Australia Federates: Commonwealth Born in 1901

Six separate British colonies voted to become one country, and one of them almost said no. Western Australia''s referendum passed with barely 60 percent approval, and only after London applied direct pressure on the holdouts. The Commonwealth of Australia came into existence on January 1, 1901, after a decade of conventions, referendums, and bitter arguments over tariffs, immigration, and which city would become the capital. The federation movement had been building since the 1880s, driven primarily by practical concerns rather than nationalist fervor. The six colonies maintained separate customs, separate railways with different track gauges, and separate postal systems. A letter from Sydney to Melbourne crossed an international border. Defense was the other motivator: French and German colonial ambitions in the Pacific made the scattered colonies nervous about their inability to coordinate military responses. Edmund Barton, a Sydney barrister who had campaigned relentlessly for federation, became the first Prime Minister. The constitution he helped draft created a parliamentary system modeled on Westminster with a senate modeled on Washington, a hybrid that reflected Australia''s dual inheritance. It also gave the federal government power to make laws regarding "the people of any race," a clause that would underpin decades of discriminatory legislation including the White Australia policy. Aboriginal Australians were explicitly excluded from the national census and barred from voting in federal elections. That exclusion lasted until the 1967 referendum, when over 90 percent of Australians voted to count Indigenous people as citizens of the country they had inhabited for 65,000 years. The nation celebrated its birth in 1901. Its original inhabitants were not invited.