It is reasonable to suggest that if, after 1900, there had been a colony
covering all tropical Australia, with its own seat of government guiding its
special economic interests, and a right to select cheaper forms of labour, the
tropical north would have advanced more rapidly. Instead, the entire and vast
region of tropical Australia was ruled by capital cities, which lay in the 60 per
cent of the nation standing to the south of the Tropic of Capricornia.
The failure to create any new fully-fledged colony or state after 1859, when
Queensland was founded as a breakaway from NSW, was a vital event or non-
event. Whereas many new states were created in the USA after 1859, not one
was created in Australia—except the large Northern Territory and tiny Austra-
lian Capital Territory, which, at best, are half-states. A new colony or state,
created in, say, 1860 or 1889, and based entirely in the tropics, would have
formed its own policy on immigration, and probably would not have been a
democracy in the Australian style. Whether such a colony would have
resolved to enter—or been permitted to enter—the Australian federation in
1901 is doubtful.
Australia had remained in ancestry, for much of its history since 1788, a
child of the British Isles. On the other hand, largely hidden from sight was an
Aboriginal component which increasingly intermarried with the Anglo-Celtic
component. After 1945, and the shock of Japanese military victories so close
to Australia, came a population somersault. Australia sought a higher popula-
tion and a strong industrial base. Deliberately its population mix was trans-
formed,first by migration from continental Europe and, after the late 1970s,
by increasing migration from Vietnam, China, India, and other parts of South
and East Asia, with lesser intakes from Africa, the Americas, and Pacific Islands.
Australia became cosmopolitan—‘multicultural’is the more popular label but
is clumsy because it carries too many rival meanings. Few countries had
voluntarily changed their population mix so quickly. Here was yet another
episode in Australian exceptionalism.
At the same time, Britain ceased to be the main trading partner, being
surpassed by Japan in the 1960s and then by South Korea, Taiwan, and a
cluster of East Asian nations (McLean, 2013, p. 228). China almost propped
up, indeed galvanized, Australia’s economy after the globalfinancial crisis
in 2008.
2.12 The Balance Sheet
Australia had provided a mixture of unusual experimenting, and unusual
rigidities and conservatism. What is the balance sheet? All in all, it is one of
the most experimental, and one of the most exceptionalist, countries in the
Geoffrey Blainey