Historians of Australia have worked with a range of conceptual framings to understand trajectories of change and continuity over the past two centuries. Matthew Kennedy begins The Imperial Commonwealth: Australia and the Project of Empire, 1867–1914 by invoking some of these, noting descriptions of a lucky country, a working man's paradise, a republic-in-waiting, and more (1). To these we might add the postcolonizing nation, a white man's country, a settler colony. Kennedy contributes to this ever-expanding repertoire by characterizing Australia itself as an empire and introducing the concept of a political cosmology of empire which, he explains, is a way of understanding the world, its history, and its destiny, making sense of that world through a regime of race in which all peoples would have a rightful place.
As Kennedy goes on to argue, this cosmology enabled white Australian settlers to understand themselves as members of a transimperial and transnational white race, as men who could—who must—take responsibility both for themselves and for those less fortunate, governing “subject races” around an expanding empire (39). Through this practice, they could take their place as citizens of that empire alongside other Britons the world over. Kennedy considers this cosmology in chapter 1, carefully assembling a stimulating range of sources to reconstruct a set of conversations about Australians’ place in the world. He is alert here to the finer distinctions between forms of imperial belonging and national or racial articulations of Britishness, and he traces an anxious sense of empire in which late-nineteenth-century Australians worried about the evaporation of either their formal ties to Britain or their role alongside other Britons, “securing themselves against an unknown future” through an ever renewed commitment to empire (15).
Kennedy elaborates on this in the following chapters. In chapter 2, he considers Australians’ shifting understanding of famines in India in the 1870s and 1890s and their appropriation of the role of saving Indians from metropolitan Britons. This humanitarian intervention was as much about Australian aggrandizement as it was about Indian salvation, enabling Australians to take their place as equals, even leaders, within an empire. This pattern is also apparent in the description in chapter 3 of Australian settlers’ willingness to fight on behalf of empire, following Britain into wars across the globe and, in so doing, understanding themselves as taking responsibility as fully enfranchised imperial citizens.
In chapter 4, Kennedy turns to address Australia's desire to possess and govern territory and people across the Western Pacific, first in Fiji and New Guinea, then in the Northern Territory within the Australian continent. Kennedy traces settlers’ assumption of responsibility for colonial government, first by virtue of their own racialized “civilization” (163) and then by framing a newly progressive and “‘scientific’ colonial governmentality” that improved on prior modes of rule (199). Australians would argue that this kind of innovation evidenced their privileged status and confirmed their entitlement to imperial citizenship.
The story Kennedy tells is an uncanny one: in 1997, the Australian writer Stephen Muecke wrote in No road (bitumen all the way) that “[w]e can't stand it that Australia is childlike in relation to empire, to Europe; Australia always being talked about as if it is coming of age” (224). The Imperial Commonwealth narrates this kind of discourse—of Australians positioning their nation as lacking in some respect and seeking external validation—in an earlier time, describing a constant striving for a future that never quite arrives. This is a recursive historicity; considering political cosmologies, as Kennedy argues, helps us understand these discursive returns.
Kennedy narrates the development of this political cosmology through reconstructions of conversations between colonists and imperialists—in other words, between white men across the seas. Aboriginal people are outside this framing, as are the voices of many of the people being or to be governed, often haunting the discussion from the unseen other side of a frontier. While we read in The Imperial Commonwealth of white Australian writers’ responses to conditions in Fiji or Papua, for instance, we read very little about their relationship with Indigenous people and places on the Australian continent.
The book's final chapter presents a story of Australians developing novel forms of “anthropological governance,” crafting “imperial governmentalities” that built on and consciously broke away from older settler colonial and imperial methods (199). This is one more instance, perhaps a culminating moment, of white Australian settlers’ claim to be rulers in an empire, constituting themselves as imperial citizens and their nation as an imperial Commonwealth. Missing from this oedipal settler psychodrama are the Aboriginal people who were the subjects of that anthropological governance; instead, the nature of the subject under examination is the subject as he imagined himself, as self-authoring and in conversation with Britons.
We might think of Alfred Deakin who, as a representative of the Victorian government, visited India, Egypt, and California in 1885 to investigate their public irrigation works, developing scientific knowledge that would position him and other Australians as “authorities” across a unified empire (77). Years later, as Australian Prime Minister, he led the Commonwealth to take possession of the Northern Territory and appointed the reformer Hubert Murray to govern Papua, expanding and transforming the nature of the Australian empire. Deakin here exemplifies the central themes of a cosmology of empire. Excised from this account, however, is the way he crafted a sense of imperial belonging through his engagements with Aboriginal people.
Kennedy is careful to note that, for writers like Deakin, awareness of the “non-white communities across the world” was derived from “those public thinkers to whom many believers in empire listened” rather than from members of those communities themselves (211). But Deakin did speak with Aboriginal people: as a younger politician he assisted communities on reserves before later ceasing that support and, as Victorian Chief Secretary, rushing into force legislation designed to break up, weaken, and destroy those same Aboriginal communities. How, I wonder, might an imperial cosmology be understood through reconstructions of the kinds of constitutive conversations about land, belonging, and government Deakin had with Aboriginal interlocutors, alongside those that are otherwise the focus of the book?
The key contribution of The Imperial Commonwealth, alongside so compellingly stitching together a wide range of sources to represent public discourse, is in introducing a novel conceptual terminology. Thinking with a political cosmology of empire helps us consider imperial endurance and return, enriching our sense of the past in the present.
