Eureka to the Diggers by Thomas Keneally

Author:Thomas Keneally [Keneally, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Australian History
ISBN: 9781742693507
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2011-01-25T13:00:00+00:00

The Australian colonies cherished Britishness to the extent that in South Australia in 1856, legislation had been passed to exclude non-British settlers and naturalised aliens from membership of the legislature. And even being a naturalised alien was a limited good. Until Australian Federation, a naturalised subject of one colony did not become a formerly foreign naturalised subject of the United Kingdom or another colony unless he went through a legal process. Thus one could be naturalised in, say, South Australia but revert to being an alien as soon as you crossed the border to Victoria. This was a constant grievance in the colonial German press. But colonial Britons pointed to the Lutheran schools in South Australia and along the Murray in New South Wales where classes were conducted in German, and based on the Prussian system of education, and declared that the German settlers felt superior to the Australo-British. Lutheran church services were entirely in German as well. But the desire for a naturalised form of citizenship which would be good for the whole continent was probably one of the reasons the German community would vote for Federation.

Martin Basedow, born near Hamburg, was the owner-editor of the Tanunda Deutsche Zeitung, founded in 1863, which became in time the Australische Deutsche Zeitung. He was interested in German community issues but also social questions, the Labor movement and Australian Federation. He declared that the Germans, with their ‘honour, sentiment, gemutlichkeit, obedience to superiors’, were natural collaborators with the British. Such talk was partially lip service, because some in the German community rather hopefully foresaw Australia and New Zealand breaking with Britain. His father-in-law, the reforming Lutheran pastor Dr Carl Wilhelm Ludwig Muecke, who often wrote for Basedow’s paper, had said in 1875, ‘Not Germans, not Englishmen: we want to be Australians.’ Basedow himself argued that if the British government empowered Australia to make treaties with foreign countries, then only the monarchic link would remain and the colonies might be neutral should the United Kingdom go to war. But German ambitions in New Guinea and the Pacific in general in the 1880s put the German–Australians at odds with the British-derived Australians. German society believed that the British Empire was on the wane, and so to an extent did the German community in the United States and Australia, and that it was a mere inevitability that the German Empire would replace it.

The dreams of Martin Basedow would be subverted by world events. Once war broke out, naturalised Germans were immediately suspected of collabor-ating with intelligence-gathering networks based in the consulates. Consular officials and German businessmen were interned under the Trading With the Enemy Act, 1914. Unhappily, the spread of anti-German hysteria resulted in the reporting of innocent people of German origin or background. Some Germans might even have sought internment as a means of survival. Any German reservists who happened to be travelling in Australia or passing through when war began were also interned, as were the sailors on German vessels in Australian ports.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.