Federation of Australia

Federation was the process by which six self-governing British colonies on the Australian continent, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania, joined together as the Commonwealth of Australia. After a decade of conventions and referendums in the 1890s, the new federal constitution took effect on 1 January 1901, and the colonies became states. Federation created the modern nation of Australia while keeping its ties to the British Crown.

British settlement, which began with the First Fleet in 1788, grew into a set of separate colonies, each with its own government, tariffs and railways. Proposals for some kind of general assembly were made from the 1840s onwards by officials in the colonies and in London, but none went far. By the 1880s, however, most Australians had been born in the colonies, a sense of Australian identity was growing, and telegraphs and railways were bringing the colonies closer together.

Concern about German and French activity in New Guinea and the New Hebrides led to an intercolonial convention in Sydney in 1883 and to the Federal Council of Australasia, created by a British act of 1885. It could legislate on a few shared matters, but it had no revenue or executive, and New South Wales, the largest colony, never joined. On 24 October 1889 the veteran New South Wales premier Henry Parkes, in a speech at Tenterfield, declared that the time had come for the colonies to federate.

A conference in Melbourne in February 1890 was followed by the National Australasian Convention in Sydney in 1891, attended also by delegates from New Zealand. Its draft constitution, drawing heavily on a draft by the Tasmanian Andrew Inglis Clark and edited by Queensland's Samuel Griffith, combined an American-style Senate, with equal representation for each state, and a British-style cabinet responsible to the lower house. The draft stalled in the New South Wales parliament. Many obstacles remained: smaller colonies feared domination by New South Wales and Victoria and the loss of customs revenue, free-trading New South Wales wanted assurance that a federal tariff would not be protectionist, Queensland feared restrictions on its imported Pacific Islander labour, and the young labour movement thought the plan too conservative.

Federation leagues and the Australian Natives' Association kept the cause alive. At a conference at Corowa in 1893, John Quick proposed that an elected convention should write a constitution to be put to voters in each colony, and the premiers accepted the scheme in 1895. Delegates elected in March 1897 met in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne, and on 17 March 1898 adopted a bill to constitute the Commonwealth of Australia.

In June 1898 four colonies voted yes, but in New South Wales the vote fell short of the required minimum of 80,000. The premiers agreed concessions, including that the national capital would be in New South Wales but at least 100 miles from Sydney, and in 1899 the revised constitution won majorities in every colony that voted, with Western Australia following in 1900. The British Parliament passed the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act on 5 July 1900, and Queen Victoria gave royal assent on 9 July. New Zealand and Fiji, once part of the discussions, stayed out.

The Commonwealth was proclaimed in Centennial Park, Sydney, on 1 January 1901, with Edmund Barton, long second only to Parkes as a champion of the cause, as interim prime minister until the first federal election in March 1901. The constitution created a two-chamber parliament, a governor-general representing the Crown and a High Court. The states kept their own parliaments and most of their powers, while the federal government took charge of defence, immigration, customs and currency, among other matters. Internal tariffs were abolished, and a common external tariff followed later in 1901. Violent conflict with Indigenous peoples on the northern frontier, part of the Australian frontier wars, continued after Federation.

Our 1900 map shows the separate Australian colonies within the British Empire on the eve of Federation, and the 1914 map shows the united Commonwealth.