Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  It was Froude’s mentor, Thomas Carlyle, who was most explicit in recounting the coming purpose of Britain’s possessions. ‘According to him England’s business, if she understood it, was to gather her colonies close to her, and spread her people where they could breathe again, and send the stream of life back into her loaded veins.’83 If the Empire was to survive, the decaying Anglo-Saxon population of Old England needed a racial transfusion from the vigorous, sun-drenched young men and women of the White Dominions. After travelling through Australia and New Zealand (as well as the Cape Colony), Trollope was convinced ‘that the born colonist is superior to the emigrant colonist … the emigrant is superior to his weaker brother whom he leaves behind him. The best of our workmen go from us, and produce a race superior to us.’ These second- and third-generation settlers, born under the Southern Cross, were the ‘coming men’ of the imperial project. And this was obviously the case in Melbourne. Froude regarded ‘the principal men in Melbourne’ as of ‘exceptional quality’, since their weaker brethren had been lost to the gold mines of Ballarat. Those who survived the digging and sifting, Froude suggested in a chilling display of social Darwinism, were a ‘picked class, the seeming fittest, who had the greatest force, the greatest keenness, the greatest perseverance’.84 The consequence of this breeding-out of the weaker human bloodlines could be seen in the startling vitality of the coming colonial generation. As the visitor passes through Melbourne’s broad streets, wrote John Freeman, ‘he will notice the well-to-do look of the people he meets; he will admire the grace and demeanour of the women, and the manly, independent bearing of the men’.85 Melbourne’s sea-air suburbia was producing a colonial master race in whose hands the future of the Empire could safely be placed. ‘I would say to any young man whose courage is high and whose intelligence is not below par, that he should not be satisfied to remain at home; but should come out to Melbourne,’ proposed Trollope, ‘and try to win a higher lot and better fortune than the old country can afford to give him.’86 In barely 100 years, a settler bay on the south-west edge of Australia, peopled by convicts, sailors and gold-diggers, had been identified as the imperial gene-pool of the future.

  From an Australian perspective, it was not so clear-cut. By the 1880s, a tapered, dual identity as both Australians and Brits had begun to develop across Victoria. In most instances, this could safely be packaged under the banner of ‘Britannic Nationalism’, a shared racial and ethnic sensibility united through the global purpose of Greater British imperialism to spread civilization, trade and Christianity around the globe. In Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne, Australian urban society was able to offer the institutions and public spaces for the working out of this identity. And among the most popular forms of urban culture was the cascade of jubilee, centennial and then international exhibitions which in their artefacts, iconography and ritual provided opportunities for exploring the ambiguous colonial status of Melbourne’s subjects. In the shadow of a huge rhombic dodecahedron, representing 50 million ounces of gold valued at some £200 million, the opening cantata for the 1880–81 Melbourne International Exhibition summed up the sense of a shifting but shared cultural inheritance:

  And that true spirit of the British race

  Which makes the wilderness a dwelling place,

  And wrestles the desert into fruitful soil;

  Swift on the track of the bold pioneer

  Science and learning and the arts appear.

  The themes of this 1880–81 exhibition outlined both a narrative of Australian progress in agriculture and industry – with displays from milliners, furniture makers, state forests, railways and Collingwood’s celebrated Foster Brewing Company – and a reminder of the elemental ties which connected Victoria both to the mother country and to her fellow colonies around the world. Browsing the British pottery, the Indian silverware and the Irish linen, taking pride in their own displays of gold and wool, the Turner watercolours and the historical dioramas helped to nurture within Melbourne residents an imperial sensibility, allowing them to feel right at the centre of a virtuous, modern, wealth-creating Empire. This vernacular and highly popular exhibition format could also present all of Joseph Chamberlain’s complex ambitions for an imperial federation and a trading Zollverein in the guise of an enjoyable, family day out attracting millions of visitors. ‘God bless them both, old England and the new … / Each helping each other, each to the other true…’ as the official ode of the 1887 Adelaide jubilee exhibition put it.87

  Yet even the success of Melbourne’s exhibitions paled when compared to the most popular passion of the ‘Queen-City of the South’. ‘Among many other essentially British attributes which the Victorian transplanted with himself to this adopted country, love of sport has taken the deepest root,’ explained ‘Tom Brown’, sports commentator for the Australasian newspaper. ‘Racing, rowing, cricketing all flourish here even to a greater extent, in proportion to our population, than they do in the old country.’88 In Melbourne, the one sport to rival the horse-racing Cup was the British Empire’s great gift to the world, cricket. It had been played in Australia since the 1810s, but public enthusiasm surged mid-century. In 1869, the Bishop of Melbourne even revoked the ban on diocesan clergy playing the game. ‘The mania for bats and balls in the broiling sun during the last summer exceeded all rational excitements,’ declared the usually anodyne Australian Facts and Prospects. ‘The very walls of Melbourne became infected and threatening. Whichever way you turned a cricket ball met your eyes.’89 It remains the case today: Melbourne is a sports-mad city with the entirety of its downtown handed over to whichever cricket, soccer, Australian rules football or rugby league match is in progress. Then as now the centre of this commotion was the vast Melbourne Cricket Ground, relocated in the 1850s to the east of the city next to Richmond, with a 213-metre grandstand able to accommodate some 6,000 spectators. In the 1870s it was reconfigured (as it would be again for the 1950s Olympic Games and then the 2006 Commonwealth Games) with swivel seating to enable fans to watch cricket in summer and football on Richmond Park during the winter season.

  It was here that the All England Eleven – the first international cricket team to tour Australia – played their inaugural match in 1861, having been carried into Melbourne from Sandridge dock in a coach drawn by eight grey horses. Their trip was funded by Spiers and Pond, operators of a well-known restaurant in Melbourne, who booked the bowlers and batsmen only after Charles Dickens turned down the offer of a twelve-month reading tour. It was a smart second choice as 40,000 Melbournians came to welcome the tourists to the MCG and, in the words of Bell’s Life magazine, to demonstrate that ‘the race which inhabits Australia is essentially English in all its feelings and amusements; and that in changing our sky we have not lost our old love for the manly sports of the mother country’.90 The series was such a triumph that another tour followed in 1863, before the legendary W. G. Grace himself arrived in 1873–4 – for the not inconsiderable fee of £1,500 (plus extras). It was worth every penny. ‘As a judge of a run and for speed between the wickets he is unequalled in the world,’ the Australasian gushed. ‘The ease and power with which the leviathan played the bowling, the shooters, and bumpers, met equally coolly, not hitting the ball over the moon, but making runs simply and rapidly without apparent effort … all this was as near perfection as it is possible to be.’91 What could match this? Only the triumphant return to Melbourne of the Australian cricketers who beat the English at Lord’s during the celebrated 1882 tour, after which the Sporting Times announced that English cricket had died and ‘the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia’. The victors were greeted on arrival by a torchlight procession of 700 firemen, marching bands from the Victorian Navy and a procession numbering tens of thousands striding into the MCG to the tune of ‘See the Conquering Hero Come’ under the din of fireworks and cheering crowds.

  For cricket fans and colonists alike, the ‘Ashes’ victory over the English on English soil was a pivotal moment. For ‘test’ cricket
between England and Australia had become exactly that – a test of the virility and manhood of the colonies in combat with the mother country. In the 1990s, the British Conservative politician Norman Tebbit would seek to gauge the level of ‘Britishness’ amongst UK immigrant populations with his ‘cricket test’: when the West Indies or Pakistan teams were playing a cricket series against England, if second-generation Caribbean British or Pakistani British citizens of immigrant descent did not support England against the teams of their parents’ birth nation then they had failed to integrate properly. Cricket was, for Tebbit, a useful arbiter of the health of immigrant patriotism and the level of multiculturalism the UK had reached. In 1880s Melbourne, cricket worked the other way by helping to undermine any unitary sense of Britishness. In fact, it was a very powerful means of generating a more cohesive national Australian identity and shedding that unclear affiliation of being southern hemisphere Englishmen split between six different colonies. The Australasian magazine was quick to remark on how different the cricket tours of the 1870s felt to those of the early 1860s, when ‘the national or Imperial sentiment was dominant in men’s minds, and the local or colonial sentiment was comparatively weak. But during the last decade all this has obviously undergone a striking change. The Imperial feeling has not been weakened, we would fain believe but there has grown by the side of it a healthy and vigorous Australian feeling.’92 And this was only added to by the growing number of native-born Australians, descended from the Celtic fringes of Great Britain, within the Melbourne crowds. By the 1860s, just over 30 per cent of the city population had been born in England, with Irish descent accounting for 16 per cent, Scots 11 per cent, and a further 9 per cent from outside the British Empire. Increasingly, the watching crowd was divided into two camps: ‘the Englishmen, particularly those from the cricketing counties, were eager for the success of their champions, [but] the Irish, the Scotch and the Australians were burning for their adopted country’.93 Of the latter, Tebbit would have approved.

  These increasingly frequent cricketing duels allowed Australian commentators to dwell further upon the healthy, virile nature of their sporting young men; how the bowlers and batsmen of Victoria and New South Wales could match, in bone and muscle, run for run, the sportsmen of Surrey or Yorkshire. The Victorian Eleven’s crushing victory over James Lillywhite’s tourists (who grumbled about beer rather than champagne being served at the pre-match lunches) at the MCG in 1877 was a moment for the Sydney Daily News to reflect: ‘For all that the sceptre has passed away so to speak, the flag is struck. It may console them to note that the English race is not degenerating, and that in the distant land and on turf where lately the blackfellow hurled his boomerang, a generation has arisen which can play the best bowlers of the time.’94 Indeed, just as Trollope and Froude could point to a new imperial energy coming from the White Dominion stock, so England and Australia’s shifting fortunes on the cricket pitch sanctioned a deeper reflection on the changing power dynamic between metropole and colony. Cricket allowed all those slights and snobberies with which the British Establishment had dismissed the colonies – ‘being treated by English ministers as if they were strangers accidentally connected with us, as if blood and natural affection were to go for nothing’, as the Victoria premier Robert Service had put it – to be bowled back down the wicket at them with the power of a yorker. The test series was a way of both defining a sense of Australian nationhood and cementing that Commonwealth of colonial equals which Froude and Chamberlain so desired. There was also a little Oedipal fun to be had. ‘The passion for cricket burns like a flame in the Australian blood,’ explained a leading Australian journal, ‘and in the case of an All England Eleven, the passion is intensified by an unfilial yearning on the part of young Australia to triumphantly thrash the mother country.’95

  A STERNER TEST

  Across the Empire, cricket was regarded as the supreme test of character. It was, stated one Australian newspaper, ‘A well known fact … that one of the most powerful influences … in moulding the character of the … spirited English boy into that of the steady, fearless, hearty Englishman – able to command and willing to obey – is the emulation, the discipline and the enthusiasm of the cricket field.’ In the later nineteenth century, this language of ‘manfulness’ and sporting endeavour segued into a more obviously martial rhetoric. It was the sport which turned ‘the boys of Eton, Rugby and of Harrow into the men of Alma, Inkerman and of Balaklava’ – and the manful, sporting ethos was now working its magic in the colonies.96 After Australia’s victory in the Ashes tour, the Australasian noted that ‘Mr Murdoch and his merry men would acquit themselves as gallantly upon the battle-field as they have upon the cricket-ground, and so would every true Australian.’97 To the beat of an ever louder drum, the ties of Commonwealth and imperial federation were assuming a military air, with a looming sense of the need to defend the colonies against unspecified, looming threats. The newly established Empire Day of 1905 celebrated the military heroism of Nelson and Wolfe, and commemorated the sacrifice of General Gordon, while the sporting-cum-martial valour of Henry Newbolt’s 1892 poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’ was echoing across the colonies:

  There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –

  Ten to make and the match to win –

  A bumping pitch and a blinding light,

  An hour to play and the last man in.

  And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,

  Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,

  But his captain’s hand on his shoulder smote

  ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’

  The sand of the desert is sodden red, –

  Red with the wreck of a square that broke; –

  The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,

  And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.

  The river of death has brimmed his banks,

  And England’s far, and Honour a name,

  But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:

  ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’

  In turn, a generation of Australian children were taught the jingoistic words of the Australian politician Kenneth Mackay’s poem ‘The Song That Men Should Sing’ (1899):

  So our lads must learn there’s a sterner task

  Than playing a well-pitched ball;

  That the land we love may some day ask

  For a team when the trumpets call.

  A team that is ready to take the field

  To bowling with balls of lead,

  In a test match grim, where if one appealed,

  The umpire might answer ‘dead’.98

  The ‘crimson thread of kinship’ would soon demand a blood sacrifice – and all those long innings at the Melbourne Cricket Ground crease provided the perfect schooling. ‘They acknowledge a duty to the mother country as they understand it,’ J. A. Froude confidently predicted. ‘It used to be pretended that if England fell into a war which might threaten the Colonial port towns, they would decline to share its burdens or its dangers. This will never be. The Colonies will not desert us in time of trial.’99 Indeed, fighting in defence of the mother country was a means of proving, at one and the same time, colonial fealty and an independent sense of nationhood. ‘Boys have a habit of developing into men,’ John Freeman wrote of the Melbourne corps, ‘and, by-and-by, these youngsters will be a body of well-trained soldiers, on whom we may rely in the hour of need.’100 A martial spirit, an imperial ideology premised on spreading civilization and the progress of humanity and an urge to prove a nation’s manhood on the field of battle – these were the sentiments which would be drawn upon to such deadly effect when the hour of need did arrive in 1914.

  The First World War came as little surprise to Lenin. For him, it was an ‘imperial war’ and the natural by-product of the cartel capitalism of the preceding twenty years – ‘Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak natio
ns by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations’.101 The struggle for global markets between the competing European powers inevitably led to conflict between them and their dependencies. And having benefited so richly from the cheap capital of finance imperialism, the white settler colonies were now willing to play their part in shoring it up. India was the largest single colonial contributor to the British war effort in 1914, but Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, with populations some twenty times smaller, collectively matched the Raj’s manpower. Such sacrifice for the imperial cause would entail a staggering loss of life.

  The Australian Imperial Force alone mobilized some 330,000 soldiers, 13 per cent of the white male population. Melbourne was not slow in contributing its share. When war broke out, the city was soon awash in a tide of jingoism, patriotism and colonial ardour. ‘My fellow Britishers,’ was how the Premier of Victoria began a call-up meeting at Melbourne Town Hall. If the Germans had expected Australia to use the war as a convenient point of separation from the mother country, commented a popular history of the period, they might have ‘as truthfully prophesied that Yorkshire would declare its independence or that Manchester would become a republic’.102 Instead, the healthy, athletic, virile young men of the Melbourne suburbs signed up for the infantry units of the AIF’s 6th Battalion – and, within a year, found themselves on the blood-soaked sands of Anzac Cove and evacuating Gallipoli. Over 60,000 Australian lives would be bowled out on the cricket ground of the ‘Great War’. But ‘its men had proved themselves worthy of the highest traditions of the British race’, according to the Melbourne Age.103

  Today, at the other end of central Melbourne, south of the Yarra, stands the natural counterpoint to the Royal Exhibition Building. If the REB was a ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ monument to the prosperity and purpose of Empire – the material goods, Saxon kinship and civilizing mission – the city’s Shrine of Remembrance is an austere reminder that Greater Britain could yield another kind of dividend. Completed in 1934 and set amid the statues and memorials of the Kings Domain parkland, this monument to the fallen of the First World War (and succeeding conflicts) is a bizarre architectural conflation of Greek and Egyptian designs. In the inner sanctuary of the shrine is the Stone of Remembrance, which is aligned with an aperture in the roof that allows a ray of sunshine to shine a light upon the inscriptions at 11 a.m. on 11 November every Remembrance Day. The accompanying inscription is clear about the cause of the losses and about the imperial pride which the city of Melbourne took in that supreme sacrifice: