I was reading an issue of Esquire in July 1999, in which a writer refered to Australia being like a parallel Earth version of the US, but without the War of Independence.
This seemed like a pretty accurate summary to me at the time.
What do other Australians/Americans think of this?
Well, I guess basically in both cases Europeans found a big continent occupied by people at a sufficiently disadvantage technologically that they could whomp them and take over, and then did so. Then the countries grew very significantly through mining, agriculture and immigration.
Anything else?
And the fact that Australia didn’t have a War of Independance has made a huge difference to government and culture and the way Australians see themselves, so the whole thing sounds a bit like saying a mouse is exactly like an elephant except for their size.
Not to put to fine a point on it, it’s utter tripe.
The main differneces between Austalia and the US can be easily explained by geogrphy, geology and climate with no need to indulge in history or politics.
Australia is a very stable continent, meaning there are very few recent areas of volcanic or techtonic activity. This, combined with the lack of galciation caused by Australia’s northward drift, has led to Australia having about the oldest and poorest soils on the planet. Only tiny areas of the continent have soil fertility that would even meet average figures elsewhere in the world. The climate of most of Australia is governed not by annual patterns but by the ENSO phenomenon in the Pacific, leading to the most highly variable and unreliable rainfall in the world. Added to this the flat topography and blocking influence of the New Guinea highlands has led to Australia being around 80% desert or semi-desert. The very ecology of the Australian desert, savanna and rangeland systems revolves around nutrient stabilistaion, which almost by definition prohibits plant agriculture. Australia is also far more geographically isolated from the industrialised world than the US.
There’s no way Australia ever could have or would have matched the US in terms of population or infrastructure. Water alone would prohibit anything like a US ecomomy or population spread. You only have to look at the human population pre-European settlement to get some idea of how different the nations are. Best estimates for Aboriginal populations run at about 1.5 million and that’s widely regarded as being on the high side with most authorities assuming about 500,000. Figures for Indians in the US range from 5-15 million. Without the agricultural, population and infrastructure base there’s no way in the world you can develop an economic or military base that would compare to the US. Hell with such a small population and such geographic isolation the last thing Australia could ever afford to do is become independant. We’ve spent our entire history trying to establish treaties with world superpowers because we know we can’t effectively defend our own shores for much over 12 months.
If the author had suggested that the inherent insurmountable environmenatl differences had been instrumental in preventing a major independence push in Australia I’d buy it, but beyond being British colonies I honestly can’t think of any valid ways in which Australia parallels the US. What exactly was this author basing her comparison on? And why not draw the more logical comparison between the US and Canada, which also never had a war of independence?
There is also the fact that we didn’t have slavery at least to the extent that America did. This has changed the social, cultural and ethnic makeup of America enormously.
The main difference though is the ability of each country to sustain large populations. We could never have come near America’s size and importance because Australia isn’t able to sustain any more than 100 million people. And even that would be stretching our resources. r
Canada, like Australia, is actually much smaller than it appears on maps if you consider land use. Compare these figures for arable farm land:
Australia - appr 178,000 sq mi
Canada - appr 195,000 sq mi
United States - appr 706,000 sq mi
The United States prospered mainly because it was founded next to some of the world’s best cropland which was inhabited by people who couldn’t prevent its occupation.
Nemo,
Yeah I’m aware of the lack of practically arable land in Canada, but even so it provides a much better comparison to the US than Australia. The climate and seasons are predictable and comparable to parts of the US. Rainfall (well precipitation) is uniform. The soils are new and fertile, their are large areas of natural grassland. Canada is about as geographically isolated as the US, perhaps slightly more so, but no where near so much as Oz. All in all it seems it would make more sense to draw a comparison to Canada than to Australia.
Sorry Dave, i’m an Australian doing US history at grad school in America, and i just can’t see where that comes from.
To be sure there are many similarities. For example, the size of Australia and that of the Lower 48 US states are very similar. There are also many historical similarities, including (but not limited to):
But there are also many important differences
no official slavery in Australia (although there was some indentured labour that came pretty close), and no nation-defining Civil War as a result. I think it is hard for many people outside the US to appreciate the long-term consequences of slavery and of that conflict for subsequent American social, political and economic development.
Australia has no real equivalent of the rich Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio river valleys, or the Great Lakes, that allowed the US to develop large inland populations. As a result around 95% of Australians live on the coastal strip (most in the south-east) and Australia is about the most urbanised country on earth. While Australia has the Murray-Darling river system, it was never going to be able to produce cities like Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, etc.
Australia’s continued adoption of many of the forms and functions of British society, at least until around WWII, gave it a much more class-based structure in many ways than that of the US. Of course, class has always been important in US history (despite the claims of some Americans), but it was institutionalised for much longer in Australia. For example, the Morrill (Land Grant) Act of 1862 provided much federal funding for vocational, agricultural and mechanical colleges in the US, especially in the midwest. Many of these became the large and prestigious state universities of the twentieth century, including U.Wisconsin, U.Iowa, U.Michigan etc. In contrast, by WWII Australia had only one university in each state capital (and a university college each in Canberra and Armidale), and these were still largely for the training of the upper classes in the manner of Oxford and Cambridge in England, and did not provide the upward mobility to the lower-middle classes that had become part of the US university system by the early twentieth century. Of course, one could argue that the situation has reversed as the cost of a university education in the US has skyrocketed since WWII.
Following from this, the US adopted European (and more specifically, German) models of university arrangement and professionalisation in the late nineteenth century, led by my own school, Johns Hopkins (1876), the first US uni modelled on the idea of original research (in contrast to the mainly classical programs of the old Ivy League colleges). Australia, on the other hand, didn’t adopt the US notion of specialised training and professional education until much later. Such training was seen as unnecessary by the upper class, who preferred to follow the model of Oxford and Cambridge in maintaining what Perry Anderson has called the “famous amateurism of the English upper class.” The aristocrat, says Anderson, was “defined not by acts which denote skills but by gestures which reveal quintessences: a specific training or aptitude would be a derogation of the impalpable essence of nobility, a finite qualification of the infinite.” In other words, the upper classes felt that they required no training in order to be fit to rule. An example of the difference from my own area of study: Johns Hopkins awarded the first history Ph.D. in the United States in 1882; the first history Ph.D in Australia was awarded by the newly-formed Australian National University in the late 1940s.
despite attempts to change the situation, Australia’s economy has always relied heavily on commodity exports (minerals, agricultural products). The US has also had much primary industry, but also achieved a level of manufacturing strength that Australia was never able to match. A variety of factors contributed to this difference, including the size of local markets, distance to world markets, policies regarding isolationism, levels of immigration at different times, the relative speed of consolidation of national transporation and communication links. On the last point, the Morrill Act mentioned above also made way for the huge mileage of railway lines built in the US after the Civil War, connecting the country in one big network. By contrast, bickering betwen the states meant that, as late as the post-WWII period, passengers travelling from Sydney to Perth had to change trains two or three times because each state had different-gauge (width) tracks. Not exactly a situation conducive to easy movement of people and materials.
These are just a few of the many differences between the two countries. Of course, as i’ve already said, there are also many similarities, but i don’t think that they are sufficient to posit the level of congruence indicated by the Esquire article that you read. Of course, anyone expecting historical rigour from a fashion magazine is likely to be dissappointed. 
If anyone’s interested in some works that look at the issues discussed above, they can look at:
H.C. Allen, Bush and backwoods; a comparison of the frontier in Australia and the United States (1959).
Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998)
Lyn Spillman, Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia (1997).
Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930 (1999).
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (1988).
Stuart Macintyre and Julian Thomas (eds), The Discovery of Australian History 1890-1939 (1995).
To gaspode:
Actually, in terms of geography, economy, historical development etc., i think the closest comparison would probably be the one between Australia and Canada, leaving out the US.
And in terms of economic development, Australia is also quite frequently paired with Argentina.
Yeah, the only problem with that as regards the OP is that Canada never had a war of independence either, so there wouldn’t be much point in attributing any differences to such a war.
Since you seem to have more than a pssing interest in this I was wondering if you’ve read “The Future Eaters” by Flannery? It’s a look at what makes Australasia unique, largely from a biological/geographical point of view, and makes a few very interesting distinctions between Australia and the US. It’s very similar in tone to “Guns, Germs and Steel” but from an Australasian persepective.
To gaspode
What you say about the war is true. In fact, there is a strand of American history (populated largely but not exclusively by historians of the Revolutionary period) that is known as American Exceptionalism. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means pretty much exactly what it says. These historians say that the US is fundamentally different from every other country in the world - not just different in the way that each nation is unique, but in a class by itself altogether.
This position was traditionally one that valorised and celebrated America’s difference, but in the late twentieth century there also emerged a group that saw the US as uniquely bad rather than good. These latter historians mainly came out of the 1960s and the era’s anti-war, civil rights and feminist protests.
Like many other historians, i think that American Exceptionalists tend to paint with too big a brush and often ignore similarities with other nations that don’t happen to fit their argument.
Yes, i’ve read Tim Flannery’s work, and i think it’s very interesting.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the United States has an official language.
To MonkeyMensch
You may well be right; i’m not sure of Enlgish’s official status. But if it isn’t the de jure official language then it is certainly the de facto one.
Although some would say that what is spoken in the US isn’t really English at all.
It’s de facto, but not de iure. Movement is being made to declare English the official language of the US, what with the influx of Spanish speakers. Personally, I think that they should do so…I don’t really want to see America turned into a nation where parts speak Spanish and others speak English, with language superiority issues always coming into play (think Québec).
Off to Great Debates
bibliophage
moderator, GQ
I understood this more in terms of common culture, than economics, although I appreciate that economics has an influence upon culture.
A very interesting explanation, and one I’ll digest.
I was looking at Australia’s British origin, its role as an immigrant country, of continental size, and its overwhelming European population, all of which it has in common with the US. The cultural values of the Declaration of Independence are all values appreciated by Australians, absent an actual Australian declaration.
What more appropriate cultural parallels are there between Australia and Canada?
I think those aspects that you were thinking of do show some considerable similarity, and as i hope my other post made clear i wasn’t rejecting every aspect of the comparison.
In terms of British origin, there’s no doubt some similarity there. Although i would contend that the motivations behind the colonisation of each country, and the actual agents of that colonisation, make for some considerable differences. Australia was a much more official, i.e. state-run operation by the British, whereas America’s first English immigrants were part of chartered companies (Virginia) or religious pilgrimages (Massachusetts). This simplifies things too much, but it’s just for the basis of comparison.
It is certainly true that both countries are peopled largely by immigrants and their descendants - when you kill off much of the native population, immigration remains the only real option! Both places also owe much of their present-day cultures to the rich heritage of these groups. But again, i see some significant differences. Most notably, the earlier influx of immigrants in the US. Also, America was historically considerably more egalitarian in who it allowed to immigrate, whereas even after WWII Australia was giving priority to lighter-skinned northern Europeans over the “swarthy” (that was the term often used) Mediterraneans, such as Italians and Greeks. Of course, some would argue that the openness of each country switched around from about the 1970s.
Continental size is a no-brainer. Australia and the lower 48 states are very, very close in size. But i think that there are significant geographical differences, which i alluded to in my other post, and which have had significant consequences for the development of the two countries.
I also agree that Australia and the US share many cultural values. I would probably point to the sentiments expressed in the US Bill of Rights (i.e the first ten amendments to the Constitution) as being just as important as the Declaration as far as Australians are concerned. Although there is no way in the world that you would get the second amendment (re. bearing arms) passed in Australia. Although the Aussie constitution has no bill of rights, courts in Australia have consistently interpreted the law to include freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly etc. etc. (there are a couple of unfortunate recent examples to the contrary, but i think the point holds in general).
And finally, regarding your question about Canada, i think i probably focused my answer there too much on geography and economics.
For example, both countries are very large, with huge areas of land that is useless for agriculture (in Australia it’s too hot and dry; Canada is too cold and icy). They both have populations heavily concentrated in small, productive strips - Australia around the coast, Canada in the south. They have both relied heavily on primary industries to fuel their economies, and have been unable to sustain the sort of manufacturing base that the US has.
Culturally, both are members of the Commonwealth with quite strong ties to England (although that is overshadowed in Canada both by the presence of a French-speaking population, and proximity to the US). Many Canadians and Australians, at least in my experience, seem to share some sort of indefinable camaraderie (maybe i’m sentimentalising here), some of which seems to come from a sort of inferiority complex about the two countries’ relative lack of power and importance compared to Europe and the US.
Well, these are some of my thoughts on the subject. I don’t want to trivialise your OP, because i think the question is worth asking, and i think Australia and the US have more in common than many people often realise. My more personal, cultural comments can perhaps be dismissed as somewhat idiosyncratic, but as an Australian who lived in Canada for two years and has just completed my first year (of five or six) living in the US, i have some first-hand experience of the issue. I know, for example, that i felt more immediately at home in Canada than in the US, for reasons that i can’t really put my finger on. But i also love living here in the US, and have made a lot of great friends here.
Hey, maybe next time someone has a go at me for criticising the US, i’ll use that age-old ploy and say, “yes, but some of my best friends are Americans…”
I think another reason is that while the majority Australian population can trace their ancestry to England, Scotland and Ireland, only a fraction of Americans can claim British descent. In other words, probably the most influental events in U.S. history were the massive waves of immigration which took place during the 19th and 20th centuries - events which were not, to a large degree, shared by Australia.
The people who fought in 1776 are not, for the most part, the same people who live here now. American culture has been forged from the original cultures of its inhabitants.
I’d go further, and say that none of the people who fought in 1776 live here now.