Imagine you are on a train, traveling for hours across the vast Australian continent, and partly through your journey, someone asks you for your immigration papers. Back in the late 1800s making a trip between Australian colonies was a bit like traveling to a different country. You can be stopped at the border by immigration and searched. In fact, if you are traveling between New South Wales and Queensland you would have had to change trains because the rails were different sizes.
Australia wasn’t a country. It was just the name of a continent divided into six very separate British colonies. They had different leaders and different laws, they even had their own armies. But there were some people pushing to change that. One was Henry Parkes, five times Premier of New South Wales. In 1889 he made his famous speech in the town of Tender Fields about federation, the push to unite the colonies as a single country. It wasn’t the best speech but it made an impact. Parkes convinced the leaders of the colonies to get together and talk about federation. Some came from New Zealand, it was a British colony too and it could have joined the new country.
After much negotiating in 1891, the delegates drew up a draft constitution for The Commonwealth Of Australia but the idea didn’t take off. It wasn’t a good time for the colonies, the economy wasn’t doing well and there was a feeling that the draft constitution wasn’t democratic enough, that it didn’t give ordinary people enough of a say.
Time went on and the colonies kept changing. Many kept fighting for the cause of federation like Alfred Deakin. He was part of a new generation, born and bred in Australia who thought the continent should be a united country. Eventually, he helped to convince the colonies to give it another shot. This time people got to vote for representatives who’d help to draw up a new constitution. There was a lot of arguing. The bigger, richer states were worried that they’d have to share money with the poorer ones and the small states worried they wouldn’t have a say in decisions. South Australia had recently given women the right to vote and it wanted the whole country to have that right. Then there was the issue of where the nation’s capital should be. New Zealand had decided to stay out of it and Western Australia wasn’t too keen on federation either but eventually, a new constitution was drawn up.
Most colonies let their people vote on whether or not they wanted in. In 1899 all of the colonies except Western Australia said yes. Australia was about to become a nation. Western Australia agreed to join a year later. In 1901, in Sydney Centennial Park, The Commonwealth Of Australia was proclaimed a federation with six states. The Northern Territory in the ACT would come along a few years later. The states would keep a lot of their law-making and tax collecting powers while the federal government would run things like defence and immigration. The first Prime Minister was Edmund Barton who helped to write the new constitution.
Not everyone benefited from federation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people weren’t included in the constitution. The new government also made it harder for people who weren’t European to immigrate to Australia but it was a major point in history and the first step to the country we know today.