Wild colonial boy

Colony:  Strange Origins of One of the Earliest Modern Democracies
By Reg Hamilton
(Wakefield Press 2010, 312 pages)

In the 1850s, the colony of South Australia was a world leader in the development of modern democratic practices.

It was the first colony in the British Empire to establish the right of all men to vote;  the first to ''permanently'' end government funding of churches;  the first in Australia, and probably the Empire, to settle on triennial parliaments as a compromise between the traditional seven and the radical demand for yearly elections;  and the third, after Tasmania and Victoria, to adopt the secret ballot.

Reminding people of the leading role of Australia in developing radical democratic practice is important in itself, because the Old Left narrative which lauded these developments as part of their paean to the Australian working man have been superseded, in recent decades, by the New Left one which tends to take a dim view of most happenings in nineteenth century Australia.

There is also an important task in asking why South Australia became the ''democratic laboratory'' for not just the Australian colonies, but also the British Empire and hence the world.

Colony:  Strange Origins of One of the Earliest Modern Democracies has a good crack at both these roles.  The author is Reg Hamilton, who has a day job as a Deputy President of Fair Work Australia, and a personal interest in early South Australian history, as a descendant of an early colonist, Richard Hamilton, who arrived in the colony in 1837.

The Hamilton family came from Dover in England, and the author devotes a significant portion of the early part of the book to a study of the life, in particular the political life, of that town in the early nineteenth century.  This section is the least successful part of the book because, while a lot of the material is quite interesting, it is too long an entree before the South Australian main course.

Of course, the developments in South Australia do have English origins and, away from the Dover detail, Hamilton demonstrates that it was the Chartist agenda which was largely adopted in South Australia, with just minor adaptations, such as the move from annual to triennial parliaments.  He explains that those who drafted South Australia's radical 1856 constitution were almost all adult immigrants, who were clearly aware of contemporary British political ideas before they headed to Australia.

Of course, in a colony that was only two decades old, those old enough to be active political participants were less likely to be native born than they would have been in New South Wales at that time, but there is also the fact that those who emigrated from Britain often had a degree of dissatisfaction with the home country that helped trigger their departure.

While British Chartism was a major contributor to the rapid adaption of democratic ideas in South Australia, Hamilton also recognises that they were fertilised in other parts of the world, both in Europe and the colonies.  For instance, he provides a good summary of developments in Canada, a source too often neglected when looking for comparable countries for Australia.

Another factor in the rapid democratisation in Australia was the very newness of colonial Australian society, which meant that there was an absence of an entrenched privileged class trying to retain power and status at all costs.  What further distinguished South Australia from the other colonies, was not just that it never received convicts, but also the fact that, under the system devised by Wakefield, land had been distributed in small parcels and hence there was no squattocracy.

In addition, Hamilton makes the point that Australian democrats had a pretty easy road to hoe compared to many others of their ilk.  While there was opposition to some aspects of the democratic agenda from governors, or the Colonial Office, overall those with existing authority were far more tolerant than were the regimes that liberals in other parts of the world were trying to reform at that time.

Even those local Conservatives who opposed a full adult male franchise, nonetheless still wanted some form of local control, rather than direct Colonial Office rule.  The quick move to an extended franchise meant that some in South Australia, in turn, came just as quickly to appreciate a point which the South Australian Advertiser made as early as 1860, that universal suffrage was ''the only firm basis for political conservatism''.

Indeed, one striking feature is how polling day rioting rapidly disappears once the franchise is widened, with the 1857 South Australian election being ''very orderly'' compared to its predecessors of 1851 and 1855 when the franchise was more restricted.

A refreshing part of Hamilton's work is that he recognises that political developments take place within an economic context.  He shows how technological developments, such as Ridley's mechanical reaping machine, and the discovery of minerals, diversified the South Australian economy in the 1840s, enough to make South Australia a candidate for responsible government and democracy.

He also spots how local councils were putting roads jobs out to tender in the 1860s, noting that it was ''before the long experiment with direct and extensive public sector employment, which was reduced in the 1980s when contracting out became once again the fashion''.  He also observes how attitudes to taxation have changed, saying ''it is hard for us to remember the level of general taxation, and the general horror that proposals for taxation led to in colonial times''.

The path to the constitution of 1856 had begun on 29-30 October 1840, when the free ratepayers of Adelaide voted in ''the first democratic election on the continent of Australia, or in the Asian part of the British Empire''.  One of the odd features of this poll was that it used a sort of proportional representation, another South Australian contribution to the worldwide development of democratic practice.  While many modern Australians fail to appreciate the historical significance of many of these events, contemporaries were also sometimes unaware of how momentous they were.  Hamilton notes that Henry Parkes's radical Sydney newspaper The Australian skimmed over the Adelaide election, an event which Hamilton describes as ''the beginning of the long and successful experiment with democracy in Australia [which] ... began in a small polling booth at the junction of two dusty and unpaved roads in Adelaide''.

However, Hamilton makes it clear that ''the long and successful experiment'' was not a linear progress, observing that ''the first experiment in democracy on the Australian continent failed'' as the council ended up in financial crisis.  A similar thing happened when there was representative government as South Australia, with regular crises leading to 47 governments in 36 years, the most unstable record of any of the Australian colonies prior to Federation.  Elections within the newly widened franchise were often met with voter apathy and low turnouts.

Yet the new system did produce some landmark legislation, most notably Torrens Title, which revolutionised the means of keeping track of ownership of real estate.

The new South Australian democracy also had an extra agenda item which was not on the Chartist list of demands -- freedom of religion.  A key factor why this issue had a particular resonance in South Australia, was the high proportion of Protestant Dissenters in the population, plus the fact that even within the Church of England there was a view that churches should support themselves.  Not that Dissenters were beyond a touch of religious bigotry, as Hamilton describes in the case of George Fife Angas, who was so upset that his son married a Catholic that he not only excluded him from inheriting anything from his £850,000 estate, but also declined a baronetcy, probably through fear that it might end up being inherited by a Catholic.

As well as personal prejudice, there were of course still other imperfections with South Australia's democracy -- women could not vote, upper houses were undemocratic and even in the lower houses, electorates varied enormously in size.  However, South Australia was at the forefront of important change, change in which Australian colonial liberalism made a crucial contribution.

Yet it was achieved in a uniquely Australian way, without revolution or great disturbance, or soaring rhetoric.  Hamilton's book helps us to understand the way it happened, and how, generally speaking, the aim of the 1856 South Australian Constitution to allow everyone the common law right to the ''quiet enjoyment'' of their property has been delivered.