and will be dominated, just as the physical environment will be dominated by
any body with a soul.
Hartz’s triumph of mentality over materiality may be plausibly denied.^14
Even if it is accepted, the representation of Australia as a sundered limb, or a
fragment (‘incomplete part’) of the idea-population of the parent culture can
also be refused. Australia, at least until the end of the nineteenth century, was
not the sundered limb of some denizen of the European pantheon, but a cell of
global cultural entity; not a fragment, but an epitome. At least until the end of
the nineteenth century Australia remained an integrated, if incompletely par-
ticipating, province of the British cultural world. In the humanities, a persist-
ing integration is indicated by Samuel Alexander, V. Gordon Childe, and
Gilbert Murray, all alighting in Britain without a feather ruffled, or a sign to
show their Antipodean origin; or, going in the other direction, the instant
assimilation by Australian political life of variousflorets of British learning
(Charles Pearson, Francis Adams, B. R. Wise). Australia at the end of the century
seemed utterly open to thefin de siècle. Hartz’s formulation of his thesis for
Australia amounts to a denial of the relevance for Australian events of any
currents from Europe felt later than, say, 1860, whatever visibility they may
have had. Thus, for all the unusual prominence of British immigrants in the
creation of the Labor Party in the 1890s, they didn’t make a difference; or, for
all the protectionist ideas that the same British unionists brought with them,
these didn’t make a difference. However wrong Hartz may have been in these
denials, he at least had a vision that yielded them: just as bodies without soul
are without an influence, so are souls without bodies. The intellectual societies
that shape material events consist of a population of bodies with soul, and this
population had been established, according to Hartz, by 1860. Yet the choice of
cut-off date is not important. To Hartz the foundation of Australia was con-
cluded at some point, and an oversimplicity in the social contents of that
foundation precluded any intellectual combustion, leaving a stable ideological
ascendancy. An inert one,^15 but an ascendancy all the same.
3.3 Autonomy and W. K. Hancock
Ward and Hartz’s common presumption of the hypertrophy of fraternity as
the characterizing feature of Australian life was challenged by Hancock’s
(^14) Contrary to a triumph of the ideal over the material,‘fragments’appear protean in their
subsequent development: Ulster, the West Indies, and North America took roughly equal shares of
British immigration in the twenty years before 1642 (Bolton 1973). 15
‘Australia has not got a mind’(Horne 1964, p. 16). See the same sentiment in Grattan (1940,
p. 7), Edwards (1979, p. 43), MacKenzie (1961, pp. 146–9).‘The poverty of theoretical notions is
astonishing’(Métin [1901] 1977, p. 180).
William O. Coleman