The name of ‘Garibaldi’ is a household word.
(South Australian Register, 9 October 1860)One of the most famous public figures in later nineteenth-century Australia, as in the rest of the Anglophone world, was Giuseppe Garibaldi. The man known as the ‘hero of two worlds’ – Europe and South America – was in fact also the hero of a third. Evidence of Garibaldi's capacious impact on Australian public life is not hard to come by. In 1863, for example, an advertisement for Mrs Sohier's Waxwork Exhibition in Pitt Street, Sydney, listed Garibaldi first among a cavalcade of mannequins that included Presidents Lincoln and Davis, the Queen and the royal family, and a bearded woman.Footnote 1 At the lord mayor of Sydney's fancy-dress ball in 1879, the most common costume among the guests was a Garibaldi shirt.Footnote 2
Surprisingly then, when recent historians have discussed the impact of Italians on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia Garibaldi has scarcely rated a mention. This absence from recent accounts by Australian historians is symptomatic of a wider malaise. In studies of Garibaldi appearing during the past twenty years, Australia is wholly overlooked. For example, Alfonso Scirocco's 2007 hagiographical account is subtitled ‘citizen of the world’, but apparently the world did not extend as far as the antipodes. Similarly, Jérôme Grévy's detailed political history, published in French in 2001, ignores Australia. Even Lucy Riall's excellent 2011 study of Garibaldi's public persona does not mention his fame in Australia.Footnote 3
Readers could therefore be forgiven for thinking that this most public of lives and legacies somehow passed the Australian colonies by. Only Ros Pesman, a Sydney-based historian, has noticed Garibaldi's place in public life in Australia before the First World War. In short articles published in the 1980s, Pesman focused on the efforts of admirers in Melbourne early in the 1860s to raise funds to present the general with a silver sword; Garibaldi's controversial place in the career of the celebrated Australian artist Adelaide Ironside (in 1861 she used his features for the face of Christ in her celebrated painting The marriage of Cana); and the importance for some colonial politicians of Garibaldi's anti-clericalism.Footnote 4 For Pesman, these episodes are capsule statements of the widespread affection for Garibaldi across a broad constituency. Having set the agenda, however, she does not go further to try to unravel Garibaldi's extensive public appeal. Nor does she seek to understand the nature and precipitate end of his fame.
Garibaldi's iconic status in the Australian colonies occurred at a moment when the notion of celebrity was being transformed amid what was effectively a fundamental democratization of the public sphere in the Anglophone world. People on the fringes of the political nation were increasingly asserting their right to commemorate and celebrate those who led them, in opposition to those who governed them.Footnote 5 In this sense, Garibaldi was waiting in the wings, ready to be called to centre stage at a propitious moment. Admittedly, Simon Morgan has recently chided sociologists and students of the media for insouciantly equating celebrity with modernity. He rightly points to the existence of celebrities in eighteenth-century popular politics and invites historians to join him in offering a corrective.Footnote 6 He has a point. The first half of the nineteenth century also produced its share of celebrity-cum-popular heroes: think here of ‘The Liberator’ Daniel O'Connell, among others.Footnote 7 The eastern seaboard of Australia, too, had at least one notable political celebrity: John Dunmore Lang. For several decades, Lang was so famous he was known in public discourse simply as ‘The Doctor’.Footnote 8 Nevertheless, Riall's designation of Garibaldi as the first celebrity of modern politics is compelling and worth lingering over.Footnote 9 Moreover, for students of the relationship between the centre and periphery of the British world, her study of the nature of Garibaldi's fame provokes questions about the relationship between celebrity and distance.
To understand Garibaldi's celebrity, Riall bypasses modern sociology and media studies, reaching back instead to the work of Max Weber to invoke the concept of ‘charismatic authority’, suggesting that the general was an ideal case in point.Footnote 10 In the aftermath of the First World War, Weber famously argued that ‘charismatic authority’ rested ‘on devotion to the specific and exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person’.Footnote 11 Second, Riall argues that Garibaldi became the personification of the idea of nationalism – indeed, he was the ‘most complete expression of “heroic masculinity” allied with nationalism in all of nineteenth-century politics’.Footnote 12 Moreover, unlike the leaders of twentieth-century nationalism endowed with an ‘authoritarian personality’, which was predicated on submissive constituency, Riall argues that Garibaldi was essentially a democratic leader.
At the same time, Riall is keen to emphasize Garibaldi's personal role in engineering his fame. ‘It seems clear’, she writes, ‘that Garibaldi's celebrity was the result of a political and rhetorical strategy’; he ‘played a serious part in creating himself as a political celebrity’. For Riall, then, he was not only charismatic but also calculating, caught up to some extent in what has been called a ‘frenzy of renown’.Footnote 13 Finally, and connecting the preceding points, Riall emphasizes the importance of Garibaldi's physical presence in establishing and maintaining his fame. For all that he was the beneficiary of rapid advances in communications technology when spreading the good word, she argues that Garibaldi's greatest asset was his flesh and blood: ‘here was a man who understood very well the impact of his presence and knew how to protect and manipulate it to achieve the desired effect’.Footnote 14
For the student of nineteenth-century demotic politics, the notion that aspiring leaders simultaneously sought and expected celebrity is something of a truism; indeed, it is hard to think of a political aspirant who did not. As elsewhere, popular leaders in the Australian colonies routinely stressed their selflessness and sacrifice but were equally convinced of their worth and thus their entitlement to lead. In relation to Australia, however, it is equally if not more important to emphasize the agency of the led. Riall notes the irony that Garibaldi enjoyed charismatic authority despite the fact that he was never in power in any meaningful sense.Footnote 15 Here Weber might have proven even more helpful than she allows. Although he does not mention Garibaldi (when he well might have, given the other examples he cites), Weber specifically discussed the situation of a charismatic leader without power, recognizing that charisma ‘may be subject to interpretation or development in an anti-authoritarian direction’. This is effectively Riall's view of Garibaldi as a democratic-charismatic leader writ large. Significantly, however, Weber contended that democratization fundamentally changed the relationship between the leader and his acolytes: ‘The leader whose legitimacy rested on his personal charisma then becomes leader by the grace of those who follow him’, and as a consequence he no longer enjoys charismatic authority.Footnote 16 It seems clear, then, that a European understanding of charismatic authority and the relationship between leaders and followers needs to be fundamentally recalibrated when examining Garibaldi's place among Australia's heroes. In fact, Garibaldi's colonial fate invites consideration of an intercolonial and transnational perspective in the broader discussion of the contemporaneous changes to the concept of celebrity.
Before we can properly do so, we need to take up the opportunity opened by Ros Pesman, and seek to rescue Garibaldi from the footnotes of Australian history and thereby add a new dimension to our understanding of the fame of the man reputedly described by A. J. P. Taylor as ‘the only wholly admirable figure in modern history’.Footnote 17 In this respect, the article will argue that, in Australia, Garibaldi became at one and the same time an ideological touchstone for public figures, politicians, and activists across the political spectrum, an apolitical icon, and a cash cow. More specifically, it will posit that a cacophony of voices bent on enlisting Garibaldi to a local purpose, far from Europe, not only drowned out his voice but also splintered his public image. Paradoxically, the breadth of his appeal condemned him to a relatively brief efflorescence. By disentangling the nature of Garibaldi's fame in a place so far from his physical presence, I will suggest, in turn, that historians of Australia can profitably use his example as a starting point to reconsider the impact of faraway ‘heroes’ on local public life, whether from the ‘old world’ or from the new. In fact, Garibaldi's fame in Australia provides an important opportunity to ponder the implications of what has, in another context, been called ‘intimacy at a distance’.Footnote 18
I
For all that Garibaldi became a household name in the Australian colonies and the outline of his life was well known (and, up to the mid-1860s at least, uncontroversial), his image was splintered.Footnote 19 The contest over the real Garibaldi was brought into sharp relief at the time of his death in 1882, when a ‘meeting of condolence’ was organized in Sydney's Garden Palace. Constructed in the heart of the city to house the International Exhibition of 1879, the palace was described as the only venue big enough to hold the anticipated throng of mourners. The organizers were not disappointed, as an estimated 10,000 Sydneysiders attended. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the crowd was in no way exclusive to Italians; it also comprised ‘lovers of liberty generally, and those who reverenced the name of Garibaldi as one of its most distinguished apostles’.Footnote 20 This was actually an understatement: an estimate put the number of Italians in Sydney in 1877 at fewer than 500 (the 1901 census registered an increase to just over 900).Footnote 21 Thus, one commentator did not have throngs of Italians in mind when he wrote:
Here in New South Wales, far removed from Europe, this meeting is barely announced … and, as if by magic, this enormous hall is crowded to excess. What did this but the bare mention of the name Garibaldi and the esteem and affection in which it is held in this country?Footnote 22
The hall was festooned with ribbons of red and black and evergreen wreaths ‘to great effect’. On the platform was erected what was described as a ‘scene representing the celebrated Arch of Constantine’. Those seated before it included Dr Vincenzo Marano, the Italian consul, the lieutenant-governor, Sir Alfred Stephen, the mayor of Sydney, and two well-known parliamentarians, David Buchanan and George Reid, the future premier of New South Wales and prime minister of Australia. The proceedings opened with a selection on the organ, followed by a funeral march, ‘composed especially for the occasion’, performed by the Permanent Artillery Band, and culminating, as the Herald noted, with Garibaldi's hymn. In front of the stage was a ‘colossal’ veiled bust of the departed hero. As the strains of the Hymn rang out, ‘the veil that had hitherto concealed the bust from the auditorium was removed, amidst the most enthusiastic cheering’.Footnote 23
What was being cheered as the veil lifted? For many – perhaps even most – at centre stage was the marble visage of an entirely apolitical (perhaps supra-political) Garibaldi. The first eulogist, Dr Marano, set the tone for the day by drawing attention to this Garibaldi in unequivocal language: ‘In promoting such a meeting they could have no political aims to further; no bigotry of any kind stirred them; they had no special cause to advocate – no party battles – under Garibaldi's flag; they could mean defiance to nobody, offense to no-one.’Footnote 24 The apolitical Garibaldi was also Garibaldi the fearsome and fearless warrior-hero. As noted, on the platform was a representation of the Arch of Constantine. Exactly how it was represented is not clear but the message was unequivocal: here was a great soldier worthy of a triumphal arch of Roman antiquity. Moreover, around the walls of the palace were hung large signs containing the names of the battles in which Garibaldi had participated. Fittingly, the second contributor to the proceedings, Colonel Octave Fariola Di Rozzoli, an American who spoke from wide experience (having commanded a ‘Colored’ regiment in the Civil War), developed this point.Footnote 25 Although the general's ‘military tactics were not always in accordance with military teachings’, Fariola told the mourners, ‘his campaign in Northern Italy was certainly one of the finest episodes in the military history of modern times’.Footnote 26 Fariola went on to declaim at great length on the details of the general's exploits.Footnote 27 An obituary in the Queenslander had already summarized this case with eloquent simplicity: ‘No strategist of warfare on a grand scale, he won his battles by sheer dash and gallantry.’ These were ‘feats of arms the oldest soldiers might envy’.Footnote 28
In his eulogy, George Reid looked to the pages of Sir Walter Scott for a benchmark when it came to courage and military prowess. Scott, he told the audience, ‘had drawn many interesting pictures of the grace and gallantry of soldiers of the middle ages, but his genius never conceived of any career more romantic and thrilling than the actual life of this simple soldier of freedom’.Footnote 29 This was unsurprising. The earliest mention of Garibaldi in the colonial press was in June 1845, when the Sydney Morning Herald reprinted a report, eagerly purloined from a British packet, outlining the seizing of the Argentine fleet off the coast of Montevideo, where Garibaldi raised an ‘Italian legion’ to fight for the independence of Uruguay.Footnote 30 A report in 1846, quoting from an eyewitness account, illustrates the way that Garibaldi's public persona was already being portrayed: ‘disinterested … brave, humane and honourable’.Footnote 31 At about this time, Garibaldi adopted the uniform for public performance that he would wear for the rest of his life: the red shirt, poncho, and distinctive hat.
After a long interregnum, during which Garibaldi travelled extensively out of the public gaze, reports of his exploits again began to appear in the colonial press. In 1860, when uprisings occurred in Messina and Palermo in the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Garibaldi made what was his most important contribution to the Risorgimento and certainly the one that entrenched his reputation around the globe: as commander of the march of i Mille (the Thousand), or, as they would be known throughout the Anglophone world, the Red Shirts. ‘Garibaldi's expedition’, as Australian newspapers dubbed it, commenced early in May, when he landed in Sicily. Within days he had won a celebrated victory at Calatafimi by ordering an uphill bayonet charge against a superior force.Footnote 32 ‘In spite of the heat of the day’ and their opponents' ‘advantages of position and numbers’, ran a report in the Melbourne Argus, Garibaldi's men ‘drove the Neapolitans at the point of a bayonet from one position to another’.Footnote 33 News of a string of bloody victories that helped to facilitate the unification of Italy in 1861 under Victor Emmanuel echoed through the colonial capitals.
If the details of Garibaldi's campaigns in faraway lands had provided plenty of grist for the press mill, the lessons of his martial experiences had, from the outset, been seen through the prism of a local military narrative. An editorial in the Bathurst Free Press in September 1860, for example, opined: ‘Australia's sons have hitherto known nothing of war and we think an account of the life of the memorable self-made soldier before us deserves attention and will repay a perusal.’Footnote 34 Similarly, according to a well-known lecturer, George Bent, one of the principal messages to be learned from a study of the general's life was the importance of a volunteer force.Footnote 35 When Bent lectured in Brisbane, the local volunteers resolved to march to the venue ‘for the purpose of doing honour to the occasion, and availing themselves of any instruction which the career of so great and patriotic a soldier is calculated to afford’.Footnote 36 In 1861, another lecture attracted the interest of the premier of New South Wales, Charles Cowper, who occupied the chair. In his closing remarks, Cowper continued the pattern of relating Garibaldi's struggles to the future of the colonies. According to the Herald, ‘Mr Cowper observed that hints having sometimes been given of a probable dictatorship in this colony, he had been anxious to know something of Garibaldi.’Footnote 37
Of course, Garibaldi the great warrior was quintessentially a great man; in fact, his heroism and masculinity were different sides of the same coin. This had had a measurable impact during Garibaldi's celebrated visit to England in 1864, most notably among society women, where there was undoubtedly a sexual element in evidence. As Christopher Hibbert has noted, Garibaldi was ‘smothered’ by the attentions of upper-class women who (in the words of Earl Granville, lord president of the Council) were ‘temporarily a little out of their minds’. Even the queen – no supporter of Garibaldi – admitted he had natural dignity, dash, and a ‘pleasing smile’.Footnote 38 His contemporary biographer Theodore Bent argued that Garibaldi was the ‘idol of the fair sex in all parts of the world’.Footnote 39
The martial Garibaldi was also inextricably linked to Garibaldi the freedom fighter. Opening the Sydney meeting of condolence, for example, Manolo suggested that those present had gathered ‘to pay honour to a champion of freedom and an enemy of tyranny’. Notably, he also gave the sentiment a local inflection: the ‘admiration they felt for his noble virtues and great principles had brought them together to-day and the same spirit would make them martyrs or heroes to-morrow should any homegrown or foreign tyrant try to take their liberty’.Footnote 40 Nevertheless, Garibaldi's struggles against tyranny were often presented in relatively vague and generic terms. Some even attempted to explicitly disentangle the struggle for freedom from rebellion. ‘Although Garibaldi always fought against governments,’ Fariola told the memorial gathering, ‘it was not as a rebel or because he was impatient of regular government and duly constituted authority.’ He had simply taken up his sword to fight for the ‘weaker side that was struggling to secure recognition of its rights’.Footnote 41 No-one pointed out the audacious self-contradiction.
There were those, however, who saw that Garibaldi's constant struggle against tyranny was the work of a soldier in the cause of liberty, at the core of which was a much more clearly defined agenda, known in contemporary parlance as ‘advanced-liberal’ and even ‘radical-liberal’. For them, the bust at centre stage was of Garibaldi the radical-liberal. ‘The key-note of Garibaldi's life’, wrote Howard Blackett in 1882, ‘is his enthusiasm for liberty. Without this he might have been an honest, brave, and illustrious citizen; with it, the world recognizes in him such a hero as one does not frequently meet with in the long annals of human history.’Footnote 42 Liberals did not in any way seek to take the sword out of the general's hands; they simply emphasized the nature of the causes in which it had been wielded.Footnote 43
Moreover, fighting for a liberal polity fitted neatly into the pervasive trope of the rights of the freeborn Briton. For example, the most significant national organization devoted to democratic reform of the British political system in the middle years of Victoria's reign, the Reform League, had elected Garibaldi president of its organization in absentia, a position he enthusiastically accepted.Footnote 44 The objective of the League was extensive political change but within the ambit of the constitution – indeed, usually justified by a liberal interpretation of it – and for many Garibaldi endorsed this stance. Although the League spearheaded the efforts to raise funds to send a company of British excursionists to fight in aid of the general,Footnote 45 he was principally enlisted as an advocate of constitutional reform. As Bent wrote in 1881, Garibaldi often ‘would speak of England and the English as the pattern on which he would wish all governments to be framed’.Footnote 46 One historian has recently made the point even more emphatically: Garibaldi's ‘pervasive vision of liberty as the very breath of life in the human soul’ was inextricably linked to his attitude to parliament, which he saw as a ‘necessary pillar of that liberty’.Footnote 47 This ‘radical-liberal’ version of Garibaldi resonated in Australia, and it was a stance that was buttressed by the presence of his son Ricciotti. It is not well known that Garibaldi's fourth son, Ricciotti, lived in Victoria between 1874 and 1881. Colonial readers were told that this was no accident. According to one report in 1875, the general was ‘familiar with the history of the colony’ and he had afforded it ‘the strongest proof of the interest he takes in its prosperity by sending out his son Ricciotti Garibaldi to settle in Melbourne’.Footnote 48
Ricciotti was named in honour of Nicola Ricciotti, who had been executed for his part in the abortive revolt led by followers of Mazzini (the Bandiera Brothers) against Austrian rule in the kingdom of Naples in 1842. He lived up to his name. Before sailing for Victoria, Ricciotti had fought alongside his father at Bezzecca in 1866 and Mentana in 1867. He also participated in Garibaldi's attempt in 1870 to support the French during the Franco-Prussian War, receiving a wound that incapacitated him for the rest of his life. Reputedly, he captured a Prussian flag at Pouilly, the only such trophy won during the debacle.Footnote 49
Ricciotti and his wife arrived in Melbourne in 1874 and, while he has all but vanished from the historical record, he soon became a well-known figure in his new home. After a short stint as a labourer, he obtained a post in the Victorian public service, where he rose rapidly through the ranks to become chief secretary to the premier, James McCulloch. McCulloch was a liberal who had drifted steadily leftwards; by the time he employed Ricciotti, he was a radical-liberal according to the standards of the day.Footnote 50 It was not surprising that Ricciotti should make a connection such as this. He had lived in England during the 1860s, where he rubbed shoulders with many liberal and radical-liberal politicians including his father's close friend John McAdam. Like his father, Ricciotti had links to the Reform League, sharing the platform at a London meeting in 1867 with the League's president, Edward Beales, as well as Charles Bradlaugh and Henry Vincent, the former Chartist.Footnote 51
During his time in Victoria, Ricciotti became a British ‘citizen’ – the word he used, rather than ‘subject’. ‘People will hardly believe it’, he told an interviewer in 1915, ‘but I am a British citizen … And I am enormously proud of the distinction.’Footnote 52 He was also a great admirer of Australia's political system: ‘I brought away the most intense admiration of Australia. Many of the institutions, much of her Parliamentary system and government, I regard as perfect.’ He continued, ‘Since my return [to Europe] I have often said that if the States of Europe wish to be well governed, they should send their representatives to study the government of Australia.’Footnote 53 Among those whom Ricciotti influenced during his Australian sojourn was the young J. F. Archibald, later co-founder of Australia's iconic radical-nationalist journal, The Bulletin.Footnote 54
As noted above, in Australia (and elsewhere in the English-speaking world), Garibaldi's name carried a strong overtone of rebellion and for radicals this was, by definition, a struggle against tyranny, which, at that time, revolved around the trinity of church, state, and empire, and for freedom and democracy. In 1879, Garibaldi undertook what was virtually the final political act of his life, when he founded the League of Democracy to campaign for universal suffrage, the emancipation of women, and the abolition of ecclesiastical property, and against the maintenance of a standing army. His vision extended well beyond the fate of Italy. In 1861, for example, well before the Emancipation Proclamation, Garibaldi was reputed to have engaged in negotiations with Abraham Lincoln to take up the post of commander-in-chief of the Union army, but only on the proviso that the abolition of slavery became a specific war aim. Withal, in the aftermath of the proclamation, Garibaldi penned an effusive public letter to Lincoln declaring him a ‘pilot of liberty!’Footnote 55
In Britain, Garibaldi's identification with radical reform across a broad front saw him embraced by a number of Chartists, such as Gerald Massey, G. J. Harney, and G. J. Holyoake.Footnote 56 Arguably his most ardent supporter and intimate friend in Britain was a former Glasgow Chartist, John McAdam. The mutual affection was evident following McAdam's visit to Caprera in 1860, when Garibaldi wrote ‘I love you like a childhood friend’.Footnote 57 In Australia, it was another former Glasgow Chartist, David Buchanan, who was foremost in these ranks. In his speech at the Sydney condolence meeting, Buchanan emphasized Garibaldi's heroism in the face of tyranny and, as other speakers had done, introduced a local dimension. Why, he pondered, was Garibaldi of interest to those so far away from Europe? It was precisely his commitment to freedom, significant at a time of nascent Australian nationalism. Facing prosecution for his part in the Chartist activities in 1848, Buchanan fled Glasgow, arriving in Sydney in 1852.Footnote 58 He could boast a personal connection with Garibaldi, having enticed him into a direct intervention in politics in New South Wales. In 1873, anticipating a debate on the issue of state aid to religious education, Buchanan wrote to the general to solicit his views and, to the horror of many of his fellow MPs, read the reply into the parliamentary record. ‘My Dear Buchanan’, Garibaldi had written, ‘The principal obstacle to human progress is the priest, and those who think that humanity will easily destroy him are mistaken … I trust in God that you will not suffer the presence of this human viper in your beautiful and virgin land.’Footnote 59
Buchanan, however, was by no means the only self-professed Garibaldian radical in Australia. In Victoria, for example, Dr William Henry Embling was one of the general's leading supporters. The son of a radical MP, Thomas Embling, William had grown up in London in the company of ‘a league of European political exiles’. According to his obituarist, an ‘excess of youthful spirits and his vigorous championship of the cause of the league’ put his medical studies on hold, and he subsequently helped to organize and joined the British volunteers who fought with Garibaldi. ‘After stirring experiences and attaining the rank of lieutenant’, Embling returned to Britain to graduate, before joining his parents in Victoria. Here he set up practice in St Kilda, and in 1892 he followed in his father's footsteps into the Victorian parliament. Reputed to be an ‘unbending’ radical in parliament, Embling was also known for his lectures about Garibaldi – entitled ‘Two hours’ gossip by the camp-fire’ – and for sporting a red shirt on public occasions.Footnote 60
Another Garibaldian – although perhaps less credibly so – was one of Australia's most notorious bushrangers, Andrew Scott, or Captain Moonlite as he was known. During his trial (before he was executed in 1880), Scott claimed that he had been a Red Shirt, thereby undoubtedly seeking to bathe his criminal activity in the reflected glory of anti-authoritarianism. Whatever the truth of the boast, it is certainly true that Moonlite often sported a red shirt while breaking the law.Footnote 61 As noted above, the Australian painter Adelaide Ironside clearly regarded Garibaldi's rebelliousness as worthy of imitation with her paintbrush. Although a familiar trope in Europe, modelling the face of Christ on Garibaldi on a canvas commissioned by one of the flowers of the British aristocracy revealed that she had lost none of the radicalism she imbibed in Sydney as a protégé of Australia's republican iconoclast, John Dunmore Lang.Footnote 62
Garibaldi's principal, or at least most enduring, followers in the Australian colonies – and certainly the only ones to base their admiration of him on a whole-career approach – were socialists. For many of them, his nationalist credentials were important. One of the organizers of the condolence meeting in Sydney, Francesco Sceusa, is a case in point. As a boy, Sceusa had witnessed church bells in Sicily being taken down and smelted into cannon balls for Garibaldi's freedom fighters. Subsequently, as a student in Palermo, he became involved with both republican and anarchist movements, as well as Marx's International Working Men's Association.Footnote 63 According to his own account, Sceusa was forced to leave Italy as a result of his socialist activities, arriving in Sydney in 1877. In his published writings, he offers a sometimes arcane and often incoherent melange of nationalism and splenetic anti-clericalism, framed by a deep commitment to his adopted home.Footnote 64
Whatever his shortcomings as a thinker, Sceusa made up for them with a combination of assiduousness and pugnaciousness. In 1890, he helped to found the Socialist League in Sydney, and in 1893, as secretary of the Social Democratic Federation, he travelled to Europe to attend the Socialist International in Zurich.Footnote 65 He proudly claimed that he was the first Australian to do so. Here he caused two minor furores that underscore the extent to which his socialism was laced with Australian nationalism à la Garibaldi. First, at the credentialing table he refused to be counted among the British delegation and thereby secured a separate vote as an Australian delegate. In this way, he accomplished what the Australian prime minister Billy Hughes famously insisted upon at Versailles twenty-five years later. Second, when, during a relatively minor debate over the importance of May Day, the Belgian chairman closed the session before giving Sceusa an opportunity to speak, he caused ‘uproar and confusion’ by storming out of the hall proclaiming loudly that ‘Australia was as important as ten Belgiums’.Footnote 66
Sceusa was by no means the only Australian socialist to embrace Garibaldi's nationalism. The editor of Queensland's Worker, for example, credited Garibaldi, along with William Wallace, John Hampden, and Abraham Lincoln, as those who ‘had drawn their stainless swords and stricken the tyrants down’.Footnote 67 Notwithstanding his acts of realpolitik, Garibaldi's enemies were consistently kings, priests, and emperors. He was a nationalist but, as John Hirst has written, it was a time in Australia when nation-making was typically a progressive cause.Footnote 68
From the 1850s those who described themselves as ‘extreme’ democrats and radical liberals – many of them erstwhile Chartists and radicals from Britain – overlaid a familiar discourse about political rights with nationalist and increasingly racist claims. As an editorial in the Melbourne Age – owned and edited by immigrant Scottish radicals – put it in 1855:
the utmost extravagance of ‘extreme democracy’ goes no further than asserting equality among those who are of the same nation, and trained under the same institutions. Democrats are generally great sticklers for nationality. Hence, their watch-words generally are, ‘America for the Americans’, ‘Ireland for the Irish’, ‘Italy for the Italians’, and ‘Hungary for the Hungarians’. For ourselves, our ‘extreme democracy’ consists in claiming ‘Victoria for the Victorians’, and contending that those Victorians should continue to be, what they are now – composed principally of Europeans.Footnote 69
This was the ‘exclusionary empire’ (to borrow Jack Greene's phrase): a rejection of the idea that British rights extended to all those who lived under the aegis of the British flag.Footnote 70 The constitutions, granted grudgingly by the imperial parliament to the principal Australian colonies in the mid-1850s, ushered in responsible government and paved the way for rapid and extensive political reform. By the end of the decade, a number of the Chartist demands – including manhood suffrage – had been implemented, and working men had begun to take seats in colonial parliaments.Footnote 71 But the rapid advance of popular constitutionalism had an infamous legacy in the Australian colonies: for many colonial radicals and ‘extreme’ democrats, one of the liberties of freeborn Britons was the right to deny those rights to others.Footnote 72
Garibaldi's appeal to socialists later in the century was based both on his radical nationalism and on his identification with class. Here, too, Sceusa's summation is an example worthy of note. In an essay published in 1900, Sceusa lauded Garibaldi as a working man who, following his patriotic service, had returned to his farm, ‘as poor as when he quitted it, there to live Cincinnatus-like by the sweat of his labour’.Footnote 73 Sceusa did not explain the reference; he surely did not have to. Most radicals and socialists would have known the tale of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a man seen as a paragon of heroism and love of nation. A small farmer, Cincinnatus had left his fields untended to lead the Roman army to victory against an invader. Having saved Rome, he relinquished power and returned to the simple life of citizen-farmer on the land that he cherished.Footnote 74 Of course, characterizations of Garibaldi as a working-class hero were not confined to socialists. A lecture by George Lyons, held in Sydney's Temperance Hall in 1861, is a good example of the tone and content. Lyons told a capacity crowd that Garibaldi had grown up among sailors and fishermen and, in this company, he had ‘acquired a fearless, adventurous disposition’, an ‘earnest hatred of oppression’, and a ‘profound pity for the weak and suffering’.Footnote 75
Again, this view of Garibaldi aligned closely with the general's self-image. Indeed, it is significant that, throughout his career, Garibaldi insisted he was a working man. His response when the Reform League elected him as their leader is typical: ‘Honorary President of the Great league of the English working men!’ he wrote; ‘This is indeed the most precious title that you could offer me … myself truly a son of the people and a working man in heart and arm.’Footnote 76 Garibaldi's determination to define himself in terms of class underpinned his visit to Britain in 1864 at what was, arguably, the peak of his fame. As he assured the ‘working men’ of London, he belonged to their class, and his ‘only pride is to never disassociate myself from them’.Footnote 77
The attraction for socialists in particular was that Garibaldi's identification with class was bookended by an increasingly vocal commitment to social revolution. To take one example, the members of the Victorian Socialist Party (including numerous veteran Garibaldians) invariably asserted that Garibaldi's true legacy was as an advocate of socialism. They had a point: as with class, the most unequivocal advocate of the socialist Garibaldi was Garibaldi himself. ‘The age of political revolution is past’, he had written. ‘Only a Social Revolution can give bread and peace and happiness to the people! Behold SOCIALISM, the sun of the future: it is rising!’ By celebrating the life of a social revolutionary, they insisted that only they were honouring the memory of the ‘great hero’.Footnote 78
Garibaldi's increasing commitment to a socialist future caused much consternation among his supporters elsewhere on the political spectrum and gave rise to a none-too-subtle revisionism. Now, not only was he a humble cabin-boy-cum-farmer, but also naïve, unsophisticated, and something of a dullard easily seduced by wild nostrums. As Bent wrote in 1881, Garibaldi had become ‘utopian’ and ‘communistical’ in his views and ‘to the deep regret of his English friends now speaks of regicides as martyrs in the cause of liberty’. ‘Throughout his career’, Bent continued, ‘he has been as easy to guide as a child’: a ‘Don Quixote in real life, too good in many respects, in others too silly’. Even Trevelyan lamented that his hero ‘often degenerated into folly’, and pointedly halted his mellifluous narrative of the general's life in 1860.Footnote 79
In Australia, Garibaldi's legacy did not long survive him, and invocations of his struggles quickly disappeared from mainstream political discourse. It was only socialists who continued to hold a torch for him, a point recognized among the Italian community. Speaking at a celebration of the centenary of Garibaldi's birth in 1907, one Italian commentator, Enrico Versi, himself a radical, lingered over this fact. The centrepieces of the evening's revelry were Elsie Mann's rendition of Garibaldi's hymn (in Italian) and Tom Mann's stirring encomium. Versi noted: ‘A strange fate that Tom Mann, “the miner boy from Wolverhampton” should commemorate the centenary of “The Cabin Boy of Nice!”’ Versi was incorrect: it was not strange. He concluded by complaining – with understandable exaggeration – that not a word about the centenary had appeared in the daily press.Footnote 80
For all that Garibaldi's increasingly open espousal of socialism tainted his public reputation and diminished his political utility, it does not, however, in and of itself fully explain his sudden eclipse. On the one hand, as we have seen, the fact that he had been pressed into the service of a multitude of causes meant that he effectively came to stand for nothing. Garibaldi might well have been the ‘model patriot of the age’ (to borrow John Hirst's words), tailor-made for the emerging radical nationalism of the 1880s and ’90s in Australia, but this was essentially diluted into insignificance.Footnote 81 After all, David Buchanan, the advanced radical, and Francesco Sceusa, the socialist, occupied the platform at the memorial gathering in Sydney but so did the lieutenant-governor, the imperial representative in New South Wales. In a moment of terrible irony, the Garibaldi hymn was played by a contingent of the British army.
II
Equally important in understanding Garibaldi's sharp decline from political discourse, however, was his abstraction as a result of his commodification. Indeed, for a growing number of entrepreneurs, the bust at centre stage when 10,000 Sydneysiders gathered to mourn was a cash cow. Paradoxically, commodification spread Garibaldi's fame exponentially, ultimately making him too famous and at the same time easy to forget.
Garibaldi the commodity was evident, first, in the presentation of self. The most common means to emulate him was to sport a Garibaldi shirt. As early as February 1862, the Melbourne Argus described the shirts as ‘enjoying a degree of favour at present’.Footnote 82 This would prove to be a significant understatement. For example, in March 1888, a suburban Melbourne newspaper described the shirts as ‘much in favour’.Footnote 83 As noted earlier, at this time it was the most popular costume at the lord mayor's ball in Sydney. Garibaldi shirts were sold far and wide throughout the Australian colonies: from Rockhampton to Broken Hill, from Hobart to Perth.Footnote 84 Women's versions of the shirt (sometimes called a Garibaldi blouse or jersey) were also increasingly prevalent. David Jones, ever the purveyor of fine garments down to our own day, offered ‘Ladies’ ‘GARIBALDI vests, in French llama, Merino and Saxony flannel’, assuring female customers that they were ‘very fashionable in London and Paris’. A children's version – sometimes used for games of dress-up – was also very popular.Footnote 85 Indeed, for the best part of four decades, Garibaldi shirts and jackets were available in any size for men, women, and children.Footnote 86 Garibaldi hats and shoes were also widely popular.Footnote 87 In a very real sense, colonial Australians of all shapes and sizes could look like Garibaldi from head to toe.
Other avenues of consumption were readily available. For inside the home, a range of items for domestic use were produced – Garibaldi plates, cups, jugs, teapots, even a pipe – and a range of prints and engravings, as well as busts, statuettes, ornaments, and other items of iconographic utility.Footnote 88 At the same time, consumers could imbibe Garibaldi soup and nibble Garibaldi biscuits. The recipe for the former tantalized readers of the Town and Country Journal with the promise of a chowder-like broth comprising white fish, oysters, eggs, white pepper, cayenne, anchovy sauce, onions, and lemon juice.Footnote 89 Garibaldi biscuits were undoubtedly the most famous foodstuff to be named in his honour. First manufactured in Britain in 1861 by the London biscuit-makers Peek, Frean & Co., ‘Garibaldis’ were based, reputedly, on the recipe for the thin fruitcakes which sustained the general's soldiers through the vicissitudes of their struggles. Peek, Frean exported the biscuits to Australia, where they met stiff competition in Melbourne from a prominent local biscuit-maker, T. B. Guest. In 1877, Guest patented a recipe for a Garibaldi biscuit he claimed was unmatched in quality and authenticity.Footnote 90
The clothing, kitsch, and culinary delectations were part of a larger process of imprinting Garibaldi's name on the landscape. For example, towns and streets in several colonies were named in his honour. Similarly, there were numerous Garibaldi hotels opened, from Hunter's Hill in north Sydney to Little Collins Street in central Melbourne, from Grafton to Inglewood, from Ballarat to Sale.Footnote 91 On Victoria's goldfields, mines bore his name; ships christened the Garibaldi routinely plied Australian waters.Footnote 92 Even Australian livestock were forced to bear the burden of the name of the ‘hero of two worlds’. Garibaldi had supposedly named a pet donkey after Pope Pius IX, so he might have been amused to learn that there were numerous equine Garibaldis in Australia.Footnote 93 And, if the regular stock reports are to be believed, Old Garibaldi, a prized red bull, seems to have sired half the cows in Victoria.Footnote 94
Late in the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, however, the association of Garibaldi's name with commodities collapsed. The jangle of coins had undoubtedly added to his fame but also to the cacophony that drowned out his voice and condemned him to political abstraction. On the one hand, the market for some products was no longer good business: the chipped teapots were not replaced (some remnants destined for antique shops and eBay), the pictures discarded, the books unread, the music unplayed.
The history of the red shirt is a case worth lingering over. The enthusiasm for Garibaldi the soldier was manifested in the appropriation of this central element of his presentation of self to a local military purpose. As noted, he and his coadjutors had adopted a red shirt as their uniform during their wars of liberation in South America, which they later made famous in Europe. Even without taking into account the association of the colour red with revolution and republicanism (and, later, international socialism), it was surely impossible to ignore the fact that in continental Europe the Red Shirts fought almost invariably against tyranny and empire. But this association was exactly the opposite of what happened in Australia. Unlike Britain, where the red shirt was most famously adopted by a working men's football team (Nottingham Forest) in 1865, in fin-de-siècle Australia it was extensively taken up as a uniform of the official defenders of monarchy and colonial authority. By 1900, when a South Australian contingent headed off in 1900 to bear arms in the Boer War, the apotheosis of British imperialism, the governor's wife delighted to see them in what she called ‘regular bushman's dress’, comprising ‘baggy trousers’, slouch hats, and Garibaldi shirts.Footnote 95
At the same time, almost from the beginning, a red shirt could be an entirely apolitical affectation, a generic gesture to courage and determination. For example, H. L. van den Houten's well-known painting of the ill-fated Australian explorers Robert Burke and William Wills (1861) depicts them in red shirts and Garibaldi hats.Footnote 96 If explorers, rebels, and the queen's soldiers could wear a red shirt with equal enthusiasm, what value did it have as a political statement? Beyond the symbolic miasma, the shirt ceased to be a symbol at all. The fact that they were increasingly marketed in a range of colours – red no longer mattered – for women, children, and men suggests that a Garibaldi shirt had simply become what we nowadays call a fashion statement – a reference to a style not a person. And, ultimately, the style went out of fashion. In this sense, the eclipse of the Garibaldi shirt as a commodity had nothing to do with the fortunes of the man that inspired it.
On the other hand, the association of Garibaldi with objects with no original metonymic properties was even more fragile; when they became disconnected from their inspiration, there was nothing to sustain their mnemonic value. Many of the pubs were renamed, the gold mines were exhausted, as, no doubt, was Old Garibaldi the bull. By this time, the bovine Garibaldi had surely become just a bull with a name. Admittedly, there are faint historical traces of a relationship that was at one and the same time public and intimate. There are still Australian towns and streets named Garibaldi, but they are no longer associated directly with him. In some cases, the meaning of imprinted objects has been appropriated. In Garibaldi, Victoria, for example, the Garibaldi Memorial Gate commemorates someone else; it has nothing to do with the ‘hero of two worlds’.
III
For colonial Australians, then, the relationship to Garibaldi was entirely one-sided and, unlike Europe, for him the capacity to personally manage the cult of Garibaldi was virtually non-existent. In Australia, Garibaldi was invariably enlisted to a local purpose, and in this sense Australia's versions of Garibaldi mattered more than Garibaldi himself. He was essentially beyond his own control. In Weber's terms, the fact that he was appropriated meant that he had no ‘charismatic authority’; his malleability made him too famous and thereby meaningless. Thus, Garibaldi had become, in terms of Daniel Boorstin's well-known conception, a ‘human pseudo-event’, ‘a person who is known for his well-knownness’.Footnote 97 If Garibaldi could be enlisted to stand for anything, this meant that he also stood for nothing. This is true even of his progressive nationalism, which was readily shorn of its radicalism and incorporated into a military narrative about defending Australia's borders and, more perversely, was invoked to buttress the defence of empire. Paradoxically, the more clearly his voice was heard, the less relevant he became. In this sense, he drowned himself out.
The notion that physical presence was crucial for a political leader was not uncommon in popular politics in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 98 Australian commentators certainly attested to the importance of physical proximity to understanding Garibaldi's appeal. For example, an astute correspondent to a Victorian newspaper in 1872 wrote:
There was a nameless charm about the man impossible to describe and only to be felt, when seeing him as we saw him with the light of victory smiling on his war-worn face … a thrill ran through our veins and we felt we were in the presence of a man we could follow to the death.Footnote 99
For the vast bulk of Garibaldi's throng of Australian admirers, however, there was no visceral encounter; the affective dimension of their relationship was entirely second-hand.Footnote 100 Donald Horton and Richard Wohl have pointed to the ‘intimacy at a distance’ of twentieth-century film stars to their audience. This notion is helpful when seeking to understand Garibaldi's celebrity in the antipodes: he too was both intimate and distant. In the case of Australia, we surely need to look elsewhere for the source of Garibaldi's charismatic authority or accept the fact that, by the 1860s, the trope that to secure their influence leaders needed to breathe the same air as their constituency was becoming platitudinous. Or perhaps, notwithstanding his fame, for Australians Garibaldi was never a leader.
In his study of celebrity, Fred Inglis is at pains to demarcate celebrity and fame: ‘The rise of urban democracy, the two-hundred-year expansion of its media of communication, together with the radical individualisation of the modern sensibility made fame a much more transitory reward.’ If Garibaldi's fame in Australia was fractured during his lifetime, he suffered a crueller fate in public memory: by the 1920s Garibaldi was a biscuit and then his eponymous biscuit became a ‘full o'fruit’. Perhaps Garibaldi was not only the first modern celebrity; he was also (to borrow Thomas Carlyle's lament penned in 1840) the last great man, a hero of old.Footnote 101 What the arc of his public life certainly illuminates, however, is a profound shift in the nexus between celebrity, intimacy, and distance.
