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The intersection of labour, race, and immigration is a neglected area of comparative history and this article suggests its potential. This article draws particularly on the papers of Arthur Calwell who, as a leading figure in the Australian Labor Party, was unyielding in his defence of 'White Australia'. Calwell used the 1958 riots against West Indians in Nottingham and London to bolster his opposition to the admission of non-whites. His attitudes are contrasted with the views of selected figures in the British labour movement who championed class over race, and upheld the virtues of the multi-racial British Commonwealth. These differences are held up as a mirror to the contrasting attitudes of Australian and British labour towards race and immigration. These differences, however, narrowed considerably during the late 1950s and 1960s as the ALP abandoned its traditional commitment to 'White Australia', and the British labour movement modified its earlier support for 'coloured' immigrants and their presence within Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia was a precocious mass democracy. In the middle of the 19th century the franchise was extended to nearly all white male adults, the secret ballot was introduced, and other important reforms implemented. Surprisingly, these developments have attracted little recent attention. Dominant interpretations are based on selective surveys of particular colonies; they either elevate the gold diggings or else cynically claim that democratisation was mostly accidental and inglorious. This paper encompasses a survey of the three major colonies. It argues that widespread collective action was a spur to political change, and that electoral reforms were introduced to contain future contention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ways in which Europeans experienced the legal system for crimes against Aboriginal people needs more systematic research. Although for the first fifty years of Australian settlement Aboriginal legal status was protractedly ambiguous, the foundational principle of later-established South Australia was that Aboriginal people were British subjects and settler crimes against them would be punished 'with exemplary severity'. This paper puts this foundational principle to the test by examining the working of the legal system where Europeans were investigated for the deaths of Aboriginal people. Ultimately, we argue, the principle of protecting Aboriginal people as British subjects not only failed, but became inverted into a principle of Aboriginal punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores British, Australian and New Zealand phosphate mining histories in Oceania, with a particular focus on the impact of mining on Banaba, also called Ocean Island, in Kiribati, the former Gilbert Islands Colony. The Ocean Island case provides insight into the nature of Australia's imperial relationship with the Pacific Islands, putting into context, for example, its current relationship with Nauru as a host for refugee detention centres. Both islands were mined for phosphate by the British Phosphate Commissioners which operated out of centres in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland and London. Islands such as Banaba, once critical for Australian agriculture, are absent in Australian public memory but the effects of Banaba's environmental and social ruining endure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the late nineteenth century Australian writers were frequently part of a care group of advocates of on Australian cultural nationalism but they faced a particular problem. British publishers were dominant in book sales in Australia and could be unsympathetic to their aspirations. The writers made attempts to break into the British market, encouraged by the rhetoric of imperial understanding but, as the case of Macmillan and Co. illustrates, support could be difficult to secure, short-term and focused on quite different goals. Rolf Boldrewood had some success but that was owing to particular circumstances. In the first decades of the new century reliance would have to remain based on serial publication and emerging local book publishers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluates the old and the neonationalist interpretations of Australian commercial policy in the 1930s. Influence of a complex structure of pressure groups and political, bureaucratic and regulatory institutions on Australian commercial policy towards Great Britain; Adoption of inflexible positions that limited Australia in its international economic relations.

When war erupted in 1914, Britain embarked on its prewar plans of mobilising resources from its vast Empire, and created an imperial coalition which fought within a wider coalition with France, Russia and, later, the United States of America. This article examines the limited role performed by Australian naval and military forces within this wider imperial effort and assesses the extent to which Australian forces relied on British command, technology, and logistic support. It challenges common assumptions about Australia’s wartime performance, including the degree to which Australian forces and commanders contributed to tactical innovation and wider planning and operational thought. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholarship on Australia's colonial protectorates has examined the ways in which protectors largely failed in their humanitarian mission, as well as the ambivalent roles they played as agents of ‘civilisation’. Yet as well as representing ‘friends and benefactors’ of Aboriginal people, colonial protectors worked to bring them within the legal reach of police, courts and prisons. This article will compare the work of the protectorates during the 1840s in Port Phillip and South Australia with that of Western Australia, where a more systematic and forebodingly modern policy of Aboriginal governance existed. It argues that in Western Australia a logic of Aboriginal protection emerged through a principle of discipline and punishment facilitated by the distinctive policy regime of Governor Hutt. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Justice John Walpole Willis arrived in Melbourne in March 1841 as its first Resident Judge. After just over two years he was removed from office by Governor Gipps and the Executive Council and returned to England to pursue justice through the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. His career exemplifies the colonial civil servants' dilemma: 'thinking globally' by maintaining connections in the wider imperial circuit, but 'acting locally' by keeping boundaries in the local and interpersonal colonial sphere. The dismissal of Justice Willis reflects the tensions between colonial authority and politics and the broader transnational nature of imperial justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the conceptual problems and contextual assumptions found in the treatment of Britishness in Australian history, especially as it has affected the understanding of Australia's relations with the world. It examines firstly the problem of the teleology of nationalism and its uses in Australian history, secondly the notion of Britishness in Australian identity, thirdly the Australian view of Britain and the Empire/Commonwealth in the twentieth century and lastly the implications of this for tensions between the community of culture and the community of interest in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For much of the twentieth century, Australia's commercial dealings with Great Britain were profoundly influenced by the idea that Australia was a 'British country'. Sentimental assumptions about a worldwide community of British peoples underpinned the sense of an organic imperial community of mutual self-interest. This article explores the intersection between sentiment and self-interest in the evolution of the Anglo-Australian relationship, tracing the wide-ranging manifestations of 'British race patriotism' in Australian commercial culture. It is argued that the demise of the imperial ideal in Australia can only be fully comprehended in terms of the radical changes in Australia's international economic prospects occasioned by the British shift towards a European trading future in the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]