enlargement of one province clearly need not exclude the enlargement of
another. Taking up that truth, this chapter suggests it is the hypertrophy of
two arenas—fraternity and societal technology—that captures the incongru-
ities that characterize much of Australian life. At the same time, there is also
too much agreement in that, whatever their differences, the diagnosticians
of Australian exceptionalism concur that Australia has now been shaped, for
good or ill, and its cast is rigid. History for the Australian exception is, indeed,
over. This belief implicitly infers a latent strength from its manifest rigidity.
The chapter ends by imputing instead a potential brittleness to the hardened
figure of the Australian exception. This possibility is entertained on account of
a third potential shaping force; neither rational adaptation to a physical
reality, nor the non-rational impress of culture, but the good sense in obeying
the reverberating edicts of past events until new events countermand.
3.1 Status and Station
A former highway man is the personal physician of the governor; the owner
of the colony’s sole copy of Blackstone’sCommentarieshas been convicted of
stealing calico from Sir Robert Peel; and the Chief Constable of Bathurst has
been previously found guilty of high treason.^1 And then, in the space of ten
years,BotanyBaybecomes,tousetheChineselexicon,theNewGoldMountain,
and isflooded by emigrants—disproportionately young, Irish, and Scottish^2 —
welcoming, in Anthony Trollope’s judgement—the‘overthrow’of the state of
the world.
Australia’s particular origins evidently played mayhem with the customary
vertical gradations of society, and the manifestations of that were copiously
noted by British visitors: how traditional relations were unsettled between
women and men (Adams 1892, p. 49), children and adults (Fraser 1910,
p. 123), and sons and fathers (Twopeny [1883] 1973, p. 102), and how the
subordination of the Dissenter and Catholic to the effectively disestablished
Church of England was broken.^3 Most conspicuously, class relations were
dislocated, as the reliance on birth and refinement would jar too badly with
imperatives of pioneer existence. In this aspect Australia was‘English, with a
thick slice cut off the top, and a thin slice at the bottom’(Martineau 1869,
p. 56); Great Britain with the‘upper classes left out’(Dilke 1890, vol. 2, p. 236).
(^1) D’Arcy Wentworth, Simeon Lord, and John Strange.
(^2) In 1891, the population of Ireland and Scotland amounted to 30 per cent of the population of
England and Wales. In New South Wales (NSW) in 1891 the number the Irish and Scots born
amounted to 72 per cent of its English and Welsh born. 3
The Church of England itself could not, in Australia, reproduce in its own governance the
vertical structures of its metropolitan.
Theories of Australian Exceptionalism