Benjamin T. Jones - This Time: Australias Republican Past and Future

PRAISE FOR THIS TIME

Benjamin T. Jones This Time takes us to the high ground of political argument. His republic is one that institutionalises and promotes the values of democracy, meritocracy and community not just in our constitution but also in the many symbols we need to unite and inspire our citizens, including our flag, our coins and our national anthem.

GEOFF GALLOP, former premier of Western Australia

If you want to think, for the very first time, about why Australia needs an Australian head of state, this is the book for you. Passionate, provocative and patriotic, this is the book we all need for the republic we have to have.

CLARE WRIGHT, historian

Powerful and compelling. This is the book weve been waiting for. Jones has written the most passionate and coherent argument for an Australian republic in decades.

MARK MCKENNA, historian

This is an important Australian book about an important Australian campaign. Benjamin T. Jones tells the republican story as it should be told the story of Australias long journey towards its own best self.

MICHAEL COONEY, national director of the Australian Republican Movement

Thought it would be good. Didnt think it would be one of the best and most fascinating books I have read for years. Benjamin T. Jones for PM! Stuff that, Benjamin T. Jones FOR PRESIDENT!

CATHERINE DEVENY

Published by Redback,
an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

www.blackincbooks.com.au

Copyright Benjamin T. Jones 2018

Benjamin T. Jones asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

9781760640347 (paperback)

9781743820186 (ebook)

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

Cover design by Peter Long

Typesetting by Marilyn de Castro

Portrait of John Dunmore Land on page 45 courtesy of State Library of Queensland.

Convict Uprising on page 24 courtesy of National Library of Australia.

Cartoon from Tribune courtesy of National Library of Australia.

Dedicated to the memory of John Hirst, historian, republican, friend

FOREWORD

PETER FITZSIMONS

That great Australian author John OGrady was bloody well right. We Australians really are a weird mob.

On the one hand, since the days of the convicts we have had an innate desire to beat the Poms at everything, starting with the Ashes, cos it proves we are better, hardier and stronger than they are.

On the other hand, we persist with a system of government whereby the only person good enough to be the Australian Head of State must come from a particular family of English aristocrats, living in a palace in London even while reserving the primary place on our flag for their flag.

As if that isnt odd enough, we pride ourselves on being the anti-snobs good, gritty, down-to-earth folk whose primary value is egalitarianism, exulting in the notion that we are all equal beneath the Southern Cross. Yet we insist that if you are the first-born of that particular family of aristocrats, and wear a sparkly hat, you must be better than any one of us.

A weird mob, I say!

In the 1890s, our people were hardy enough and strong enough to overcome the worst depression and worst drought of the century, and to accomplish the colossal task of forming a Federation. In the 1940s, our troops were the first to stop the German Army in the Second World War, beating the brutes senseless at Tobruk, before returning to our own neck of the woods to be the first to stop the Japanese Army at Milne Bay, and then Kokoda. But right now, well into the twenty-first century, we still have a huge chunk of the population who insist that taking the garden shears to the last of our ties to England and making the snip is a task completely beyond us.

WEIRD.

And it goes on

We fancy ourselves as go-it-alone types, believing that in our natural state we are independent, can-do characters. But 250 years after Captain Cook landed at Botany Bay, we still have not mustered the wherewithal to have our own free-standing government of Australians, for Australians, overseen by an Australian.

Weve produced people smart enough to invent the likes of penicillin and wi-fi, but we have other people even highly regarded ones who insist that we are a crowned republic, which to me sounds like a red-meat vegetarian or a religious atheist completely nonsensical.

How to explain all this, these two central but opposed strands of our national character? The obsequious Uriah Heep, on the one hand, always seeking favour from our superiors, and Dennis Lillee on the other, steaming in from the Randwick end to knock their bloody blocks off as we roar for more?

Enter This Time, Benjamin T. Jones wonderful book in which he takes us back through the evolution of these twin identities. This Time traces the history of our earliest colonial republicans, the search for Australian identity in the twentieth century, and the saga of the 1999 referendum. Jones describes not just our republican past, but what our republican future might look like complete with a proposed preamble and republican model. Whether you agree or disagree with the particulars, this book is a discussion-starter. What should our republic look like?

In the end, it will be for we, the people, to decide which part of our national character is the dominant one. If the Australian Republic Movement has anything to do with it and we do! we will soon have a referendum on that very subject. This book makes our case stronger.

As the decades have rolled on, our dependence on England has waned and the sense of our own, entirely separate identity has surged. We just need that one last push to get there, to be finally free-standing beneath the Southern Cross!

While reserving the right to do my own book on the evolution of the Australian identity, I warmly commend Dr Jones on his book and unlike me when it comes to another Australian author I hope it sells its socks off!

PETER FITZSIMONS AM

Chair, Australian Republican Movement

Neutral Bay

26 October 2017

INTRODUCTION

AUSTRALIA IS HAMLET

A ustralia was born in chains and is not yet fully free. With these words, the eminent historian John Hirst began his 1994 book, A Republican Manifesto. Some may cringe at the implications. Australias human history did not begin when shackled white feet took their first steps around Sydney Harbour in the late eighteenth century, but over fifty thousand years earlier, at the conclusion of an epic journey over land bridges and open seas from Africa. But what of freedom? Even if Australian history is measured only from British colonisation to the present day, surely the nations evolution from penal settlement to democratic society is complete? Not exactly.

Heres a riddle: if a slave is offered freedom but rejects it, is that rejection an act of freedom? From a constitutional perspective, Australia is far from free. That great edifice of democracy, the federal parliament, operates (technically, at least) only at Her Majestys pleasure. This is the paradox of Australian freedom. It has already been won but sits rejected. In the heated republican debates of the 1990s, few noted the irony that the proposed constitutional changes would require royal assent. The point was largely moot, however, as the Queen agreed to sign off on the republican project if the referendum carried.