by Tim Sherratt
[seminar paper delivered before History Program, RSSS, ANU, October 2000]

a hymn of the future

The glow of his campfire framed a simple tableau of pioneer life. Across this ‘untenanted land’, Edwin Brady mused, ‘little companies’, such as his own, sat by their ‘solitary fires’. ‘They smoked pipes and talked, or watched the coals reflectively’. Around them, the ‘shadowy outlines’ of the bush merged into the dark northern night, and ‘the whispers’ of this ‘unknown’ land gathered about. It seemed to Brady that this camp, this night, represented the ‘actual life’ of the Northern Territory as he had known it. But the future weighed heavily upon that quiet, nostalgic scene. The moment would soon fade, Brady reflected, as the ‘cinematograph of Time’ rolled on. It was 1912, and something new was coming.^[1]

Staring into the flames of the campfire, Brady imagined he heard ‘the whistle of the Trans-continental Express’. The ‘rumble of freight trains’ followed, and the sound of water churning in the wake of ‘fast coastal steamers’. The night was filled with movement as Brady perceived an end to the north’s crippling isolation, the conquest of its ‘lonesome distances’. New industries too! The ‘chug-chug’ of sugar mills, ‘the buzzing of cotton jinnys’, ‘the clinking of harvesters’, ‘the hissing of refrigerators’ - as Brady listened, ‘the thousand homely sounds of human progress’ joined in a triumphant ‘hymn of the Future’. The night’s subtle whispers were lost amidst the clamor of technology on the move. Not mere campfires, but ‘young cities’, electric lit and alive with enterprise’, would soon arise to defeat the darkness.^[2] This was Brady’s dream. This was progress.

Edwin James Brady, poet and journalist, visited the Northern Territory in September 1912, gathering material for his ambitious compendium of Australian developmental opportunities, Australia Unlimited.^[3] Brady was travelling the country, charting the outlines of Australia’s future with his typical optimistic zeal. His trip north was drawing to a close and, as he relaxed by his last campfire, he began to ponder the transformation of the Territory. The sounds and images conjured from the night reveal much about the spirit that invigorated his work. He imagined an end to isolation and emptiness, the growth of both population and production. The future was rising like a flood, lapping at the frontiers of settlement, ready to redeem Australia’s waste lands with the regenerative flow of human ingenuity and enthusiasm. Australia’s unlimited prospects lay both in the conquest of space and the fulfillment of time. Plotted against these two axes, the upward course of progress was clear.

The linking of land, progress and nation was nothing new, nor is it unfamiliar. We may prefer to speak of development rather than progress, potential instead of destiny, but many underlying assumptions remain intact. Brady’s fervent rhetoric builds confidence in our own sophistication, keeping the past at a comfortable distance, but that distance is itself a product of progress. We are still in the business of converting time into space, and vice versa, even though the precise formula is constantly being adjusted, argued over, and rewritten. This paper examines some of those adjustments across the span of 20^th century Australia.

Brady’s ‘cinematograph of Time’ was an apt metaphor, portraying the unfolding story of Australia’s national progress as a product of the latest technology, presented with an assured sense of inevitability - frame follows frame follows frame. In the early years of the century, confidence in the transforming power of science and technology was high. ‘The wealth of today’, Brady argued, ‘is but a beggar’s moiety of the unlimited wealth of the future which will be won by the application of modern knowledge to local conditions’.^[4] But the actual means and meaning of this ‘application’ remained uncertain. This paper explores some aspects of the relationship between science and national progress. It charts a journey along the intersecting and overlapping frontiers of ‘Australia Unlimited’ - frontiers of geography, of violence, of knowledge and of time. ‘Little now remains for the geographical explorer to do’, Brady wrote confidently, ‘but for the scientific investigator there is still an almost limitless field in Australia’.^[5]

all this paraphenalia

In July 1909, the Minister for External Affairs, Littleton Groom, introduced legislation for the Commonwealth takeover of the Northern Territory.^[6] Groom, a methodical and well-educated liberal MP from Queensland, had amassed a large amount of information on the prospects for northern development. Having briefly surveyed the history of the Territory, he presented to the House ‘a few opinions of practical men’, all of whom were optimistic about its potential. ‘[T]hose who consider the matter impartially’, Groom concluded, ‘will be forced to the conclusion that we have there, unoccupied and uncultivated, some of the finest land in Australia’. However, the Territory’s ‘latent resources’ would not be extracted without effort. The investment of capital and a dramatic increase in population were essential, but so to was an increase in knowledge. ‘We are every year acquiring a better knowledge of our natural conditions and a better understanding of the laws of production’, Groom argued. It was through such an understanding, he continued, that ‘much of the land which is now despised will ultimately become very productive’. Where would this knowledge come from? Groom looked to a scientific agency whose establishment he had advocated since his entry into politics - a Federal Bureau of Agriculture.

William Henry Groom, Littleton’s father, was one of the most senior figures in the first Commonwealth parliament, having served for nearly forty years in the Queensland colonial legislature.^[7] He was a committed protectionist who instilled in his son a belief in the power of the state to improve the lot of its citizens. Trusting in the virtues of the small land-holder, and confident in the bounties of science, William Groom’s campaign for a federal seat drew particular attention to the need for a Commonwealth agency to arm his imagined yeoman brigades with the latest agricultural knowledge. He was not alone in his quest, as several prominent protectionists, including John Quick and Alfred Deakin, professed similar policies.^[8] Quick moved swiftly. Within two months of parliament’s first sitting, he introduced a motion seeking the establishment of a National Department of Agriculture, that would coordinate scientific investigations and collect ‘the very best and latest information’ for dissemination to primary producers.^[9] William Groom was preparing to speak in support of Quick’s motion when he became ill. Within a few weeks he was dead. Littleton Groom inherited both his father’s seat in parliament, and his unfinished business.

The idea of creating a national department or bureau to foster agricultural improvement, was emblematic of the creeds of ‘new liberalism’ or ‘progressivism’, which began to emerge in the late nineteenth century. ^[10] Traditional laissez faire policies seemed increasingly impotent in the face of growing threats to social cohesion and unparalleled opportunities for accelerated development. New liberals sought to wield the power of the state to claim progress as their own, to enrich the character of their citizens, and to ensure the prosperity of their nation. As another prominent protectionist, Isaac Isaacs, argued in support of Quick’s motion: ‘All this paraphernalia... is only the gold lace of the Constitution, unless we can make of it an engine for the promotion of the material, moral, and social welfare of the people’.^[11]

Schooled in his father’s brand of practical politics, inspired by his own love of learning, and energised by a strong sense of duty, Littleton Groom embodied much of the spirit of new liberalism, or ‘progressive liberalism’, as he termed it. ‘I want to see the individual and individuality developed to the full’, Groom argued.^[12] But rather than being threatened by the encroachments of state power, he believed that such individual freedom could be enhanced by the actions of an enlightened government. When state power was properly directed towards the interests of its citizens, Groom maintained, it ‘always led to the greater development of the individual, and the farmer on the farm feels greater liberty when he knows that he is assisted by intelligent legislation’.^[13] The establishment of a Federal Bureau of Agriculture was an example of such ‘intelligent legislation’, easing the burden on individual farmers, while increasing the country’s capacity for production.

The role of government was to create and maintain an environment in which the nation and its citizens would grow in a healthy symbiosis. This interdependence and its implicit sense of balance was at the core of Groom’s liberalism, revealed nowhere more clearly than in his passionate commitment to education. Universities, Groom argued in 1906, were ‘elevating and edifying organisations that were calculated to mould men’s souls’. But modern universities were also ‘now necessities to the well being of... nations’.^[14] They were institutions in which ‘agriculture, industry, arts and sciences’ were accepted to be just as important as ‘the absorption of Latin and Greek’. The balance between ideals and practice was one that also helped define the relationship between citizen and state. He quoted approvingly the Victorian Director of Education’s assessment that an ‘ideal education’ concerned itself with ‘physical fitness’, ‘mental fitness’ and ‘moral fitness’. ‘So it was with national life’, Groom added, ‘Industrial and intellectual capacity must be developed’. The nation’s greatest resources lay in ‘the hand power, the brain power and the heart power of our manhood and womanhood’.

There was no simple formula for progress. It was a property both of individuals and of nations. In a good society the two were closely linked, proceeding apace. But this could be achieved only through a complex set of balancing acts, by constantly tweaking the levels of authority and freedom, duty and reward, ideals and practice, knowledge and control.

the modern hayseed

The life and work of Littleton Groom was memorialised by his widow Jessie, in a biography she compiled under the title, Nation Building in Australia.^[15] A tad grandiose, but the title perhaps speaks more of Groom’s compelling sense of duty than it does of posthumous puffery. ‘Nation building’ was a commitment, an act of service, a life to be lived, not a victory to be won. But the title also makes reference to one of the most significant periods in Groom’s political life. From 1905-08, he served as a minister in Alfred Deakin’s Protectionist government. The achievements of this administration were eulogised by Groom himself in a pamphlet also entitled ‘Nation Building in Australia’. It was a phrase that linked the personal and the political, a citizen’s duty and a country’s destiny.

In 1905, Alfred Deakin wrested government from George Reid’s free-trade alliance with the support of the Labor Party and the promise of ‘New Protection’. Although they were a parliamentary minority with a fragile hold on power, Deakin’s protectionists nonetheless embarked upon an ambitious legislative program that did much to define the nature of Australian federalism.^[16] As Minister for Home Affairs, and later Attorney-General, Groom contributed significantly to the government’s tally of ‘practical legislation’, all the while edging closer to the fulfillment of his long held ambition - the establishment of a Federal Department of Agriculture.

Groom was profoundly influenced by the example of the US Department of Agriculture, with its wide-ranging powers over areas like meteorology and statistics, as well as agricultural research and education. He imagined not just a single agency, but a system of institutions and legislation designed to manage Australia’s productive resources through the rational application of scientific knowledge. Introducing the Bounties Bill, in July 1907, Groom expounded on the relevance of the US model, noting that the Commonwealth was already assuming control of areas such as meteorology, statistics and quarantine. Continued progress along such lines, he suggested, ‘must ultimately develop into a Federal Department of Agriculture, which will be one of the most useful institutions we can establish’.^[17]

In 1908, Groom prepared a detailed memorandum outlining the scope and powers of the proposed Australian Bureau of Agriculture, but before a bill could be presented, the government fell.^[18] The liberal protectionists were forced into an uneasy ‘fusion’ with the free-traders, as the heyday of progressive legislation came to its anti-climactic end. Groom’s bill was finally introduced in 1909, and again in 1913.^[19] Both times it met with considerable opposition, from the government side as well as from Labor, mainly due to concerns about interference with, and duplication of, the work of existing state agricultural agencies. Few doubted the value of science, but what was its role in the building of nations?

By improving farming methods and combating a range of destructive pests and diseases, it seemed obvious to its supporters that an agricultural bureau would greatly increase Australia’s productive capacity. ‘The establishment of a bureau of agriculture can be justified on financial considerations alone’, Groom argued confidently.^[20] Not only would existing farms be made more efficient, the frontiers of land settlement would be advanced. Immigrants would be rallied to Australia’s great nation-building crusade, inspired by the government’s commitment to the application of science. A Bureau of Agriculture would enable Australia to offer potential settlers the ‘best proposition’ possible, to hold out ‘certain inducements’ that would encourage them to favour this country above other competing destinations.^[21]

But there was also a moral dimension to the promise of agricultural improvement. ‘We may trust the cupidity of mankind to develop our mineral resources’, Deakin remarked pointedly, ‘but agricultural, pastoral, and kindred pursuits need the superintending and assisting help of the States and of the Commonwealth’.^[22] Agriculture was not just about profit. Supporting Quick’s 1901 motion, Isaac Isaacs had argued for the need to ‘liberalise’ agriculture, ‘to raise it to a level higher than it has ever occupied before, to give it a dignity, a worth and a profit which may raise the Australian nation in the whole scale of civilization’.^[23] The application of science promised to ‘elevate’ agriculture and its practitioners.^[24] No more would the farmer be figure of ridicule, a ‘clodhopper’, a ‘hayseed’.^[25] On the contrary, Deakin argued, ‘The modern “Hayseed” is an up-to-date, keenly alive businessman, whose study is how to make the best of a small area with limited means but unlimited intelligence’.^[26]

Science was a potent addition to the regenerative elixir of frontier life. The idea that a new ‘type’ of man was being created at the nexus of European civilisation and Australian environment had gained considerable currency, infused by progressive assumptions about the benefits of rural living and the role of the frontier in the formation of national character.^[27] Edwin Brady warned that the land’s ‘ancient lineage forbids the familiarity of the unworthy’, and welcomed its ‘paradoxes and difficulties’ as a test of Australia’s physical and mental prowess.^[28] The establishment of a Bureau of Agriculture was a response to this continental challenge, offering further improvement of the Australian type through a reinvigorated assault on the vicissitudes of frontier existence. Groom quoted approvingly US President Roosevelt’s assessment, that as well as creating wealth, his own department must aim ‘to foster agriculture for its social results... to assist in bringing about the best kind of life on the farm for the sake of producing the best kind of men’.^[29]

But in the transfigurative furnace of frontier life, both man and land were forged anew. Just as Groom had looked to a future when the ‘despised’ lands of the Northern Territory would be revealed in their true productive glory, so other supporters of the Bureau of Agriculture believed that the accumulation of knowledge would ultimately redeem lands now defamed as ‘desert’.^[30] Deakin, who had studied irrigation practices in the US, described the transformation wrought upon their desert plains. However, the answer was not simply irrigation, but intelligence: ‘Brains pay better than water, and brains are making farming pay to-day’.^[31] Australia’s ‘hope’, he continued, ‘lies in those enormous tracts which have yet to be brought into the service of man and made productive of wealth for the whole community’. Australia’s ‘Dead Heart’, Brady argued memorably, was in fact a ‘Red Heart’ destined to ‘pulsate with life’.^[32] Brain and heart, mind and matter, man and nature: the golem of progress would arise, moulded from the continent’s red soil in the image of the ‘modern hayseed’.

In a progressive society, the accumulation of knowledge and the occupation of land would continue apace. The Bureau of Agriculture would help bring the frontiers of science and of settlement into alignment, thence to move forward in their inexorable conquest of time and space. ‘Altogether, a great realm of exploration lies open to us’, proclaimed Prime Minister Joseph Cook, reintroducing the bill in 1913: ‘A whole vista of duties and potentialities opens up when inquiry is made as to what there is to be done in Australia’.^[33] Brady’s scientific explorers were consulting their charts, planning their journeys, marking Australia’s route from continent to nation. Groom frequently stressed that this was a ‘continental’ issue, both geographically and politically. State boundaries meant nothing to insect pests, and yet their eradication would require full cooperation between state and federal governments.^[34] Deakin regarded the proposed Bureau as a clear example of the Federal principle, combining local action with national coordination.^[35] And yet it was the strength of their imagined nation that proved the Bureau of Agriculture’s greatest failing, as state jealousies derailed Groom’s engine of progress. Geography was not quite ready to succumb. The links between science, nation, citizen, land and progress were still being articulated. And so it continues. But dreams of future prosperity were never far removed from fears of decline and destruction, and Groom’s vision was only a war away.

the battle of Australia

The campfire was slowly dying, as was the dream. Edwin Brady continued to ponder the Northern Territory’s future, but the sounds of progress filling his thoughts gradually yielded to the insistent ‘tramp of young Australian feet at drill’. Instead of ‘clinking’ harvesters, he now heard ‘the wireless keeping watch by night and day’; instead of rumbling freight-trains there was the sound of ‘scouting aeroplanes coming home to their military hangars’. As the embers crumbled to ash, Brady concluded his campfire devotions, looking up at the stars ‘glittering like bayonet points’ and offering a prayer to the ‘God of Nations and of Battles’ that ‘this Northern State-to-be might put her young feet upon the paths of Destiny... in peace’.^[36] Brady’s hymn of the future was scored to a martial beat; Australia’s unlimited future could be assured only through determined vigilance and resolute defence.

Australia Unlimited was a ‘Book with a Mission’, not merely to sell Australia, but to save it. ‘A mere handful of White People’, perched uncomfortably near Asia’s ‘teeming centres of population’, could not expect to maintain unchallenged ownership of the continent and its potential riches, the book’s prospectus warned.^[37] Australia’s survival as a white nation depended upon ‘Effective Occupation’, secured by a dramatic increase in population and the development of its vast, empty lands – ‘The Hour of Action is Now!’. Even as Australia was beginning to enjoy the first fruits of nationhood, its legitimacy, its very existence, seemed imperilled. Australia’s ‘empty north’ was widely perceived as an open door to potential Asian aggressors.^[38] The Deakin government was keen to remedy this vulnerability, and its move to assume control of the Northern Territory was justified both in terms of development and security. ‘We have in the north a rich, fertile country’, Groom argued, introducing the legislation, ‘and... that Territory, as it is to-day, especially in relation to other nations, is a menace to the Commonwealth’.^[39]

Offering both the promise of riches and the threat of invasion, northern Australia revealed the complexities of nation building. Development and defence were closely entwined, as they were in the very concept of ‘protection’. Campaigning in 1906, Groom declared himself ‘a protectionist – pledged up to the hilt’. But protection was not simply an economic doctrine, it was a ‘natural instinct’. Other nations, Groom argued, ‘were girding themselves for the fray’. The United States, for example, had ‘equipped herself industrially and defensively’. ‘Was Australia to stand supinely by and watch others pass her in the race for supremacy?’, he asked: ‘This Commonwealth must equip herself to enable her to defend her shores against foreign attack... We must be able to furnish our food supplies and to maintain our integrity... We should develop our own country and make use of our materials and commodities’.^[40] Protection promised safety, strength and self-reliance.

Moreover, protection was a ‘complete system’, incorporating bounties, technical education, price and wage controls, and imperial trade preferences, as well as customs duties.^[41] Within the country’s defensive frontiers, ‘direct agencies’ such as a Bureau of Agriculture would work to create a strong, self-contained nation, one that was sustained by productive industries, and populated by sturdy citizens.^[42] The problem with the Northern Territory, Groom explained, was that it remained ‘unmanned’.^[43] But ‘manning’ the country was not simply a matter of numbers. What was required was ‘effective’ occupation: ‘occupation by a people who are applying their energies and industry to developing the resources of the country’.^[44] Science could help make occupation ‘effective’, ensuring security through improvements in productivity. As part of a well-balanced civic education, science rounded out the armoury of Australia’s ‘citizen soldiery’. The nation’s best defence, Groom argued, lay in ‘the ideal of the intelligent proprietor of the land defending his own country’.^[45] With the coming of war, the quest for self-reliance became increasingly acute - the ‘race for supremacy’ was hotting up. On the day of Australia’s final withdrawal from Gallipoli, Prime Minister Billy Hughes announced plans for a ‘national laboratory’ to direct the application of scientific knowledge towards the development of Australian industries. Though the path was sometimes tortuous, Hughes’s initiative would ultimately result in the establishment of CSIR (later CSIRO).^[46] Groom’s hopes were at last fulfilled.

National progress was to be achieved both through development and defence, but defence meant more than just preparedness. Australia’s progress had to won in a ongoing contest of legitimacy, with battles raging along the frontiers of race, land, identity and occupation. Groom’s 1901 election campaign was energised by his detailed and passionate advocacy of the principle of ‘White Australia’. Quoting C.H. Pearson on the dangers of Asian immigration and the threat of racial degeneracy, he warned his electors ‘we are not fighting the battle of Australia alone, ...we are fighting the battle of civilised Europe’.^[47] Australia was seeking to defend, not only its land, but its integrity as a civilised nation. Fears of infiltration, contamination and degeneration constantly pricked at the confidence of White Australia, reflected in Commonwealth action to enforce quarantine and eradicate topical diseases.^[48] Groom’s Bureau of Agriculture was justified as a means of defence against the pests and diseases which ‘have no respect for the border lines marked on our maps’.^[49] It was in the denial of borders, the negation of boundaries, that Australia’s dissolution threatened. The battle for racial integrity was both personal and national, moral and martial. ‘Can you allow your children to blend their blood with that of the alien races?’, Groom asked, ‘Can you imagine anything more pathetic than sad-looking almond eyes peeping out of the Caucasian faces?’.^[50]

But the very notion of integrity, the fearfully imagined borders of White Australia, were themselves a denial of Aboriginal presence. The ‘waste’ and the ‘emptiness’ that Groom hoped to dispel through the application of science, were constructed out of a lingering sense of unease and illegitimacy. ^[51] With its offer of life and renewal, science helped to legitimate possession, demonstrating the inevitability of civilised conquest. There was a place for Aboriginal people in this modern world, but it was not on the land. Opening the science section of the Austral Festival in Toowoomba, Groom noted that while the region’s ‘native tribes’ were virtually extinct, some of their weapons remained. He suggested that ‘out of love and respect for the black races that were passing away’ such implements should be preserved ‘as an historical lesson... as to the weapons of those who preceded civilisation’ and as a ‘permanent memorial’.^[52] With Aboriginal people consigned to the museum showcase, it was the land itself that had to be subdued. Brady imagined the coming breed of farmers, ‘with library and laboratory behind them’, as a ‘silent conquering army’: ‘Led by the shining spirit of William Farrer, this Army of Invasion is preparing its assaults upon the outstanding citadels of Nature’.^[53] Science, the Argus claimed, was simply another name for ‘man’s organised attack on Nature’. Nature would ‘crush’ or ‘destroy’ man, unless science could turn it ‘from an enemy into an obedient slave’.^[54]

Frontiers are uneasy places, juxtaposing the known and the unknown, civilisation and nature, us and them. Around and through the markers of geography, the imagined borders of knowledge and possession create place from race, gender and time. The splendour of nation is revealed against the dark, looming shadow of otherness. Unthinkingly we talk about the future in terms of our fears and our hopes, rarely pausing to consider how the two are related. Groom’s vision of progress, his mission to create a prosperous and fulfilling future through the application of science, encompassed both development and denial. Progress was both a quest for improvement and a battle against the primitive and degenerate. It is this tension which gives progress its power. The oppositions and dichotomies of frontier imagining, energised the process of nation-building, expanding the bubble of time to create a space into which the future could unfold. ^[55] But this act of creation proceeds by destruction, obliterating alternatives. For Groom and Deakin the development of the north was both a fulfilment of destiny, and a vital necessity. There was no choice. Progress uses its own internal tensions to make itself seem natural, necessary, inevitable.

blast the bush

Len Beadell was leading a survey party through the mulga scrub of central South Australia, when he came across something unusual, even unnerving. ‘It was almost like a picket fence’, he described, with posts made from ‘slivers of shale’. Being in such an isolated location, he decided ‘it was obviously an ancient Aboriginal ceremonial ground built by those primitive, stone-age nomads in some distant dreamtime’ – an Aboriginal ‘Stonehenge’. As he scrabbled in the dust, searching for a piece of charcoal that might be used to fix this eerie structure in time, Beadell pondered the ‘ironic clash of old and new’: ‘only a few short miles away the first mighty atomic bomb ever to be brought to the mainland of Australia was to be blasted into immediate oblivion..., and it was by-products of this very weapon which could be used for determining the age of the charcoal from these prehistoric fires’.^[56] Beadell’s expedition had set out from the British atomic test site at Emu Field, searching for a permanent testing range – one that would become known as ‘Maralinga’. It was 1953, and something new was coming.

The ‘clash of old and new’, the sense of disjunction, was a familiar characteristic of frontier experience. But with the coming of the atomic bomb, the sense of ‘newness’ seemed to have become more acute. The destruction of Hiroshima was revealed unto a shocked world as the harbinger of a new age – the ‘atomic age’. Media reports talked about ‘new vistas’, a ‘new era’ in world affairs, a ‘revolution’ in daily life. The atomic bomb, Clem Christesen wrote in Meanjin, had ‘severed the old world from the new with guillotine-like decisiveness’.^[57] Most importantly, the world faced new challenges, for the atomic age carried grave implications for the future of humanity. It was a ‘turning point’, ‘perhaps the most solemn turning point of all history’, Rev. Dr C.N. Button warned his Ballarat congregation: ‘Humanity is at the crossroads’.^[58]

The Sydney Morning Herald relayed the news from Hiroshima under a pair of significant subheadings: ‘Terrifying New Weapon’ and ‘Big Possibilities In Peace’.^[59] The ‘good’ atom / ‘bad’ atom routine dominated much public understanding of this mysterious technology. It was a formula popularly represented in the image of the atomic crossroads, placing humanity at a fork in the road of destiny, with a signpost pointing one way to destruction and the other to progress. Which was it to be, apocalypse or utopia? There was no escaping, it was time to choose. The assumed imminence of the crossroads, the disjunctive dynamic of the atomic age, obscured much of its familiarity. Like the frontier, the crossroads gained its metaphorical power from the conjunction of opposites. The wonders of a techno-utopia shone invitingly amidst the menacing gloom of atomic obliteration. But there was no choice. The signpost to destruction was a warning, a lesson to be learnt. Just as it had in Groom’s plans for northern development, progress in the atomic age used the threat of dissolution to charge itself with the force of destiny. Both imagined a future fulfilled through the accumulation of space, whether by the inexorable expansion of Australia’s frontiers, or by a continuing march along the road to atomic nirvana. Both offered a journey from which there was no turning back.

An article in the August 1951 edition of Walkabout described a ‘romantically beautiful group of small islands’ off the coast of north-west Australia. One day, the author suggested, the Monte Bello Islands might ‘become a great holiday resort’.^[60] A year later the Monte Bellos were depicted in parliament as ‘barren and fairly flat’, home to nothing but ‘a few birds and small animals’, and the ideal site for Britain to test its first atomic bomb.^[61] As it happened, one of the British scientists attending the test was an amateur naturalist, who managed to identify more than 400 different plant and animal species on the islands.^[62] The image of vast expanses of idle and wasted land, silently awaiting the transforming power of science remained strong. As the British moved their testing program onto the Australian mainland at Emu Field, the Sunday Herald looked forward to the moment when the ‘inland silence that remained unbroken for ages’ would be ‘shattered’ by the bomb. Australia’s desert lands had found a new destiny, for ‘the very poverty of these areas in surface resources made them valuable in the atomic field, either as a storehouse of uranium riches or as the kind of waste land where experiments can be most safely conducted’.^[63] Ivan Southall described the Woomera rocket range, established some years earlier, as an ‘open-air laboratory’: ‘one of the greatest stretches of uninhabited wasteland on earth, created by God specifically for rockets’.^[64]

The land was a gallant martyr, offering itself to science for the sake of progress, and in the hope of its own glorious rebirth. In the glare of an atomic explosion, Len Beadell imagined, the mulga scrub would ‘come to life’.^[65] But it was not the direct effects of blasting the bush that most interested the Australian government. Their eager support of the British testing program was motivated by broader cooperative and strategic considerations. Australia was as yet denied access to the ‘secrets’ of atomic energy, and hoped to gain admittance to the club by proving itself a useful and trustworthy friend.^[66] The tests also offered increased security, through the strengthening of the ‘free world’s’ deterrent power. It was a familiar mix of imperial loyalties and national self-interest, of development and defence. The Minister for Supply, Howard Beale, sought to justify the establishment of the Maralinga range by portraying it as ‘a challenge to Australian men to show that the pioneering spirit of their forefathers who developed our country is still the driving force of achievement’. The combination of Britain’s ‘knowhow’ and Australia’s ‘open spaces’ would bring increased security and ‘historic advances in harnessing the forces of nature’.^[67] Distorted echoes of Deakin’s ‘citizen soldiery’ rang down the years, charged with imminence of the crossroads challenge.

Australia Unlimited Ltd

In June 1957, the Sydney Morning Herald published the first in an annual series of supplements surveying ‘the great endeavours and achievement of Australian commerce and industry in the postwar years and the fabulous promise of future national development’. The supplements were titled Australia Unlimited. Edwin Brady would have been pleased by the overwhelming sense of optimism that suffused every page. ‘Confidence’, the supplement declared, was the ‘theme for the future’.^[68] It was a confidence born of postwar reconstruction, economic expansion, and a rise in the standard of living, but it was nourished also by a belief in the generative power of science and technology. The chairman of CSIRO, Ian Clunies Ross, provided something of a keynote in his observation that ‘there are no problems so great that they cannot be solved once we marshal our resources for a resolute and sustained attack on them’.^[69] Clunies Ross’s ‘faith’, the supplement concluded, ‘articulates the endeavours of the planners and makers of Australia’s future’.^[70]

During the inter-war years, the invigorating optimism of Groom, Brady and their fellow progressives, had been increasingly diverted towards conservative ends, and their enthusiasms denounced as naïve ‘boosterism’ by a growing cadre of academic experts. ‘To speak of “Australia Unlimited” in terms of Australian agriculture 20 years ago would have been considered frankly laughable’, Clunies Ross noted. But things had changed, it was ‘the beginning of a new era’. CSIRO, the ultimate fulfilment of Groom’s hopes, was enjoying a golden age of political support, public respect, and financial stability. Clunies Ross could point with satisfaction to research into trace elements that seemed to have finally realised the booster’s dream of transforming ‘worthless soil’ into ‘fertile pasture’. The control of rabbit populations through the introduction of myxomatosis symbolised the inevitable victory of science over the pests and diseases that threatened the nation’s agricultural livelihood.^[71] The Minister for Primary Industry, Billy McMahon, praised the work of Australia’s ‘modern explorers’, the ‘scientists and scientifically minded farmers’, who were ‘rolling back our farm horizons’ and revealing our ‘unlimited’ opportunities.^[72] It was a familiar catalogue of hopes, but one charged with an increasingly powerful sense of expectation. The spirit of this ‘new’ age was moving amongst the masses. Science had taken an atom-powered leap into the future.

Attempting to define the ‘newness’ of the atomic age, the nuclear physicist Ernest Titterton suggested that ‘the funeral pyre of Hiroshima’ was ‘the symbol of an era in which science has become so important in our lives that all decisions, including political ones, must be made with scientific considerations in mind’.^[73] It was an assessment coloured by Titterton’s legendary arrogance, but it reflected nonetheless a prevailing sense that no nation could afford to ignore the implications of science. The power of science was the power of the bomb, the ability the change the world, to bring down the guillotine on the past, to erect the signposts at the crossroads of destiny. Progress, science and atomic energy were virtual analogues, each brought expectation of a future transformed.

The promise of atomic energy neatly coincided with technocratic visions of a reconstructed Australia able to step confidently into the postwar world. Rapid industrialisation demanded power, which the atom seemed to be offering at cut-price rates. But wait, there was more. In 1947, Mark Oliphant, quickly becoming Australia’s most recognisable scientist, suggested another ‘very visionary’ way in which atomic energy might fuel Australia’s development. He envisaged large-scale irrigation projects drawing their water from atomic-powered desalination plants. Only 50 tons of uranium, he calculated, would be necessary to cover 1,000 square miles of land with two feet of water.^[74] Resurgent confidence in the conquest of nature was reflected in the Snowy Scheme, which also sought to harness water and power, while providing a foundation for future atomic efforts. A symbol of postwar progress and technocratic dreaming, the Snowy scheme was conceived as Australia’s answer to the Manhattan Project.^[75]

As with most other ‘revolutionary’ technologies, atomic energy was cast as the enemy of distance. Beyond the fancies of atom-powered planes, trains and automobiles, running on the standard ‘teacupful’ of uranium, there were persistent suggestions that atomic energy might accelerate the development of Australia’s ‘great spaces’.^[76] Writing in the Australia Unlimited supplement, the Chairman of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, J.P. Baxter, described the possibility of ‘package power stations for country towns and inland centres’. As a first step, Baxter suggested that reactors might serve ‘the remoter parts of the continent’, particularly those whose mineral wealth ‘will demand exploitation’.^[77] Mt Isa, with its recently discovered uranium deposits, was frequently suggested as the location of Australia’s first atomic power station. Sydney University physicist Harry Messel, a tireless atomic advocate, inspected uranium-bearing regions in the Northern Territory, and concluded: ‘The place could have a chain of nuclear power stations from the Arafura Sea to Alice Springs five years from now’.^[78]

At last, uranium appeared to offer a solution to Australia’s ‘empty north’. The mining and processing of this mysterious metal, it was argued, would stimulate the development of transport, housing and power, giving ‘the economic life of the Territory the transfusion of new blood it needs’.^[79] Indeed blood was still a critical factor in the nation’s progress; the secretary of the Department of National Development, H.G. Raggatt, proudly described Rum Jungle as ‘the largest mining operation in the world wholly carried on by men of European stock at such a low latitude’. Australia was entering a new era of ‘pioneering’, he claimed, one that was perhaps represented by the ‘modern facilities’ of the town of Batchelor, created specifically for the Rum Jungle miners and their families.^[80] Opening the project, Prime Minister Menzies declared it ‘something of a miracle’. ‘Not long ago’, he continued, the Northern Territory had seemed ‘almost worthless’: ‘But the history of Australia is the history of converting people from despair to hope and from hope to achievement’. With the discovery of uranium, the north seemed destined to host ‘one of the great communities of Australia’.^[81]

Edwin Brady always intended to write a sequel to Australia Unlimited, and if he had lived a few years longer, one could imagine him poring over accounts of the Rum Jungle project, thinking back to that campfire and his dreams of progress. But there was something rather different about this new style of pioneering. The town of Batchelor, with its individually-styled family homes and its remarkable range of ‘comforts and amenities’, had brought suburban living to the frontier.^[82] More importantly, its inhabitants were not sturdy landholders working their properties, but wage-earners, employees of Consolidated Zinc Pty Ltd. The Sydney Morning Herald’s version of Australia Unlimited was not the story of hardworking individuals creating national progress out of their own instinctive drive for improvement. In the wake of the Manhattan Project, the scale of progress had changed dramatically, represented now by huge developmental projects that married government supplied infrastructure with foreign investment and expertise.^[83] Progress was measured not in the sweat of the yeoman farmer, but in the profits of large multinational companies.

The Liberal Party went before the electors in 1958 emphasising its achievements in national development and its success in attracting foreign capital.^[84] ‘Our slogan is “Australia Unlimited”’, Menzies asserted, ‘and we pronounce it with confidence’.^[85] The campaign theme was highlighted by a tour of key projects and facilities, including the opening of Australia’s first nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights. But behind the confidence of ‘Australia Unlimited’ lurked a new fear. Electors were urged, not to make, but ‘to conserve the forces of progress’.^[86] As the security enclosures at Rum Jungle and Lucas Heights demonstrated, while individuals had seemingly lost the power to create progress, they had somehow gained the ability to threaten it.

a change of heart

The war, when it came, only lasted for a month, but that was long enough. All life was quickly extinguished in the northern hemisphere, and the clouds of deadly radioactive fallout gradually diffused to shroud the whole globe. For the people of Australia, it was a lingering, drawn out journey to oblivion. Nevil Shute’s apocalyptic novel On the Beach was published the same year as the first Australia Unlimited supplement. Its theme was not confidence, but fear, resignation and confusion. There was a new threat from the north, invisible and unstoppable. ‘It’s going to go on spreading down here, southwards, till it gets to us?’, Moira asks, ‘And they can’t do anything about it?’. ‘Not a thing’, replies Commander Dwight Towers, ‘It’s just too big a matter for mankind to tackle. We’ve just got to take it’.^[87] All they can do is wait helplessly for their own death. In this final act of surrender the people of Australia are united with the rest of humanity. One world or none.

Just as atomic power promised to conquer Australia’s vast spaces, so the bomb seemed poised to obliterate national boundaries. There would be no winners in an atomic war. G.V. Portus from the University of Adelaide argued that the ‘only defence of the world against the threat of atomic warfare is political defence’, and called for the ‘abandonment’ of the ‘out-of-date’ concept of national sovereignty.^[88] Some looked with hope to the newly-formed United Nations and its attempts to negotiate a system of control, but the UN Atomic Energy Commission soon descended into deadlock.^[89] Others sought more radical solutions, inspired by Einstein and his declaration in favour of world government. But the political fallout from our atom-bombed world soon settled, and the divisions became clear again. In this new age of oxymorons, war was cold, and the bomb was a weapon of peace.

The Cold War pushed Australia’s defensive frontiers ever northward, as the concept of ‘forward defence’ emerged to contain the threat of communism.^[90] ‘We must, by peaceful means extend the frontiers of the human spirit’, Menzies proclaimed, ‘We must, by armed strength, defend the geographical frontiers of those nations whose self-government is based upon the freedom of the spirit’.^[91] Menzies invoked the prospect of a looming third world war to justify his government’s defence preparation program, but increasingly Australia sought security in treaties and alliances, rather than men and guns. The nation’s defence was to be assured through the graces of its powerful friends, rather than the character of its citizen soldiery. Just like the characters in On the Beach, Australians were left to ponder a threat that they barely understood, and against which they could do very little.

But even as the frontiers of Australian security expanded, so they rebounded inwards, enclosing hearts and minds in an ever tighter grip. Long-held fears of infiltration were revived, with communism identified as a domestic as well as an international threat. Agents of the enemy were amongst us. The circumstances of the bomb’s creation and use focused much of this anxiety on the myth of the ‘atomic secret’. When, in October 1948, fire destroyed an atomic physics laboratory at Melbourne University, the federal opposition trumpeted their alarm – was this an ‘act of sabotage’?^[92] The building housed not ‘vital defence experiments’, as the opposition suggested, but fundamental work on cosmic rays. More horrifying than the threat of espionage, was the prospect facing ten postgraduate students who had lost all their notes in the midst of preparing their theses.^[93] But recent tales of atomic spies, the heightening of the Cold War, and the air of mystery surrounding atomic energy, all combined to provide the Opposition with a blunt instrument to continue its attacks on the Chifley government’s inability to preserve Australia’s defence security. The CSIR, with its modest atomic energy program, was a favourite target. Not only was it believed to be harbouring communists, its Chairman, David Rivett, had the temerity to suggest that good science entailed the free and open interchange of information.^[94] To prove its security credentials at home and abroad, the Chifley government cranked up the legislative apparatus, providing new levels of protection for defence projects, establishing ASIO, and bringing the CSIR under closer government control. Such measures were reinforced and elaborated throughout the 1950s, as the state increasingly sought to protect itself from its own people. The common citizen was no longer the nation’s guarantee of security, but the weak link in its protective enclosure.

It was, perhaps, human weakness that was most glaringly exposed by the bomb blast over Hiroshima. Even as the world marveled at this new conquest of the forces of nature, they wondered if humanity had the maturity and wisdom to control it. ‘It is a challenge to the conscience of man’, the Argus considered, ‘to ponder gravely whether his intellectual achievements have not outrun his moral perceptions’.^[95] Humankind had to demonstrate that the ‘vast powers’ of atomic energy were not ‘in the hands of moral and physical pygmies’, argued the Age: ‘Unless man can control his own impulses and use the powers of science for beneficent purposes, his life becomes a brutish affair’.^[96] The ‘crossroads of destiny’ had brought a ‘moral test’ upon the world, science demanded ‘a change of heart’.^[97]

And there was no time to get your breath back. Bomb tests, and more bomb tests, and then the Russians had it, and so the Americans built the H-bomb, and there were more tests... The frontiers of science were running ahead, pushing ever deeper into unknown territory, leaving the world gasping, trying to catch up. In April 1954 a distinguished panel of speakers considered the latest menace under the title ‘The H-Bomb – A Challenge to Humanity’.^[98] Mark Oliphant argued that world must give up war.^[99] Julius Stone perceived the ‘threat of the new weapon’ as lying in ‘the immaturity of men and women and of the instruments of government which they have created’.^[100] Canon E.J. Davidson proclaimed: ‘Our civilisation stands at the point of decision... It must conform to the moral order of the universe or perish’.^[101] And so it continued, in 1957 there was Sputnik. ‘It is a magnificent scientific achievement’, commented Harry Messel, an achievement which ‘means life or death for us – freedom or extinction of civilisation’.^[102]

Each new challenge brought its own sense of urgency, its own restatement of the crossroads choice - change or die. There was no ‘turning point’, no critical juncture on the road to progress, only constant reminders of our own fallibility and the apparent disconnection of science from the ethical life of humanity. The crossroads offered not the chance to change the future, but to conform to it. We were the ‘other’, able to occupy the future only through the courtesy of science. The destructive sense of inevitability that the frontier wreaked upon the land and its original inhabitants, was turned upon us all. It was humanity itself that threatened progress.

the future is always precarious

In May 1999, The Australian invited a range of ‘well-informed and influential’ speakers to examine the question: ‘How can we continue to build an open, competitive international economy while ensuring we develop a progressive society?’^[103] The resulting conference was entitled – yes, you guessed it – ‘Australia Unlimited’. Perhaps the title was an ironic reflection on Deakinite protectionism, a system criticised by the newspaper’s international editor, Paul Kelly, as the ‘Australian Settlement’.^[104] If it was, few got the joke. More likely, it was a straightforward reference to the dangers and opportunities brought by the latest in revolutionary forces – globalisation. Something new was here.

Like its previous incarnations, the Australia Unlimited forum was heavily dependent on advertising dollars. Progress is an attractive brandname. Indeed, the forum’s major sponsors provided a convenient summary of its themes in their half-page advertisements. Ansett offered ‘a world of destinations’, Foxtel brought the news of the world to you 24 hours a day, while IBM described the ‘treasure trove of products’ available on the Web. ‘Now it really is a small world’, they told us.^[105] Just as they had a hundred years earlier, developments in communications and transport encouraged a sense of simultaneity, proximity and speed.^[106] Globalisation is progress rebadged, measured still in the conquest of distance, the colonisation of space. Science and technology continue to bolster its imagined momentum, pushing time beyond its limits, creating the fault-lines of the new.

Within each Australia Unlimited, there is an attempt to articulate the balance of forces that will ensure continued progress – the interplay of nation and citizen, knowledge and capital, freedom and control. In the latest version science remains important, but is itself only a contributor to the broader ‘marketplace of ideas’.^[107] It seems, too, that a knowledge of mining is becoming rather less important than the mining of knowledge.^[108] But there are more fundamental changes, particularly in the presumed relationship between society and economy. It is the balance between the ‘two competing imperatives’ of ‘economic growth and social harmony’ that most concerns the movers and shakers at the Australia Unlimited forum.^[109] But have they always been ‘competing’? Would Groom have thought so, or even Menzies? This tension between the economic and the social provides the forum with its drama, its urgency. It appears that the world is at a crossroads.

The only contributor to make the connection back to Brady and Deakin is Stuart Macintyre, who notes that ‘the principal object of Australian policy in the early years of the century was not the economy or social justice but the nation’.^[110] For most of the forum participants, progress is to be found in the maintenance of a healthy, global economy. The frontiers of the future are those that impede the flow of trade and commerce. Nations are not built, they grow in the rich and fertile environment of globalisation. Just keep piling on the manure. But all is not well in the garden of plenty, for the disintegration of social cohesion threatens continued reform. ‘Even at a terrible cost to themselves’, Dennis Shanahan writes in his summary of the forum, ‘individuals and single nations have the potential to turn the advantages and underpinnings of globalisation against globalisation itself’. Unless governments and corporations can persuade individuals of the benefits of this new age, their ‘resistance... has the potential to... set off a chain reaction threat to general progress’. The danger is not ideological, resistance derives not from political commitment, but from ‘a sense of alienation, envy and resentment’.^[111] The problem is in being human.

In traversing these three versions of Australia Unlimited, it is tempting to imagine a linear narrative, to trace the progress of progress. That is the lie at the heart of this paper. Concepts such as the individual, the nation, even science, are never simple, and are always contested. There is no single stream of progress meandering through time, there are many countercurrents, eddies, backwaters and divergences. The point is not what progress has become, but that it has become, and is becoming still. Progress is not a belief, a hope, a naïve aspiration; one that we can in our supposed sophistication simply reject or deny. Within the meaning of progress there are many balances to be negotiated and boundaries to be drawn: a continuing process of accumulation and disjunction that shapes our perceptions of time and our awareness of change. Dennis Shanahan comments: ‘Just as the change is constant, the future is always precarious’.^[112] But how does the sense of an endangered, precarious future limit our possibilities for change? We live with fear and hope, but need we be captive to them? To understand our options, we have to explore how such boundaries are created, to find the frontiers of our future in our past. We frequently turn to spatial metaphors to illuminate the meaning of time, and so it is that progress is forged at the frontier, the crossroads or in the networks of globalisation. Movement is taken for granted, we are on a journey, ever onwards. There is no turning back. Is there?

In one of his last journal entries, Alfred Deakin struggled to stay within time: ‘Why babble more... I have shed, once and for all, my past as a whole – my present fruitless – my future a hapless mess of wreckage and misunderstanding’.^[113] His memory was almost gone, so too his words, his life. Groom lived on, but also battled to keep pace with progress. So thoroughly modern in his nation-building enthusiasm, he suffered the ultimate humiliation of being remembered by Robert Menzies as ‘old fashioned’.^[114] And Brady? Edwin Brady died in 1952, just short of his eighty-third birthday. He spent most of his later years at his camp in Mallacoota, sandwiched between the bush and the sea. He was, he reflected ‘perhaps the most successful failure in literary history’. Barely able to make a living, he nonetheless persisted ‘in asserting that Australia is the best country in the world’. ^[115] Most of his plans had come to nothing. There was no sequel to Australia Unlimited, no film version, his hopes for the economic development of East Gippsland had been thwarted, his utopian farming community had failed. ‘Should I end up, therefore, on a melancholy note?’, he asked. Brady’s journey along ‘Life’s Highway’ was coming to an end, but he would not submit to the inevitable, he would not surrender to time. ‘I decline to become mournful’, he answered, ‘I refuse to grow old’.^[116]

NOTES

^[1] Edwin James Brady, Australia Unlimited, Melbourne, George Robertson and Company, 1918, p. 570
^[2] Ibid., pp. 570-1
^[3] Ibid., p. 515ff; Some details of Brady’s travel arrangements, facilitated by the Commonwealth, are contained in National Archives of Australia (NAA): A659/1, 1943/1/3907
^[4] Ibid., p. 53
^[5] Ibid.
^[6] Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (CPD), vol. 50, 30 July 1909, pp. 1878-1891
^[7] David Carment, 'The making of an Australian liberal : the political education of Littleton Groom, 1867-1905', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 62, no. 4, March 1977, pp. 233-4; D B Waterson, 'Groom, William Henry (1833-1901)', in Douglas Pike (ed.), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1972, pp. 304-5; Jessie Groom, Nation building in Australia : the life and work of Sir Littleton Ernest Groom, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1941, pp. 15-16
^[8] Quick makes reference to Groom, Alfred Deakin (Ballarat), Hugh McColl (Echuca) and Allan McLean (Gippsland) as campaigning on the issue, CPD, vol. 2, 28 June 1901, pp. 1827-8
^[9] CPD, vol. 2, 28 June 1901, pp. 1827-31
^[10] Michael Roe, Nine Australian progressives: vitalism in bourgeois social thought, 1890-1960, St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1984, pp. 1-20; Tim Rowse, Australian liberalism and national character, Malmsbury, Victoria, Kibble Books, 1978, pp. 38-9
^[11] CPD, vol 2, 12 July 1901, p. 2507
^[12] Toowoomba Chronicle, 21 Nov 1906
^[13] Quoted in Groom, Nation building, p. 56
^[14] Toowoomba Chronicle, 5 November 1906, p. 3
^[15] Groom, Nation building
^[16] J A La Nauze, Alfred Deakin - a biography, 2 vols., vol. 2, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1965, pp. 407-8
^[17] CPD, vol. 36, 23 July 1907, p.776
^[18] Australian Bureau of Agriculture: Memorandum on the establishment of, Parliamentary Papers, No. 194, 1907-8
^[19] Bureau of Agriculture Bill, Second Reading, House of Representatives, CPD, vol. 50, 3 August 1909, pp. 1919-29 and, vol. 70, 5 September 1913, pp. 931-5
^[20] CPD, vol 50, 3 August 1909, p.1928
^[21] Rodgers (Wannon), CPD, vol. 70, 16 September 1913, p.1261; Patten (Hume), CPD, vol. 72, 12 December 1913, p.4249.
^[22] CPD, vol. 58, 6 October 1910, p. 4215
^[23] CPD, vol 2, 12 July 1901, p. 2507
^[24] For example: Senator McColl, CPD, vol 52, 15 October 1909, p. 4603
^[25] CPD, vol. 52, 14 October 1909, p. 4521
^[26] CPD, vol 59, 23 November 1910, p. 6589
^[27] Richard White, Inventing Australia, Sydney, George Allen & Unwin, 1981, pp. 63-84; Graeme Davison, 'Frontier', in Graeme Davison, John Hirst, and Stuart Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 269-70. See also: Roe, Nine Australian progressives: vitalism in bourgeois social thought, 1890-1960, pp. 68-70; Brigid Hains, 'Mawson of the Antarctic, Flynn of the Inland: progressive heroes on Australia's ecological frontiers', in Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds), Ecology and empire: environmental history of settler societies, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1997, pp. 154-66
^[28] Edwin James Brady, Australia Unlimited, Melbourne, George Robertson and Company, 1918, p. 636
^[29] CPD, vol. 50, 3 August 1909, p. 1929
^[30] For example: Fenton (Maribyrnong), CPD, vol. 58, 6 October 1910, p.4217; Patten (Hume), CPD, vol. 72, 12 December 1913, p.4251
^[31] CPD, vol. 59, 23 November 1910, p. 6590
^[32] Brady, Australia Unlimited, p. 630
^[33] CPD, vol. 70, 5 September 1913, p. 933, 935
^[34] For example: Toowoomba Chronicle, 10 December 1903; Argus, 27 October 1908
^[35] CPD, vol. 58, 6 October 1910, p. 4214
^[36] Brady, Australia Unlimited, p. 571
^[37] Copy of prospectus (undated) contained in NAA: A659/1, 1943/1/3907
^[38] David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1939, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1999, p. 113ff
^[39] CPD, vol. 50, 30 July 1909, p. 1880
^[40] Toowoomba Chronicle, 15 November 1906
^[41] Groom, Nation building, p. 2
^[42] Toowoomba Chronicle, 29 August 1901
^[43] CPD vol. 50, 30 July 1909, p. 1880
^[44] Ibid
^[45] Toowoomba Chronicle, 21 November 1906
^[46] Sir George Currie and John Graham, The origins of CSIRO: science and the Commonwealth Government 1901-1926, Melbourne, CSIRO, 1966
^[47] Toowoomba Chronicle, 29 August 1901
^[48] Alison Bashford, 'Quarantine and the imagining of the Australian nation', Health, vol. 2, no. 4, October 1998, pp. 387-402; see also Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1939, pp. 141-53
^[49] Toowoomba Chronicle, 10 December 1903
^[50] Toowoomba Chronicle, 29 August 1901
^[51] Tom Griffiths, Hunters and collectors: the antiquarian imagination in Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 187; Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1939, pp. 12, 113ff
^[52] Toowoomba Chronicle, 7 November 1906
^[53] Brady, Australia Unlimited, pp. 286-7
^[54] Argus, 15 January 1921, p.18
^[55] Deborah Bird Rose describes the ‘hand of destruction’ and the ‘hand of civilisation’ that shape the space-time of the frontier, see Deborah Rose, 'The Year Zero and the North Australian frontier', in Deborah Rose and Anne Clarke (eds), Tracking knowledge in North Australian landscapes, Darwin, NARU, 1997, pp. 19-20; Deborah Bird Rose, 'Hard times: an Australian study', in Klaus Neumann, Nicholas Thomas, and Hilary Ericksen (eds), Quicksands: foundational histories in Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand, Sydney, University of NSW Press, 1999, pp. 12-5
^[56] Len Beadell, Blast the Bush, Adelaide, Rigby, 1976, pp. 173-6
^[57] Clem Christesen, 'Editorial', Meanjin, vol. 4, no. 3, Spring 1945, p. 149
^[58] C N Button, God, Man, and The Bomb, Ballarat, St Andrews Kirk, 1945, p. 8
^[59] SMH, 8 August 1945, p. 1
^[60] Trevor Tuckfield, 'The Monte Bello Islands', Walkabout, August 1951, pp. 33-4
^[61] CPD, vol. 217, 4 June 1952, p. 1374
^[62] Margaret Gowing, Independence and deterrence: Britain and atomic energy, 1945-1952, 2 vols., vol. 2: 'Policy execution', London, Macmillan, 1974, p. 478
^[63] Sunday Herald, 4 October 1953
^[64] Ivan Southall, Woomera, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1962, p. 3
^[65] Beadell, Blast the Bush, p. 8
^[66] Tim Sherratt, 'A political inconvenience: Australian scientists at the British atomic weapons test, 1952-3', Historical Records of Australian Science, vol. 6, no. 2, 1985, pp. 137-52; Alice Cawte, Atomic Australia: 1944-1990, Sydney, New South Wales University Press, 1992, pp. 35-63
^[67] Quoted in Robert Milliken, No conceivable injury: the story of Britain and Australia's atomic cover-up, Melbourne, Penguin, 1986, p. 93
^[68] ‘Australia Unlimited Supplement’, SMH, 19 June 1957, p. 1
^[69] Ibid, p. 28
^[70] Ibid, p. 1
^[71] Ibid, p. 28
^[72] Ibid, p. 24
^[73] E W Titterton, Facing the Atomic Future, Melbourne, F.W. Cheshire, 1956, p. 4
^[74] SMH, 26 March 1947, p. 2
^[75] Wayne Reynolds, 'Atomic war, Empire strategic dispersal and the origins of the Snowy Mountains Scheme', War and Society, vol. 14, no. 1, May 1996; Wayne Reynolds, 'In the footsteps of Manhattan: Australian defence science and the quest for the atomic bomb, 1946-60', in Frank Cain (ed.), Arming the nation, Canberra, Australian Defence Studies Centre, 1999, pp. 39-60
^[76] ‘Australia Unlimited Supplement’, SMH, 19 June 1957, p. 16
^[77] Ibid
^[78] Sunday Herald, 14 August 1955, p. 11
^[79] National Development, no. 1, October 1952, p. 13
^[80] ‘Australia Unlimited Supplement’, SMH, 19 June 1957, p. 10
^[81] SMH, 18 September 1954, p. 3
^[82] D E Burchill, 'Rum Jungle uranium field - Building the township of Batchelor', Walkabout, vol. 21, no. 1, January 1955, p. 29; SMH, 23 September 1954, Womens Section p. 7
^[83] Lenore Layman, 'Development ideology in Western Australia, 1933-1965', Historical Studies, vol. 20, no. 79, 1982, pp. 235, 258-60; Lenore Layman, 'Development', in Graeme Davison, John Hirst, and Stuart Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 184-6
^[84] Marian Simms, A Liberal nation: the Liberal Party & Australian politics, Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1982, p. 58
^[85] Australian Liberal, vol. 2, no. 1, November 1958, p. 1
^[86] Liberal Party of Australia, Australia unlimited! : a nation on the march, Canberra, Liberal Party of Australia, 1958
^[87] Nevil Shute, On the Beach, London, Heinemann, 1957, pp. 39-40
^[88] Kerr Grant and G V Portus, The Atomic Age, Adelaide, United Nations Association, SA Division, 1946, pp. 16,23-4
^[89] Joseph I Lieberman, The scorpion and the tarantula : the struggle to control atomic weapons, 1945-1949, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970. For Australian involvement see: Tim Sherratt, 'A physicist would be best out of it: George Briggs and the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission', Voices, vol. 3, no. 1, 1993, pp. 17-30
^[90] Lachlan Strahan, 'The dread frontier in Australian defence thinking', in Graeme Cheeseman and Robert H. Bruce (eds), Discourses of danger & dread frontiers : Australian defence and security thinking after the Cold War, Canberra, Allen & Unwin, 1996, pp. 157-65
^[91] Quoted in Ibid., p. 162
^[92] CPD, vol.198, 6 October 1948, pp.1317-8
^[93] SMH, 7 October 1948, p. 3
^[94] Rohan Rivett, David Rivett: fighter for Australian science, Melbourne, R D Rivett, 1972, pp. 1-14
^[95] Argus, 8 August 1945, p. 2
^[96] Age, 8 August 1945, p. 2
^[97] Age, 1 July 1946, p. 2; Argus, 6 July 1946, p. 2
^[98] Voice, vol. 3, no. 7, April 1954, pp. 12-20
^[99] Ibid, p. 13
^[100] Ibid, p. 17
^[101] Ibid, p. 19
^[102] SMH, 7 October 1957, p. 1
^[103] ‘Australia Unlimited’ Liftout, Australian, 8-9 May 1999, p. 2; Articles and reports from 1-8 May in the Australian
^[104] Paul Kelly, The end of certainty : power, politics and business in Australia, Rev. ed., St. Leonards, N.S.W., Allen & Unwin, 1994
^[105] Australian, 1-2 May 1999, p. 17; 3 May 1999, p. 12; 4 May 1999, p. 16
^[106] Stephen Kern, The culture of time and space, 1880-1918, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1983
^[107] Helen Garnett, ‘Let’s push the young towards cutting edge’, Australian, 3 May 1999, p. 12
^[108] Mary O’Kane, ‘Funding a necessary tool in the mining of knowledge’, Australian, 3 May 1999, p. 13
^[109] Australian, 1-2 May 1999, p. 16
^[110] Ibid
^[111] ‘Australia Unlimited’ Liftout, Australian, 8-9 May 1999, p. 1-2
^[112] Ibid
^[113] Quoted in Walter Murdoch, Alfred Deakin - A sketch, Melbourne, Bookman, 1999, p. 284
^[114] ‘Foreword’ in Groom, Nation building, p. vi
^[115] Edwin James Brady, 'E.J. Brady, by Himself', Life Digest, vol. 3, no. 3, June 1949 1949, p. 23
^[116] E.J. Brady, ‘Life’s Highway’, Southerly, vol. 16, no. 4, 1955, p. 201; extracts from ‘Life’s Highway’ were published in Southerly from no. 4, 1954 until no. 4, 1955