economic vision that is kindred to the sphere of fraternity. This vision is made
vivid with regard to the mineral bounty of Australia. An illustration: within
eight years of European settlement coal was found‘littering the beach’(Perry
1963, p. 58). At various times since, Australia has been the world’s leading
producer of tin and gold; it is currently the largest producer of aluminium
oxide and bauxite; ranked second in iron ore, gold, and lead; third for man-
ganese, uranium, and zinc, and in contention for third place in coal and
nickel.^39
Another salient material feature of Australia is her population, or lack of
it. Australia is a small-scale society. It is just large enough to be prone to the
‘illusion of completeness’(Davies 1985, p. 243) and a‘delusion of compe-
tence’(Clement Freud cited in Boyd 1972, p. 24), but small enough to
suffer from the expatriatism, amateurism, gossiping and score-settling of a
small one (MacKenzie 1961, p. 146). Most significantly of all, there exists
social theory to argue that small societies facilitate collusion: economically,
politically, and socially (Olson 1965). Australia seems a convincing illus-
tration. Is Australia not the societyof the tidy stitch-up, whether in the
party room, the Trades Hall, the Chamber of Commerce, the University
Council, or Council of Governments? Is it not a society in which the inner-
ring prevails and beguiles? Tellingly, a popular ABC current affairs pro-
gramme is called‘Insiders’. The most bought edition of one national
newspaper is the annual‘Power Issue’that identifies for its readers the
‘most powerful people in the country’. Visitors past and present have
been struck by the rule of golden circles. ‘Exclusive and clique ridden’
judged one British observer at the time of Federation (Rowland 1903,
p. 122). Even 110 years later, one American political scientist declared:
‘the one thing that has overwhelmed me about Australia and its politics
is how cosy everything is. Despite its vast physical expanse, the country’s
political elites seem remarkably inbred. Party cliques determine candidate
selection in mysterious ways, highly reminiscent of tightly-held 19th century
machine politics of the US’(Loomis 2013, p. 39). Australia is a classless society
with a ruling class. It is a country where the elite chooses its own successors,
but recruits them from across society.
fostered by the Crown in thefirst place. State land was notoriously expensive; the‘preposterously
high’price (Therry 1863, p. 2523) of £1 an acre was the benchmark in Australia, compared to
$US1.25 per acre of the US Land Act of 1820 (about 5s).
(^39) ‘At December 2012, Australia had the world's largest economic resources of gold, iron ore,
lead, rutile, zircon, nickel, uranium and zinc’. GeoScience Australia, http://www.ga.gov.
au/scientific-topics/minerals/mineral-resources/aimr. The same bounty does not extend to
petroleum, but it remains the case that Russia and Norway are the only developed countries with
larger‘conventional’oil reserves per capita than Australia.
Theories of Australian Exceptionalism