15.1 Exceptional Anglo-Western Expansion
James Belich (2009) emphasizes a pervasive British connection. While there
are other regions of recent resettlement (South America, South Africa, Siberia,
Manchuria), it is only the Anglo-wests that experienced explosive growth in
the nineteenth century. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK consti-
tuted a‘Greater Britain’that, in the course of history since around 1840—the
year of New Zealand’s founding Treaty, and Canada’s Act of Union—had been
more or less apparent as a single cultural and supra‑political identity. Belich
sees Australia, New Zealand, and Canada as neo-Britannic,‘Anglo‑wests’,
parallel to (but distinct from) the various Anglo-wests that constitute the
American union. By this analogy, New Zealand would be equivalent to Cali-
fornia, a‘farthest-west’.^1 Melbourne projects as a close analogue of Chicago.
From this point of view, neither the‘wests’of Greater Britain nor of the USA
are uniquely exceptional, but considered together are exceptional. Canada
now references itself more to its southern neighbour and less to its British
origins, leaving only Australia and New Zealand as Britain’s authentic and
ongoing new wests. The exceptional differences between American and
Greater British western expansions arose from timing, the extent of geograph-
ical distance, and in the different contributions of government to their
respective development processes.
Before the railway age, when oceans were connectors rather than dividers,
the actual extent of distance should not be overstated. Australia, an eastern
‘far west’, remained conceptually and culturally near-west; and, by sea, closer
to London than San Francisco was to New York.^2 Nevertheless, physical
distance does matter. And that is thefirst point of Australasian exception.
New Zealand—like Australia—feared Asia to the north, much nearer than
London, always sensing that Austral-Asia was mislocated. While Australia
and New Zealand resolutely retain the symbolism of Greater Britain through
their blue ensigns, the stars of the Southern Cross represent their antipodean
distance.
While antipodean physical detachment from their metropole was an
Australasian reality quite different from that of an Atlantic-focused America
(^1) Belich (2009, p. 69) imagines a map of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as if they were in
the Atlantic Ocean; an alternate Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In his map of the Atlantic,
New Zealand sits between Australia and England. Perhaps he should have placed New Zealand to
the west of Australia: the Belich analogy works best with the‘newer wests’(California and
New Zealand) also being the 2 ‘farther wests’.
New York to San Francisco via Cape Horn is 24,000 km. The problem of distance in the USA
eased dramatically following the 1869 completion of the Pacific Railroad. While this opened up a
shorter and faster passenger route from New Zealand to Britain (by steam rather than sail), the
opening of the Suez Canal in the same year also reduced the effective distance from Australia to
Europe.
Keith Rankin