This is an edited version of a speech given by Associate Professor Carolyn Holbrook to the Ballarat Reform League Charter 170th Anniversary St Paul’s Church Ballarat, Monday 11 November 2024
Thank you very much for this invitation to address you on this important occasion of the 170th anniversary of the declaration of the Ballarat Reform League Charter.
I would like to join the organisers in acknowledging that we are meeting on the traditional lands of the Wadawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung people. I pay my respects to elders past and present.
As we have just heard, it is 170 years since the remarkable charter of the Ballarat Reform League was first read at Bakery Hill. It is a particularly apt time to be talking about the charter of the Ballarat Reform League and about democracy itself.
The self-proclaimed greatest democracy in the world has just emphatically elected a president who openly flouts many of the conventions of democratic government that have been established over the past 250 years. We need to be doing some very hard thinking about what we mean by democracy, and how we can safeguard our own precious democracy. Democracy is more fragile than many of us imagined. It is not a ‘thing’ that can be achieved and left to its own devices. Democracy is a continual work in progress, the viability of which is sustained by the consent of the citizenry.
Ballarat Reform League Charter
Before I launch into some more general comments about the history, and the future, of democracy in Australia, I will briefly touch on the events that occurred right near here 170 years ago on this date.
A crowd of approximately 10,000 people gathered at Bakery Hill on the afternoon of Saturday 11 November 1854 to formalise the establishment of the Ballarat Reform League. Prominent members of the League included the Welsh Chartist John Basson Humffray, English Chartist and newspaper editor George Black, Irish engineer Peter Lalor, German sailor Frederick Vern, Italian revolutionary Raffaello Carboni, Scottish Chartist Thomas Kennedy, and the English Chartists Henry and Charles Nicholls. Humffray, Vern and Kennedy addressed the meeting, at which the Charter was read and approved.
As we have just heard, the Charter opened with the assertion: ‘That it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a choice in the laws he is called on to obey, and that taxation without representation is tyranny’. In these words, we can hear the echo of the American Declaration of Independence. It is easy to see why the editor of the Ballarat Times, Henry Seekamp, called the Charter ‘the draft prospectus of Australian independence’ and claimed that Bakery Hill had become ‘the rallying ground for Australian freedom’.[1]
Listen again to these words:
‘If Queen Victoria continues to act upon the ill advice of dishonest ministers and insists upon indirectly dictating obnoxious laws for the colony, … the Reform League will endeavour to supersede such Royal prerogative by asserting that of the people, which is the most royal of all prerogatives, as the people are the only legitimate source of all political power.’
The document contained five of the six demands of the original Chartist movement in the United Kingdom. It called for full and fair parliamentary representation, manhood suffrage, no property qualifications for members of parliament, payment of members of parliament, and short parliamentary sittings. The Charter did not mention the secret ballot, which was the sixth point of the original 1838 Charter in the UK. In addition to these demands for democratic reform, the Ballarat Charter demanded abolition of the hated miners’ licence and the existing goldfields administration.
Leaders of the Ballarat Reform League held a meeting with Governor Hotham in late November at which they demanded the release of the three men who had been convicted of burning down Bentley’s Hotel.
Hotham rejected their demand.
Events escalated over the following days and led to the split within the Ballarat Reform League, between men who were prepared to countenance violence, and those like John Humffray, who insisted on peaceful resistance.
And we all know what happened on 3 December 1854.
The meaning of 1854
Debates about the intentions of the protesters and the causes of the Eureka rebellion have continued for more than one hundred years.
Writing in 1897, the American author Mark Twain thought the Eureka Stockade was ‘the finest thing in Australian history’, ‘a revolution small in size but great politically’. In contrast, some historians, like Manning Clark, have downplayed the significance of the rebellion and events leading up to it.
An oft-heard interpretation sees the events as the protest of entrepreneurial small businessmen, proto-capitalists rather than proto-unionists. This interpretation is given credence by the subsequent behaviour of the leader of the stockade, Peter Lalor, who later opposed some progressive land reforms in the Legislative Assembly.
Others have seen the seeds of radical nationalism, republicanism and labour activism in the events of 1854.
The historian Robin Gollan believed the Ballarat Reform League Charter amounted to a declaration that the League would be prepared to engage in civil war if reform was not forthcoming. In The Golden Age, published in 1963, Geoffrey Serle described Eureka as a ‘fight for freedom’ and a ‘democratic protest against arbitrary government’. H.V. Evatt argued that ‘Australian democracy was born at Eureka’.
The historian David Goodman has pointed out that many of the diggers were focussed on being given their rights as British subjects, not as members of an emerging political community in Australia.
Geoffrey Blainey proposed an explanation for the rebellion based around the deep mine shafts that characterised the Ballarat goldfields. He claimed that the effort required to dig these deep shafts created a more stable mining population, in which discontent and activism could ferment.
Others, including Weston Bate, and Marjorie Theobald, in her recent history of Mount Alexander, disagree. They point to the fact that other goldfields, such as Chewton and Bendigo, saw plenty of unrest in the years leading up the Eureka rebellion.
Recent research has considered the influence of the 1848 revolutions in Europe on the goldfields. And the role of women.
I don’t propose to wade into these debates about the meaning of 1854.
What I would like to speak to you about this evening is the place of the Ballarat Reform League Charter and the events of 1854 within the broader context of the history of democracy in Australia. As I said, I think it is a very apt time for Australians to be thinking very seriously about the nature of our democracy.
I will argue that the events of 1854 form part of a democratic history of Australia that has been overshadowed in our national imagination by two phenomena: first up, by an emphasis until the middle of the twentieth century on the Britishness of our democratic tradition. And second, by an equally overweening focus on our military history. I will argue that our lack of attachment to our democratic history is a cause for concern at a time when democracy is in retreat around the world, and when Australians are increasingly disillusioned with our political system.
First up, let me quickly run through why we need to be concerned about the future of democracy.
Triumph of democracy
The twentieth century might well be remembered as a golden age of democracy. At the cusp of the twentieth century, few, if any, nation-states were democratic, in the sense that we understand the concept.
That is:
- A representative government chosen by the adult population in free and fair elections
- rule of law
- freedom of the press
- independent judicial system
- protection of free speech and individual rights.
During the twentieth century, democracy seemed to be on an irresistible march.
By the year 2000, there were 120 democracies around the world, the highest number in human history. Approximately half the world’s population was governed under some form of democratic rule.
The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union encouraged the belief that democratic governance was the natural order. Remember, the collapse of Communism in Europe was happening at the same time as the Tiananmen Square protests in China.
Looking at the world at the end of the Cold War, it was easy to agree with the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s famous argument that we were reaching ‘the end of history’, a time where liberal democracy would triumph over all other forms of government.
Democratic decay
So, the retreat from democracy around the world in the past couple of decades has come as something of a surprise for many of us.
We know that far from walking down the democratic path, China and Russia have gone in far more autocratic directions. But the trend is much wider. The world passed its democratic highwater mark in 2012.[2]
The Politics academic Damien Kingsbury claimed last year that just 24 countries fulfilled the criteria of a ‘full democracy’, constituting just eight percent of the world’s population. If you include what Kingsbury called ‘flawed democracies’, that number increases to 72 countries. These ‘flawed democracies’ include the United States, Poland, South Africa, and Botswana. Many of these countries have seen the rise of so-called ‘strongman’ leaders. Examples include Recep Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. And Trump in the US. These leaders prize a macho populist leadership style, characterised by increasing levels of autocracy, and restrictions on free speech and judicial independence.
Kingsbury argues that the trend began in 2006, with around three-quarters of all democratic countries undergoing degrees of democratic deterioration by 2021.
Democracy in Australia
So, what about the situation in Australia?
Australia is in a stronger position than many other countries. However, there are alarming signs of democratic decay in rising levels of polarisation and distrust in our democratic system. This is particularly so among the young and less advantaged.
Australian democracy also faces threats posed by foreign actors through various means. These include the use of human commentators by a surprisingly high number of overseas governments — 47 in the year to May 2023 — to distort online debate and seed conspiracy theories.
It also includes the deployment of AI technology to spread distrust in government. The threats presented by AI, social media and the internet more generally are also home-grown. These technologies can be used to rapidly spread disinformation and misinformation, and polarise communities far more effectively than analogue technologies.
We must also acknowledge the endemic social and economic causes of declining trust in democratic governance.
While social connection — “a vibrant civic society” — is vital to democratic wellbeing, loneliness and isolation are increasing. Membership of political, religious, sporting, political and trade union communities has declined. Crucially, those who feel shut out of opportunities such as home ownership and employment, or suffer from mental ill-health and forms of complex disadvantage, are more likely to feel disillusioned and distrustful.
The civic deficit
Australia does not have a tradition of sentimental attachment to our democratic tradition.
The historian John Hirst observed that there was a ‘strange gap’ between Australians’ democratic achievements and their lack of attachment to them. Hirst wrote: ‘there was never a time when [Australians] attached themselves to their political system as the embodiment of the nation’.[i]
With the introduction of compulsory education in Australia from the 1870s, school children were inculcated into imperial citizenship. Children were introduced to what is often called a ‘Whiggish’ version of imperial history, a story of political progress from monarchical rule towards the liberal institutions that Britain graciously exported to its settler colonies.
This extract from a 1914 Education Department document about history education shows how children were encouraged to consider themselves part of a British rather than an Australian democratic tradition:
Admiration of the achievements of the British race in peace as well as in war should lead to a broad patriotism and a real sense of our kinship with the other portions of the Empire.
The child would learn from history lessons:
what a debt he owes his ancestors.
And a competent history teacher would:
make him swear to pay [that debt], by transmitting down, entire, those sacred rights to which himself was born.[3]
The imaginative failure of Federation
This focus on the British liberal inheritance has distorted the way that Australians have understood their democratic history. It explains why Federation completely failed to capture the national imagination.
The men, and they were all men, who made the Commonwealth of Australia, liked to imagine that the moment of Federation would be revered by future generations. The Attorney-General Alfred Deakin expressed a hope that Australians would commemorate our nation-making day in the same way that Americans celebrated the fourth of July each year. In the first federal parliament, Deakin tried to establish 1 January, as a national day of celebration, to be known as Commonwealth Day. But he was unable to win the support of parliamentary colleagues.
The first prime minister, Edmund Barton, made undertakings during the first year of Federation, that there would be celebrations on a grand scale at the first anniversary of the Commonwealth. But despite these assertions, New Year’s Day in 1902 passed without any effort to commemorate the first anniversary of the Commonwealth.
This pattern continued in the following years, as Federation faded from the national imagination.
A columnist in Victoria’s Numurkah Leader newspaper contrasted the apathy of 1903 with the enthusiasm of 1901:
He would have been a bold man indeed who in 1901 would have ventured to predict that in two short years the patriotic fervor … and imperialistic rejoicings with which the inauguration of the Commonwealth was celebrated would have been practically non-existent.[4]
How do we account for the lack of enthusiasm about commemorating the foundation of a new nation?
Federation represented a separation from Britain at a time when Australians wished to emphasise their connectedness to the mother country. Indeed, some influential Australians saw Federation as a step in the larger process of imperial federation, under which the nations of the British empire would be ruled by a single parliament in London.
The Victorian School Paper, which was distributed to schools by the Education Department, is a good measure of how Australians regarded Federation. Its coverage gave greater emphasis to the presence of the Queen’s representative, Lord Hopetoun and his wife, at the Federation celebrations in Sydney than to the new prime minister, Edmund Barton and his Cabinet. Coverage of the death of Queen Victoria just a few weeks after Federation far eclipsed the attention that was given to Federation.
Martial nationalism
The other major shortcoming of Federation was that it created a new nation from a peaceful legal settlement at a time when most Australians believed that nations were made in war.
Some, like the Federation poet George Essex Evans, tried to muster pride in Australians’ ‘bloodless flag’ and the fact that theirs was ‘Free-born of nations, Virgin white, Not won by blood nor ringed with steel’.[5] But the sentiment of journalist and author A.G. Hales more accurately represented the view of the majority:
A nation is never a nation
Worthy of pride or place
‘Till the mothers have sent their firstborn
To look death on the field in the face…
Bridle to bridle our sons will ride
With the best that Britain has bred,
And all we ask is an open field
And a soldier’s grave for our dead.[6]
The British journalist Alfred Buchanan managed to be especially patronising when he wrote that: the most gaping deficit for the ‘little Australian’ looking to ‘nourish the flame of patriotic sentiment’ was that: ‘The altar has not been stained with crimson as every rallying centre of a nation should be’.[7]
The martial baptism
Australia achieved its martial baptism on 25 April 1915 at Gallipoli; a military event that conformed sufficiently to the conventions of turn-of-the-century martial nationalism.
The Gallipoli landing, and the men who fought for Australia in the First AIF, rapidly became the stuff of legend, not least at the hands of the official historian Charles Bean. It became a widely held belief that Australia was, as Bean wrote in his Official History, born on the battlefield at Gallipoli.[8]
The Anzac legend has had its up and downs.[9] Indeed, it entered a malaise after the Second World War when Anzac became an object of criticism among younger generations during the 1950s and 1960s. Some young people were inclined to see Anzac as representing outdated values of allegiance to the British empire and racial hierarchy. The anti-militarism that emerged in opposition to the Vietnam War further reduced the stocks of Anzac. By the 1980s, it was widely expected that Anzac would die out along with the last of the old diggers.
As we all know, that is certainly not what happened!
Historians have written about how a remodelled version of the Anzac mythology, stripped of its anachronistic elements, stepped into fill the breach left by the demise of the British-Australian identity. There had been a period of flux during the 1960s and 1970s, when the government was actively looking to cultivate a new, post-British form of Australian nationalism.
It was even given a name—the New Nationalism.
But after the failure to find a new, unifying Australian mythology, the government eventually settled on a dusted off and revised form of the Anzac legend, Anzac 2.0 as I like to call it.
The Hawke government in the late 1980s had noticed that there were signs of a softening public attitude towards the Anzac mythology. Family historians had begun to take an interest in the stories of their Anzac fathers and grandfathers. There were the beginnings of what would become a steady flow of books, often self-published, about the personal experiences of Australian men in the First World War. These books were typically based on letters and diaries. Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli appeared in 1981 and was hugely influential in turning new generations of Australians onto the Anzac legend. If younger Australians were apt to conjure elderly men with what were now considered to be bigoted views when they thought of the Anzac legend, Gallipoli presented a sympathetic version, of innocent young men who were sacrificed due to British arrogance and incompetence.
Looking at these changing public attitudes, Bob Hawke made the decision to accompany a group of elderly diggers to Gallipoli in 1990 for the 75th anniversary of the landing. This so-called ‘pilgrimage’ was a great success, and marked the beginning of the great political patronage of Anzac commemoration.
Since the 1990s, governments have plunged hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of dollars into educational materials about Australian military history, into the Australian War Memorial, and into sprucing up monuments to war all around the country. Australia spent more than any other country, and almost more than all other nations combined, in commemorating the centenary of the First World War between 2014 and 2018.
The federal government has spent more than a billion dollars in the last decade on Anzac commemoration, including the ongoing $550 million renovation of the Australian War Memorial.
The democratic deficit
There was a moment in the 1960s and 1970s, when Australia might have turned towards its own democratic history in seeking a new national legend.
This didn’t happen.
So, with the earlier emphasis on British race patriotism and the more recent focus on Anzac, our own national democratic story has been underplayed. There has never been a time when we have focussed sufficiently on the Australian democratic story.
I worry that this failure to sufficiently value our own democratic history leaves us vulnerable to the anti-democratic headwinds swirling around the world.
A democratic legend?
Australia has more than enough material with which to build a democratic legend.
Many, perhaps most, Australians will have heard of the Eureka Stockade, but how many know about the Charter of the Ballarat Reform League?
As we have heard tonight, this is an extraordinary document, which placed the Ballarat goldfields at the heart of profound debates about democracy that were happening in many parts of the world in the nineteenth century.
The Charter and the stockade might not have brought democratic reforms, which were already coming, but they consolidated a democratic mindset. They helped to keep the Australian colonies, and later the Commonwealth, at the vanguard of democratic innovation.
Australian colonies pioneered crucial democratic reforms, like government-provided ballot papers and separate voting booths, which allowed people to cast their votes in secret. Women were early to get the vote in many of the colonies, and in the Commonwealth itself. In 1911, Saturday voting was introduced, making it easier for working-class people to cast their ballots. Preferential voting was introduced in 1918 and compulsory voting in 1924.
Compulsory voting helps Australia ameliorate the polarisation and voter suppression that are eroding American democracy.
And thank goodness for the Australian Electoral Commission, which administers electoral campaigns in a non-partisan and consistent way.
Australian democracy has failures and blind spots as well as successes. These are most glaring in the treatment of Indigenous Australians and non-white people.
And they must be acknowledged.
The United States stands as a cautionary tale of a nation whose democratic swagger does not match reality.
But there is much we can feel proud of.
Imagine if the Commonwealth, instead of ploughing another half a billion dollars into the already excellent Australian War Memorial, had directed that money towards democracy education.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I am arguing that our national imagination has never focussed sufficiently on a distinctively Australian story of democracy.
For a long period, our status as a British settler colony meant that our democratic history was refracted through the larger imperial story—the focus was on British liberty rather than Australian democracy. After the decline of British race patriotism in the middle of the twentieth century, a revived form of the Anzac legend has come to dominant our national imagination.
So, we are left with a democratic system of government that is among the best in the world, but with insufficient appreciation and knowledge of it.
Why does this matter?
Well, I believe that people protect what they value.
What they care about.
Anzac is considered sacred by many Australians.
But how many of us appreciated the seriousness of Scott Morrison’s decision to secretly appoint himself to several ministries during the Covid pandemic? A fundamental breach of representative democracy.
Democracy is sacred.
I commend the effort you are making in this community to perpetuate the memory of the Ballarat Reform League Charter.
Let us all take a lead from you and ensure that we as Australians value our democracy and take the time to understand and protect the delicate social and economic compact that sustains it. Because, as the diggers who gathered at Bakery Hill 170 years ago could have told us, democracy is hard won, precious, and more precarious than we could have imagined.
Thank you.
[1] Anne Beggs-Sunter, ‘Birth of a Nation: Constructing and De-constructing the Eureka Legend’, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2002, p. 34.
[2] Damien Kingsbury, ‘Democracy in Decline’, Australian Institute of International Affairs, 23 May 2023, https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/democracy-in-decline/.
[3] Education Department of Western Australia, The Curricula for Primary and Central Schools, Perth, 1914. The Curriculum, Courses for Classes VII and VIII.
[4] Numurkah Leader, 9 January 1903, p. 2.
[5] Fragment of a poem called ‘Ode for Commonwealth Day’ by George Essex Evans, which won ‘the prize of 50 guineas given by the New South Wales government for the best Commonwealth day ode’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 15 February, 1901, p.3, quoted in Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward (eds), Australia’s Empire, OUP, Oxford, p. 154.
[6] A.G. Hales, ‘Australia’s Appeal to England’, Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900), Cassell and Company, London, 1900, p. x.
[7] Alfred Buchanan, The Real Australia, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1907, p. 308.
[8] C.E.W. Bean, The Story of Anzac: From 4 May 1915 to the Evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, vol. II, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914—1918, new edn, QUP, Brisbane, 1981 [1924], p. 910.
[9] See Carolyn Holbrook, Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography, New South, Sydney, 2014.
[i] John Hirst, Australia’s Democracy: A Short History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2000), 329.
