Australiaof 1930. Where in Australia, asked Hancock, were the manifest-
ations of‘civil society’that would surely be one fruit of such a sense of
bond and identity? The only example he couldfind was the Australian
Natives Association, a Fabian-like pressure group for state action, and hardly
an expression of self-contained community activity. To add to his case, he
could have pointed out that the then newly established Parents and Citizens
Associations had been created‘top down’, at the behest of school inspectors,
who sadly contrasted the indifference of Australian parents with the vitality
of US school associations.^16 And he may have observed that the one fragment
of civil society in Australian education that did exist—the Australian Council
of Education Research, founded in 1925, was established by the Carnegie
Foundation. In the same vein, he could have noted that all Australian uni-
versities were state foundations; instrumental‘public utility’universities.^17
Or that trade unions of twentieth-century origin, as distinct from those of the
nineteenth century, were the deliberate growths of the legislative hothouse.^18
Finally, Hancock might have added that local government—surely an indi-
cation of the strength of tendency to form associations—is feeble in Australia.
First instituted in 1842 by imperial edict in the face of a wary colony, only in
1906 was local government expanded to encompass the great bulk of
New South Wales, and then only over the strenuous opposition of local
residents.^19
In Hancock’s analysis, the Australian condition is diagnosed not as hyper-
trophy of fraternity but a distortion of the very different‘sphere’: that arena of
life in which self-assertion, guided by private reason and constrained to‘walk
reputably towards those without, and have need of no one’(1 Thessalonians
4:12), results in wealth. This might be referred to as‘the economy’, but may
just as well be identified with the‘modern liberty’discerned by Benjamin
Constant. It will be called here‘the sphere of autonomy’, and it was the key to
Hancock. According to Hancock, Australia’s foundation amounted to an erup-
tion of individual self-assertion in the wake of the eclipse of social deference.
Australia began with an‘enrush of a horde’of‘individualistic’,‘self-assertive’,
‘egotistical’‘invaders’who were‘held together by nothing’and, driven by
‘greed’,‘imposed themselves’on the continent to draw its wealth,‘forcing’,
(^16) The relative rarity of cooperatives in Australia may also betoken a weakness in civil society.
Dilke (1890, vol. 2, p. 296) notes their‘disappointing’state.‘There is very little co-operative
enterprise in Australia 17 ’(Eggleston 1953a, p. 54).
‘The notion of the school as being a kind of society...has not been very conspicuous in
Australia’(Partidge 1973, p. 82). Partridge suggests the goal of the government school system
in Australia is to dispense a 18 ‘basic wage’of education.
A historian of one of Australia's largest unions has judged‘undoubtedly, arbitration...was
largely responsible for the union 19 ’s growth’(Merritt 1986, p. 363).
As in NSW, local government in South Australia and Victoria was very much the creature and
dependent of state governments (see Hirst 1973, p. 147).
Theories of Australian Exceptionalism