The expansion in higher education is surely a symbol of the new Australia.
In 1939 14,000 students were enrolled in higher education in Australia: by
2014, domestic enrolments were a touch under 1 million. But this expansion
underlines the persistence of the old, as the expansion is a replication of the
format laid down for school education a century before: massive state univer-
sities, with a parallel-funded Catholic system, largely free-to-user,^18 all under a
Department of Education exercising a degree of control unseen in universities
in any other anglophone country (Corden 2000; Lane 2013). In Australia,
history keeps on keeping on.
The 1960s literature was, additionally, overly‘Australianist’. It functioned—
like all twentieth-century theorists of Australian exceptionalism—under a
distinct sense of an integral‘national community’. All explanation was to
arise from an integral Australia; none, it seemed, from sub-national or supra-
national categories. A reaction against this false unity of an integral Australia
had begun in the 1960s with the emergence of regional history. Regrettably,
that regional history neglected the greatest geographical fracture of all: that
between‘the two cultural and intellectual regions into which the country has
always been divided’(Davies 1984, p. 57),‘the cold south’and the‘uncouth’
north (Ward 1988, p. 2); a fracture that had been noted by visitors from the
late nineteenth century,^19 was underlined by Sydney’s rejection of Federation
in the referendum of 1899,^20 and was felt throughout the subsequent century
(Clark 1962; Docker 1974; Davidson 1986). Yet the existence of that fracture
does not repudiate Australian exceptionalism. On the contrary, one of the
unusual features of Australian society is that a vital north–south dualism has
failed to truly develop, and instead the‘cold south’carves out‘all her desires
and will brook no interference’(Adams 1892, p. 60). Thus, part of the under-
standing of Australian exceptionalism will not be locating some national
essence but understanding a regional sway.
The reaction to the history of‘national community’that did eventually
prevail was an overreaction to that history, and an overreaction that would
have Australian exceptionalism extinguished. In the succeeding historiog-
raphy, all contention would be focused on sub-national (indigenes,‘ethnics’)
or supra-national categories of (women, ‘settlers’). There was no more
(^18) No payment is required up front of Australian tertiary students, but graduates are liable to a
supplementary tax on any income in excess of a certain amount. The revenue of this tax is about
onefifth of the cost of current domestic students. This type of scheme wasfirst mooted by Milton
Friedman (1962, p. 105), and was 19 first implemented by Australia.
See Adams (1892, p. 59) on Sydney vs Melbourne, and Richard Twopeny on the‘Whiggism’of
New South Wales and Queensland and the‘radicalism’of Victoria and South Australia. Also Dilke
(1890, vol. 2, p. 484) on the greater fellow feeling with the USA in NSW and Queensland. 20
The referendum of 20 June 1899: Sydney‘No’s 35,457, Sydney‘Yes’s 34,765 (Legislative
Assembly of New South Wales 1899).‘Sydney’means‘Greater Sydney’as according to the usage
of Clifford et al. (2006, p. 33).
William O. Coleman