crucial decision of union, the founding fathers turned for guidance in creating the architecture of government not to Canada, whose confederation was only three decades old, but to the United States, which had long served as an inspiration for Australian self-government.¹⁰⁷

     The resulting government reflected its American forebear in a number of crucial ways. The constitution created a three-branch government. The executive role was played by the governor-general, the Queen of England's official representative in Australia, but functionally delegated to the prime minister. The bicameral legislature consisted of a lower House of Representatives, with seats apportioned by population, and an upper house, the Senate, where each of the six states received the same number of representatives. The Senate's equal votes gave disproportionate power to small states. This arrangement elicited elation from states with small populations and consternation from states with larger populations, a virtual replay of reactions to the Great Compromise from the delegates to the 1787 Philadelphia gathering, which also allotted equal votes to each state in the upper chamber.¹⁰⁸ The third branch of the Australian government was to be headed by a High Court, explicitly endowed by the founders with the power of judicial review, designed to serve as a check on Parliament's power and directly inspired by the role of the American Supreme Court at the time.¹⁰⁹ Reliance on the American example was not limited to drafting of the constitution. The proposed government required ratification by electors in each colony. Among commonwealth proponents, there was fervent discussion about drafting an Australian version of the Federalist Papers to persuade a skeptical public to embrace the constitution's virtues.¹¹⁰

     The design of the new capital city, Canberra, is another story of American conjuncture. Walter Burley Griffin, a sometime architectural partner of Frank Lloyd Wright, won the international design competition for the new capital in 1911 with the assistance of his wife Marion, an MIT graduate and employee of Wright. The design was inspired by the Garden City movement but also owed something to Pierre L'Enfant's 1791 plan for the layout of Washington, D.C. Both capitals were purpose-built cities whose location was meant to satisfy competing regional factions.¹¹¹

     The so-called "Australian Settlement" that led to union brought the two major political factions together on a number of issues, including the notion of a white Australia, enforced by legislation restricting immigration.¹¹² The belief that national strength and racial strength were coextensive reflected intellectual cross-fertilization between Australia and the United States. Arguments about racial identity were shaped by scientific notions of racial determinism, echoing American discussions and often borrowing from them. Prominent Yale geographer Ellsworth Huntington asserted that cold climates produced more advanced civilizations than tropical or semi-tropical climates. Lieutenant Colonel Charles E. Woodruff, an American physician who served in the Philippines, made a similar argument in The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men, where he expressed concern about the ability of white settlers to thrive in Australia.¹¹³ This scholarship formed the basis for anxieties in the interwar period about the prospects for full intellectual and physical development of white Australians in a transplanted homeland.¹¹⁴

     Racial hygiene was part of the larger agenda of progressive era reform, which also reflected substantial exchange of ideas between Australia and the U.S. Though progressive reform was in many ways a transnational phenomenon that resulted from many "Atlantic Crossings" between the United States, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe, there were Pacific crossings as well.¹¹⁵ Australian progressives were  particularly inspired by American reform ideals of "efficiency, voluntarism, the social gospel, order and planning, welfare, and the broader intervention and regulation by the state."¹¹⁶ Australian reformers corresponded with American counterparts or visited the U.S. to learn about innovations in health, industry, and government, seeing in that nation a closer model for their own than the class-based societies of Britain and continental Europe.¹¹⁷

     Ideas about race, reform, and national strength were informed in part by Christian conviction. American missionary and Social Gospel advocate Josiah Strong linked the well-being of the world to Anglo-Saxon Christianity, led by an expansionist United States. Strong's writings shaped President Theodore Roosevelt's ideology of racial strength, reflected in his domestic and foreign policies. In a show of strength, Roosevelt sent the American Navy's "Great White Fleet" on a global tour in 1907. Enthusiastic about this American display of power, Prime Minister Alfred Deakin invited the Fleet to Australia and floated the idea of extending the Monroe Doctrine to the Pacific, though he received no American response.¹¹⁸ The nations shared a similar perception of the Pacific: they viewed China—and Manila, Singapore, and Java—as large untapped markets, and eyed the rising power of Japan in the Pacific with geopolitical concern shaped by racialist assumptions.¹¹⁹

Shared Global Struggles

     The parallels in this era resulted from the substantial economic growth of continent-sized nation-states with middle classes that had increased disposable income and leisure time. Regional railways promoted tourism in Australia and the U.S.¹²⁰ The beach became a popular destination in both countries by the early twentieth century, and tourism advertisements in both places helped solidify their international images as warm, coastal vacation destinations.¹²¹ After the Great War, their economies and popular cultures continued to reflect important similarities, and some significant conjunctures. Australians demonstrated an early enthusiasm for cars and auto racing that matched the U.S..¹²² Each nation had an early native film industry, stimulated in part by year-round temperate climates conducive to filming outdoors. (Errol Flynn, the iconic Golden-Age Hollywood leading man, was born and largely educated in Australia.) Even religion became a source of entertainment in an era of mass culture, as itinerant evangelical ministers drew large crowds in Melbourne and Sydney, just as Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, and others were doing in the U.S. at the time.¹²³

     If progressive reform often reflected notions of white racial supremacy, it was capacious enough to include civil rights for people of color. In the U.S., the Niagara Movement led to the creation in 1911 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its influential magazine, The Crisis. In Australia, this period saw the formation of many Aboriginal political organizations with similar goals. The Association for the Protection of Native Races, formed like the NAACP in 1911, aimed to "promote equality of rights and to eradicate caste or race prejudice among the citizens of the United States." In the next two decades, several similar organized were launched: the Australian Aboriginal Progress Association, the Native Union, the Aborigines Advancement League, the Australian Aborigines Association, the Euralian Association, and the Aborigines Progressive Association.¹²⁴

     In foreign policy, too, Australia and the United States shared a common ambivalence toward relations with Europe. During the Great War, both were pressed to side with the Allies as a result of their connections with England—Australia, as a commonwealth nation, obviously much more directly than the U.S., which was linked to its former metropole largely by language and culture. For both, the effects of involvement were substantial. American participation broke a tradition of isolationism from European affairs and led to a strong backlash in the form of fervent reassertion of isolationism. The effects on Australia, however, were much more profound, as it suffered a staggering casualty rate of nearly two-thirds, which left a permanent imprint on the Australian psyche.¹²⁵ Representatives from the two nations participated in treaty negotiations at Versailles, both deeply frustrated with their European counterparts. But they played dramatically differing roles reflecting their disparate status. Australia's Billy Hughes challenged the gathering's acknowledged leader, President Woodrow Wilson, on several points. Hughes expressed particular concern about Japanese power and complained about a lack of voice in imperial deliberations.¹²⁶ As a concession, the League did allow Australia a more independent role in regional affairs as a newly responsible mandate power.¹²⁷

     The Great Depression, truly global in scope, devastated both countries. It led to a peak unemployment rate of 30% in Australia in 1932, compared with the U.S.'s 25% peak rate in 1933. Neither side embraced Keynesian policies right away, though wartime Keynesian eventually rescued both countries.¹²⁸ Chastened by their experiences in the Great War and initially buffered from the war front, both showed less enthusiasm for the new war. Prime Minister Robert Menzies grudgingly announced the formation of a new expeditionary force for his Commonwealth nation, while Franklin Delano Roosevelt was only able to persuade Congress to declare war after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941. Both nation-states worried about Japanese invasions and both experienced minor naval attacks that fueled fears out of proportion to the genuine prospect of an invasion of the mainland. The famed Battle of the Coral Sea did, however, preempt a planned Japanese attack on Port Moresby, capital of the Australian colony of Papua. Australia served as the allies' southern Pacific base and the headquarters of General George MacArthur.¹²⁹ American troops began arriving in Australia in December 1941, first in Melbourne, where MacArthur was initially headquartered. Eventually 30,000 soldiers were stationed in the country. Fears of the overbearing American presence in the country—including soldiers' romances with Australian women—prompted much soul-searching about Australian identity.¹³⁰

     The conjunctures between the two nations in this period serve to underscore the growing influence of the United States in virtually all realms. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the U.S. had overtaken the United Kingdom as the world's greatest manufacturer. It also boasted the globe's largest GDP. American dominance in the global economy gave it greater diplomatic influence and military power. The United States led in the creation of the League of Nations, the first international diplomatic organization. It brokered the Dawes Plan that, for a time, allowed reparation payments to flow from Germany to the Allied Powers in the post-World War I period. And it hosted the Washington Naval Treaty, aimed at de-escalating the arms race. None of these ventures was especially successful, but they all reflected increased American ability to assert its vision of the world. Australia, by contrast, remained a spectator in all these affairs, not least because its commonwealth status meant that it still had to defer to Great Britain on matters of foreign affairs. And when the Second World War came, superior American might mean that its forces took the lead in managing the Pacific theater of war. Australia played host to "invading" American forces, while its chiefs of staff were excluded from strategic discussions led by the U.S. and the U.K. American economic power also facilitated its growing cultural influence.

Globalization and the Contemporary World: 1945–present

Postwar Comparisons Become Conjunctures

     American magazine magnate Henry Luce's assessment that the postwar era was the "American century" indicates why U.S. dominance was felt in Australia much as it was around the rest of the world.¹³¹ Given this influence, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate conjunctures and comparisons; most similarities were a function of direct American influence. The Cold War era saw a deepening web of connections between Australia and the United States. Australia was not unique in this regard. As the U.S. became a military and economic superpower, it established commercial ties through global, regional, and bilateral trade pacts, and military alliances with innumerable nations around the globe. Nevertheless, where such ties might be grudging in some circumstances, they were largely—though not always—warm and open in the case of Australia, facilitated by a common language and similar cultural traditions.

     If the United States was the lead actor in founding the postwar global order, Australia played its part. It was, for example, a founding member of the United Nations. H.V. Evatt, Minister for External Affairs, helped shape important features of the organization: the role given to smaller states in the General Assembly, the function of U.N. agencies, and the organization's International Bill of Rights.¹³² When hopes for a peaceful world order were quickly dashed with the emergence of the Cold War, the U.S. quickly found a willing ally in Australia, which joined with New Zealand to form the ANZUS Treaty with the U.S. in 1951. Australia showed its loyalty by sending conscripted soldiers to Vietnam to support its American counterparts. By 1967, the total reached 8,000; in all, nearly 61,000 troops went to Vietnam during the U.S.-led war. A university-based New Left movement in Australia took up the anti-war cause, borrowing protest strategies from its American counterpart.¹³³

     As the global economy pivoted away from Britain to the U.S., so did Australian economic attention.¹³⁴ For the first three postwar decades, the global economic order represented in the Bretton Woods system was functionally an American economic order. Australia participated in one of its cornerstone institutions, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Nevertheless, harmony between the two states should not be exaggerated. Though committed philosophically to the reduction of trade barriers, Australia lobbied for exemptions to tariff removal to protect manufacturing as a Newly Industrialized Country. ¹³⁵ Beginning in the 1970s, Australia occasionally expressed frustration with American hypocrisy in allowing loopholes to its own farmers in GATT provisions. Still, such grumbling was relatively muted. Australian leaders often acquiesced to American leadership, earning the criticism of the press and public for supposed spinelessness and sycophancy.¹³⁶

     The long economic boom was fueled in both countries by an increasingly educated labor force whose college education was a product of state funding. The 1960 California Master Plan, which created a three-tier system of community colleges, four-year colleges, and research universities, was quickly adopted by many states across the nation.¹³⁷ It then became a global model. Australia took its cue in part from the United States, particularly the California Master Plan. The 1964 Martin Report, which situated the growing need for an educated workforce in the context of a mature industrial economy, stimulated creation of a two-tier public university education system comparable to the American college and university model.¹³⁸

     In an age of widespread prosperity, Australian patterns of suburban-based consumerism looked strikingly like those in the United States. Both nations saw a baby boom, as their citizens settled down after the war, confident in continued prosperity.¹³⁹ In an era that celebrated family and morality, religious enthusiasm led to increases in church attendance and income.¹⁴⁰ Famed American evangelist Billy Graham performed a month-long crusade in Melbourne and Sydney 1959.¹⁴¹ Pentecostalism, an American-born strand of ecstatic Protestantism, began to take off in Australia during the following decade.¹⁴²

     Homeownership rates, bolstered by federally-backed loans, steadily increased. By the 1960s, two thirds of each population owned their own homes. New housing was characterized by suburban sprawl on a scale only possible in physically large nations, facilitated by widespread car ownership and middle class antipathy to urban life, which included disdain for public housing.¹⁴³ Suburbanization and car ownership went hand in hand. Australians' love of cars was only outpaced by the United States and Canada, a reflection in part of the vast geographic size of the three countries. And cars served the same roles in Australia in the postwar period as they did in the U.S.—as a marker of status, a symbol of freedom, a source of gendered and sexualized marketing, and a cause for anxiety about teen recklessness and sexuality.¹⁴⁴ Consumers in both countries often purchased the same cars; since the 1920s, Australians had largely preferred American cars to British models. Australia's auto production was in its infancy in the postwar period. It began producing the Holden as a notional mark of its economic independence; in fact, even here its dependence on the U.S. was evident. Holden was a division of General Motors, the largest American car manufacturer; the first Holden was modeled on a rejected Chevy design.¹⁴⁵

     Government investment in infrastructure helped fuel the growing automobile market. In a rare feat of nationalist inspiration, the United States passed the Federal Highway Defense Act in 1956, spurring creation of the modern interstate system. Australian states followed a typical federalist pattern—one familiar to the U.S.—funding road construction and public transit on the state level. But the cultural outcome was similar: the emergence of the long road trip as a key feature of summer vacation. While Americans began to idolize road travel and summer holidays, which often involved camping or trips to the beach, Australians hailed a similar lifestyle as one dimension of a purportedly distinctive "Australian way of life."¹⁴⁶ In a Cold War context, this Australian way was "closely related to the image of Australia as a sophisticated, urban, industrialised, consumer society," with a strong emphasis on the ideal of freedom.¹⁴⁷ This sentiment could not have been more at home in the United States, where "the Cold War established the framework" in which "freedom became an inescapable theme of academic research, popular journalism, mass culture, and official pronouncements."¹⁴⁸ One common vacation destination, already growing in popularity in the early decades of the twentieth century became iconic in the postwar era: the beach. In the U.S., Southern California became the synecdoche for this pastime.¹⁴⁹  In Australia, as vacation at the beach became a central feature of patterns of leisure, Sydney's Bondi Beach lifesavers came to represent the "national type."¹⁵⁰  

     In the 1960s, a counterculture movement emerged in both nations, spurred by the same factors: a generation gap between baby boomers and parents, disillusionment with the promises of affluence, and a distinctive youth culture shaped by fashion, music, film, and television.¹⁵¹ Civil rights advocacy was prominent in both nations. The mistreatment of Aborigines paralleled both the plight of African Americans and Native Americans. The Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement, founded in 1958, called for equal citizenship rights and advocated constitutional change. Australian civil rights leaders often took their cues from the United States, both in goals and strategies. Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American civil rights movement, Charles Perkins led the formation of a Student Action for Aborigines organization and a Freedom Ride in 1965 to picket movie theaters, swimming pools, and clubs.¹⁵² The 1967 referendum on discriminatory clauses in the constitution, which empowered the federal government to enact policies to benefit aborigines, and thus to overrule any contradictory state policies, echoed  the American Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965) in their reliance on national power to enforce legal equality. In the mid-1960s, both movements saw the emergence of a more militant black nationalist movement.¹⁵³ The Australian branch of the provocative Black Panther Party was modeled directly on the American organization.¹⁵⁴ One outcome of advocacy in both was the emergence of black studies classes in the 1970s.¹⁵⁵

     Immigration reform was connected to issues of racial equality and civil rights. In the postwar period, as Australia sought to expand its economy and increase its security, it had intentionally labored to increase its population by actively recruiting immigrants from Europe. By 1970, this policy "had produced a kaleidoscope of diverse peoples," as thousands of Southern and Eastern Europeans, including significant numbers of Jews, emigrated to Australia, mimicking US patterns from a half-century earlier.¹⁵⁶ The U.S. Immigration Act of 1965, which overturned previous immigration quotas and significantly increased immigration from Asia and Latin America, had a counterpart in the Australian Citizenship Act of 1973, which removed disparities in requirements for European and non-European immigrants, one of the last vestiges of the White Australia policy in place since formation of the commonwealth in 1901.¹⁵⁷ Deliberations regarding the Act, which enabled non-European immigrants to gain citizenship more easily, were informed in part by the 1965 American law.¹⁵⁸

     The liberalization of immigration policy increased the non-European ethnic diversity of both nations, particularly in major metropolitan areas. Both nations received large numbers of immigrants from recently decolonized countries, such as India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Beginning in the 1970s, refugee populations from Southeast Asia contributed to this diversification. As allies of South Vietnam, both Australia and the US felt some obligation to welcome refugees from Vietnam after the communist takeover.¹⁵⁹ The rapid growth of non-white populations prompted handwringing from pundits and politicians about the potential loss of a unified national identity and counternarratives celebrating multiculturalism.¹⁶⁰

     Beginning in the 1980s, the two nations turned in a conservative direction. During the Reagan and Bush administrations, the United States embraced neo-liberal economic policies, rejecting Keynesian, celebrating free markets, and privatizing many services. Australia followed similar policies, under strong direct influence the U.S.¹⁶¹ In a shift away from public financing during the Whitlam era, for example, Australia reintroduced college fees, along with measures to force colleges to be competitive and accountable.¹⁶² Demonstrating commitment to liberal trade, the two nations signed the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement in 2004.¹⁶³ Both countries pursued conservative racial policies as well. The Reagan administration worked to reduce the immigration of undocumented workers across the border with Mexico. In 1992, the Keating government introduced a policy of mandatory detention for anyone entering Australia without a valid visa.¹⁶⁴ Australia has also been a loyal ally in the war on terror. Prime Minister John Howard was visiting Washington, D.C. when the 9/11 attack occurred, which spurred his immediate commitment of Australian support to the U.S., including the misguided invasion of Iraq.¹⁶⁵ Muslim immigrants—constituting a small percentage of the total population in both nations—have challenged the limits of tolerance, often experiencing hostility with the global rise of Islamic extremism, especially in the wake of 9/11.¹⁶⁶

Different Landscapes and Divergent Development

     Why are the remarkable similarities and conjunctures between Australia and the United States over more than two centuries so often ignored? The first answer requires a leap back in time of millions of years to address the very different landscapes that led the two in such divergent directions despite their many similarities. The Australian continental landmass is roughly the size of the present-day United States, but it differs dramatically from the North American continent. The oldest existing landmass, Australia's soil was leached by precipitation that carried off nutrients for millennia. Conversely, it has been subject to very little glaciation for millions of years, so little soil renewal has taken place. Consequently, while the landmass is marked by tremendous biodiversity, it has had much less fecundity. This has meant that Australia has historically had a limited carrying capacity and, consequently, a small human population. According to the best estimates, at the time of European arrival, Australia had a population of perhaps one half million Aborigines speaking roughly two dozen languages and organized into fifty clan groups.¹⁶⁷ The North American landmass, by contrast, had an abundance of inland rivers and lakes, with substantial alluvial soil that supported large populations and the development of complex societies. In a considerably shorter period after initial migration, the population in North America north of Mexico reached perhaps seven million people speaking three hundred languages in the late pre-Columbian period. The mounds left behind by the creators of Cahokia testify to large-scale social organization and hierarchy.¹⁶⁸ Nothing equivalent was constructed in Australia.

     Despite the key similarities in English settlement described above, Australia and British North America diverged significantly from the outset as well. While 1788 was an important conjuncture between the two regions, this date is also potentially quite misleading in terms of comparisons. By the time the First Fleet arrived to stake a British foothold in Australia, the young United States boasted a population of four million and a nearly two-century history of settlement, albeit as distinct colonies. It is not surprising that Australia lags behind its cousin with a two century head start. The solitary settlement at what became Sydney contrasts with the multiple early seventeenth-century British colonies on the North American mainland. And unlike the government-sponsored convict project, the American colonies were initially led by joint-stock companies seeking profits (albeit with strong support from and connections to Parliament), which tended to make them more dynamic and responsive to change. The contrast could not be stronger with a government-sponsored venture that deposited convicts on the far shores of the British empire. While their status as a government colony meant that they were not entirely forgotten, there was also much less urgency for profit-making, though they did have to remain viable.

     Economic and demographic differences only deepened over the course of the nineteenth century. Though primary production oriented toward British manufacturing was a key feature of both economies in the mid-nineteenth century, manufacturing accounted for almost a third of American economic output by that time. The Australian economy, by contrast, would not have a manufacturing sector worthy of the name until the twentieth century.¹⁶⁹ Demographically, there were significant differences as well. In the era of steamship travel, transport to Australia from Europe cost significantly more than a move to New York.¹⁷⁰ This contributed to the growing population gap between Australia and the U.S.

     By the early twentieth century, the already pronounced economic and demographic gap between the two nations fueled other changes. American economic power, for example, facilitated its growing cultural influence. American consumer tastes dictated many of the goods that were exported to the rest of the world, including Australia. The early film industry, an important medium for shaping and conveying popular ideas and values, came to be dominated in the 1920s and especially the '30s by the U.S., as Australian companies found themselves increasingly unable to compete with their heavily-capitalized American counterparts.¹⁷¹

     The disparities in size between the two—in population, economy, military power—remain the most notable, but there are others. In comparison with the American constitutional system with a truly independent executive, Australia's parliamentary system makes it much more difficult for a single individual to reshape the nation to a degree that an American president can. Also, despite the American neoliberal influence on economic and social policies in Australia over the last forty years, Australia still has policies reflecting a more liberal tradition: serviceable mass transit, basic medical care for all inhabitants, subsidizing of university costs, and strong restrictions on gun ownership.

     These very real differences have been exacerbated by increased perceptions of difference for more than a century, fueled by the demands of nationalism. An intentional cultural amnesia regarding American influence began in Australia around the turn of the twentieth century. As "Waltzing Maltilda" was emerging as the unofficial national anthem, Australians were busy forging their narrative of a unique identity shaped by a rugged, arid landscape. With the drive to commonwealth status, this identity-formation narrative was sharpened by contrast with the very different culture elicited by the verdant, parklike landscape of England. Australians' focus for self-comparison shifted from convergence with the U.S., with whom they had so much in common, to divergence from the metropole. The development of the mythology of a unique national identity, then, helped to obliterate recognition—and sometimes awareness—of the deep, long-term, and ongoing influence of the U.S. on most aspects of Australian life.

Conclusion

     The centennial of the Battle of Hamel on the Western Front at the end of World War I has provided an opportunity to commemorate a "century of mateship," The recognition of this century-old friendship between Australia and the U.S. seems like a recent discovery. In reality, of course, the links between them run much deeper in time and much wider in form. Australia and the United States share a number of similarities rooted in their origins as British settler colonies. These similarities are legal and linguistic, cultural and religious, political and economic. More important than similarities, key conjunctures between the two, which date all the way to the First Fleet's 1788 expedition, provide an understanding of the depth of connection between them. Most notably, perhaps, the structure of Australian government—and the physical layout of its seat of power—bear the unmistakable stamp of American influence.

     Despite these similarities and conjunctures, there are significant differences between the United States and Australia, differences dramatic enough to obscure the many bonds they share. That neither most Australians nor most Americans are aware of these bonds is a tribute to the power of environmental realities and cultural construction. The relative geographic isolation of Australia and the limited carrying capacity of its rugged landscape have kept its population or economy from growing to the size of California, let alone the United States. And the evocative authority of nationalist mythmaking has worked to obscure a once-clear relationship. Though differences have inevitably shaped each in distinct ways, compelling similarities and significant conjunctures have drawn Australia and the United States together in profound and enduring ways.

Dave Neumann (Ph.D. in History, University of Southern California) is Assistant Professor of History Education at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. His research explores transnationalism, American religion, the Cold War, Southern California, and historical thinking. His publications include Finding God through Yoga: Paramahansa Yogananda and Modern American Religion in a Global Age (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) and articles in The History Teacher, The Journal of Religious History, Religion and American Culture, Southern California Quarterly, Social Education, and The Social Studies.

¹ See, e.g., the Australian History Channel's film, "Mateship–Australia & U.S.A: A Century Together, which describes one hundred years of "friendship, forged in battle, shaped also by long exchanges of ideas, people and trade." This makes for a "fascinating story of trust, difference, loyalty and respect." See https://www.historychannel.com.au/shows/mateship-australia-usa-a-century-together/ (accessed October 15, 2018).

² The website describes the political and economic arrangements between the two, then comments on their discussions on "defence and security, immigration and trade." "The two countries," it concludes, "maintain a strong relationship, characterised by cultural similarities and robust bilateral arrangements." See Australia in the United States, "Australia and the United States Relations," https://usa.embassy.gov.au/australia-and-us-relations (accessed October 13, 2018).

³ The State Department proclaims, "Australia is a vital ally, partner, and friend of the United States. The United States and Australia maintain a robust relationship underpinned by shared democratic values, common interests, and cultural affinities. Economic, academic, and people-to-people ties are vibrant and strong. See U.S. Department of State, "U.S. Relations with Australia, https://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2698.htm (accessed October 13, 2018).

⁴ John Kirby, "Will U.S. and Australia have another '100 years of Mateship'?," CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/22/opinions/will-us-and-australia-have-another-100-years-of-mateship-kirby-opinion/index.html (accessed October 15, 2018)

⁵ For studies of comparative historiography that reveals the emphasis on national uniqueness, see Ian Tyrrell, "Comparing Comparative Histories: Australian and American Modes of Comparative Analysis" Australasian Journal of American Studies 9, No. 2 (December, 1990), 1–11; for the U.S. see Michael Adas, "From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon," American Historical Review 106, No. 5 (Dec., 2001), 1692–1720.

⁶ Some of these features are clearly shared by other settler societies, particularly Canada and South Africa. But prior settlement by other European powers, the French and Dutch respectively and the relative sparseness of English settlement limit the similarities.

⁷ Richard W. Bulliet, "Themes, Conjunctures, Comparisons," in Teaching World History, ed. by Heidi Roupp (Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 1997).

⁸ For an introduction to this perspective, see Geoffrey Scammell, "Series Editor's Preface" in Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2003), ix.

⁹ For a helpful introduction to British North American colonialism from the perspective of Atlantic History, see David Armitage, ed., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), which includes essays illustrating the primacy of connections in ocean-based frameworks, while also successfully exploring cultural, social, and even political links.

¹⁰ Arguably, the Pacific Ocean only emerged as an integrated realm of exchange after the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. Katrina Gulliver, "Finding the Pacific World," Journal of World History 22, No. 1 (March 2011), 83–100, acknowledges earlier activity in the Pacific, from Magellan's travels to the Manila galleons, but contends that a decisive change occurred with the arrival of James Cook. She argues that the increased scale of maritime trade following Cook's voyages constituted "the beginning of what could be conceived as a 'world' within the zone of the Pacific." David Igler, whom Gulliver references several times, argues that a distinctive world came into existence in the "eastern Pacific" in the late 18^th century. He grants that his fuzzy geography provides "an unstable concept for a tremendously complex oceanic space." Like Gulliver, Igler chooses not to appeal to Braudel to justify the utility of flexible spatial constructs; instead he evokes borderlands scholarship. David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 8–9. His book "examines interactions between different groups—ocean peoples, mainland native communities, and foreign voyagers who encountered one another during period of rapid change between Cook's voyages and Gold Rush." (Igler, The Great Ocean, 5.) Cook's voyages prove decisive for Igler's conception of the Pacific. Before Cook, Igler argues, the Pacific was a largely disconnected collection of indigenous homelands and "contending European imperial ventures." As a result of Cook's travels, sustained contact between Europeans and Pacific peoples developed, changing the region forever. Igler's approach makes European activity decisive for the formation of a Pacific World—a world both sinister and violent. (Igler, The Great Ocean, 183.) See also his earlier "Diseased Goods: Global Exchanges in the Eastern Pacific Basin, 1770–1850," American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (2004): 693–719. The vast size of the Pacific largely explains the lateness of its development; the Pacific Ocean is one and a half times the size of the Atlantic and more than twice the size of the Indian Ocean.

¹¹ Two caveats are in order. First, this article does not explore the British role in Australia, not because it is unimportant, but rather the opposite. Until at least the formation of the commonwealth in 1901, it is meaningless to talk about Australia without considering the British state of which the Australian colonies were parts. Rather, this relationship is ignored precisely because it is a given and one that has been routinely explored. Second, this article does not claim that all similarities—or even all conjunctures—shared by the U.S. and Australia were unique to that relationship. Particularly since the start of the twentieth century, the U.S. has had ties with many nations, just as Australia has retained important links to the U.K. and other commonwealth nations. The larger point is that for more than two centuries, the U.S. and Australia have shared a number of significant, substantive parallels that are mutually illuminating, reflecting in part conjunctures where the U.S. has significantly influenced Australian history, much more than is generally recognized.

¹² For dogs in general, see Raymond John Pierotti, The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). Dingoes evolved from a species of wolf between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago and spread throughout southern Asia. They were probably brought to Australia by Austronesian seafaring peoples between 3,500 and 4,000 years ago. With the help of aborigines, they spread throughout the continent. Some aborigine peoples used them to hunt game. See L.K. Corbett, The Dingo in Australia and Asia (Ithaca: Comstock/Cornell Press, 1995), 5; 9–20. North America and Australia were each populated by megafauna that seem staggering to contemporary readers, from ten-foot tall ancestors of kangaroos and one-ton flightless birds, to two-ton mastodons and bear-sized beavers. Indigenous groups hunted these megafauna in groups, in part through the use of fire. The extinction of these animals coincided with the peopling of each continent. The causes, in both cases, are fiercely contested, with the same basic arguments offered in each case: overhunting, partly through the use of fire, or dramatic environmental changes—an earth that warmed up too rapidly 12 millennia ago for megafauna to adapt.

¹³ That is, they were the first phase of European settlement, as opposed to South Africa, first settled by the Dutch, or Canada, originally settled by the French. Spanish, French, Dutch, and English adventurers explored the North American coast for decades before the first successful settlements were established. Spanish explorers set out from the Philippines and Dutch explorers ventured out from Batavia more than a century before James Cook stumbled upon Botany Bay in 1770.

¹⁴ Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 47.

¹⁵ Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1969).

¹⁶ John M. Murrin originated the notion of the Anglicization of North American colonists; for a recent evaluation of this concept, see Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, David J. Silverman, Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

¹⁷ Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); White, Inventing Australia, 16–28 ("Hell Upon Earth") and 29.

¹⁸ William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983); Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011).

¹⁹ In New South Wales, officials may have assumed this principle, but, in contradictory fashion, also acknowledged aboriginal jurisdiction and only asserted jurisdiction and, more importantly, sovereignty over the region after 1820 through the right to resolve incidents of violence between indigenous people. They also recognized their leverage over a people with no European competitors nearby and no tradable goods, refusing to make treaties with them. Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), esp. 28, 43–44; she claims that after 1836, "colonial Australian judiciaries declared in case after case that British sovereignty was an absolute measure of jurisdictional and territorial right." The legal cases of the 1830s "redefined settler sovereignty as a territorial measure of authority that left little or no space for indigenous rights to property, to sovereignty, or to jurisdiction" (205–06). But see also Stuart Banner, "Why Terra Nullius? Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia," Law and History Review 23, No. 1 (Spring 2005) 95–131.

²⁰ For aboriginal spiritual traditions, see Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: A History Since 1788 (Sydney: Allyn & Unwin,2002), 18–19; for Native Americans, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 110–141. On land use, see Laura Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Laura Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

²¹ See Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) and Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1981) for examples of mutually beneficial exchange between native peoples and European settlers.

²² White, Inventing Australia, 11; Kupperman, Indians and English, 20.

²³ Violence broke out in 1610 in Virginia, settled in 1607 and in 1636 in Massachusetts Bay, settled in 1629; Aborigine leader Pemulwuy's sustained warfare against English intrusion began within four years of the First Fleet's arrival in 1788. For British North America, see Kupperman, Indians and English, Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1999). For Australia, see Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier.

²⁴ Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 [2^nd ed.]).

²⁵ William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang; Rev. ed. 2003); Peter C. Mancall, "Pigs for Historians: Changes in the Land and Beyond," William and Mary Quarterly 67 (April 2010), 796–804.

²⁶ As rabbits became pests, government officials and settlers attempted various efforts at control, including bounty killing, poison, and the introduction of predators. Rabbits were joined by foxes, pigs, cats, rats, horses, and donkeys, as well as various invasive plant species. Eric C. Rolls, They All Ran Wild: The Story of Pests on the Land in Australia (Melbourne: Angus and Robertson, 1969).

²⁷ Alfred Crosby coined the term "virgin soil epidemic," which has received criticism from various quarters. See Alfred W. Crosby, 'Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America', William and Mary Quarterly 33 (2), (1976) 289–299, For a revision, see, e.g., David S. Jones, "Virgin Soil Epidemics Revisited," William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 703–42.; But though the concept has not always been discussed with sufficient nuance, there is little dispute that exposure to epidemic diseases proved catastrophic for native peoples. Judy Campbell, Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia, 1780–1880 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002) argues that though Europeans inflicted Aborigines with tuberculosis, measles, and syphilis, smallpox, the most deadly disease, was introduced by Macassan sailors in the late eighteenth century. Regardless of origin, it caused "virgin soil outbreaks" in Sydney in 1789 (220). She also points out the isolation of Australia was more recent, less total, and ended more abruptly than that of the Americas (8), while the relatively short duration of the Atlantic voyage allowed infected but not symptomatic travelers to infect colonial populations, while those suffering acute infections died during the long trip to Australia, slowing the spread of disease in new settlements and allowing for the quarantining of recent arrivals (216). For a brief refutation of Campbell's argument, see "Appendix: What was the 'smallpox' in New South Wales in 1789?" in the revised edition of Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 309–11. The pre-European populations of Native Americans and Aborigines are uncertain and highly contested, but scholars agree that the death rate from diseases such as smallpox was catastrophic. For North America, see David S. Jones, "Virgin Soil Epidemics Revisited," William and Mary Quarterly, 60 (2003): 703–42.

²⁸ Daniel Boone led Virginians across the Cumberland Gap in the 1770s and into Kentucky. The Blue Mountains were first traversed in 1813 and a road begun the following year, leading to the founding of Bathurst in 1815.

²⁹ John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002), 41.

³⁰ David Brion Davis, Problem of Slavery in Western History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 197–211, especially 207.

³¹ David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

³² J.B. Hirst, Convict Society and Its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales (Sydney: G. Allen & Unwin, 1983).

³³ Igler, The Great Ocean, 134.

³⁴ Frank Welsh, Great Southern Land: A New History of Australia (London: Penguin, 2004), 30–34.

³⁵ It was no coincidence that he named his original landing site Botany Bay. The First Fleet included an astronomer and his equipment, a decidedly impractical element of this expedition, suggesting larger Enlightenment-inspired intellectual interests. White, Inventing Australia, 5.

³⁶ T.H. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

³⁷ Linda Young, Middle Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain (New York: Palgrave, 2003).

³⁸ Linda Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 8; Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992); see also Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

³⁹ Young, Middle-Class Culture, 33.

⁴⁰ Matt Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Thomas J. Osborne, California History, Vol. 87, No. 1 (2009), pp. 26–45, 66–71.

⁴¹ On democracy as a term of opprobrium, see, e.g., Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 223; on the increasingly positive use of the term in the postrevolutionary republic, see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 287–304.

⁴² See Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 287–304.

⁴³ Parliament of New South Wales, "History of Democracy in NSW," https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/about/historyofdemocracy/pages/history-of-democracy-in-nsw.aspx (accessed October 9, 2018)

⁴⁴ The movement remained marginal in the United States, while the relative paucity of women in Australia—and their status as forced migrants—retarded the development of any comparable movement there.

⁴⁵ David R. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 2007); White, Inventing Australia, 66.

⁴⁶ Peter Monteath, ed., Germans: Travellers, Settlers and their Descendants in South Australia (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2011).

⁴⁷ Maura Jane Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 157, concludes that while conservative Protestants worried that the Vatican would end up controlling American politics, liberal Protestants saw Catholic indifference to abolition as a roadblock to social reform that could only be solved through immigration restriction or limitations on voting rights. See also Daniel W. Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 320, who argues that the absence of millennialism among Catholics kept them from embracing the zeitgeist of America as God's chosen nation, which contributed to their alienation from the mainstream.

⁴⁸ Like Lewis and Clark, who followed the Missouri River to its source and then ventured across the Rockies to the West Coast, Charles Sturt traced the routes of the Macquarie and Murray Rivers, hoping to discover a great inland riverine system.

⁴⁹ William J. Lines, Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 51.

⁵⁰ Census of the Colony of New South Wales, 1850, Australian Data Archive, at http://hccda.anu.edu.au/pages/NSW-1851-census-01_1 (accessed October 11, 2018)

⁵¹ Frederick Jackson Turner's notion of a moving frontier as decisive for the formation of American culture was applied by Australian scholars to their own. In 1947, for example, Fred Alexander argued that settler-led pastoralism, gold rushes, and agricultural expansion in the nineteenth-century share important parallels with the American situation, proving decisive for the formation of national culture. See Fred Alexander, Moving Frontiers: An American Theme and its Application to Australian History (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1947), especially pp. 26–39.

⁵² For Australia, see Connor, Australian Frontier Wars; for British North America, describing similar patterns in a somewhat earlier era, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

⁵³ Grace Karskens, The Rocks: Everyday Life in Early Sydney 1788–1830 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998).

⁵⁴ Work involved irregular hours, long breaks, and an often seamless connection between home and work. Premodern entertainments like gambling, drinking, dancing, cockfights and betting were popular in both places. See Grace Karskens, The Rocks, 42. For similar activities throughout the British North American colonies and states in the Early Republic, see Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas: A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday (New York: Knopf, 1996), passim.

⁵⁵ This included government infrastructure projects. As a port city, shipbuilding and dredging were crucial in Sydney, as in other American cities. See Lynette C. McLoughlin, "Shaping Sydney Harbour: Sedimentation, Dredging and Reclamation 1788–1990s," Australian Geographer 31(2) (July 2000): 183–208; Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

⁵⁶ Anne O'Brien, God's Willing Workers Women and Religion in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2005), 16; the government made attempts to achieve this end by formalizing marriage between cohabiting partners, but to little effect (23). The population increase brought by the Gold Rush gave this effort a boost (28–30). Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) shows that in the first half-century (1788–1840), men dramatically outnumbered women, and convict women were almost as numerous as free women (see Table A1, 253–254).

⁵⁷ Governor Macquarie's efforts to humanize the penal situation in New South Wales paralleled American penitentiary reform and asylums for the mentally ill in the United States. For the U.S., see Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

⁵⁸ American missionaries protested the Trail of Tears in the Southeast, while Australian evangelicals contributed to the formation of the Aborigines Protection Society. O'Brien, God's Willing Workers, 27.

⁵⁹ Douglas Pike, Paradise of Dissent: South Australia, 1829–1857 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967 [2^nd ed.]), 52. Unlike Massachusetts, however, where Puritan theology was enforced, South Australia's founders intentionally enshrined religious equality and religious liberty. See Hilliard, Godliness and Good Order, 3.

⁶⁰ Paul Sendziuk and Robert Foster, A History of South Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

⁶¹ Charles Wentworth, Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales (London: G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1819).

⁶² Mark McKenna, The Captive Republic: A History of Republicanism in Australia 1788–1996 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 16, 20, 12.

⁶³ As N.D. McLachlan, "'The Future America': Some Bicentennial Reflections," Historical Studies 17, No. 68 (1977), 361–83, comments, "Land, convict transportation, schooling, religious voluntaryism, native policy, literature,-all evoked reference to the way the Americans had gone about them" (375).

⁶⁴ David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 127–28.

⁶⁵ Malcolm Prentis, "Methodism in New South Wales, 1855–1902," in Methodism in Australia: A History, edited by Gleon O'Brien and Hilary M. Carey (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).

⁶⁶ Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

⁶⁷ George William Rusden, National Education (Melbourne: Argus, 1853), 72–73, described the "talented and diligent" Mann as contributing significantly to "the prosperity and advancement of his country's educational system."

⁶⁸ McLachlan, "'The Future America," 372. Obviously, they often had family in Britain as well, but, as indicated in the introduction, that is not the point in this article.

⁶⁹ David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850's (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994).

⁷⁰ Goodman, Gold Seeking, 26–27.

⁷¹ McKenna, The Captive Republic, 97.

⁷² Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage, 1788–1914 (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 1990), 6.

⁷³ Goyder intended to create a division between farmland and pastoralism that would allow for harmonious settlement. See Janis Sheldrick, "Goyder's Line: The Unreliable History of the Line of Reliable Rainfall" in Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, edited by Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin (Sydney: National Museum of Australia Press, 2005), 63–64.

⁷⁴ Kirsty Douglas, "'For the Sake of a Little Grass': A Comparative History of Settler Science and Environmental Limits in South Australia and the Great Plains," in Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand, edited by James Beattie, Emily O'Gorman, and Matthew Henry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

⁷⁵ Douglas, "'For the Sake of a Little Grass,'" 103.

⁷⁶ Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009) 31–40.

⁷⁷ John Chesterman and Brian Galligan, Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16.

⁷⁸ Broome, Aboriginal Australians, 101.

⁷⁹ Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 242–43.

⁸⁰ David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997), 335.

⁸¹ Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998), 130–31.

⁸² Ronald Lawson, "Towards Demythologizing the 'Australian Legend': Turner's Frontier Thesis and the Australian Experience, Journal of Social History 13, No. 4 (July 1980), 577–587; Erik Altenbernd and Alex Trimble Young, "Introduction: The Significance of the Frontier in an Age of Transnational History," Settler Colonial Studies 4, No. 2 (2014), 127–150.

⁸³ The popularity of women's suffrage was strong in the West. See Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Women got the vote in Western Australia in 1902; see Susan Magarey, Passions of the First Wave Feminists (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2001), 153.

⁸⁴ O'Brien, God's Willing Workers, 37.

⁸⁵ For example, Australia imposed "voluntary" isolation in sanatoria for tuberculosis. See Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 79–80; In her chapter on leprosy, she comments, "This joint management of race, health and sex was undertaken through sets of spatialised practices, involving boundaries, separation, quarantine, isolation and protection on the one hand, and anxiety about the regulation of contact, contagion, integration and assimilation on the other." (113). Quarantine was a way for Australia to define itself as a nation and establish patterns of international relations (135). For similar practices employed against Mexican Americans, See William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Emily K. Abel, Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007).

⁸⁶ Lionel Frost, New Urban Frontier: Urbanisation and City Building in Australasia and the American West (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 1998), 18–19; quotation from 100.

⁸⁷ John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), esp. 23–30.

⁸⁸ Patrick Manning, Migrations in World History (New York: Routledge, 2012).

⁸⁹ In the U.S., anti-Chinese violence continued well into the 1880s in Wyoming, Washington, and Oregon. California served as a warning to New South Wales and Victoria (Andrew Markus, Australian Race Relations, 1788–1993 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 80.

⁹⁰ Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2005), 11–13.

⁹¹ Influence sometimes ran in the other direction, however; California congressman Horace Davis "took a keen interest in colonial developments" in Australia towards Chinese in the 1870s as he looked for legal inspiration. Hostility to Chinese led to immigration restriction in 1881 in Australia and the following year in the U.S.. Markus, Australian Race Relations, 64.

⁹² White, Inventing Australia, 140.

⁹³ For a description of the American experience, see Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 169–74.

⁹⁴ Bell and Bell, Implicated, 33–35.

⁹⁵ Ian Tyrrell, Woman's World/Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America's Moral Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). The medicalization of reform reflected conjuncture as well, as Australian gynecologists like Walter Balls-Headley took their cue about hysteria from leading American psychoanalyst Weir Mitchell. See Magarey, Passions of the First Wave Feminists, 89.

⁹⁶ O'Brien, God's Willing Workers, 41.

⁹⁷ Ian Tyrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Complex water-sharing agreements were crafted where rivers often watered multiple territories or states. Norris Hundley, The Great Thirst: Californians and Water: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001 [rev. ed.]).

⁹⁸ Kim Allen Scott, "Robertson's Echo: The Conservation Ethic in the Establishment of Yellowstone and Royal National Parks," Yellowstone Science 19:3 (2011) 7–11. For Royal National Park's international chronological status as second only to Yellowstone, see Australian Government: Department of the Environment and Energy, "Royal National Park and Garawarra State Conservation Area, Sir Bertram Stevens Dr, Audley, NSW, Australia, http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/ahdb/search.pl?mode=place_detail;place_id=105893

⁹⁹ Richard Waterhouse, The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia (Bentley: Curtin University Books, 2005).

¹⁰⁰ Thomas A. Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006).

¹⁰¹ Sylvia Lawson, Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2006).

¹⁰² White, Inventing Australia, 85.

¹⁰³ Bell and Bell, Implicated, 75.

¹⁰⁴ Legislation, tariffs, reactions to flora and fauna, perceptions of the landscape—even vocabulary like "homestead," "squatter," and the now fundamentally Australian "the bush." "Throughout the nineteenth century," argues Richard White, "Australia was being depicted as 'another America', a 'new America', 'the America of the South', 'the Future America', 'a humble imitation of the United States' 'that great Am on the other side of the sphere', 'the United States of Aus', 'a newer America' and 'the Yankee-land beneath the Southern Cross'." See White, Inventing Australia, 50–52.

¹⁰⁵ Scholars have pointed out that there was no compelling reason for the individual colonies to move toward nationhood and debates over protectionism—New South Wales advocated free trade while largely agrarian Victoria wanted strong tariffs—were a significant hurdle. The three paragraphs that follow rely heavily on John Hirst, Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For his poem, see Henry Parkes, "The Flag." In The Beauteous Terrorist and Other Poems (Melbourne: George Robertson & Company,1885). 

¹⁰⁶ On the significance of the American invention of a constitution as a fixed written document in contrast to Britain's constitution as an evolving body of legal doctrine, see Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 259–307, especially 259–67.

¹⁰⁷ The United States had already developed as the model to emulate by the 1850s; at that time, it was, as Bell and Bell, Implicated, 25, note, "the only significant English-speaking society in the Northern World not still bound by colonial ties," and Australian republicans often anticipated an eventually independent nation. Canada only achieved commonwealth status in 1867.

¹⁰⁸ In early negotiations, members of the Senate were to be determined by state legislatures, as in the original U.S. Constitution. But in the final document, reflecting the democratic spirit of the era, senators were elected by popular vote. American reformers lobbied for the same practice and, after two decades of advocacy, the Seventeenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was adopted in 1913.

¹⁰⁹ On the Court's power of judicial review, see Ronald Norris, Emergent Commonwealth: Australian Federation, Expectations and Fulfilment (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1975), 14.

¹¹⁰ Some argued that such documents were not really needed precisely because the American version already existed. Still, some federation advocates produced such a collection, The Commonwealth and a book by poet William Gay, neither of which sold well. Channeling the spirit of James Madison, Australian founders Alfred Deakin, Henry Higgins, and Isaac Isaacs argued that the greatest divisions in the new nation would not be between states but between conservative and liberal factions.

¹¹¹ Where the District of Columbia reassured Southerners that New York would not be both the financial and administrative center of the U.S., Canberra's location was a compromise between the new federation's two largest cities, Melbourne and Sydney. Like Washington, D.C., the purely administrative city of Canberra was slow to develop. Construction began in 1913, more than a decade after federation, and the legislature only moved there in 1927. Canberra only began to develop significantly after World War II, and in 2018, the entire population of the Australian Capital Territory's 900 square miles just topped 400,000.

¹¹² Paul Kelly, The End of Certainty: Power, Politics and Business in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008).

¹¹³ Ibid, 95.

¹¹⁴ David Walker, "The Curse of the Tropics" in Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, edited by Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin (Sydney: National Museum of Australia Press, 2005), 93–94.

¹¹⁵ On the transatlantic nature of progressive-era social reform, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998).

¹¹⁶ Bell and Bell, Implicated, 39.

¹¹⁷ Bell and Bell, Implicated, 40.

¹¹⁸ Deakin's invitation caused some tension with Great Britain, as he bypassed the Colonial Office, still the authority on matters of foreign policy. See Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), chapter 8. On extending the Monroe Doctrine, see David Lowe, "Politicians and Australia's Progress," Contemporary Histories at Deakin, https://blogs.deakin.edu.au/contemporary-history-studies/working-paper-series/politicians-and-australias-progress-professor-david-lowe/#_ednref18)

¹¹⁹ Sandra Tweedie, Trading Partners: Australia and Asia, 1790–1993 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1994), 36–50.

¹²⁰ Jim Davidson and Peter Spearritt, Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia Since 1870 (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2000), 482; David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 25.

¹²¹ Davidson and Spearritt, Holiday Business, 483.

¹²² Knott, "The Conquering Car," Australian Historical Studies, 31, 114 (2000).

¹²³ Mark Hutchinson, Reviving Australia: Essays on the History and Experience of Revival and Revivalism in Australian Christianity (Sydney: Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity, 1994), 185–199. Indeed, revival meetings led by American Pentecostal minister A.C. Valdez, present at the famed 1906 Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, were instrumental in launching Pentecostalism in Melbourne. Philip J. Hughes, The Pentecostals in Australia (Canberra: Australian Govt. Pub. Service, 1996), 233.

¹²⁴ Attwood, Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, 15, 11.

¹²⁵ More than 60,000 died and 150,000 were wounded out of a total 324,000 who served. Prominent war memorials, ubiquitous in Australia's cities and towns remonstrate "Lest We Forget." ANZAC Day functions as a national holiday much more than Founders Day on January 1, which celebrates the formation of the commonwealth, or Australia Day on January 26, which commemorates Captain Arthur Philips' placement of the British flag at Sydney Cove in 1788.

¹²⁶ W.J. Hudson, Billy Hughes in Paris: The Birth of Australian Diplomacy (Thomas Nelson, 1978).

¹²⁷ Alexander Cameron-Smith, "Australian Imperialism and International Health in the Pacific Islands," Australian Historical Studies (2010), 60–61.

¹²⁸ David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 358–361. The Australian government only accepted Keynesian in late 1939 after the start of WWII. Alex Millmow, The Power of Economic Ideas: The Origins of Macroeconomic Management in Australia, 1929–1939 (Canberra: Australia National University Press, 2010), chapter 10.

¹²⁹ Jeffrey Grey, A Military History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 2008).

¹³⁰ Bell and Bell, Implicated.

¹³¹ In February, 1941, before formal U.S. entry into the war, Luce envisioned the nation leading the world in creating a "vision of the 20^th Century" based on "the ideals of Freedom and Justice." Henry Luce, "The American Century," Life (February 17, 1941), 65.

¹³² Ashley Hogan, Moving in the Open Daylight: Doc Evatt, an Australian at the United Nations (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2008), viii.

¹³³ Peter Edwards, A Nation at War: Australian Politics, Society and Diplomacy During the Vietnam War, 1965–1975 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998), 155; 168–170.

¹³⁴ David Meredith and Barrie Dyster, Australia in the Global Economy: Continuity and Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 192.

¹³⁵ See John Murphy, Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies' Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000), 119.

¹³⁶ Bell and Bell, Implicated, 127–131.

¹³⁷ John Douglass, The California Idea and American Higher Education: 1850 to the 1960 Master Plan (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007).

¹³⁸ Simon Marginson, Educating Australia: Government, Economy, and Citizen since 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 11–12, 27, 36. Though Australia was not an OECD member until 1971, it followed OECD developments, as clearly indicated by the fact that the Martin Report quoted from Phillip Coombs, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, and chair of the 1961 OECD conference on economic growth and education. In January 1963, the OECD committed to undertake the creation of more school systems on the model of California's Master Plan, which represented "the most advanced effort to construct a system of mass higher education…while maintaining a quality of research and education at the top which is unsurpassed anywhere among OECD countries and probably in the world." See John Aubrey Douglas, The California Idea and American Higher Education: 1850 to the 1960 Master Plan (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000), 311–312.

¹³⁹ Graham Hugo, "A Century of Population Change in Australia," Year Book Australia (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2002), http://members.ozemail.com.au/~rdunlop/Year8WebPages4_01/StatExercise/AusStats%20%20Centenary%20Article%20-%20A%20century%20of%20population%20change%20in%20Australia.htm

¹⁴⁰ O'Brien, God's Willing Workers, 231.

¹⁴¹ Stuart Piggin, Evangelical Christianity in Australia: Spirit, Word, and World (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996), 154–171; Hutchinson and Piggin, eds., Reviving Australia, 249–61.

¹⁴² Hughes, The Pentecostals in Australia (Canberra: AGPS, 1996).

¹⁴³ Patrick Troy, Accommodating Australians: Commonwealth Government Involvement in Housing (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2012), 140; Graeme Davison and Tony Dingle, "Introduction: The View from the Ming Wing," in The Cream Brick Frontier: Histories of Australian Suburbia, edited by Graeme Davison, Tony Dingle, and Seamus O'Hanlon (Monash: Monash Publications in History, 1995). Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, The Suburbanization of America, New York : Oxford University Press, 1985. The similarity in the titles should not be ignored—it reflects historians' tendency in both locations to place suburbia in the larger tradition of the frontier as a formative cultural influence.

¹⁴⁴ Graeme Davison, Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered Our Cities (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004).

¹⁴⁵ Harper and White, eds., Symbols of Australia (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2010), 170.

¹⁴⁶ Susan Sessions Rugh, Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 2, describes how the summer family vacation, typified by the road trip, began in the post-World War II era due to new prosperity, employer vacation benefits, high auto ownership rates, and the construction of highways. See also Richard White, On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia (London, Pluto Press, 2005), chapter 5. Unlike the U.S., however, Australia's vacation tradition was often fueled by strong labor governments that supported policies of extensive vacation time. See White, On Holidays, 121–29.

¹⁴⁷ White, Inventing Australia, 158–66; quote on 161.

¹⁴⁸ Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999), 260.

¹⁴⁹ Lawrence Culver, The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 62–66.

¹⁵⁰ White, Inventing Australia, 154.

¹⁵¹ Peter Cochrane, "At War at Home," in Gregory Pemberton, Vietnam Remembered (Chatswood, NSW: New Holland Publishers, 2017 [new ed.]), 167–170.

¹⁵² Attwood and Markus, Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, 18.

¹⁵³ Attwood and Markus, Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, 20.

¹⁵⁴ Attwood and Markus, Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, 174.

¹⁵⁵ Attwood and Markus, Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, 201.

¹⁵⁶ Eric Richards, Destination Australia: Migration to Australian since 1901 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008), 204–243; quotation from 244.

¹⁵⁷ Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, 199.

¹⁵⁸ Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, 132.

¹⁵⁹ Richards, Destination Australia, 258–63.

¹⁶⁰ Frank G. Clarke, The History of Australia (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002), 179–80.

¹⁶¹ Michael Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra: a Nation-Building State Changes its Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

¹⁶² Jim McMorrow, "Education Policy," in Susan Ryan and Troy Bramston, eds., The Hawke Government: A Critical Retrospective (Melbourne: Pluto, 2001), 184–201.

¹⁶³ Graeme Hugo, Kevin R. Harris, Dianne Rudd, Australia's Diaspora: Its Size, Nature and Policy Implications (Melbourne: Committee for Economic Development of Australia, 2003).

¹⁶⁴ James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The story of Australian Immigration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

¹⁶⁵ Murray Giit and Benjamin E. Goldsmith, in Public Opinion and International Intervention: Lessons from the Iraq War, edited by Richard Sobel, Peter Furia, and Bethany Barratt (Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012).

¹⁶⁶ Clarke, History of Australia, 208. In 2016, the Australian Muslim population was estimated to be just over 600,000, or 2.6% of the population; see Australian Bureau of Statistics, "Religion in Australia: 2016 Census Data Summary," June 28, 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/
20170710020910/http://abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2071.0~2016~Main%20Features~Religion%20Data%20Summary~25 [archived copy]. As many as half of Australia's Muslims, however, may be non-practicing. See Jordan Baker and Caroline Marcus, "Inside Sydney's City of Imams" Sunday Telegraph (September 23, 2012). In 2017, the US had roughly 3.45 million Muslims, or 1.1% of the US population; see Besheer Mohamed, "New Estimates Show US Muslim Population Continues to Grow," Pew Research Center, January 3, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/03/new-estimates-show-u-s-muslim-population-continues-to-grow/

¹⁶⁷ Welsh, Great Southern Land, 20.

¹⁶⁸ Daniel Richter, Looking East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

¹⁶⁹ Bernard Attard, "The Economic History of Australia from 1788: An Introduction," EH.net, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-history-of-australia-from-1788-an-introduction/

¹⁷⁰ Frost, New Urban Frontier, 63.

¹⁷¹ Katarine Brisbane, ed., Entertaining Australia: An Illustrated History (Sydney: Currency Press, 1991). Collins, "Movie Octopus" in Peter Spearritt and David Walker, Australian Popular Culture (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1979).