Of no personal influence

Marking 175 years

ISBN 978-0-646-93093-0

How people of common enterpriseunexpectedly shaped Australia

Of no personal influence…

Alex McDermottO

fnopersonalinfluence…

Alex

McD

ermott

Au

stralian U

nity

In 1840, a group of men of no ‘fortune… or importance’ sought

to create a society of mutual aid and self-improvement.

That society became the antecedent of today’s Australian Unity.

Armed with little more than the ideals of egalitarianism,

entrepreneurialism and cooperation, this society and others

like it grew with the fledgling colony and changed the nation.

Drawing on public records and private archives, historian

Alex McDermott captures the spirit of this 175-year history in

Of no personal influence: how people of common enterprise unexpectedly

shaped Australia. McDermott’s account examines the characteristics

and events that moulded the Australian friendly societies and

the world around them. In so doing, he reveals these groups’

little-known pattern of quiet, yet potent, influence on history,

community and democracy.

‘With the patronage, in the firstinstance, of no man of fortune,or of Colonial rank—a few oldmembers of the Manchester Unity—men of no personal influence orimportance, armed only withthe well digested and strikinglyexcellent laws of that Society,formed themselves into a smallbranch, and were joined byone and another, chiefly of thepoorer classes.

Their existence as a body wasunknown to the public, or whereknown, in too many instances,misunderstood—laughed at orcensured. Still they proceeded.Gradually inquiry was substitutedfor laughter, information forignorance—and praise, at length,for censure.’The South Australian Odd Fellows’ Magazine, January 1845

Alex McDermottA research fellow at the State Library of Victoria, since

2005 Alex McDermott has worked full-time as historian,

producer, research scholar and consultant on a range of

projects in television, academic research and mainstream

publishing. He has provided historical expertise for a range

of organisations—Screen Australia, State Library Victoria,

La Trobe University, ABC, Channel 7, SBS and the Museum

of Australian Democracy (Canberra). His constant

endeavour throughout is to create history that ordinary

people can both understand and enjoy.



First published in Australia in 2015

AUSTRALIAN UNITY LIMITED

ABN 23 087 648 888

114 Albert Road, South Melbourne, Victoria 3205

www.australianunity.com.au

Text © Australian Unity Limited 2015

Design and typography © Australian Unity Limited 2015

The right of Alex McDermott to be identified as author of this work has been asserted

by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This book is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968

and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned or stored

in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted in any form or by any means or process

without the prior written permission of Australian Unity Limited.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator: McDermott, Alex, author.

Title: Of no personal influence : how people of common enterprise

unexpectedly shaped Australia / by Alex McDermott.

ISBN: 9780646930930 (hardback)

Notes: Includes index.

Subjects: Barton, Edmund, Sir, 1849-1920.

Deakin, Alfred, 1856-1919.

Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows Friendly Society.

Australian Natives’ Association.

Australasian Women’s Association.

Fraternal organizations—Australia—History.

Australia—History.

Dewey Number: 366.0994

Text and cover design by Nuttshell Graphics

Indexed by Max McMaster

Typeset in Mrs Eaves XL by Emigre

Front-cover artwork by Tom Roberts

Printed in Australia by Adams Print

Every attempt has been made to locate copyright holders for material quoted in this book.

Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed is welcome

to contact Australian Unity.



Alex McDermott

Foreword 6

Introduction 7

Entrepreneurs, egalitarians and the working family’s paradise 12

Friendly origins 15

Transplanted to Australia 18

Gold avalanche and the colonial start-up culture 20

Mutual aid 24

New homeworlds for old 29

A workingman’s paradise 33

The ANA emerges 34

Dealing with division 38

Nationhood and the new social laboratory 42

The big collapse 44

Against trend, friendly societies survive and thrive 47

An ANA nation 50

The social laboratory 54

‘Fraternalism’, women and nation 58

The race issue 62

Contents

From closed to open Australia 66

The Great War and after 69

Friendly societies versus the doctors 72

Modern times: friendly societies in search of a new role 78

The Great Depression 79

The Second World War and the national welfare fund 80

Triumph of the welfare state 83

Adapting to the post-war boom 86

The end of certainty 90

Towards tomorrow 94

The new millennium: challenge and opportunity 96

Mutual enterprise: a renewed local and global contribution? 100

Household stress and golden triangles—an index to wellbeing 103

Reference 106

‘The Big Picture’ key 108

Notable members 110

The evolution of Australian Unity 112

Sources 1 14

Index 119

6

In a Melbourne pub on 7 December 1840, a newspaper proprietor,

a surgeon, a chief constable, a carpenter and a glazier were among eight

men who formed one of the first—and perhaps most enduring—friendly

societies in Australia.

In 2015, Australian Unity—which traces its roots to those founders—

celebrates 175 years of change, growth and success as a unique

Australian institution.

To mark this milestone, we decided to produce a work that would explain

the values and culture that have shaped the company. We looked to our

history and realised that, in many ways, a history of Australian Unity is

also a history of friendly societies and mutual organisations, and in part

a history of the modern nation itself. Over 175 years, the organisation,

its antecedent bodies and members have been linked to the major events

and demographic and social shifts in the country.

With this in mind, we commissioned professional historian Alex

McDermott to explore these links. He was given access to our archives

to aid his research.

This history is in no way designed to be a comprehensive record of either

the company or the country. Instead, we offer it as a reflection on some

deep and abiding ideas that have helped shape mutual organisations in

Australia, and, as Mr McDermott argues, the country itself: independence,

unity and freedom.

We thank Mr McDermott for his work and are delighted to present ‘Of no

personal influence... How people of common enterprise unexpectedly

shaped Australia’.

The board of directors of Australian Unity Limited,

on behalf of members, past and present

January 2015

Foreword

7Of no personal influence

Introduction

How can I provide for myself and for those I love?

How can I make sure that we will have something to rely on in times of need?

Today, these are some of the questions that occupy most people’s lives.

With the welfare state under increasing pressure, and with the collapse

of old certainties of workplace security, they are questions that require

new answers. Perhaps surprisingly, some of the best solutions have

already been found—by organisations and philosophies that flourished in

the years before the welfare state was established.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, friendly societies provided

one of the great solutions to the perennial problem of how ordinary people

could secure some form of insurance or safety net for themselves and their

families in times of hardship, chronic injury and illness or death. Right

from the start, friendly societies were mutual aid organisations designed

to provide economic assistance to families who weren’t wealthy and who

didn’t want to rely on charity in times of hardship. The regular contribution

of funds by members created a common pool of funds, from which

individuals could draw in times of need.

Developed in Britain, friendly societies transplanted freely to the

Australian colonies to become one of the great social welfare success

stories of Australian history. Australian Unity traces its origin to the first

lodge meeting of one of these friendly societies—Manchester Unity—in

Melbourne, 175 years ago.

The typical origins of friendly societies were well described by the

unnamed editor of a South Australian Oddfellows magazine in 1845.

In this newly established colony, ‘with the patronage... of no man of

fortune, or of Colonial rank—a few old members of the Manchester Unity—

men of no personal influence or importance, armed only with the well

digested and strikingly excellent laws of that Society, formed themselves

8

into a small branch, and were joined by one and another, chiefly of the

poorer classes’. This sums up the origin of countless lodges and branches

of friendly societies that would spread across South Australia and Victoria

especially, but also New South Wales and Queensland and, in subsequent

decades, Tasmania and Western Australia.

Friendly societies in colonial Australia adapted to the uniquely egalitarian

social conditions of the antipodes, distinct from their originators in

Britain or their counterpart organisations in the United States. For a start,

Australian membership was spread along the social continuum, not

limited to any one class as was the case in Britain, where traditionally

structured class hierarchies still dominated. The Australian friendly

societies were also different from those in America, where working

families received scant acknowledgement or respect.

Friendly societies in colonial Australia reflected a politically radical,

democratically advanced, socially open, dynamic and porous society.

More than almost any other social institution, friendly societies provided

a hands-on school of democracy in the crucial early decades of self-

government mass democracy that began in the 1850s. The majority of

settlers arriving from Britain and Europe in the gold rush decades of the

1850s and 1860s had never voted to elect a government before in their

lives, let alone had experience as officeholders. Friendly society lodges

were democratically run, self-governing branches. Here people

experienced the realities of not only how to debate and vote, but how

to accept the decision of the majority, how to respond to opposing

arguments with civility and respect, and how to behave responsibly in

positions of relative power. For a newly joined dockworker from

Liverpool, as an example, all of this would have been entirely new.

Friendly societies in colonial Australia reflected a politically

radical, democratically advanced, socially open, dynamic and

porous society


Later in the century—in the 1880s and 90s—one of Australian Unity’s

central antecedent bodies, the Australian Natives’ Association (ANA),

played a dominant role in getting the campaign for Federation and

nationhood off the ground. When it appeared as if the forces of inertia,

state pettiness and division would wreck the movement to nationhood,

it was the ANA, as an organisation and as individual members, who

provided the political initiatives, the drive and the emotional fervour

to push the still seemingly fanciful dream through to realisation.

Nationhood was secured at the same time as the vote was extended to

Australian women and the major friendly societies established branches

for women. Nellie Melba, when home from her tours of Europe and

America, gladly became the first global opera diva to become an honorary

member of the ANA’s Australasian Women’s Association.

Suffragette Vida Goldstein, the first woman to stand for parliament

anywhere in the English-speaking world, also signed up. She shared many

progressive ideals with ANA member Prime Minister Alfred Deakin in the

notion of Australia as a new ‘social laboratory’ that could solve the

problems of class conflict and women’s subjugation, which had bedevilled

the old world. The principles the friendly societies had early on committed

to—of democracy, of fraternity, of mutual respect—were written into the

citizenship ideals of the new nation. In a fateful irony, however, good

wages and mutual regard were thought to be in need of not simply

economic protection (from cheap labour imports from overseas), but

racial protection too. The White Australia Policy, though not directly part

of the constitution, barred non-white immigrants and remained in place

until the 1970s. The long boom decades of the second half of the

nineteenth century was the period when friendly societies and Australia’s

national culture truly established itself. Both the friendly societies and the

developing society were largely the result of the most highly entrepreneurial

10

generation in Australian history. Building on the basic ethos of self-reliance

and mutual help, they looked to pursue and create economic opportunity

at every turn. Voting rights, social respect, economic prosperity, high

wages and the lack of Britain’s most degraded ‘pauper class’ meant that

this generation’s chances of realising the dream of living well, establishing

and supporting a family in comfort and achieving home ownership were

better here than anywhere else in the world. They took full advantage

of this opportunity, establishing lives and families without relying on the

largesse of political, economic elites or the state to meet their social

welfare needs.

In the twentieth century, the state’s expanded role saw government

intervene in the provision of pensions, medical care, health insurance and

retirement benefits. From the 1940s, the welfare state bore almost sole

responsibility for the provision of welfare. Yet even then, friendly societies

continued to play a key role, either as non-government alternatives or as

actively designated agents of government initiatives.

In some ways, we have come full circle. The fragmentation of today’s

workplace and the increased fluidity of movement between occupations

and careers has destabilised many of the twentieth century certainties.

The welfare state, while still central as a safety net in national life, is no

longer the dominant agent it was 30 or 50 years ago. It remains unclear

to what extent it will be relied upon in the decades to come.

Simultaneous with the decline of the welfare state is the emergence of

a great disruption in business, economic and social life brought about by

new technology. New peer-to-peer forms of interaction seem likely to

revolutionise the provision of various services, from listening to the radio,

to ordering a taxi, to borrowing money from a financial lender, to seeking

medical care.


The dominance of organised medical, banking and financial service

providers in the last century has come under increased pressure from

a new market force—the unexpected alliance between individuals and

technology. This tussle between state or corporate provision of services

and the opt-in, peer-to-peer model is the backdrop against which mutual

organisations reemerge in the twenty-first century.

Solutions to basic life and welfare problems, which flourished so effectively

in the first decades when the Australian polity and social ethos were being

established, are recurring in entirely new forms and guises.

It seems a fitting time to tease out the ways Australian Unity’s history can

provide a potential road map for the future.

Older ways of solving basic life and welfare problems…

are recurring in entirely new forms and guises

Entrepreneurs, egalitarians andthe working family’s paradise

14 Entrepreneurs, egalitarians and the working family’s paradise


Friendly originsFriendly societies have multiple mythic origins. Some orders have traced

their origin to the Garden of Eden, Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest and

the exile from ancient Babylon respectively, but they first emerged in the

modern world in eighteenth-century Britain. Here, a nation was making

a dramatic transition to a modern economy, and would soon embark on

the world’s first industrial revolution. Population surged, cities and

agriculture boomed, but so did poverty, homelessness and destitution.

For those not wealthy or unwilling or unable to rely on the Poor Law

charity available, the choices of how to provide for self and loved ones in

periods of sickness, infancy, old age and death were exceedingly limited.

For people of limited means but with aspirations to self-reliance, small

local clubs, called friendly societies, began to emerge, quite distinct

from the local trade organisations being formed by lodges of Freemasons

(with which they are sometimes confused). Based on the principle of

mutual reliance between equals, friendly societies ensured that one’s

welfare could be guaranteed by regular contributions to a common fund

that would be drawn from in times of need.

They also provided for ‘good fellowship’, regular gatherings of male

breadwinners to contribute money and examine finances, and the warmth

of mutual support and good company. Women were generally excluded

from direct membership; they became members through marriage.

Friendly societies clearly fulfilled a need in a rapidly changing economic

and social landscape. The British government, amid the turmoil of the

French Revolutionary Wars, in 1793 acknowledged this with An Act for the

Encouragement and Relief of Friendly Societies. With this legislation the Pitt

government legally recognised friendly societies for the first time. Societies

could now be formed to secure voluntary contributions from members,

This anti-poor law poster, c.1834, shows the

interior of an English workhouse and reflects the

antipathy toward “charity” that forged the ideals

of mutual aid.

Opposite page: The Dispensation collected from

Sydney by Melbourne newspaper proprietor

Thomas Strode that established the Manchester Unity

Independent Order of Oddfellows in Melbourne.

Preceding page: ‘Gold diggings’, Ararat, c.1858,

by Edward Roper c.1832–1909.


and establish funds for mutual economic relief and social welfare.

Individuals were given the incentive of tax breaks to join friendly societies,

which took some of the financial burden for social welfare and public

charity off the government.

While individual friendly societies were recognised, wider federated

organisations of friendly society networks—‘affiliated orders’—were not.

These orders were collective associations of different individual branches

or ‘lodges’ keen to promote a fellowship and fraternity beyond their

immediate neighbourhoods. In the eighteenth century a network of

‘Royal Foresters’ sprang up to become the Ancient Order of Foresters in

1834; in 1789 two orders of different ‘Oddfellows’ amalgamated to become

the Grand United Order of Oddfellows. In 1810, a group of Grand United

branches in and around Manchester seceded to form Manchester Unity.

Originating in the rapidly industrialising north and midlands of England,

these affiliated orders were key antecedents to Australian Unity.

In a period of much migratory movement—from the country to the city,

from one region to another and, since the early 1800s, to the United States

or British colonies—the ability to travel and carry a kind of passport that

allowed continued benefits and fellowship in one’s new destination was

of great value. In a period before mass literacy, oaths and passwords took

the place of the more reliable signatures and certificates. Passwords were

kept secret to members to ensure interlopers couldn’t claim benefits

without paying dues. Yet, though their purpose was administrative rather

than revolutionary or seditious, such oaths drew the hostility of

suspicious authorities.

From its beginnings in 1789 until the end of the Napoleonic Wars at

Waterloo in 1815, the French Revolution had combined new ideals

of democracy and egalitarianism with an explosion of violence, regicide

and systematic, state-organised terror. In Britain a climate of fear and

‘Death–The True Relieving Officer! Dedicated

without permission to the Poor Law Board’

By E.G. Dalziel in Fun, February 1868


suspicion resulted, and legislation was passed to outlaw groups using

secret oaths and passwords. Groups, largely drawn from the ‘lower

orders’, as these affiliated orders of friendly societies were, drew

particular attention as potentially ‘seditious agents’ of revolution.

The ‘affiliated orders’—such as Manchester Unity, Grand United, Foresters,

Druids and Gardeners, and the Independent Order of Oddfellows—

remained technically illegal until 1850 in Britain. County societies, sick

clubs, burial clubs, town or village societies and trade-specific societies

were allowed, but affiliated lodges—which attracted large numbers from

a wide range of regions and occupations, based on oaths of fraternity and

brotherhood of equals, continued to draw hostility from the authorities

in an era of political, social and industrial revolutions.

When transplanted to Australia, these affiliated orders would swiftly

establish themselves. Indeed, such was their dominance that other types

of mutual aid clubs and friendly societies that proliferated across Britain

proved unable to secure a foothold. Friendly societies, which had

developed their networks of mutual assistance in the world’s first industrial

heartland, would now spread their techniques and habits of association

to the southeast of a continent in the grip of gold fever. In a goldfields

society displaying what historian Nancy Renfree describes as a ‘moratorium

on distinctions’, whether of birth, education, occupation, dress or speech,

it was the affiliated orders that would prove so successful that all other

mutually contributory competitors were driven from the field.


Thomas Strode, founder and first secretary/

treasurer of the Manchester Unity IOOF, was born

in Somerset, England. He arrived in Sydney and

went on to Melbourne where he set up the Port

Phillip Gazette in 1838. He later returned to

Sydney to obtain registration for the Loyal Australia

Felix Lodge. He was also influential in setting up

the first Widow and Orphans’ Fund.

Transplanted to AustraliaThe Australian colonies during the early nineteenth century were free

colonies largely populated by convicts and ex-convicts. New South Wales

was established in 1788, barely a year before the French Revolution had

broken out in Europe. Largely removed from the decades of conflict that

ensued, the colonies prospered, with convicts and emancipists responding

to a demand for scarce labour to achieve economic affluence and a degree

of respect that was denied them in Britain.

The first arrivals of free workers in the 1830s and 40s, and the end of

convict transportation, seem to have been essential preconditions for the

establishment and strong growth of friendly societies. It’s difficult to see

how orders of men priding themselves as free men devoted to not only

mutual economic support but independence and personal liberty could

flourish in a society where most ordinary workers and business owners

still carried some ‘taint’ of servitude.

The first regular meetings of the Australia Felix Lodge of Manchester

Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows on 7 December 1840—to which

Australian Unity traces its origins, included in its rules the special

(colonial) proviso that only the ‘absolutely free’ would be allowed to join.

Its founder, Thomas Strode, printer and proprietor of Melbourne’s first

legally recognised newspaper, the Port Phillip Gazette, engaged in highly

public quarrels with one of Melbourne’s founders, John Pascoe Fawkner,

in the early 1840s, taunting him over his convict background.

It was Strode who prompted the establishment of Manchester Unity,

advertising in his newspaper for past members of the Oddfellows Society

of Manchester to meet with him to discuss forming a Melbourne lodge.

Along with Strode, Manchester Unity’s founders included Dr Augustus

Greeves, a surgeon who was later to become Mayor of Melbourne;

John Marzagor, a carpenter; John Shepperd, a painter and glazier; and

... only the ‘absolutely free’ would be allowed to join


William Johnson Sugden, a sheriff’s bailiff who four years later would

become the colony’s chief constable. Among those members admitted

to the first meetings of the lodge were a brewer, five publicans,

a gentleman, a landowner, three builders and a farrier. They had to deal

with the vagaries of an only recently founded frontier town. The first

regular meeting of members was held at the Yarra Yarra Steam Packet

Hotel, at the then remote corner of Flinders and William Streets, where

severe rain flooded streets and passers-by risked drowning. The hotel

proprietor was Dr Greeves, who chaired the first meeting. The early

members were also active in other community developments. Dr Greeves

campaigned for a bridge to be built over the Merri Creek, in what is now

Clifton Hill, to stem the loss of life in flood times. John Thomas Smith,

an early member had been a teacher on an Aboriginal mission on the site

that was to become Melbourne’s Royal Botanical Gardens. Around the time

of the establishment of Manchester Unity, he built the Queens Theatre

and put on performances there to raise money to install street lights on

Queen Street.

An economic boom in the expanding wool industry had fuelled the rise

of what we now call Melbourne. In the early 1840s, almost immediately

after the Melbourne Lodge of Manchester Unity was founded, the wool

market collapsed. Bankruptcies proliferated. If a Manchester Unity

member was jailed for debt but the other members were convinced that

the entrepreneur was honest, then 10 shillings a week was paid to support

him and his family for the length of his incarceration.

Greeves, Strode and others provided assistance for members struggling

to establish themselves in a recently founded town and pastoral

hinterland that had endured economic headwinds through the decade.

In 1841, the Lodge assisted a member who had been shipwrecked on

arrival. Shortly after, the wife of another member was given funds and 1858

Manchester Unity established the

first Widow and Orphans’ Fund in 1858

with funds raised in an amateur

performance of ‘Love’s Sacrifice’.


assistance to join her husband in the bush. A ‘Benevolence Box’ was

introduced at the Lodge for the more comfortably well off to contribute

to those more acutely suffering. A public procession raised money for

the newly built hospital. A member’s widow and her seven children had

a house bought for them from the first Widow and Orphans’ Fund in 1858,

its establishment assisted by £150 raised through an amateur members’

performance of Love’s Sacrifice in 1857.

From these promising beginnings, the central ethos of the affiliated

friendly societies—the mutual economic assistance provided for each other

by one’s equals—would come into its own in a unique and distinctive way

in the decade that followed.

The discovery of gold and the influx of gold-seekers from the 1850s would

transform the face of the colonial world. Amid the boom-time changes,

ordinary Australian men and women began to seek and find their

economic independence through affiliated friendly societies, branches of

international orders that would come to have characteristics quite unlike

those in Britain, America or anywhere else in the world.

Gold avalanche and the colonial start-up cultureIt’s difficult to overestimate the impact of the 1850s gold rushes on

Australian society. After gold was discovered in New South Wales and

Victoria in 1851, the Argus newspaper reported ‘gentlemen foaming at the

mouth, ladies fainting, children throwing somersaults’ as the news

arrived in Geelong of ‘splendid treasure’ to be had in the hills and ranges

of the hinterland. Soon enough, every able-bodied man in the main cities

of Sydney and Melbourne—labourers, shop assistants, artisans, mechanics,

clerks headed to the diggings, fired by a desire to find a fortune in the soil.

Soon enough, every able-bodied man in the main cities...

headed to the diggings, fired by a desire to find a fortune

in the soil


It took a while for news and sample gold to get back to Europe and

America. At first the news at the size of the findings was disbelieved—

surely the tales were over the top? But more ships returned, bringing gold

in still more staggering quantities and more stories of fortunes made

overnight. By mid-1852 more ships, including the latest Boston Clippers,

were headed for Melbourne than towards any other port in the world.

Europe, still emerging from the preceding hungry decade, began to

spark back into life with the gold surge. An acute coin shortage ended,

a continent’s economy kick-started out of severe recession and Europe

emerged at the centre of a soon-to-be burgeoning world economy.

Writing to fellow Communist revolutionary Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels

complained that this sudden ‘Australian goldshit’ would delay the

arrival of the dictatorship of the workers.

With the discovery of gold in the 1850s, Victoria’s

population exploded. The previous system of

ferrying people and luggage upriver from ships

anchored in Hobsons Bay, or dropping them on the

beach to travel overland to Melbourne, was now

completely inadequate.

The Melbourne and Hobsons Bay Railway

Company conceived a scheme to link Melbourne

to the bay with a rail line and a large, deep water

pier in Hobsons Bay. The new pier became

known as Railway Pier and is now Station Pier,

Port Melbourne. It was opened in 1854.

Photograph by Charles Nettleton, 1870


Gold would power a long boom in Australia, supercharging the colonial

proto-nation for forty years, the most sustained period of prosperity in

Australian history. Over the 1850s, 33 percent of the global output of gold

came from Victoria alone. Australia’s population quadrupled in twenty

years, and over ten years Victoria’s population rocketed from 25,000 to

600,000. The creation of ‘instant cities’—Melbourne, and towns such as

Bendigo, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Sofala and Braidwood—in a largely new

settler society created a massive new market for Britain’s export trade;

everything from beer and cider to prefabricated houses and pianos was

shipped out to the cashed-up colonies.

The demand for food, clothes, infrastructure and services spawned the

great colonial cities and towns. The largest investment sector was house-

building—bigger than wool, bigger even than mining. For all our received

impressions of nineteenth-century Australia as a land of shearers,

bushrangers and stockmen, the colonial world in which people made

their lives was predominantly a town and cityscape.

Equally important to the raw economic growth that ensued is the

distinctive attitude and mentality it engendered. The initial and continuing

gold strikes fuelled an ebullient optimism. A ‘start-up culture’ was

Gold-seekers line Mount Alexander Road,

Flemington, heading towards the Castlemaine and

Bendigo gold fields. Painting by Samuel Charles

Bree, 1856.


prevalent—business ventures multiplied as everyone tried to carve

out new niches in the economic landscape. The origins of the ‘have a go’

mentality in Australian culture in part lie here.

Yet business failures multiplied too. William Westgarth, merchant and

financier, explained it best: ‘A colony is not commonly a place for saving

money. People make it by heaps and spend it or lose it with a like facility.

Lightly come, lightly go...’ The many gains and losses, the high rate of

commercial insolvency, made economic fortunes in the colonies more

erratic, less steady than in Britain, ‘but at the same time, as the

unfortunate of today is often the successful of tomorrow... the deficiencies

of the past are frequently made good from this subsequent success’.

This was a period that saw high degrees of entrepreneurialism, fused

with a radical, at times aggressively egalitarian, streak. The goldfields were

no respecters of professions or class hierarchy, and this translated into

economic activity. The colonial statistician T A Coghlan observed how the

gold decade affected ‘a complete social revolution... during these years

large numbers of men passed, by their exertions and their prudence, from

the ranks of labourers to those of employers’.

For the friendly societies recently established in Australia it was a period

of extreme dislocation. In the initially intense ‘gold fever’ years at the

beginning of the 1850s, it proved well nigh impossible to maintain

branches in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, towns that functioned

largely as thoroughfares to the goldfields. With almost every able-bodied

male arriving only to exit soon after to the diggings, regular attendance

at friendly society lodge meetings suffered.

On the goldfields, gold fever was having its most direct impact. In these

early years the chief, almost sole, preoccupation among gold-seekers

was to make a fortune. It wasn’t until later in the decade that people began


1860

to temper their expectations, and to think again of such mundane affairs

as providing for one’s future in the unlikely event of not striking it rich.

Those committed to staying in the new country and trying for new

opportunities—a predominantly immigrant population from Britain

and Europe—began to think seriously of settling down and of questions

of economic wellbeing and security.

This was when the friendly societies came into their own. From about

1858 affiliated lodges began to reappear. Soon they would be spreading

almost as quickly and as far across the colonial landscape as gold fever had.

Mutual aidIn this new colonial society opportunities were many, but hardships were

as ubiquitous. Death, illness and accident caused acute difficulty for the

individual and his dependents. Doctors’ bills and loss of earnings in

a world with no government-provided safety net made for lives carried

out against a backdrop of ever-present risk.

The solution was mutual aid; friendly societies formed by men without

enough wealth to feel secure against all vicissitudes. The desire for

economic independence was the aspirational foundation stone on which

friendly societies were built. Each man made regular contributions into

a common fund, to be drawn from at an agreed weekly allowance in time

of sickness, or by one’s family in the case of death.

Doctors were contracted to attend to members when ill, and from the 1860s

cheap chemists, known as dispensaries, were established by the friendly

societies to bring better value and safer medicines to their members.

The need to be a contributor to the common fund was crucial, and

was the reason most societies accepted no new members older than

about forty years old. Life expectancy being shorter, there had to be

enough theoretical years ahead of each member so he could contribute

In the nineteenth century, there were

concerns that some pharmacy dispensers

were diluting the medicines and taking

excess profits. The friendly societies

took matters into their own hands and

started their own dispensaries, the

United Friendly Society Dispensaries,

and employed their own dispensers.


for a sustained period in order to draw from the funds in the future.

Before joining, new members were required to produce a declaration of

age, health and conformity to show they were not an immediate liability

to the fund.

The affiliated orders helped spread the degree of risk. With a trans-

regional, district structure, they were able to ensure that economic costs

were shared (funeral fund liability was more widely spread than simply

among members of one’s own branch). Moreover their broad network was

ideal for the highly mobile colonial society. They worked hard to create a

sense of fraternal bond and practical benefit across geographic boundaries.

‘Clearance certificates’, issued to Society members who left their branch

in Britain for the colonies, were recognised by newly established branches

in Australia. Clearance certificates also allowed for easy movement

between branches if members moved for work or family reasons. Partly

because of this, the major affiliated orders—Manchester Unity, Australian

Order of Foresters, Grand United, Independent Order of Oddfellows,

Druids, Rechabites, Gardeners—seized a monopoly in the field of mutual

help organisations. Of this monopoly, Manchester Unity and Foresters

formed 80 percent of all friendly society members.

‘Topsy Turvey—or our Antipodes’. This

hand-coloured engraving offers a satirical view

of the gold rush during the 1850s. It shows a group

of ruffians playing cards in a shanty town

somewhere in the outback as they are waited on by

fashionable and distinguished members of society.

Painting by John Leech, 1864.


For all these mutual benefit societies, the funds came from the

members, not from outside sources. In tune with the entrepreneurial

ideal of the period, people contributing to this scheme placed almost

overwhelming emphasis on common enterprise, and not being

dependent on others for charity. The working classes, who made up the

majority of these groups, flatly rejected the idea of state welfare. They

had liberated themselves from paternal authority disguised as largesse

from their social and economic betters in Britain, and left a country

where the act of receiving state welfare carried with it the deep stigma

of the Poor Laws. The working classes considered that to accept outside

help from individual or state was to be patronised and belittled,

almost imprisoned. Victorian Oddfellows considered interference from

government or betters as a continuation of this old form of being

‘ordered about’. The Victorian Royal Commission on the Working of the

Friendly Societies Statute reported in 1876 that Australian working men

were significantly more hostile than English counterparts to anything

with the appearance of a government relief system. State pensions and

government sickness insurance were still a long way off, clearly.

The colonial ethos, which would eventually become the Australian ethos,

was strikingly different from Britain’s. In the free-forming 1850s, the

attitude that Jack was, at the very least, as good as his betters, had spread

like wildfire in a place that already placed a higher premium on skills,

hard work and talent than place or privilege.

The affiliated friendly societies committed themselves to the central

principles of equality, egalitarian brotherhood and fraternal harmony,

as well as the financial ambition of mutual help. The fit was perfect.

From the late 1850s, the uptake in membership of these societies was

phenomenal. Whereas in 1850 there were barely 1,000 financial friendly

The Independent Order of Rechabites South

Australia was established in 1848. The Foundation

Stone was laid in 1880.

Whereas in 1850 there were barely 1,000 financial

friendly society members in Australia, by 1865 there

were some 26,606 members in Victoria alone


1875

society members in Australia, by 1865 there were some 26,606 members

in Victoria alone. Even considering the rapid population rise, the swiftness

of uptake is striking.

The social composition of friendly society members in the antipodes

also represented a radical shift from the traditional model. The defining

characteristic of British friendly societies had been their class-specific

character: they were organisations for the self-help of workers, generally

skilled men. The middle classes, while also suffering strong anxieties

over their financial welfare, were petrified of associating with the classes

below, as it carried the implied risk of downward social mobility.

In Australia, where labour had established itself as proud and as self-

regarding as any other part of society, this was dramatically not the case.

Membership figures here reveal a striking fact—practically every

occupational group involved themselves as members of the friendly

societies. Artisans, mechanics, skilled and semi-skilled workers, miners,

labourers and carters, draymen, timber splitters and rail workers

formed a large proportion. But the commercial and trading occupations—

clerks and salesmen, traders in goods and personal services—were also

represented. Also turning up to weekly meetings were civil servants,

politicians and members from the professions of law and medicine.

Less strongly featured were the rural workers and farm owners.

Notably, no occupational class was missing. The friendly societies captured

the range of colonial society in almost complete microcosm. Groups

previously divergent, even antagonistic, were now integrating with each

other thoroughly. The egalitarianism that has been described later as

a core national ideal in Australian history was strongly displayed at the

regular branch meetings of colonial friendly societies.

In the early years of the ANA, branches

flourished in the gold rush towns of

Ballarat and Bendigo, known then

as Sandhurst. It would be a few more

years before the Geelong branch was

established. The first Geelong Minute

Book, 1875–1876, shows Tom Wills,

a pioneer of the Victorian Football League

(now the Australian Football League)

was a founding member of the branch.



Opposite page: Scenes from a fete day at the

Friendly Societies’ Gardens in Melbourne, highlight

the community activities fostered by friendly

societies. David Syme & Co., Melbourne 1879.

New homeworlds for oldThe generation of the second half of the nineteenth century were

newcomers, all trying to make a new and better world for themselves

in alien circumstances. As the gold-rush mania eased and the 1860s began

there was a greater emphasis on securing a decent life for oneself, on

living well without the gold-strike jackpot. A central part of this was the

creation of new, functioning communities. A nation quadrupled in

population is a significant number of strangers and unfamiliar faces.

There was a strong need to create new bonds of fraternal community

that make up part of the feeling of ‘home’ in one’s new locality, beyond the

immediate ties of one’s family and workmates. These bonds of local and

suburban identity also helped school the newly self-governing colonies

in the arts and realities of democracy.

Migrants, recently arrived from disparate regions of Britain and Europe,

became determined community builders, wanting to put down the planks

of both practical and emotional local identity. The practical was found in

the constant agitation and provision for the building of amenities—roads,

bridges, churches, schools, train lines. In a society where the aspiration

towards land and home ownership was not only universal but rapidly being

realised, the local interests of rate-paying homeowners predominated.

One historian, Geoffrey Curr, points out that in this era the flavour of

democratic politics was almost entirely local. Before the advent of major

organised political parties almost every election was decided by which

candidate could deliver the best benefits in infrastructure for the local

community. Localism was ‘an overriding political influence shaping the

voting behaviour of the whole electorate at this time’, Curr says.

The establishment of an emotional local identity was realised through

frequent participation in local events and festivities that were reassuringly

familiar from the old world. Fetes (musical, horticultural, Mayor’s,

Migrants... became determined community builders,

wanting to put down the planks of both practical and

emotional local identity


Working Men’s, Oddfellows, Foresters and Manchester Unity); street

processions (torch-lit, daytime, German, Chinese, Scandinavian,

Freemason’s, Eight Hours Movement, military and bridal); hall openings

(town halls, temperance halls, People’s, Bible and Missionary Society)

proliferated in suburban, town and metropolitan newspapers across the

colonial landscape.

Emotional familiarity also explains the powerful appeal of affiliated

friendly society rituals and regalia. In a colonial world rapidly approaching

effective mass literacy, the need for secret passwords, signs and arcane

oaths became academic rather than functional. Yet they were suffused with

the power of the remembered. As any migrant generation knows, what

carries the aura of past practice in the place of one’s birth and upbringing

can take on an almost talismanic effect. (It’s noteworthy that the pre-

eminent mutual aid society of the following ‘native-born’ generation, the

Australian Natives’ Association, defiantly eschewed all such ‘foolery’.)

Simultaneously local volunteer associations sprang up to establish and

run libraries, community halls, charities and friendly society lodges.

Committees of local citizens involved themselves in hospitals, sports clubs

and mechanics institutes. And it is in these local associations and

committees, historian John Hirst argues, that people for the first time

experienced the basic realities of democratic process in civic life—not just

how to vote but how to hold office, how to listen to opposing arguments,

respect the rulings of the chairman and accept the majority decision.

The most developed form of direct democracy was found in the friendly

societies. Here, all of the day-to-day running of medical and funeral

insurance schemes was in the hands of practically all members. Main

officeholders were regularly rotated and voted on to avoid entrenched

cliques of office-holding elites developing. Workers, clerks, miners,

businessmen, farmers and railway navvies all learnt how to participate


1870

in democratic debate, run meetings, take advice, give rulings and perform

a multitude of roles. For an entire generation previously unversed in

democratic life, these practices laid the foundation for what has proved to

be one of the most stable and enduring democratic polities in the world.

For Australia, the bold experiment of founding democratic society would

be midwifed by friendly societies.

The other notable school for democracy was school itself. Victoria

pioneered the world in establishing a mass-use, public-school system

based on the principles of free, secular and compulsory primary school

education with its Education Act of 1872, and other colonies soon followed.

The essential aim was to provide education for children of all social

origins and economic classes, creating a widespread egalitarian shared

identity that successful democratic life required. The future Victorian

Premier Graham Berry identified class differences as ‘the great barrier

to true democratic progress’, and so praised this new system of education,

where ‘undesirable social distinctions are being annihilated’.

The Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, alarmed at the numbers of young

Irish Catholic children being sent to secular public schools, forbade

Catholic parents to send their children there, an injunction that was

largely ignored by the Catholic Australian faithful. Aside from this, the

range of attendance across creeds, sects and classes was close to universal.

It was this generation of children, all passing through the same school

gates together in the 1870s and 80s, which became the well-educated and

articulate Australian-born generation that would advocate more than any

other for Federation and nationhood in 1901, and also for the extension of

women’s voting and legal rights.

In 1870, Manchester Unity was granted

Crown land to establish a home for aged

and disadvantaged members. Bounded

by Newry, Station, Freeman and

Canning Streets in Carlton, Melbourne,

and approximately 1 ¼ acres in area,

the land was to be used to build a facility

for ‘aged, infirm, decayed, distressed or

indigent members’.

In 1935, the Order decided to dispose

of the property and use the proceeds

to build a convalescent home in

Woodend, Victoria.


A workingman’s paradiseIn the 1880s, the long boom reached its final, slightly dizzying crest.

Its epicentre remained Melbourne, the largest city in Australia, but the

boom’s effects were spread across the continent, carrying with them

the middle classes and workers.

The middle classes benefitted from the extraordinarily high degree of

investment from, and trade with, Britain. (Britain, at this time the world’s

leading financial power, invested more heavily in Australian development

than practically anywhere else during the 1880s.) The volume of business

that this generated in Australian fields, towns and cities was significant

for both British investors and Australian development.

Likewise, the working classes also benefitted from the frenzy of

construction, manufacturing and industry that this investment and

continued population growth unleashed. Train lines radiated outwards

into suburbs still being built, new cable tramlines were put into the old

suburbs of the major cities. Electricity was arriving, as were telephones,

and new elevator technology meant buildings could exceed the height

limitations they had previously laboured under.

All of this meant work and high wages. One of Britain’s foremost

politicians, Sir Charles Dilke, said that the ‘most striking feature in the

social life of the Australian Continent is the position of the Trades Unions’.

The trade organisations were powerful and wealthy, and the eight-hour

day—still an impossible dream in Britain—had been claimed for the bulk

of the workforce. Workmen were paid well enough to accrue savings, and

looked to secure their own futures as well.

The almost mythical ‘workingman’s paradise’, which had long been touted

as Australia’s special contribution to the world, looked like it was to be

enshrined as perennial. And for workers, friendly societies were on a par

Workmen were paid well enough to accrue savings,and looked to secure their own futures as well

Opposite page: Building the N Class Steam

Locomotive No.110, Newport Railway Workshop.

The first small tank locomotive was built at Newport

in 1893. By the end of the steam era, sixty years

later, 536 steam locomotives had been produced in

addition to hundreds of passenger carriages and

thousands of goods trucks. At its peak, the Newport

Workshops employed more than 5,000 people and

was the largest industrial complex in the State.


... a ‘benefit mutual non-party progressive national

all-Australian association’

This poster promoting tree planting across Victoria

was distributed through schools and local

government agencies. It illustrates the breadth of

national development the ANA sought to influence

while remaining fiercely non-partisan. The poster

describes the society as a ‘benefit mutual non-party

progressive national all-Australian association’.

Published by the Australian Natives’ Association in

conjunction with the Forests Commission of

Victoria in 1937.

with trade unions for importance. At processions celebrating the eight-

hour day or Queen’s jubilees, members of trade unions and friendly

societies marched in the same section. The vast majority of trade union

members were also friendly society members at any rate; some estimates

put it at about seven-eighths of union workers.

The historian Geoffrey Blainey describes this decade as the friendly

societies’ ‘Golden Age’, the ‘accepted axiom’ being that ‘in a land as

favoured as Australia it was possible for the average hard-working family

to provide its own social security by joining one of the friendly societies’.

Friendly society membership in Victoria almost doubled in the three years

from 1887 to 1890, and new lodges sprouted everywhere, especially in the

new suburbs, but also in the older established country towns.

The ANA emergesEstablished in Melbourne in 1871, the Australian Natives’ Association

(ANA) would evolve and grow to become arguably the most historically

influential friendly society in Australia, and as the key player in realising

nationhood through Federation. Within decades, it would come to form

a self-conception as “the greatest national benefit society in the world”.

With health, funeral and financial plans for its members, the ANA

committed itself to the development of its members’ capacity to play a

full part in national life, and dismantle the barriers frequently placed in

front of the colonially born by their British-born elders.

The ANA began as a small mutual aid society in Victoria, whose members

identified as ‘native born’, though a small number of prominent early

members were in fact born outside of Australia. They were the children

of the gold-rush immigrants and the largest branches quickly formed in

Ballarat and Bendigo. The ANA entered a crowded field of friendly

societies—Foresters and Manchester Unity had 283 Victorian lodges


1901

between them, the Temperance Orders had 150-plus, and new national

and sectarian friendly societies for Scots, Irish and Germans also jostled

for prominence.

Progress was painfully slow at first, but the ANA took off in the 1880s.

Unlike the old world mutual benefit societies, the organisation made a

point of not having rituals or regalia. They insisted on no discussion of

political (but not ‘national’), religious or sectarian issues, meaning

Protestants and Catholics alike could join. Rule 45 stated ‘that no member

of the Association shall introduce a subject being upon religion or allusion

calculated to execute sectarian feelings and any one guilty of such conduct

shall be fined or suspended by the Chairman then presiding’.

For a generation of men who had largely finished their education at

primary school, the ANA’s commitment to ‘moral, social and intellectual

improvement’, the public talks and debating societies meant that the

lower middle-class clerks, teachers and salesmen, and skilled workers

who constituted the majority of the Association, were able to fulfil their

desire for self-improvement.

The insistence on colonial birth for membership eligibility was almost

explicitly generational. By the 1880s and 90s, and especially in Victoria

and South Australia (perhaps less so in the older, steadier colonies of

Tasmania and New South Wales), ‘Australian-birth only’ ruled out almost

everyone over forty. The gold-rush generation that had largely forged the

new society their children had grown up in were not wanted. Addressing

the hundredth meeting of the Prahran branch of the ANA at the Town Hall,

31-year-old ANA member and future Prime Minister Alfred Deakin

responded to the oft-asked question, ‘why exclude your elders, who came

with the wisdom and knowledge of elder lands?’

Victoria was the first colony, indeed was

the first in the world, to set up a

centralised public school system based

on the principles of free, secular and

compulsory education. The Victorian

lead was followed across Australia and

by the time of the Federation debates in

the 1890s almost every Australian child

could read and write. The ANA supported

this system and in 1901 continued its

interest in educational reform with

deputations to the Minister of Public

Instruction. The ANA Board published

a pamphlet on the Educational Reform

Movement stating that: ‘The real

underlying justification of a free and

compulsory education of the whole people

is to be found in a true understanding of

the aim of democracy.’



Opposite page: The ANA certificate of membership,

from 1893. The motto Natale Solum Dulce

translates as “sweet native soil”.

Deakin responded bluntly, emphasising the degree to which the younger

generation wished to maintain their ‘independence absolutely’ from old

controversies, as well as from the parental generation’s control. If the

British-born elders had been allowed to join, he argued, they would have

controlled the organisation ‘in its infancy, [they] would have been able to

mould the minds of the younger members to their will’. Deakin allowed

that their fathers might bring ‘greater experience and matured views’, but

they also brought ‘factious feeling’, ‘partisan views’ and ‘those dangerous

and deadly old world prejudices’. Instead, he concluded, the founders had

said, ‘let us have an institution racy of the soil, something which would be

Australian in its texture, and free from these views and prejudices’.

The ANA sought to raise a new level of patriotism in colonial society. One

of the ways it set about doing this was campaigning for the adoption of

26 January—the anniversary of the date Arthur Phillip had landed at Port

Jackson in 1788—as a ‘national day’. Beginning with a motion from the

Kerang branch at the 1886 annual ANA conference ‘that a National Holiday

be fixed’ the ANA set to lobbying parliamentarians and creating publicity

to this end. The labour met with success.

In 1888, a hundred years after the First Fleet’s arrival in Sydney Harbour,

26 January was celebrated in four of the five Australian colonies. Soon

enough the annual holiday was referred to as ‘the ANA Weekend’, and the

ANA themselves turned to a bigger ambition—nationhood.

To contemporary eyes, perhaps most startling is that the ANA, who used a

sort of kitsch Indigenous symbolism in their social functions—calling their

social nights ‘corroborees’ and so forth—gave no thought to acknowledging

the presence of Indigenous Australians in their ‘Foundation Day’ events

and ceremonies. Despite the use of ‘natives’ in their name as well as their

Indigenous insignia, the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ would hardly,

if at all, have occurred to them.


In this, they were not remarkable. The original contact between

Indigenous Australians and British settlers had been punctuated by

frontier conflict, and had a devastating impact on Indigenous life. In some

instances, most notably Tasmania, entire populations of Indigenous

people were destroyed through intentional killing or mass death as a

consequence of land loss or disease. By the 1880s, the rolling frontier zone

had passed well northwards, to the northwest of Western Australia and the

tropics of Queensland. The world in which friendly societies, including

the ANA, thrived was mostly urban and metropolitan. Cities, towns and

suburbs were the seed grounds of friendly societies, and these were

predominantly white places that gave little thought to the question of

Indigenous lives and affairs, an example of what anthropologist William

Edward Hanley Stanner would in a 1968 Boyer Lecturer describe as the

‘Great Australian Silence’.

Dealing with divisionThe main fracture in colonial society, reflected in the friendly societies,

was sectarianism between predominantly Irish Catholics and chiefly

Scottish and English Protestants (Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists).

This was an ancient enmity, of hostility born of centuries of conflict and

colonisation in Ireland by the English and Scots.

But the British settlers in Australia were a far more equal amalgam of

Irish, Scots and English than anywhere in Britain. Here, they had to learn

to live with each other. Constant work was needed to tamp old hatreds that

could fatally undermine social cohesion and the ‘egalitarian consensus’

that so distinguished colonial life. Surprisingly, the capacity of these three

groups to live and work together, to intermarry and to share most elements

of their daily lives was a strong feature of colonial society. No one was

expecting this, since it had not been the case in Britain or America, where

large numbers of Irish began arriving during the Potato Famine of the 1840s.


All were devoted to fraternity and universal brotherhood,

and recognised no distinctions of creed or race

In Australia, from the get-go, the Irish lived not in ghettos but in the same

neighbourhoods as everyone else. True, there were more of them in

prison, but there were also more of them working as police. Intermarriage

showed the old dividing line between Catholics and Protestants to be

porous, not sealed. Friendly societies’ memberships were one of the best

examples of this. All were devoted to fraternity and universal brotherhood,

and recognised no distinctions of creed or race. The Irish joined in as large

numbers as any other race.

But despite—or perhaps because of—this degree of integration, sectarianism

reemerged. Archbishop James Goold declared it was time for Catholics

to stop joining ‘objectionable societies with signs and passwords’—that is,

friendly societies. The Hibernian society was established in competition,

and Irish Catholics deserted the older friendly societies in droves.

In retaliation, the Protestant Alliance was launched and the fracture

threatened to become more widespread.

For a time, these divisions were contained and dealt with from the ground

up, though not by the Protestant or Catholic hierarchies, whose interest

seemed to be in accentuating problems. In suburban and small-town life,

on committees for hospitals and charities, sporting clubs, mechanics’

institutes and still some of the friendly societies, Protestants and Catholics,

English, Irish and Scots, managed to find ways to come together, rather than

split off into separate committees managing separate hospitals, charities,

sports clubs and the like. People actively worked to keep the peace, ensuring

that all backgrounds and faiths were represented on community

organisations. At processions to celebrate great civic occasions or

anniversary days, all sections of society were represented—Catholic friendly

societies, Protestant ones and non-sectarian societies. There is other

evidence that the Jewish and Chinese communities participated in friendly

society life alongside other Australians. This was the secret to colonial

St Francis Catholic Church and School in

Melbourne, 1879, by W.F.E Liardet. When secular,

free and universal education was introduced in

the early 1870s, the Catholic hierarchy insisted

that Catholic children not attend, but go to

separate schools.


success when it came to dealing with differences. It provides a clue, too,

as to what cultural substrate the later post-Second World War European

migration boom was built on, and still later, the largely successful

multicultural experiment.

One other looming division was about to sound the death knell for this

‘golden age’ of friendly societies and the workingman’s paradise, however.

That was to be a class war, triggered by the end of the long boom and

a great crash. At the Eight Hours Day procession in April 1890, in what

Melbourne’s Argus correspondent described as ‘one of [the] largest

crowds that has ever collected at one time within the city limits’, the

trades procession met the Governor at the Friendly Societies’ Gardens

in Melbourne, and continued social harmony seemed assured. But

a protestor at the side of the procession waved a sign, declaring the sort

of conflict that Australia would be forced to wrestle with over ensuing

decades. The placard read, ‘feed on our flesh and blood, you capitalist

hyenas, it is your funeral feast’.

At the procession the protestor was in the minority and was largely

ignored by unionists, friendly society members and spectators alike.

As long as the boom of economic growth sustained wealth and prosperity

across all the striving and industrious classes, such slogans seemed to

belong to an alien world.

A few months later, however, riots would engulf Sydney and Melbourne

in the first great strike of the 1890s—the Maritime Strike. It was the first

of a series of different strikes that crippled industry and commerce across

the continent, and created intense hostility between bosses and workers.

Part of the solution to this problem would involve the creation of a social

laboratory more committed to state intervention, and the government

provision of social welfare. Friendly societies, born of a period of

unrivalled entrepreneurialism and pride in mutual independence from

outside assistance, would find themselves in radically uncharted waters.

‘Riot in George Street, Sydney’, published in the

Illustrated Australian News, October 1890.

Opposite page: Federated Rubber Works with

banner at Eight Hour Day procession, 1890.

The procession drew one of the largest crowds ever

seen in Melbourne. The annual procession started

in 1857 and became a public holiday in 1879.

It was the first of a series of different strikes that crippled industry

and commerce across the continent, and created intense hostility

between bosses and workers

Nationhood and thenew social laboratory

44 Nationhood and the new social laboratory

Townsville Mounted Infantry in Hughenden in

Queensland during the Shearers’ Strike, 1891.

With no end to the shearers’ strike in sight and tens

of thousands of sheep waiting to be shorn, officers

and men of the Townsville Mounted Infantry were

deployed to escort the non-unionists (blacklegs)

to do the work.

Preceeding page: ‘Opening of the First Parliament

of the Commonwealth of Australia by H.R.H. The

Duke of Cornwall and York (Later King George V)’,

May 9, 1901,commonly known as ‘The Big Picture’,

1903, by Tom Roberts, 1856–1931.

The big collapseThe prosperity of the 1880s had ushered in high wages and per capita

consumption, making Australian living standards the highest in the

world. But by the early 1890s, the new colonial world of widely spread

opportunities and material abundance collapsed. In 1893, a real estate

bubble, a stalling economy and the drying up of investment funds led first

to a property market collapse followed by the worst collapse of banks in

Australian history.

Many building societies, which had largely accounted for the savings of

ordinary workers and aspiring home owners throughout the 1880s, sank

without trace. The disintegration of the ‘workingman’s paradise’ resulted

in political crisis, economic catastrophe and visceral class conflict.

The 1890s economic collapse triggered the first and worst ‘Great Strikes’

of Australian history, as workers, organised into unions, clashed

repeatedly with bosses and employers over rates of pay and the rights of

non-unionists to work.

The Maritime Strike of 1890 resulted in docks in all the major cities going

into lockdown. Nothing was allowed in or out, which paralysed industry—

no exports out, no coal coming in for factories and trains—and threatened

daily life. New South Wales needed food imports to feed its population,

and Melbourne needed coal in winter. Riots occurred in Sydney and

Melbourne; police and soldiers were called in. Then, almost immediately

afterwards, a Broken Hill miners’ strike in 1892 saw strike leaders jailed.

The worst of the great strikes were the shearing strikes, which convulsed

Australia’s dominant export industry and almost all of the settled

hinterland. Between 1891 and 1894 the rural zone of eastern Australia,

stretching in a vast swathe down through inland Queensland and New

South Wales to Victoria’s Riverina, was engulfed in three successive strikes

which, at their worst, threatened to break out into armed civil strife.


... the fault wouldn’t be on the side of striking workers

‘if blood should stain the wattle’

Shearers refused to accept a drop in wages or to let in non-union labour,

establishing strike centres at their main shearing camps, and arming

themselves and training in quasi-military drills. Woolsheds were burnt,

men guarding property were fired on, and non-union workers were

assaulted. The districts affected drew in a vast number of policemen to

combat the unrest; at its height 28 percent of New South Wales’ entire

police force was sent to those areas. This is the context in which young

poet Henry Lawson wrote and published his ‘Freedom on the Wallaby’,

which warned that the fault wouldn’t be on the side of striking workers

‘if blood should stain the wattle’.

In 1894, the Queensland Government passed the Peace Preservation Act,

which gave the state emergency powers to deal with threats to order.

In districts proclaimed under the Act it became illegal to carry firearms,

and anyone suspected of doing so ran the risk of arrest and being detained

for six months before going to trial. The general public wasn’t pleased

with this erosion of civil liberties, but they were even less pleased at the

prospect of violence and anarchy in what had until then seemed a

particularly advanced and civilised society. The strikes were put down,

with the strong government measures receiving widespread support.

After such influence and power in the 1880s, the power the of big unions—

maritime, shearers, miners—was broken. Their membership numbers

collapsed for the rest of the decade, and many unions disappeared

altogether. Union organisers turned to a new idea—to create a political

party to be voted into parliament and to change the laws. The Australian

Labor Party (ALP) was the result. In April 1891, the first Labor Electoral

League meeting was called by the Balmain Labourers’ Union. At this

meeting, in the Labour Hall in Darling Street, Balmain, what is widely

thought of as the first Labor branch was born.


‘Scene at the Mine – Using Non Union Labour’,

1892. A huge crowd including wives of unionists

outside the mine’s office as police escort

“blacklegs”—the name given to those employed to

take on the work during strikes—to work.

The civil disruption, street violence and economic disaster of the 1890s

shook the colonial world badly. Everything that had seemed so certain—

a new society of freedom, opportunity and material abundance—was

falling apart.

For friendly societies the most direct and immediate effect was financial.

Not only had countless individual members lost personal savings in

building societies and had been union members involved in the strikes,

but many suburban lodges had invested surplus funds in mortgages on

houses and shops at higher rates of interest than in banks or government

bonds. When the property market collapsed so, too, did lodge funds.

The suspension of trading by eleven commercial banks was just as

devastating. Their mass closure in 1893 threatened the funds of many

branches. C.I. Watt, in a 1971 history of Manchester Unity in Victoria,

reports that other branches, whose funds hadn’t been locked up,

quietly stepped in to volunteer loans.


Friendly societies fared better than building societies,

banks and unions as the slow-motion train wreck of

the early 1890s unravelled

Against trend, friendly societies survive and thriveWhat is striking is the degree to which friendly societies fared better than

building societies, banks and unions as the slow-motion train wreck of

the early 1890s unravelled. The worst hit colony was Victoria. Victoria

had been the previous centre of the long boom decades, and was also the

centre of two central antecedents of Australian Unity—the Manchester

Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows in Victoria and the Australian

Natives’ Association (ANA).

Membership numbers suffered—some 15 percent of Manchester Unity

members either dropped out completely or reported themselves

‘unfinancial’ (unemployed and unable to continue regular payments)

during 1893, the worst year. While in direct contrast to the mushrooming

of membership in the late 1880s, it wasn’t a complete disaster. ANA benefit

fund member numbers held steady during the worst years at the start of

the 1890s, then resumed robust expansion from 1894.

In South Australia, the proportion of people who were members of friendly

societies remained higher than anywhere else in Australia. All the friendly

societies that would eventually come together under the umbrella of

Lifeplan Australia—Manchester Unity IOOF (SA), the ANA (SA), Druids,

Foresters, Rechabites, Free Gardeners, as well as both the Irish Catholic

Hibernians and their sectarian rivals Protestant Alliance—maintained

high membership figures.

Meanwhile, in New South Wales and other colonies, Grand United

membership remained strong. In Victoria, the heart of the friendly society

movement (thanks to the concentration of the robustly independent 1850s

gold-rush generation), there were, by 1905, more than 1000 lodges with

more than 100,000 direct members (nearly half a million family

beneficiaries out of a population of almost four million) and a combined

fund worth £1,500,000.


The success with which friendly societies weathered the worst years at

the end of the nineteenth century was due to the direct benefits they

provided becoming even more important in the depression years. Sickness

benefits, funeral funds and cheap medicine dispensaries were even more

valued during the economic downturn. For customers of medical care,

the friendly society health service constituted without doubt the most

consumer-friendly provision of medical care in Australian history, with

doctors contracted at a quarterly flat rate to provide medical service to

friendly society members.

Membership was often maintained even during periods of job loss due

to the flexibility of branch organisers and a strongly sympathetic

membership. For individual members who lost their jobs there would

often be a significant period where they received ‘sickness benefit’

payments from their local lodge, with other members and branch

Hoarding outside the Exhibition buildings in

Melbourne in 1899 advertising the “empire bazaar”

and ANA Day celebrations.


The Melbourne Exhibition Building and quadrangle

was the venue for the annual “ANA Day” celebrations

on January 26. This image is from 1898. The ANA

Day would become known as Australia Day.

secretaries tacitly condoning what was in effect a bending of the rules.

The volume of sickness claims spiked between 1893 and 1895, during the

worst trough of the depression, as many received what was effectively

welfare payment from fellow members who knew they could possibly be

seeking the same before long.

This helps explain why friendly society membership numbers remained

so robust while union numbers declined. Although some friendly society

groups suffered during the worst period, they swiftly recovered thereafter,

soon returning to, and exceeding, 1880s numbers. In New South Wales,

where Grand United had originated, 28 percent of the population were

still covered by full benefit friendly society membership in 1892. Twenty

years later this percentage had lifted to 42 percent.

In Victoria the percentage of the population covered in 1893 was 36 percent,

rising to 51 percent by 1913. South Australia, the stronghold of friendly

society membership as a proportion of the entire population, went from

a very healthy 46 percent in 1892 to an astonishing 70 percent by 1913.

Friendly society membership continued to appeal through hard times

because of the warmth of fraternal solidarity and social connections,

not only in the weekly meetings and annual conferences, but through

special events such as fetes, entertainment and celebrations put on purely

for leisure and entertainment purposes. Many friendly societies were

able to fill the social gap in a colonial world where paid entertainment

was becoming less and less attended.

For instance, the ANA’s Foundation Day celebration on 26 January 1893,

held in the trough of the depression, was a fete and banquet attended by

some 50,000 people at the Exhibition Buildings in Melbourne. Bicycle

and running races, wood-chopping competitions, athletics, gymnastic

and acrobat displays were held alongside literary, painting and drawing

competitions, and a Punch & Judy performance for the youngsters.


Brass bands, cricket teams, football matches and picnics proliferated

in the 1890s, as well as the occasional ‘free and easy evening’ featuring

billycans of beer.

The societies also provided opportunities for education and self-

improvement through branch debates, general knowledge nights and

lectures on topics of the day such as electricity and women’s suffrage.

These events and activities may seem inconsequential, but for the overall

wellbeing of individuals and societies, these strongly community-focused

events were central, and perhaps one explanation for the strength of

membership numbers.

An ANA nationWere it not for the ANA, Federation and Australian nationhood as we

know it would not have occurred. Beginning as a small network of

defiantly proud ‘natives’ rejecting the lesser status of ‘mere colonials’

ascribed to them by their parents’ generation of mostly immigrant

British, they became the central engine in the 1880s and 90s for defeating

the multifarious obstructions and divisions that stood in the way of the

colonies becoming states of a united Commonwealth.

Federation had been raised by New South Wales political heavyweight,

Sir Henry Parkes, who immersed himself in a campaign that led to the first

Australasian Federal Convention of 1890–91. Parkes’ speech at Tenterfield

in 1889 calling for a federal convention to devise a great national

government set the country on the road to Federation. But this attempt

failed, as it lacked significant grassroots support or organised local

campaigning. Parkes hoped to simply get the politicians in the colonial

parliaments to ratify the Convention’s constitution, giving ordinary voters

no direct say. As the economy collapsed and class war broke out on the

docks, streets and in country districts, politicians decided there were more

important things to think about than ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ nationhood.1902

George Witton, an ANA member from

Queenscliff, was sentenced to death

alongside Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant

and Peter Handcock for the murder of

nine prisoners during the Boer war.

The death penalty was commuted to life

imprisonment following a legal opinion

from ANA member Isaac Isaacs, KC.

In 1902, a petition was circulated by his

brother calling for George’s pardon.

George was released and welcomed home

in 1905 at a meeting in Melbourne with

ANA Board of Directors and Prime

Minister Alfred Deakin.


This was the first of two moments when ANA members made the difference

between success and failure.

In July 1893, with Federation declared by former New South Wales Premier,

Sir John Robertson, ‘as dead as Julius Caesar’, a meeting was held by the

Federation League at Corowa on the Murray River. One of those attending

the conference was the ANA delegate from Bendigo, John Quick, who had

left school when he was ten years old after his father’s death in the 1860s,

and spent his adolescence working in an iron foundry, a mine and the

printing room of Bendigo’s newspaper. Quick had subsequently achieved

success as a journalist and lawyer. At Corowa, he was one of the first to act.

At the first mention that ‘practical measures’ should be taken, he secured

a recess and sought out like minds. Together they hammered out a proposal

that put forward a startling new idea: bypass the politicians and

parliaments, and take the movement to the people. Get them to directly vote

for candidates at a popular convention, which would then propose a revised

Certificate of Australasian federal referendum,

1899. Voters were able to apply for a certificate

signifying their participation.


‘But few as we may be, and weak by comparison,

it will be the greater glory, whether we succeed or fail’

constitution to be voted on by the people again at a popular referendum.

The motion was passed with enthusiasm, and as soon as the Corowa

conference finished the ANA swung into campaigning action.

The organisational and logistical support that the ANA threw into the

Federation campaign was immense. As a well-functioning mutual aid

organisation, with more than 100 branches and 12,000 members

nationwide, the ANA established branches of the Australian Federation

League and set about campaigning, speech-making and door-knocking

with fervour. This, combined with the inspiration of nationhood being

a decision for the people rather than a governing elite, rescued the cause

from the doldrums.

Then, in 1898, the compromise constitution looked likely to fall apart;

the radical progressives thought that too many concessions had been

made. Momentum lost in the heartland of support—Victoria, which since

the 1850s gold rush had been the centre of progressive radicalism—would

mean an end for the movement.

That year, the ANA held its annual conference at Bendigo. Here, Alfred

Deakin delivered what was probably the most important speech of his life.

It was a call to arms: ‘The number actually against us is probably greater

than ever; the timorous and passive will be induced to fall away; the forces

against us are arrayed under capable chiefs. But few as we may be, and

weak by comparison, it will be the greater glory, whether we succeed or fail’.

The audience erupted. Dazzled and galvanised, they set to work. Four

weeks later, the Victorian Premier, George Turner, who was also a member

of the ANA, succumbed to pressure and declared that the constitution

be supported at the referendum. After this, the most powerful opinion-

maker in the country, George Syme, editor of The Age and for decades a

maker and unmaker of governments, reversed his previous objections.


ANA figures who helped lead the federation

movement later became senior members of the

new national institutions: Edmund Barton (NSW),

first prime minister of Australia; Alfred Deakin (Vic),

second prime minister; Charles Kingston (SA),

appointed to the first federal ministry. The three,

all delegates to the Constitutional Conventions,

travelled to London in 1900 to oversee the passage

of the federation bill through the Parliament of the

United Kingdom.

Federation was still alive. Two-and-a-half years later, after some last-

minute changes that made the new constitution more radical again,

on the first of January 1901, nationhood was achieved. On the same day,

John Quick was knighted.

The reason the ANA campaigned so ferociously, in good seasons and bad,

is because Federation was, for the members, not just ‘noble’ but ‘sacred’

and ‘holy’. Achieving nationhood meant something overwhelmingly

important. For most of their parents’ generation (give or take the occasional

Henry Parkes), the difference between living in a self-governing colony or

a nation was no big deal. They had largely arrived as immigrants, and in

their daily lives endeavoured to recreate many of the elements of their

homeworld, Britain. The rituals and regalia that the older friendly societies

of British origin—Foresters, Druids, Manchester Unity—all relished were

part of this. They were Britishers, proud of the new society in which they’d

made their new lives, but decidedly Britishers in Australia.

For the native born, things were different. They were proud to be part of

the British Empire, but considered themselves first and foremost

Australians—or those who involved themselves in the ANA did, at any rate.

Until the colonies federated as states into a nation, they would continue to

be written off as mere colonials. This was the opinion of Edmund Barton,

the ANA member who led the campaign in New South Wales. He kept a list

of local branches constantly at his desk as he campaigned, and went on to

become Australia’s first Prime Minister.


Opposite: On 1 January, 1901, crowds gathered in

Centennial Park, Sydney, to celebrate the Federation

of the Australian Commonwealth. The swearing-in

ceremony included Governor General Lord

Hopetoun taking the oath of allegiance.

This, too, was the opinion of Samuel Griffith, the ANA member who

drafted Australia’s constitution and later became the inaugural chief

justice of the High Court of Australia: ‘Young Australia is beginning to find

that it’s not satisfied with being merely British,’ he said, no doubt happy

that this time the ‘mere’ was in front of the ‘British’. Instead, he said,

young Australia wanted ‘a nationality of our own, which will be recognised

throughout the world’.

Thanks to the labours of ANA members such as Deakin, Quick, Barton and

Griffith, and the campaign run by the organisation as a whole, the wish

was realised.

Nationhood was secured.

The social laboratoryThe lessons of the 1890s were that poverty and destitution could happen

to practically anyone, and that division, conflict and strife had to be

constantly guarded against. After Federation, and boasting what people

thought of as the most ‘ultra-democratic’ constitution anywhere in

the world, the new nation set about reinstating the opportunities and

prosperity of the boom period. Australians wanted to reclaim the new

world, ‘young and free’, which had been taken for granted in previous

decades. Only this time the state would be used as a key agent in

reestablishing and protecting their claim. The state was now seen as

the embodiment of a nation-wide community, with a remit to active

responsibility for weaker citizens, and to do everything in its power

to maintain health, comfort and wellbeing for everyone.

This expanded sense of community, identity and belonging fused with the

new Australian nation. Nationalism and citizenship began life as a strongly

progressive force, trialling new procedures and state activity in order to

actively improve people’s lives. This was the ‘social laboratory’, the country

trialling new solutions to old human problems for the world to learn from.

After Federation... the new nation set about reinstating

the opportunities and prosperity of the boom period


The range of legislation implemented in the years before the First World

War is a testament to the breadth of radical state action. Women gained

the right to vote and stand for parliament; Australia was the first place in

the world where they could do both. A maternity allowance was provided

for all mothers.

A perceived good, tariff protection was extended to businesses and wages

from international competition. There was provision for strike arbitration

between bosses and workers. A land tax was established to break up big

farming properties.

Compulsory military training was set up for national self-defence.

And a government bank—the Commonwealth Bank—guaranteed and

protected ordinary people’s savings, an institution that was much

appreciated after the collapse and suspension of so many banks in

the 1890s.

One of the most significant and far-reaching events took place in

November 1907, when Justice Higgins, head of the newly established

Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, handed down his

famous ‘Harvester Judgement’. In this, he established the principle that

the state would ensure that all employers paid what it defined as ‘a fair

and reasonable wage’—that is, a wage decent enough for a family to live

a full life ‘in a civilised community’. If the business couldn’t afford to pay

that rate, the business would go under. Higgins’ decision was declared

‘an absolutely new charter on the rights of the toilers of Australia’ by

Andrew Fisher, on becoming the first leader of a majority Labor government

in the world. A reflection of the confidence in the human capacity for

social engineering, the Harvester Judgement also reflected this

generation’s strong desire for social justice in all facets of Australian life,

including economic life. The Judgement would be cherished for decades.

An individualist, volunteerist, mutually self-organising

era was being replaced by a more collectivist one


For the ANA, the new century brought the opportunity to advocate for

further educational opportunities for the ‘working man’ through

involvement with and support of the Working Man’s College, soon to

become the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Universal free and

secular public education having been secured, it was important to open

up opportunities for further avenues of tertiary education. Friendly

societies offered scholarships for members’ children to make this possible.

For friendly societies, one of the most significant pieces of legislation was

the Old Age and Invalid Pension Bill in 1908, which signalled the beginning

of what would become the welfare state—that is, the government taking on

itself the task of ensuring all people’s welfare needs were provided for,

instead of leaving it to people on their own or organising together to do so.

It embodied the new philosophy that was permeating society after the

dangers and hardships of the 1890s. An individualist, volunteerist,

mutually self-organising era was being replaced by a more collectivist one.

The values that people wanted to realise were the same: equality,

egalitarianism and material security. But now the state was to assume

more of the responsibility for securing them.

Friendly society membership nevertheless remained very strong. Even

after the Old Age Pension laws were passed by Deakin’s Commonwealth

government in 1907, the numbers accessing friendly society benefits

remained vastly higher than those on state welfare.

But a new tide was coming in.


‘Fraternalism’, women and nationFor a society built on egalitarianism, however, the inclusion of women

took some time to realise. The focus of friendly societies had always

been explicitly geared towards families; the Widow and Orphans’ Fund,

for instance, provided for families that had lost the husband and

breadwinner. But for women to join the lodges, attend meetings and

participate in the decisions? This was not countenanced.

Although women could benefit as members’ wives, women who worked

and raised families on their own could not be members in their own right.

Single mothers were common in colonial life, especially as men bitten by

gold fever tended to drift from one goldfield, colony or country to another,

seeking yet another great strike, leaving family and dependents to fend for

themselves. Laundry and domestic work proved the mainstays for these

women, but as the economy further modernised in the 1860s, 70s and 80s,

new opportunities began to present themselves. Young women preferred

working in factories to traditional jobs as domestic servants since the

pay was better, and the freedom and independence to do whatever one

liked after hours was significantly greater. Switchboard operators at new

telephone exchanges attracted women too, as did the expanding

education industry—a mass-educated generation required a multitude

of teachers to educate them.

The economic catastrophe and the increasing regulation and

unionisation of the work force in the 1890s and after, however, proved

ominous for women who worked. Work, now more scarce than in the

boom years, began to be cordoned off for men, and women were

pushed to the edges of the workforce. Married women especially were

considered to have a lesser claim to a wage, as it was presumed that they

had a husband already providing for them. In the 1890s new wages boards,

which had been established to try and broker wage claim agreements,

Opposite page: Women inside the gate of

the city polling station voting for the first time

in a Queensland state election in May 1907.


began excluding women. Girls were banned from apprenticeships

in many trades, and married women were excluded from public service

employment. Education departments in New South Wales and Victoria

stopped recruiting married women in 1893 and 1894. The New South

Wales Post Office and Telegraph Department fired all married women

workers in 1896. New South Wales government offices tried to prevent

even single women from employment in their workforce in 1903.

At the same time, however, women were winning the right to vote and

stand in parliament, and to participate in friendly societies. In 1900,

the ANA established a sister organisation, the Australasian Women’s

Association (AWA), a member-benefit friendly society run along the same

lines and with similar objectives as the ANA. In 1902, women’s suffrage

was secured, and the first woman in the world to stand for parliament,

Vida Goldstein, was recruited. She went on to stand another four times

for election to the Senate, unsuccessfully each time, and today has a

federal parliamentary seat named in her honour.

In August 1903, the ANA journal The Advance Australia reported a

‘Women’s Demonstration’ at Melbourne Town Hall, thronged by women

enthusiastic at the prospect of casting their first ever votes as citizens of

the Commonwealth. ‘As Miss Vida Goldstein said’, the journal reported,

‘“The Women of Australia had now been exalted to a position held by no

other women in the world”.’ Alfred Deakin, Attorney General and youngest

member of Barton’s cabinet, also spoke, saying that ‘the women’s vote

would make for a deeper unity, a fuller life and a true manhood and

womanhood’ in the new nation and commonwealth.

This was a heady mix. Simultaneously occurring women’s suffrage

and national citizenship made for what historian Marilyn Lake has

described as ‘a maternalist welfare state’: that is, with women joining

men in deciding how to govern the country, their values, attributes1903

In the early years of the twentieth

century, there was a tussle between the

Clifton Hill and Fitzroy branches of the

Australasian Women’s Association over

which branch would bestow honorary

life membership on opera diva

Dame Nellie Melba. In the end both

branches claimed her.

Pictured is Dame Nellie many years

later, at the 1927 ANA annual conference

in Hamilton, Victoria.


‘Women’s training tends to direct their interest to

Social Welfare... To take care of the Social Welfare,

women must be in Parliament’

and intelligence as mothers and carers would now have its effect on the

democratic polity. Women could participate in moulding ‘a caring,

protective, nation state, one oriented to securing human welfare’ rather

than naked cash transactions. This type of feminist nationalism was

embodied in a new organisation, the Australian Federation of Women’s

Voters. With the slogan ‘An All Australian Outlook’ they pursued a non-

party, non-sectarian policy line, promoting equality of opportunity, status

and reward for women between men and women.

Millicent Stanley, a member of the Federation’s executive, campaigned for

a parliamentary seat in the 1925 New South Wales election. In an election

pamphlet she made the case for the maternal welfare state: ‘Men’s training

tends to direct their interest to business (... trade, commerce, industry,

work, wages, profits). Women’s training tends to direct their interest to

Social Welfare (... health, food, housing, care of children, care of sick, care

of poor, preservation of family and home life). To take care of the Social

Welfare, women must be in Parliament.’

Stanley became the first woman to be voted into the Legislative Assembly.

Representing the Nationalist Party (the antecedent to the modern

Liberal Party), she advocated policies that focused on women’s and

children’s welfare, and custody rights in cases of divorce. Her arguments

that social welfare was a core concern of the state resonated with many,

and state welfare emerged as one of the dominant ideals of the nation-

building period.

1937

Ivy Lavinia Weber, a member of the

Australasian Women’s Association,

was elected as an Independent candidate

in the Victorian Legislative Assembly in

1937 on a platform advocating free

education and a national health scheme.


The race issueThe dark side of nationhood is that it can define itself by race when it

comes to deciding who belongs to the new country, and who doesn’t.

The gold rush drew a very wide range of ethnicities to the colonies from

across the world. Brits and Europeans, certainly, but also Bengalis,

Pashtuns, and Cantonese from Guangzhou, China. This hopeful beginning

ran into trouble by the turn of the twentieth century, when one of

Australia’s first legislative acts was to legislate the White Australia Policy,

brought in by the Barton government with support from all major political

parties. Then there was the seemingly even more intractable problem,

that of Indigenous–settler relations.

The first affiliated orders of British-origin friendly societies which either

established themselves or expanded rapidly in the gold-rush era made

no distinctions on the basis of race, colour or creed. In these first decades,

they were remarkably successful at breaking down the ‘clannishness’ of

immigrant groups—Scots, Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, Italians—and

helped incorporate them into the wider life of the settler community.

The situation was significantly different in Australia compared to the

United States, where the practice of slavery had placed race distinctions

at the core. The Americans were known for aggressive race prejudice even

on the Australian goldfields. The Chinese, the most numerous ‘outsider’

population, experienced hostility at trouble spots, especially in northern

Queensland, where their numbers were significant and economically

vital, but not initially, nor automatically.

This difference was reflected in the ways Australian and American

branches ran their friendly societies. Unlike America, Australian-based

friendly societies included both Chinese and Bengalese members—

a practice completely unheard of in the United States. (It should be noted,


Private Alfred Jackson Coombs (back row, second

from left) is an example of many Indigenous

soldiers who enlisted to fight despite not being

recognised as citizens of Australia. Pte Coombs,

a labourer from Antwerp, Victoria, embarked from

Melbourne with the 4th Reinforcements, 60th

Battalion on 1 August 1916 aboard HMAT Orsova

(A67). He was wounded in action in France on

2 September 1918. He returned to Australia on

27 July 1919.

however, that most Chinese didn’t seek to join settler friendly societies.

They were already closely involved in the regionally based fraternal

organisations or ‘brotherhoods’ that had funded their sojourn to the

goldfields, and were being paid back in the time of the Chinese diggers’

residence here.) By the end of the nineteenth century, things were

markedly different, and decidedly uglier.

A national identity can be built on universal values such as freedom,

egalitarianism and fraternity. It can be celebrated on days that

commemorate moments of extreme valour and sacrifice in the national

story, such as Anzac Day, or on foundational days. Citizenship ceremonies

every year on 26 January illustrate the extent to which national identity

can be open to all who wish to participate in it.

The tragedy of Australia’s first years of Federation was that the universal

values that were being incorporated as central to national character—


freedom, egalitarianism, mateship—were simultaneously declared

off-limits to non-whites. It was decided, largely unanimously, that

a nation of material equality, good wages, freedom and opportunity would

be secured by excluding all non-whites from entering the country. This is

what the Immigration Restriction Act or ‘White Australia Policy’ was legislated

to do in December 1901. While couched in explicitly racial terms, its

underlying logic was economic. And the most progressive, radical, cutting-

edge groups—unions, the Labor Party, Alfred Deakin’s Liberals—were the

most vigorous pursuers of this objective, thinking to safeguard the equality

of opportunity for all and workers’ rights, which were being built in as

cornerstones of the new nation.

In the movement to nationhood and Federation the Australian Natives’

Association (ANA) had been ahead of its time. Here it fell behind.

ANA branch meetings passed multiple anti-Chinese resolutions in the

fifteen years leading up to Federation in order to secure a white Australia.

The ANA also resisted changes in the 1960s and 70s, when successive

Liberal and Labor governments dismantled the policy.

The other race question in Australian history has been Indigenous–settler

relations. After the first, shattering impact of frontier conflict, the

Aborigines, as they were known, became a kind of pauper class in colonial

society, similar in some ways to the destitute and impoverished class that

had been left behind in Britain. The major difference was that they

weren’t helpless or dependent on private or public charity. Instead, they

adapted to live a semi-independent existence on the margins of settler

society. Largely left to their own devices, living in makeshift shacks and

shelters at the edge of town, they provided for themselves through casual

work and labour, and freely hunted kangaroos and rabbits in the bush.


Page 1 of a leaflet produced by the Commonwealth

of Australia relating to proposed constitution

alterations that would give Aborigines complete

recognition as Australian citizens. These

alterations were voted on in the 1967 referendum,

with 90 percent of the population voting ‘Yes’.

Things started to worsen for Indigenous people later in the nineteenth

century as the state became larger, more powerful and intrusive, and began

to take an ominous interest in their lives. They were now forced to move

onto special reserves apart from the rest of the population, and had special

Protection Boards put in place to monitor and control their movements and

behaviour. By the early twentieth century they were still devoid of the basic

rights of citizenship that ordinary men and women had acquired.

Only from the 1950s did the ANA work towards improving the conditions

and welfare of the Indigenous people, highlighting and publicising

cases of neglect or mistreatment. There is nothing in the written rules

that specifically excluded Indigenous Australians from ANA membership—

presumably they would have been eligible by the fact they were

native-born—but no documents exist to indicate whether any did

become members.

Unlike the White Australia Policy and migration restriction, this stain

on the national conscience wasn’t resolved in the 1960s and 70s. The 1960s

did see the achievement of the 1967 referendum that gave the Aborigines

complete recognition as Australian citizens, with 90 percent of the

population voting ‘Yes’, by far the greatest majority for any referendum

in Australian history. The ANA heralded the referendum result for

recognition: ‘The people could no longer suffer the stigma of racial

discrimination in the clause which excluded the aborigine from the rights

and status of full citizenship of their native country.’

The 1970s saw the beginning of the land rights movement. Yet rates

of Indigenous incarceration, drug and alcohol abuse, extreme levels of

sexual and physical violence all point to the systemic breakdown of

community life across Indigenous Australia. The relations between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia remain one of the fundamental

challenges of the national community.

From closed toopen Australia

68 From closed to open Australia


Australia proved itself a worthy participant on

the global stage, yet also suffered the greatest social

and political fractures in its history

The Great War and afterAustralia achieved nationhood in 1901, becoming one of the first and

only nations to achieve national status without the violence of revolution

or civil war. In the colonial era troops had been sent off to fight overseas:

New South Wales sent a contingent to assist the British in Sudan in 1885.

In 1899 six of the Australian colonies sent men to fight in the Boer War

in South Africa. From 1901 these soldiers became the responsibility of

the Commonwealth.

The definitive shedding of blood for nation came a bit over a decade later,

in the Great War (or ‘First World War’). Australia proved itself a worthy

participant on the global stage, yet also suffered the greatest social and

political fractures in its history. The crises of the war years were multiple.

On one level were the wounds and death, casualties and damage.

On another was a tearing apart of the consensus that had sustained the

shared social values of the nation.

Throughout, the contribution of friendly societies was substantial.

On war’s declaration Manchester Unity immediately established a Patriotic

Fund to cover the dues of all members of the order on active service

overseas, as did other friendly societies. Quarterly levies were placed on

those not serving overseas to cover this and also sick pay to ill or wounded

soldiers overseas, with the state governments reimbursing the societies.

In London, an ANA branch was formed for both men and women,

catering for the recreation of soldiers on leave or convalescing, as well as

celebrating events such the 1918 Australia Day ‘Corroboree’ held in the

Connaught Rooms—with provision for retreat to the air raid shelter should

German Zeppelin airships threaten the United Kingdom capital.

The ANA celebrated Australia Day far and wide.

During WW1, a London branch was formed to

assist members serving overseas. Pictured is a

poster for the 1918 Australia Day ‘Corroboree’,

which had provision for retreat to an air raid shelter

should German Zeppelins threaten London.

Opposite page: Embarkation of troops in

Port Melbourne, 1914, heading to their fates

in the ‘Great War’.

Preceeding page: ‘The Bridge in-curve’, 1930,

by Grace Cossington Smith, 1892-1984.


After the heroics of Gallipoli, the ANA lost no time pressuring the

education departments and various authorities to ensure that every

25 April be properly commemorated. From its first anniversary in 1916,

Anzac Day joined the ANA weekend of Australia Day as a national day.

Many breadwinners were killed in action, throwing thousands of families

into the grief of emotional loss and financial straits. The government

provided a large degree of financial assistance to these families,

and continued doing so after the war. Families with friendly society

membership had additional support. They had the Widow and Orphans’

Fund that societies had always maintained as one of their central

activities. Members fighing overseas knew that, during their service,

their membership fees were covered by fellow lodge members who

remained at home.

All of which made for material security and assistance. Beyond that,

soldiers, servicemen and women and their families also drew on a large

degree of community support and solidarity from these lodges and

societies. Although hard to quantify, this was a crucially positive

contribution in the war years, whose privations and difficulties were

deeper and societal, extending beyond emotional trauma, physical death

and economic hardship. The consensus and solidarity that had flourished

for most of the colonial era and reaffirmed in the national ideals of

shared citizenship after Federation had begun to splinter and fragment.

The shared sense of ‘us-ness’, of common identity that any nation

requires to hold itself together, was disintegrating.

In Dublin in April 1916 a short-lived Easter Uprising against British rule

occurred. While not widely supported, it was put down with such brutal

severity by the English authorities that a civil war to separate from the

United Kingdom ensued. On the other side of the world, the effect in

Australia was almost instantaneous. Irish Australians who had joined1919

Annie Margaret Wheeler (1867–1950)

was a nurse and soldiers’ welfare

worker during WWI in London.

Originally from Dingo, in Queensland,

she joined the London Branch of the ANA

and soon became known as the “Mother

of Queenslanders”—ensuring care

packages from home weren’t delayed,

supplementing restricted allowances and

advancing funds to soldiers on furlough.

By 1918, she had helped over 2,300 men.

She was given a hero’s welcome when

she returned to Rockhampton in 1919.


the war with as much enthusiasm as any other group in 1914 and during

the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 were now in a quandary—should they

continue to support and fight for the British Empire? Australia’s security,

trade and cultural ties might require it, but Ireland was in open conflict

with the same Empire.

The divisions that had been largely overcome in nineteenth-century

colonial life reemerged with increased violence. Melbourne Archbishop

Daniel Mannix and others vocally opposed full conscription of the

population for war. The Labor Party had a large component of

parliamentarians of Irish extraction. After its Welsh-born leader, Billy

Hughes, called a referendum on conscription the party split into largely

Irish and non-Irish segments.

Simultaneously, the labour movement became increasingly hostile to the

war. In 1917, a General Strike occurred that paralysed large parts of the

nation’s daily economic life. It was the most prolonged and divisive strike

since the Great Strikes of the early 1890s.

Friendly societies were not immune to these fractures, their appeal

founded, as it were, on cross-sectoral openness throughout Australian

society and maintained in part by a refusal to enter divisive political or

sectarian questions. But during the first total war in human history this

cross-sectoral openness became difficult, if not impossible, to sustain.

Divisions immediately became apparent in the ANA, which had

committed itself to ‘national questions’ (such as Federation) for decades.

At the annual Victorian ANA conference in Warragul in March 1916,

the board of directors proposed a resolution that the Association urge the

federal government to enforce conscription. This was countered by a

proposed amendment that ‘a compulsory levy on wealth as well as on life’

should also be established.

But during the first total war in human history this cross-sectoral

openness became difficult, if not impossible, to sustain


Debate ensued, which easily met the description of ‘lengthy and animated’.

One speaker declared that he ‘could not see if the poor man was called

upon to do military duties, why the rich man’s money should be exempted’,

expressing the opposition rising among trade unions. Another countered

with an appeal for the principle of ‘all for one and one for all’ to apply to

the burden of fighting: if the nation was fighting for its life then the duty

of universal citizenship required universal involvement. Eventually the

amendment was lost and the original proposal carried. A month later in

Newcastle, the New South Wales division agreed to support conscription.

The ANA had come out clearly and decisively in what would become the

most divisive issue of the First World War.

Friendly societies versus the doctorsFriendly societies in this period were also fighting another war, one that

went to the heart of their central purpose. Their war was with an assertive

union of doctors, and the central purpose was the provision of medical

care at a reasonable rate for ordinary people.

Doctors had never liked the dominance of friendly society medical

provision in Australia and its strong orientation towards patient-centric

medical care. This was caused in the main by the traditional tug of war

between the sellers and purchasers of expertise in an open market.

Outside of free competition, the bulk of ordinary people don’t normally

have an organised way of ensuring they get the best and most reasonable

price for an essential service. This is what friendly societies offered for

people who didn’t enjoy great wealth—a vehicle in which they could band

together to bargain for reasonable medical care. But from the 1890s on,

doctors organised themselves as well, into the Australian branch of the

British Medical Association (BMA). Behaving essentially like a union,

the BMA withheld doctors’ services from friendly societies until new

contracts and agreements were made. The scene was set for a battle royale,

which took decades to play out.1907

The Kelleher family are an example

of the manner in which generations

of children followed in their parents’

footsteps. Pictured includes James

D Kelleher (seated right) who joined

in 1907. Bryan (standing in the middle)

joined in 1940 and was a passionate

advocate of Australian history and

literature. For many years he took on

the publication of the ANA’s National

Questions. His daughter Rosemary

(not pictured) continues the family

legacy, currently as Secretary of the

ANA Fraternal Association.


Since colonial times, the bulk of the population derived medical care

through friendly societies, which had individual doctors contracted

to work at a flat quarterly rate for their services, including not just

general practice but midwifery and home visits. For doctors in a newly

settled country this had the advantage of a guaranteed customer base in

new areas. Doctors would often hold off setting up practice in a country

town or new suburb until a friendly society was established there first.

For young doctors just starting out, working on a friendly society contract

was the best and quickest way of getting experience and establishing

a reputation.

Members of Australian friendly societies didn’t put up with substandard

treatment. Doctors coming from Britain, used to treating a section of the

community (the working poor) under friendly society contracts, were

amazed to find that friendly society customers in Australia were outraged

if they received anything less than the best service. If lodge members,

usually turning up for treatment in their working clothes, were directed to

separate a waiting room to save the finer feelings of the more ‘respectable’

customers, a summons for the GP to explain himself to the next branch

meeting would quickly ensue. For the British doctors, this was Australian

workers displaying what one described as their typical ‘foolish pride’.

For Australian lodge members, however, it was their basic and irreducible

right to be treated as well as the next person, regardless of income.

Ultimately though, the cause of the great conflict between doctors and

friendly societies was not the uppity expectation of members. It was

the question of income—the fact that some lodge members made too much

of it, to still expect to be treated by good doctors for the basic discount

rate. Essentially, doctors wanted friendly society membership to be

means-tested, whereas friendly societies were absolutely committed to

the principle of all members being equal and treated the same, regardless

of background or wealth.

... friendly societies were absolutely committed to the principle

of all within the lodges being equal and treated the same,

regardless of background or wealth


In Australia, friendly societies had been open to everyone, and not

limited to the upwardly aspiring sections of the respectable working class.

Although workers and tradesmen still contributed the majority of

members, men of other occupations considered it no stigma to join as

well. As time went on, workers and tradesmen who were successful and

‘came up in the world’ didn’t do as they would have done in Britain—

drop all association with their blue-collar roots. They continued to use the

local mechanics institute library, and to participate in the weekly friendly

society meetings. Their own sons, now brought up in solidly middle-class

surroundings, were also initiated into membership as soon as they came

of age. All of which meant that many were getting healthcare benefits by

the end of the nineteenth century whom the doctors didn’t think should.

The first confrontation took place in the 1890s, when the BMA tried to

impose means-tested restriction on who could receive their services.

They attempted to refuse treatment of lodges who didn’t agree—in effect,

a ‘strike’ by doctors.

The ‘doctors’ strike’, occurring in the same decades of the great strikes

of dock workers, shearers and miners, was also broken, as the BMA didn’t

yet compel full obedience in its rank-and-file membership. At this time,

an estimated one-third of all doctors in Australia were involved in lodge

medical practice, a significant proportion of whom found the benefits

of such involvement outweighed the problems. Therefore there were

always enough GPs who had no interest in toeing the BMA line to make

the industry-wide ban unsustainable. Enough doctors benefitted from

friendly society contracts to continue working with them.

By the early 1910s, however, the BMA had a more substantial

membership base. There was discussion of the government legislating

a national insurance scheme, like the health and unemployment

schemes a radical Liberal government, headed by Herbert Asquith and


A tug-of-war between nurses and voluntary aid

detachments at the 3rd London General Hospital,

Wandsworth, at a sports meeting arranged by the

ANA during WW1. The President of the ANA,

Sir John Patrick McCall, is in the centre.

powered by Lloyd George and a young Winston Churchill, had enacted in

Britain. With the state likely to become a stakeholder in health, the form

of contract it would impose on the medical profession would be modelled

on the friendly society contract. This made it imperative for the Australian

BMA to act—and act they did.

For the BMA, means-testing was a non-negotiable position. When it was

flatly rejected by the lodges in December 1913, BMA doctors resigned from

their friendly society contracts. After much haggling, new model

agreements were established, but the rank and file lodge members voted

100 to 1 against means-testing.

The outbreak of the First World War brought about a temporary truce

between the two groups. Friendly societies raised special levies on

home-front members to pay servicemen’s medical contributions. Between

1914 and 1917, in Victoria alone, friendly societies paid £120,000 to doctors

to keep the soldiers on their lists.

But conflict between the two groups kept recurring. As the nation tore

itself apart domestically over conscription, over Irish Catholic and Labor

dissent, and over the general strike that struck commerce and industry,


the doctors and the friendly societies drew themselves up for their own

confrontation. The BMA had ‘blacklists’ of doctors who defied the

industry-wide embargo and continued treating friendly society patients.

Friendly societies retaliated by organising cross-organisational medical

pools and institutes, contracting doctors to service multiple lodges of

different orders and societies across a suburb.

The BMA declared friendly society medical service a ‘charity arrangement’

only. Exactly the opposite, thundered Samuel Mauger, Chairman of the

Friendly Societies’ Association (FSA), who defined his member

organisations as ‘neither philanthropy nor charity... [They are] a mutual

aid, common service association which arranged with medical men for

attendance on their members on a basis which was fair and just. There

was no sentiment, nor philanthropy, nor charity entering into it.’

Opposition to wage limits for medical services drew the fiercest opposition

from Manchester Unity. For Manchester Unity members and many others,

the principle of democratic equality was at stake. In an egalitarian

fraternity, no distinctions should be made or allowed. All should meet as

equal and be treated alike. This question would resonate nearly a century

later in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the then Labor

government introduced means-testing on the Australian Government

Rebate on private health insurance. There was strong opposition from the

sector along similar lines.

Eventually the Victorian government appointed a judge, Josiah Wasley,

to arbitrate. After carrying out a Royal Commission into the matter, Wasley

announced a compromise that favoured the BMA. He thought the doctors’

claims of 20 shillings for town and 25 shillings for country medical

practice were fair, but recommended that the monies not be paid in full

until the end of the war. On the question of income limit Wasley again

agreed with the doctors—they had a right to refuse to treat wealthy families

It was a comprehensive loss. Medical care was now provider-

oriented, not customer-focused. The united consumers had

been defeated by the doctors’ union


who were members of friendly societies. But he thought that the income

limit the doctors were insisting on was too low. Unless there was a hefty

margin of difference between a man’s income and the basic costs of daily

living, Wasley said, ‘I think he is perfectly justified in joining a Lodge and

enjoying all the benefits that arise from his membership.’

The friendly societies weren’t happy but were willing to accept the

decision, until the BMA added another condition—all medical institutes

that had been opened by the lodges during the dispute must be closed.

The FSA accepted this, but four organisations—Manchester Unity,

Foresters, Hibernians and Rechabites—held out, defiant. With numerous

branch meetings refusing to accept these conditions, the head offices

weren’t going to over-rule. The preeminent importance of Lodge members

governing themselves and making their own decisions to abide had

endured strongly since friendly societies had first proliferated as schools

for democracy in the 1850s and 60s. But the cost of this self-government

principle proved high financially and in membership terms: by 1921 only

Manchester Unity was maintaining a medical pool, and 16 percent of its

members were gone by 1923. The writing was on the wall.

Finally, an income limit of £5 per week was imposed, and the top 10 percent

of friendly society income earners were excluded from the new ‘model

contracts’. The limit was low enough to significantly impinge even on

manual workers—those in the building trade especially began to find

themselves cut off from lodge medical service.

It was a comprehensive loss. Medical care was now provider-oriented,

not customer-focused. The united consumers had been defeated by the

doctors’ union.

One result was that many people now turned to public hospitals rather than

private practitioners for health care. In the ten years from 1920 to 1930,


the percentage of the Victorian population using hospitals as outpatients

leapt from the previously stable 5.9 percent to 9.7 percent. Across Australia,

this level continued to increase during the Great Depression and the

Second World War.

Modern times: friendly societies in search of a new roleThe 1920s brought changes that propelled the world into a recognisably

modern era. Radio, cinema and automobiles all became relatively

common phenomena, and intercontinental airflight was achieved.

The modern era also ushered in a change in social tastes and mores,

which didn’t suit the traditional, small-scale, community focus of friendly

societies. The old appeal of regular contact and shared entertainment

dwindled. Geoffrey Blainey puts it vividly: ‘the enchantments of the one

era had become the tedium of another’.

In previous decades, the regular gatherings of mutual benefit organisations

and the fetes, ‘theatre parties’, musical concerts, sports events, processions

and picnics were highlights that brought the local neighbourhood together.

New entertainments and more rapid, personalised modes of transportation

sounded the death-knell for many of these traditions. The friendly societies

suffered. Initiation nights, regalia and weekly participation ceased to appeal.

The challenge to adapt increased as the state encroached on welfare

provision, which had been the traditional preoccupation of the societies,

for individuals and families after the First World War. The commitment

to returned soldiers and war widows by the state was comprehensive, and

numbers drawing on the age pension continued to rise.

The new dominance of the BMA in curtailing medical service to friendly

societies severely tested a business model that the mutuals had pursued

with such success since the mid-nineteenth century. Membership

numbers tended to either stagnate or regress in the 1920s and 30s.

‘the enchantments of the one era had become

the tedium of another’

From top: An ambulance bay at St Vincent

Hospital, 1920s. During this era, patients

increasingly used public hospitals for outpatient

services in stead of private practitioners.

The building of the Great Ocean Road in Victoria was

one scheme established by governments to provide

very low paid work during the Great Depression.


The Great DepressionThe Great Depression of the 1930s taxed the newly born modern world

to its limits. In Britain and Europe, long-established unemployment

insurance, run by the government, was unable to cope. In Australia both

workers and employers had always strongly resisted unemployment

insurance: employers didn’t much like the idea of being forced to contribute

to a fund (‘another industry tax’), while workers had from colonial days

a long tradition of demanding the government ‘do something’—that is,

provide work, generally in railway construction, in fallow seasons of

underemployment, rather than provide hand-outs.

So the Australian government provided work. Some £2,500,000 was made

available to the states by the federal government to spend on public works

projects. The work was hard manual labour, like building the Great Ocean

Road in Victoria and the Summit Road up Mount Wellington in Hobart.

The money was well under the minimum wage, but was just enough to live

on during the worst years of the Depression.

Many of the newly unemployed were unable to pay lodge dues during the

Depression. At Manchester Unity, numerous grants were made from the

Unity Relief Fund to relieve distress. As in the 1890s depression, sick pay

expenditure greatly increased.

The construction of the Manchester Unity building in Melbourne in

1932 also offered employment for hundreds of hard-up Manchester

Unity members and others. From the initial demolition of the previous

building on 1 January 1932 to when the first tenants arrived later that

same year, the twelve-storey Art Deco marvel provided not only

employment but was one of the most modern buildings in the nation.

The basement restaurant, ground-floor arcade, first-floor shops and the

rooftop cafe managed to defy the pit of economic woe that surrounded

it. Air-conditioning, passenger and goods lifts, rubbish and letter chutes, 1931

Sir Isaac Alfred Isaacs (1855–1948),

member of the Prahran ANA branch,

was a Victorian state politician who

entered the federal parliament in 1901.

He was appointed a High Court Judge

in 1906 and held that office until 1931

when he was appointed Governor

General, the first Australian-born to

hold this office.


and Melbourne’s first escalator were all enclosed in rose-hued terracotta

tiles, glazed to an eggshell finish with a mother-of-pearl tint, and stood

out dramatically in a decade of deprivation and dullness.

Exactly what role the friendly societies could play in this much changed

and changing modern world remained a vexing question. Australia’s aged

pension, unlike those of other countries such as Britain and Germany,

was drawn from consolidated revenue, not insurance contributions.

By the 1930s, the pension was costing almost the entire federal

government’s income tax revenue.

The Second World War and the national welfare fundDuring the Second World War, the state made its most dramatic expansion

yet. In February 1943, Ben Chifley, treasurer of the Curtin Labor

government, announced a new national welfare fund of £30,000,000.

The fund would provide unemployment and sickness benefits, and

eventually, maternity and funeral benefits. There was a sting in the tail

of this new government largesse, however: the fund was to be paid for by

a dramatic expansion of taxation downward on the income scale.

Previously reserved for those in high-earning occupations, income tax

would now be paid by practically all workers for the first time. Much of the

money extracted came back in the form of government benefits—in

unemployment and sickness benefits, and in increased invalid, old age

and widows’ pensions.

Construction of the Manchester Unity Building

in 1932 was the organisation’s response to the need

to create jobs for its members.


In a strange way it was the original unemployment and health

insurance schemes, where users of the benefit contributed the money.

The difference was that it forced payment through new income taxes on

the bulk of working Australians, with the resultant funds being indirectly

fed through to universal welfare schemes. The taxation scheme was

originally brought in to neutralise what Chifley described as the ‘very

serious dangers in the existence of a large amount of excess spending

power in the hands of the public’ during wartime. The scheme had built

on the expanded taxation powers given to the federal government in

1942 by the High Court to create the modern welfare state that would

dominate the second half of the twentieth century.

Such a dramatic expansion of state involvement was only possible in

wartime, and such an extension of taxation over the bulk of ordinary

workers was only possible under a Labor government. Support had to

be mobilised among the organised unions and working classes, and this

could only be done via the union movement’s political wing—the ALP.

It took two of the most seasoned and pragmatic of Labor warriors, in

John Curtin and Ben Chifley, to shift party policy on welfare without

securing party approval, and to muffle potential trade union opposition

in the process. Whereas previously Labor had vehemently opposed any

welfare scheme that didn’t draw entirely from a ‘wealth tax’ only, now

its prime minister and treasurer had shifted it to practically all working

incomes. This was unexpected, to say the least. But it was possible

because of the power, intelligence and authority of the party leaders

in a time of war.


Triumph of the welfare stateThe liberal state, pioneered in Britain, had been derisively dubbed

‘the night-watchman state’ by German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle

in 1862. The name had stuck, becoming almost a point of pride for its

advocates and liberal reformers. The liberal state had stripped down

the old, inefficient state of the 1700s and 1800s, producing a new,

streamlined state administered by public servants selected on merit

rather than privilege, patronage or bribery. It proved far superior to

any other model of governance, and was adopted by the colonies in

nineteenth-century Australia. The principle was not, as the welfare state

designers had envisaged, planning and control of society. Rather it was

freedom for the individual to make his or her own decisions.

In colonial Australia, governments used revenue from land sales to

embark on big infrastructure projects such as railways, roads and

compulsory education. By and large, the same ‘night-watchman state’

model remained until the great crises of the 1890s. From the 1900s the

efficient, meritocratic model began expanding into more areas of people’s

lives. The two principles—freedom and planning—coexisted with each

other, at times mutually accommodating, at other times in conflict.

During the Second World War, the pendulum swung decisively in favour

of the planners.

And so the Curtin government’s national welfare fund was not unique,

but part of a wider, epochal shift taking place across the industrialised

world. Barely two months before Chifley’s announcement, a report to

Britain’s wartime government by Sir William Beveridge laid the

foundation stone for Britain’s welfare state. Advising the nationalisation

of social security and all health services, Social Insurance and Allied Services

became one of the most unexpected bestsellers of the decade.

The two principles—freedom and planning—coexisted with

each other, at times mutually accommodating, at other times

in conflict


The Commonwealth Reconstruction Training

Scheme was another Curtin government welfare

initiative. The Scheme, introduced in 1944,

provided educational and vocational training to

those who had served in Australia’s armed services

during World War II. Pictured here is a 1946 class.

Sixty thousand copies were sold on the first day of release (eventually

reaching 600,000 copies), the report was broadcast in twenty-two

languages by the BBC, and copies distributed to troops and sold in the

United States.

‘A revolutionary moment in the world’s history’, Beveridge wrote, ‘is a time

for revolutions, not patching.’ With war ‘abolishing landmarks of every

kind’ there was now the chance for real, enduring social change ‘for the

purpose of victory is to live in a better world than the old world’. Beveridge

(and soon enough, a galaxy of others) advocated that the welfare state

would bring this about. In Britain, the report paved the way for Winston

Churchill’s introduction of free education for all students up to fifteen years

of age in 1944, and initiatives of the post-war Clement Atlee-led Labour

government, such as national life insurance in 1946, and a nationalised

health service in 1948.

By the time of Beveridge’s report, most people’s childhood and adult lives

had been shaped by three decades of near continuous political crises,

economic collapse, tumult and war. If ever the sentiment that the old way

of doing things was fundamentally broken and needed radically fixing,


it was now. Simultaneously, the development of modern forms of

bureaucracy, planning and administration made vast-scale state

expansion feasible.

Many of the techniques and procedures of the welfare state were originally

trialled and developed in government planning departments in the

‘social laboratory’ of the Second World War. Fighting modern war meant

higher levels of state organisation of economy and society than previously

witnessed in the democratic west. The development of the industrial

capacity to wage war touched practically every facet of daily life. This,

coupled with the traumatic experiences of the previous three decades

(two global wars and a Great Depression), meant that the ideal of

controlling the social and economic environment as much as possible for

the entire duration of individuals’ lives became not only conceivable but

in many ways desirable.

In subsequent decades, the welfare state would replace the smaller, liberal

state in which friendly societies had been born and flourished. A taxpayer-

funded welfare state, taking responsibility to provide a full employment

economy became the definition of progressive thinking and planning.

The 1945 United Nations’ founding charter stated that all governments

should strive to produce ‘higher standards of living, full employment, and

conditions of [economic and social progress]’. The 1946 Employment Act in

the United States made the executive branch of government responsible

for the general life of the economy, above and beyond the previously limited

duties of controlling money and trade. What had been the aspiration of

people to provide for themselves now became the job of government.

The shift in eras reached across the political divide. In Britain

Winston Churchill’s Conservative government’s 1942 budget and

subsequent education measures advocated a high-intervention

approach. Robert Menzies, founder of the Australian Liberal Party, 1960

The South Preston ANA Branch was one

of many local organisations to support

the construction of the Preston and

Northcote Community Hospital. ANA

Secretary, A E Watkins, was present at the

opening of the 300-bed hospital on 3 July.

His daughter, Betty Trewin, turned

90 in 2014 and is one of the many

thousands of Australian Unity members

who have been with the organisation for

their entire lives. This includes 10,000

people who have been members for more

than 50 years.


freely conceded in his 1942 ‘forgotten people’ radio broadcasts that after

the war ‘the functions of the State will be much more than merely

keeping the ring within which the competitors will fight. Our social and

industrial obligations will be increased. There will be more law, not less;

more control, not less’.

The wheel had turned. In the 1860s and 70s, the preoccupation for the

majority had been freedom to flourish and organise on one’s own or

in voluntary partnership with others. Workers and the working classes in

Britain and Australia were aggressively hostile to state assistance, seeing

the intrusion of state assistance as essentially demeaning. The ideal above

all was ‘independence’. Hence the beauty, for workers, of mutual aid

organisations founded on the belief that—in words describing the Ancient

Order of Foresters’ Coat of Arms—‘a Society of Men... when gathered

together can collectively aid the weak and distressed and fight against

the evils which cause that distress’. High friendly society membership

numbers mirrored high trade union membership, with neither expecting

nor desiring great state involvement.

But the ideal on which friendly societies had built and sustained

themselves—of providing for and helping each other mutually and

refusing the charity of others or the largesse of government—was

dealt a severe blow.

Adapting to the post-war boomRobert Menzies assumed power at the end of 1949 as the head of the

Liberal and Country Party coalition government, and remained in office

until 1966. Over this period Menzies—pro-market, pro-entrepreneurship,

raised on the creed of hard work, thrift and stout self-reliance—refused

to countenance the nationalisation of banking or social welfare (such

as health and pharmaceuticals), as Labor had attempted in Britain and

Australia in the post-war period. But nor did he abandon the new

A social movement of self-organising mutual benefit societies

committed to independence, to providing for oneself and each

other, was becoming another arm of state welfare


methods of Keynesian economic management and planning that

Chifley had so substantially created as head of the Department of Post-

War Reconstruction and as prime minister.

In 1952, the Menzies government introduced the National Health Insurance

Scheme, which provided health rebates to the majority of Australians.

To gain the commonwealth subsidy, though, people had to join a volunteer

society. Friendly societies, finding their own health schemes being replaced

by government legislation, opted to become agents of the state scheme

instead. New members could sign up to be friendly society members purely

in order to access the government health benefits. These ‘honorary

members’ forewent traditional forms of initiation and society participation,

as well as the society’s own sickness and funeral benefits, and subscribed

purely for the medical and hospital benefits of the welfare state. Societies

such as Manchester Unity and the ANA centralised their business and

organisational structures as a consequence, taking on more office staff to

process the administration of the rebate in head offices. Branch autonomy

declined and by the 1960s, honorary members outnumbered those joining

or remaining as active society members.

The irony is clear: a social movement of self-organising mutual benefit

societies committed to independence, to providing for oneself and each

other, was becoming another arm of state welfare. It would be a

lamentable way to end the story of friendly societies in Australia.

But this is not how things ended. One of the greatest transformations of

mutual benefit organisations was about to begin. In 1955 the Friendly

Societies Acts were amended to allow these organisations to significantly

widen their range of activities. A tidal shift, from traditional friendly

society social welfare and benefits to new areas of home-building and

life insurance, in the midst of new fields already taken up by established

contenders, was soon under way. The post-war boom of new suburbs,


new immigrants and new prosperity was opening up opportunities for

vigorous growth that the major friendly societies—ANA, IOOF, Manchester

Unity—were determined to make the most of. The societies were actively

involved in these expanding communities at the local level, working for

improvements to public transport, street lighting and new hospitals.

War’s end saw a population boom in Australia, with immigrants from

Europe and Britain, as well as returned soldiers and their wives, all

starting new families, building new houses and making new lives.

General Motors Holden began manufacturing cars locally, selling them

at a price affordable enough for mass car ownership to become a reality.

Whitegoods—washing machines, refrigerators, ovens—became as

ubiquitous in homes as lawnmowers were outside. Throughout the

post-war era there was a determination that the hardships of the previous

half-century—depressions, wars, social division and class antagonism—

would not be repeated, that the state of abundance would become the

norm rather than the exception.

Mr Harold Bettle drives the first production Holden

off the assembly line in Fishermans Bend, heralding

a new age of mass car ownership. From The Age,

November 1948.


The Menzies government largely abandoned Labor’s previous

preoccupation with public housing, and instead began encouraging

private home purchasing. The success was phenomenal. Home ownership

among the Australian population reached an astonishing 70 percent

by 1961. Already in 1949 Manchester Unity had established a savings and

loans society for active members to take out loans of up to £500 for

purchasing furniture or to renovate their homes, help their businesses

or pay off a second mortgage. In 1946 the Foresters began a Co-operative

Housing Society—in effect a terminating building society for members—

which was successful enough to lead to further AOF cooperative housing

societies in the 1960s and 70s.

Convalescent homes and retirement villages also began to be established.

In 1964 the ANA and Manchester Unity both set up permanent building

societies. During the early 1970s, the BP and BHP employee credit

cooperatives were formed,the key antecedents of Big Sky Building Society,

joining a rise in employment-based institutions dedicated to serving the

lending and saving needs of small communities of people. These

cooperatives were often established in remote locations that were of little

interest to the larger financial institutions—such as the mining sites of

Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia.

Now the general public were able to apply for finance under mortgage

conditions at market rates. The new era of prosperity in Australia during

these years insisted on a nimbleness and change no less than in times of

hardship, deprivation and social turmoil. By revolutionising the role they

played in Australia’s economic and social life, friendly societies proved

themselves adept where many other traditional organisations and cultural

practices fell.


The end of certaintyThe post-war boom made for widely shared prosperity: income inequality,

already fairly low in Australia, declined still further in the 1950s and 60s.

This made for a leisure-rich nation as well—earning Australia the

moniker ‘Land of the Long Weekend’. Meanwhile the government took

on a monopoly of providing social welfare, and became more and more

dominant in the friendly societies’ traditional area of health, especially

after Gough Whitlam’s Labor government established universal healthcare

in Medibank (renamed Medicare in 1984).

But while the welfare state seemed triumphant, another movement

had begun that would dismantle the inward-looking economic world.

Increased inflows of capital and labour had fuelled growth after the

Second World War, with capital invested by wartime allies USA and

Britain, and labour provided by the influx of immigrants from Europe,

in one of the most successful experiments in large-scale immigration in

twentieth-century history. Immigrants from Italy, Greece, Germany,

Holland, Britain and the Baltic states worked at award wages in factories

largely grown from overseas investment. Australia, which had in many

ways socially and economically ‘decoupled’ from global trade and

human exchanges since the great crash and subsequent depression of

the 1890s, began to redirect its economy outwards. More and more,

the openness of economic activity began to resemble the long boom

decades of the nineteenth century.

A trade treaty with Japan in 1957 converted what had been a pitiless

wartime enemy fifteen years before into one of Australia’s most valued

trading partners. Within a decade, Japan had passed Britain as our

greatest export market.

The post-war experience of booming economy and steadily

increasing tax revenues for the state was broken

1970s

Membership of health funds declined

dramatically after the Whitlam

government introduced universal

healthcare. In 1976 alone Manchester

Unity’s member numbers plunged

16 percent. The ANA introduced a $6

a week product that was welcomed with

queues of customers lining Elizabeth

Street, but was later credited with

causing the society financial stress.


Appositely, the White Australia Policy was finally dismantled in the 1970s,

and a minerals export ban was revoked. Extremely high tariff barriers,

first erected at Federation to protect local industries but which made

prices for ordinary consumers extremely high, began to seem out of place

in a world where economic barriers were starting to become more porous.

In 1973, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam implemented a 25 percent tariff

cut. Simultaneously, the Tariff Board, originally set up to promote the

vested interests of those who benefited from high tariffs, came under the

leadership of Alf Rattigan, a public servant and policymaker. Rattigan

was merciless in using the Board to publicise the exact costs to everyday

citizens and consumers of maintaining highly protected industries, and

debate grew louder. (Fittingly, Rattigan’s Tariff Board has today evolved

into the Productivity Commission.)

Simultaneously, the years of expansive prosperity that had characterised

the 1950s and 60s were at an end. Across the western world, the high tax,

high welfare-state expansion and social democracies began to grind

slower. The Arab–Israeli conflict of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 led to

international oil embargoes, with oil prices quadrupling by the end of the

year. ‘Oil shock’ effects were felt across the industrialised world. A new

phenomenon of low or non-existent economic growth and skyrocketing

inflation was christened ‘stagflation’, and unemployment swept from its

usual 2 to 3 percent range in the 1960s up towards double digits in Europe,

Britain, America and Australia. The post-war experience of booming

economy and steadily increasing tax revenues for the state was broken.

The 1980s and 90s proved the solution. Under the reformist Labor

governments of Prime Ministers Bob Hawke (1983–91) and Paul Keating

(1991–96) the economy was opened up more completely than at any time

since Federation. The Australian dollar was floated on the global market,


tariffs on imports further reduced, centralised wage-fixing was replaced

by enterprise bargaining, and banking and financial sectors were opened

up to international competition. The majority of these measures had the

support of John Howard and other leaders of the Liberal opposition.

When Howard formed government in 1996, industrial relations were

further reformed, and a consumption tax in the form of a Goods and

Services Tax was introduced in the biggest change to revenue collection

since Ben Chifley’s expansion of income tax in 1943.

A new industry—the service sector— emerged to become one of the

dominant employment and wealth creators in the Australian economy.

Local services catering to the needs of domestic customers expanded

simultaneously alongside export sectors such as financial services,

tourism and tertiary education.

A revolution in technology and communications took place. The 1990s

saw the tentative emergence of the internet and mobile-phone technology.

As with all revolutions, these small beginnings expanded dramatically

until daily life was transformed. In the 2000s, social media—which grew

out of online technology and the emergence of affordable, portable mobile

devices—dramatically altered workplaces and homes.

The workplace began to fragment in ways not previously conceivable.

Union membership began a dramatic decline, a phenomenon that shows

no signs of slowing to the present, as movement between occupations and

careers became more and more the norm. The era, dubbed ‘the end of

certainty’ in 1992 by political commentator Paul Kelly, continued to force

change and adjustment across almost every level of economic, social,

domestic and personal life.

As with all revolutions, these small beginnings expanded

dramatically until daily life was transformed

1980s

Friendly Society bonds were an important

investment product that attracted

thousands of new members in the 1980s

due to the bonds’ tax-free nature (subject

to conditions). The growth was shortlived

because the laws were soon amended;

however the run off was gradual as most

of the bonds had nominal ten year

maturities. The number of friendly

societies affiliated to the industry body,

the Australian Friendly Societies

Association, peaked in 1990 at 72,

with a combined membership of around

1.5 million people. Gross assets of

these societies peaked in 1994 at over

$10 billion. Bonds and investment trusts

remain a core part of Australian Unity’s

product offerings today.


By the late twentieth century, the world was becoming more open and

connected, but less stable. Australia had largely abandoned its ‘Fortress

Australia’ mentality of economic barriers and racial restrictions to

immigrants, and was now operating in a world of free-flowing capital

where technological and industrial changes were accelerating.

In September 1993, the members of both Manchester Unity and the

ANA in Victoria voted to merge the two organisations. It was hoped a larger

organisation would continue to build relevance in the community and

forge a stronger future. Grand United, Lifeplan and Big Sky would join

Australian Unity in 2005, 2009 and 2012 respectively as Australian Unity

continued to widen its geographical, community and business footprint.

‘The Essentials Book’

In 1990, Manchester Unity produced a funny and

engaging health education book for young

adults—‘all that stuff you can’t ask your folks about

because they’d freak’. This book included frank

discussions of sexual health and drug information

and became a useful resource for teachers in

secondary schools. The 100,000 copies produced all

disappeared within days.

Towards tomorrow

96 Towards tomorrow

The new millennium: challenge and opportunitySince the beginning of the twenty-first century, the degree of radical

change in daily life can be described as a ‘Great Disruption’. While the

changes may not be revolutionary in the true sense of the word, the

changes have nevertheless been dramatic and disjunctive. The revolution

in communications has already extended into industries such as the

media, mail and music businesses, and will doubtless reach still further

in coming years. Ever larger components of people’s daily lives, identity

and wellbeing will be transacted in the digital realm. The present

generation of Australians are the first ‘digital natives’—in some senses

pioneers—of a new world, akin to the gold-rush generation that provided

the ground on which Australia’s friendly society culture took root and

thrived a century and a half ago.

An example of oncoming revolutionary shifts can be seen in education.

In tertiary education there is now the prospect of nano-degrees, that is,

education as a decadal, ongoing, work-specific process, where teaching

is divided into small modules of particular skills. Rather than a single

certificate or degree, which incurs an enormous education debt,

qualification acquisition is likely to become continuous. Here it is not

banks but universities and technical collages that risk being cut out of

the game.

Elsewhere, digital wallet technology and the emergence of peer-to-peer

lending are likely to challenge what financial journalist and business

commentator Alan Kohler describes as ‘the two core pillars of banking—

transactions and lending’.

Obviously disruption entails risk, especially to industries, producers or

vested interests that are dependent on maintaining the status quo. Yet for

consumers, customers and citizens, the opportunities that arise from

these tectonic shifts may bring immense and direct benefit. As members2014

Nearly five decades after the Referendum

that amended the Constitution so that

Indigenous people were included in

the census, a new campaign,‘Recognise’,

proposes constitutional amendments

to formally recognise Indigenous

Australians as the country’s first people.

Recognise—a proposal supported by

Australian Unity—is calling on politicians

to put forward a referendum to the

people in 2017.

‘For me Indigenous recognition won’t

be changing our Constitution so much

as completing it. If we had known in 1901

what we know now, if our hearts had

been as big then as now, we would have

acknowledged Indigenous people in the

Constitution back then.’ – Prime Minister

Tony Abbott, Australia Day 2014.


of mutual benefit organisations in the nineteenth century discovered,

groups of individuals banding together for their own mutual benefit

without relying on outsider interests or larger stakeholders, make a very

potent economic force indeed.

Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argues that the freedom

to choose for oneself how to arrange one’s life is one of the constitutive

aspects of a truly free life, of a life worth valuing. From online music

downloads and search giants to digital wallets, peer-to-peer lending and

nano-degrees, all of these dramatic changes herald an increased freedom

for the consumer. Sen writes that ‘people have the right to undertake

transactions and exchange. Even if such rights are not accepted as being

inviolable—and entirely independent of their consequences—it can still be

argued that there is some social loss involved in denying people the right

to interact economically with each other’.

Then there are the completely new sources of wealth creation that have not

yet been imagined. Demographer and social commentator Bernard Salt,

in his keynote address to the Telstra Australian Business Awards in August

2014, made a startling proposal that ‘much of our future prosperity will be

driven by businesses yet to be conceived, rather than by the expansion of

established businesses’, and that it will spring from disruptive thinking.

Banding together: Australian Unity’s activities on

Australia Day 2014 brought together the faces of

the community in an original piece of street art in

the cities of Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney.

Preceeding page: ‘Onkaparinga Hill, Blue Wren

& Fox, SA’, 1999, by John Olsen, 1928–

98 Towards tomorrow

He cites Mark Zuckerburg as a prime example: a student connects new

technology with the essential human desire to communicate and compare,

to be part of ‘social tribes’. Voilà, Facebook.

Disruptive thinking is no new tool of the capitalist marketplace: it is at

the core of entrepreneurialism and economic growth. Changing realities

in the market call forth responses from those who can see or invent

unexpected ways of making profit from meeting these new needs. These

responses themselves create new realities, which call forth still further

waves of ingenuity. The fresh departure here, however, is the degree of

prosperity Generation Y has grown up with, in a time of extreme

technological change. This has encouraged greater adventurousness,

married to a significantly more open economic world than their baby-

boomer parents knew.

More than any generation born before them in the twentieth century,

the baby-boomers embraced social change—in fashion, music, civic and

political dissent, and lifestyle. Less remarked is the extent to which they

left unquestioned the highly regulated and constrained economic world

they grew up in: the enclosed and protected welfare state of a post-war

world. Accustomed to steady rates of prosperity, the baby-boomers have

proved to be socially libertarian while being economically cushioned.

In contrast, Generation Y, who began to reach maturity at the end of the

millennium, have grown up in a world of similar prosperity but looser

structures. Within a social and digital context, Generation Y appears to

be unleashing newly emerging cultures of entrepreneurialism and new

patterns of growth.

If Generation Y indeed proves to be a driver of massive economic change,

it would be for the second time in Australian history. For, as we’ve already

seen, the long boom decades of the nineteenth century—from the gold

rush to the late 1880s—were the product of the most highly2012

Associate Professor Caroline Marshall

was the 2012 recipient of the Australian

Unity Heritage Fellowship Grant for

her study on antibiotic prescription

in residential aged care facilities. The

Fellowship Grant continues a tradition

that began in 1872 with the Greeves

Scholarship, initiated by Dr Augustus

Greeves. The original scholarship was

‘for sons of benefit members to attend

the University of Melbourne’.

Disruptive thinking is no new tool of the capitalist marketplace:

it is at the core of entrepreneurialism and economic growth


entrepreneurial generation in the nation’s history. The ethos of self-

reliance that was born in that frontier society recurs and resonates with

both the entrepreneurs and battlers of today.

The rapid changes to economic and social life that are in part related

to the Great Disruption are creating an abundance of new opportunities

and creative change. Yet these changes have created new stresses for

Australian households.

Traditionally—that is, since the 1940s—these stresses could be expected

to be resolved by the welfare state. But it is becoming increasingly

clear that, left to its own devices, the welfare state is unable to cope

with these challenges, let alone the challenges to be expected from

approaching decades.

The proportion of the population over 65 is expected to increase from

10 percent to one quarter of the population by 2050. This means that

the share of federal government spending on health and age-related

pensions will double to about 50 percent of revenue, according to some

government projections. An explosion of debt and declining productivity

threatens. Australian life—its widespread freedom and pronounced

degree of equality and prosperity—will come under pressure. The social

infrastructure challenge to develop mechanisms, techniques and

intelligent consensus to deal with the problems of a rapidly ageing

demographic—including the rise of chronic disease and insufficient

retirement savings for the bulk of the population—remains.

The question here is not whether to abolish state welfare. Those who

desire that are currently an exceedingly small, and perhaps not very

realistic, minority. State welfare isn’t going anywhere, entwined as it

is with the modern state, and has remained roughly the same since the

1970s, at just under 40 percent of national output. More the question

is how to reshape to some degree and provide complements for,

100 Towards tomorrow

state welfare for families and households across the whole society.

As in the 1930s, the costs of essential infrastructure, now including a large

amount of social infrastructure, threatens to swallow up an extraordinarily

large proportion of taxation revenue.

In 1943, the tax base was spread radically downwards to cover, practically

all income earners. The modern welfare state was the result. The chances of

another round of such dramatic tax expansion are vanishingly small. This

solution to the problem of rising costs would almost certainly destroy the

economic dynamism essential to producing as well as spreading prosperity.

Mutual enterprise: a renewed local and global contribution?Without widespread public awareness, cooperatives and mutuals have

continued to play a significant role in the open marketplace. A striking fact

is that 13 million Australians belong to more than 1,700 cooperatives and

mutuals across the country. An even more astonishing fact is that only

16 percent of people realise that they belong—clear evidence that mutuals

gain members and customers not only through the appeal of their social

values, but through the value of the products and services they create.

Mutual companies established by and for their members, conducted on

commercially minded principles, have remained enduring agents of

economic activity: the turnover of the top 100 cooperatives and mutuals

in Australia is $17 billion.

This dynamism applies globally as well, with commercial and social value

being co-created for a membership of around one billion people worldwide.

An allowance for an estimate of multiple memberships reduces this to

around 650 million—still some 15 percent of the world’s adult population.

Over a million enterprises, employing 100 million people, operate as

mutuals, throughout insurance, agriculture and food industries, wholesale

and retail, banking, finance as well as health and social welfare.

Mutual companies established by and for their members,

conducted on commercially minded principles, have remained

enduring agents of economic activity


But does this mean mutuals will remain a robust part of the economic

landscape? Since the most recent global economic crisis, the 2007–08

collapse of some global banks and insurance companies, that landscape

has once again shifted dramatically. Business models as well as product

and service markets are both generating and facing unprecedented levels

of disruption. In the dynamic and shifting challenges of the twenty-first

century, the role of mutuals could reemerge and become prominent again

as producers and purveyors of certain types of services and of social value.

In the main, as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mutuals

remain focused on the philosophy of individuals supporting each other in

building self-reliance. With structures that allow them to focus on the long

term, mutuals can plan for likely social, economic and demographic shifts

not just years, but decades, ahead. But, as in all areas of business, day to

day performance in actually providing valued services will be key.

From small roots in 1840, Australian Unity has grown into one of the

largest mutual companies in Australia, with 300,000 members, more than

three quarters of a million customers and more than 2,000 staff across

Australia. But, like all other companies across the globe, it must continue

to earn its right to compete.

The social landscape is no less demanding of innovative solutions in 2015

than it was in 1840. The continued development of ‘social infrastructure’

remains one of the pressing problems of our times. Social infrastructure

includes hard assets as well as human, technological and physical

services needed to respond to demographic change population. By the

middle of the century, the proportion of Australians over the age of 65

will be a quarter of the population, a trend variously shared across the

industrialised world. If current trends continue, the majority of them will

rely, at least in part, on the aged pension. At the same time, the percentage

of the population of working age will be shrinking in comparison.


Further work is also needed to improve the democratic process,

to reengage politicians and people with policy rather than politics,

and to strive for environmental sustainability. The continued growth and

spread of economic and social wellbeing in the twenty-first century calls

for a renewed focus on the kind of ‘inclusive capitalism’ that mutuals

operating in commercial environments according to commercial logic

can deliver.

The history of friendly societies in Australia, especially those of Australian

Unity’s core antecedents, shows that organisations run by and for the

people are indeed able to provide for their needs efficiently, intelligently

and well.

The 161-bed Rathdowne Place aged care facility

opened in Melbourne in 2014, bringing aged care

into the heart of urban Melbourne. The $180 million

Wellbeing precinct will include independent living

units, a day respite centre and other community

facilities, and is structured around the principle of

resident-directed care.


Household stress and golden triangles—an index to wellbeingA life worth living comes from multiple sources: time as well as money,

relationships with people, and meaningful activity as well as professional

achievement. It is individual, familial and societal. Money, clearly, is not

everything. Wealth on its own ‘is evidently not the good we are seeking’

says Aristotle at the beginning of his Nichomachean Ethics, ‘for it is merely

useful and for the sake of something else’. The something else Aristotle

described as ‘flourishing’ and ‘capacity’.

Economist Amartya Sen suggests the opportunities people have for good

living involve concentrating ‘on the way human life goes (perhaps even

the choices one has) and not just on the resources or income that a person

commands’. For a mutual benefit organisation such as Australian Unity,

focused so intently on increasing people’s opportunities for wellbeing, this

sort of understanding has been central to the development of the

company’s operations.

Since April 2001, a joint project between Australian Unity and Deakin

University’s Australian Centre on Quality of Life established the Australian

Unity Wellbeing Index. Twice a year, interviews are carried out with

2,000 Australians selected to represent the overall geographic spread of

the national population. The questions try to establish what gives people

the greatest sense of meaning, purpose and satisfaction in their lives.

Across the fourteen-year study, the personal wellbeing of Australians

has emerged as strikingly robust. Very little variation occurs regardless

of economic and political shifts. Happily enough, two changes of

government, a Global Financial Crisis, terrorist threats and terrorist

strikes, housing and mining booms and economic slowdowns have

done next to nothing to affect people’s personal sense of wellbeing.


2000s

Wellbeing has been found to have some of its most important sources

from relationships—family, partner or simply someone close to you in life.

Money and income levels are important, but not overwhelmingly so.

It makes the greatest difference to those at the lower end of the income

scale. The ‘magic number’, as Deakin’s Professor Robert Cummins puts

it, is $100,000 of gross household income. On a national average,

wellbeing rises until around the $100,000 point, and not much else

happens beyond that, attributable to this aspect alone. (This is an average:

exactly how much would constitute each person’s ‘magic number’ differs

according to the individual.)

Overall, the research that goes into the Wellbeing Index highlights three

pillars of wellbeing which, taken together, constitute the ‘golden triangle

of happiness’ for most people. The three pillars are relationships, financial

security and a sense of achievement or purpose in life. They provide the

greatest degree of wellbeing to people who have enough substantive

freedom in life to pursue them. Beyond bare survival, it is the flourishing

and the amity, that makes life worth living.

This triangle also serves as a useful analogy for community wellbeing.

Economic activity, strong social interaction, along with shared goals and

aspirations—and the mechanisms to decide upon and develop these—are

at the core of a flourishing society.

Back in 1840, a group of men of no ‘fortune... of no personal influence

or importance’ sought to create a society of simple mutual aid. Through

their regular involvement in friendly societies, an entire generation

received a grounding in democratic practice and personal development

that might not otherwise have been accessible to them. Friendly societies’

bold experiment and colonial ambition would become the bedrock of

a democratic polity and of other aspects of modern Australia:

egalitarianism and entrepreneurship.

The Australian Unity Wellbeing Index

measures how happy we feel about

ourselves and about life in Australia.

The results consistently show Australians

have a wellbeing score of around 75

out of 100, and prove to be remarkably

resilient to life events. Pictured is an

article from The Sydney Morning Herald,

3 December 2012, describing a wellbeing

index report that found that wellbeing

drops in the first year of marriage.


These ideals have been carried through the generations and remain in

the fabric of the organisation today. Australian Unity still provides

products and services that support the domains of financial security,

healthcare and family wellbeing, in order to enable its customers to

achieve higher levels of mutually supported self-reliance. Australian Unity

seeks to foster this self-reliance, meaningful independence and quality

of life for as many people as possible.

‘Enabling millions to enjoy wellbeing’, is the modern rephrasing of the

spirit that has animated the organisation and its antecedents through

175 years of service to the Australian community.

Participants in the Sing out Loud Together

program, run by Arts Health Institute and

Australian Unity, embrace after their first live

performance. Residents from Australian Unity’s

Victoria Grange Aged Care were partnered

with Grade 6 students from The Knox School,

Wantirna South, 2013.

Reference

108

‘The Big Picture’ key

1. HRH The Prince of Wales2. HRH the Princess of Wales3. Marquis of Linlithgow

(Gov-Gen’l)4. Marchioness of Linlithgow5. Lord Tennyson (Governor of SA)6. Lady Tennyson7. Lord Lamington

(Governor of Qld)8. Lady Lamington9. Admiral Beaumont

(Com Aust Squad)10. Sir John S Dodds (Lt-Gov Of Tas)11. Lord Wenlock

(Head of Household)12. Lt-Col Sir A Bigge

(Private Secretary toHRH Prince of Wales)

13. Maj-Gen French (Com NSW Fcs)14. Sir John Madden (Lt-Gov of Vic)15. Lady Madden16. Sir Arthur Lawley

(Governor of WA)17. Lady Mary Lygon

(Lady-in-Waiting)18. Viscount de Vesci (ADC Gov WA)19. Major G W Watson20. Miss Ruby Madden21. Col F S Campbell

(ADC Lt-Gov Vic)22. Mrs B D Corbet23. Capt E W Wallington

(Private Secretary to theGovernor-General)

24. Maj-Gen Downes(Com Vic Forces)

25. Commander Colquhoun26. Lt-Col Byron

(Australian Artillery)

27. Mr Saville Gore (Sec to Gov-Gen)28. Maj Hon C Willoughby (Mil Sec)29. The Hon Derek Keppel (Equerry)30. Colonel J C Hoad31. Capt B D Corbet

(ADC Gov-General)32. Capt R W Duff (Extra ADC

to Governor-General)33. Rev Canon Dalton

(Domestic Chap HPH)34. Col W V Legge (Com Tas Forces)35. Brig-Gen Gordon

(Com SA Forces)36. Mr Pascoe Stuart (ADC Gov Qld)37. Flag-Lieut Pratt-Barlow RN38. Capt T P Walker, RN,

“Royal Arthur”39. Lord Richard Nevill

(Private Secretary to Governorof South Australia)

40. Capt Hon Viscount Crichton(ADC to HRH)

41. Mr H H Share (Private Secretaryto Admiral Beaumont)

42. Miss Leslie Madden43. Mr L J Brient,

“Sydney Daily Telegraph”44. Mr Maxwell, “Standard”45. Mr T R Roydhouse

“Sunday Times”46. Mr Howard Willoughby, “Argus”47. Mr J E Vincent, “Times”48. Lt Guy Madden49. Mr E E Knight, “Morning Post”50. Mr S V Winter, “Herald”51. Mr David Syme, “Age”52. Mr Curnow,

“Sydney Morning Herald”

53. Chev E de Martino,Marine Artist

54. Unknown55. Capt Vallange56. Mrs Vallange57. Sir Alan Manby

(Royal Physician)58. Lt-Col J H Bor (ADC to HRH)59. Mr G W Woolnough,

“Brisbane Telegraph”60. Mr A Fletcher,

“Brisbane Courier”61. Com Sir Chas Cust, RN

(Equerry)62. HRH Prince Alex of Teck63. Sir John Anderson64. Sir Donald Wallace (As-Priv Sec)65. Lady Catherine Coke66. Com B Godfrey Faussett, RN

(ADC)67. Hon Mrs Derek Keppel68. Mr Carl Pinschoff

(Consul for Austria-Hungary)69. Mr Arthur Ware (Mayor of Adel)70. Mr W A Brahe

(Con for Germany)71. Mr T Eitake

(Con-General for Japan)72. Rt Rev Bishop Goe73. Sir W Proe (Mayor of Brisbane)74. M de Passek (Consul for Russia)75. M Baird D’Aunet

(Con-Gen, France)76. Rev Father Kautopoulous

(Gk Ch’h)77. Sir James Graham

(May of Sydney)78. Rev Dr Abrahams

(Jewish Church)

79. Mr J P Bray (Consul for USA)80. His Grace Archbishop Carr81. Hon Sir Samuel Gillott

(Lord Mayor of Melbourne)82. Capt F W Dickins USN

(“Brooklyn”)83. Rear-Admiral G C Remey, USN

(“Brooklyn”)84. Rev G Tait (Mod Pres Assembly)85. Rt-Hon Sir Edmund Barton

(Prime Minister)86. Rt Hon Sir John Forrest

(Min for Defence)87. Rt Hon C C Kingston

(Minister for Trade and Customs)88. Hon Sir Philip Fysh

(Minister without Portfolio)89. Hon Alfred Deakin

(Attor-General)90. Rt Hon Sir George Turner (Treas)91. Mr E G Blackmore

(Clerk of Senate)92. Hon Sir William Lyne

(Minister for Home Affairs)93. Senator Hon J G Drake (PM-Gen)94. Senator Hon R E O’Connor (Vice

President Executive Council)95. Senator Hon Sir Richard Baker

(President of the Senate)96. Hon Sir Fredk Holder MP

(Sp’ker)97. Senator Hon Simon Fraser98. Mr William Knox MP99. Senator M S C Smith100. Senator Lieut-Col Cameron101. Hon T M’Donald-Patterson, MP102. Rt Hon George Reid

(Leader of Op)103. Hon C Carty Salmon, MP

It took Tom Roberts more than two years to paint his masterpiece on the opening of Parliament in 1901. His diligence

in research extended to documenting the weights and heights of those represented, and many of the attendees sat for

him so that he could accurately present their features. The following is a replication of the official key to the work.

Not mentioned in the key is Roberts’ decision to include Sir Henry Parkes, who had died in 1896, in a portrait on the wall.


104. Mr A C Groom, MP105. Mr F W Bamford, MP106. Mr W M Hughes, MP107. Mr A Fisher, MP108. Unknown109. Rt Hon Sir Samuel Griffith, PC110. Mr G H Jenkins

(Clerk House Rep)111. Unknown112. Right Hon Sir Samuel Way, PC113. Hon Bruce Smith, MP114. Hon E H Batchelor, MP115. Senator Hon Thomas Playford116. Mr Robert Harper, MP117. Hon Sir William McMillan, MP118. Senator E Pulsford119. Senator John Ferguson120. Senator E A Harney121. Senator Hon Sir

Frederick Sargood122. Senator Lieut-Col Neild123. Senator N K Ewing124. Senator A P Matheson125. Senator Hon Sir Josiah Symon126. Senator D M Charleston127. Senator J H Keating128. Senator Hugh De Largie129. Mr Geo A Cruickshank, MP130. Mr D Watkins, MP131. Hon S Winter-Cooke, MP132. Mr Thomas Skene, MP133. Mr F G Tudor, MP134. Mr J M Fowler, MP135. Mr Thos T Ewing, MP136. Mr E Solomon, MP137. Hon V L Solomon, MP138. Senator Hon Sir William Zeal139. Senator Hon H Dobson140. Mr J W Kirwan, MP141. Senator Thomas Glassey142. Senator J G Barrett143. Senator James Styles144. Senator Hon R ‘W’ Best145. Senator A J Gould146. Senator James Macfarlane147. Senator J S Clemons148. Senator J T Walker

149. Senator G F Pearce150. Senator D J O’Keefe151. Mr James Page, MP152. Senator George M’Gregor153. Mr Hugh Mahon, MP154. Mr W H Groom, MP155. Mr P M’M Glynn, MP156. Hon P Phillips, MP157. Mr James Wilkinson, MP158. Mr Charles McDonald, MP159. Mr Dugald Thomson, MP160. Mr Josiah Thomas, MP161. Mr J M Chanter, MP162. Hon Sydney Smith, MP

(Op Whip)163. Mr R A Crouch, MP164. Mr H B Higgins, MP165. Mr W B S C Sawers, MP166. Hon I A Isaacs, MP167. Senator J C Stewart168. Hon J W M’Cay, MP169. Senator E D Millen170. Senator Hon Sir Jno Downer

a. Mr D M Cameron, MP171. Mr A H Conroy, MP172. Mr W G Spence, MP173. Mr Thomas Brown, MP174. Mr R Edwards, MP175. Senator A Dawson176. Senator W G Higgs177. Sir John Quick, MP178. Mr Austin Chapman MP

(Government Whip)179. Mr J C Manifold, MP180. Mr Thomas Kennedy, MP181. Mr G W Fuller, MP182. Mr Francis Clarke, MP183. Mr A Paterson, MP184. Mr King O’Malley, MP185. Hon Allan M’Lean, MP186. Sir Langdon Bonython, MP187. Mr W H Wilks, MP188. Hon F W Piesse, MP189. Mr H Willis, MP190. Mr S Mauger, MP191. Mr J H N H Cook, MP192. Hon Sir Edward Braddon, MP

193. Sir Malcolm M’Eacharn, MP194. Hon J G Jenkins (Premier of SA)195. Hon Sir N E Lewis (Prem’r of Tas)196. Mr J C Watson, MP (LeaderLabour Party)197. Hon J H M’Coll, MP198. Mr J B Ronald, MP199. Mr A Poynton, MP200. Mr G B Edwards, MP201. Hon Sir John See (Premier NSW)202. Hon Sir Alexander Peacock(Premier of Victoria)203. Hon Sir Arthur Rutledge(Acting-Premier of Queensland)204. Hon Sir James Lee Steere(Speaker, WA)205. Mr T G Watson (Sec Celeb Com)206. Hon William McCulloch

(Chairman of CelebrationCommittee)

a. Hon N J Brown (Speaker Houseof Assembly, Tasmania)

207. Sir Hartley Williams208. Janet Lady Clarke209. Miss Barton210. Lady Forrest211. Mrs R E O’Connor212. Mrs Alfred Deakin213. Lady Barton214. Lady Lyne215. Lady Turner216. Mrs J G Drake217. Lady Fysh218. Mrs C Carty Salmon219. Com Grapsow “Cormoran,”

Germ’y220. Hon Sir Joseph G Ward

(Representing NZ Government)221. Sir Edwin H H Collen

(Rep India)222. Hon W T Taylor (Rep Ceylon)223. Hon William Mulock

(Rep Canada)224. Sir Thomas Fitzgerald225. Mr Thomas Huges

(First Lord Mayor of Sydney)226. Mr A E Morgans

227. Hon John Frost(Rep Cape Colony)

228. Mr F D North229. Mr R R Garran, CMG230. Bishop Riley (Western Australia)231. Mr Atlee Hunt232. Hon T R Murray (Rep Natal)233. Mr F K Fairthorne

(Mayor of Launceston)234. Mr W L Bosschardt

(Consul General for Netherlands)235. Capt Von Bosch, Nordbrabant236. Bandmaster Lieutenant Riley237. Trumpeter Downes238. Lt Col Vernon (Gov Architect)239. Mr J A Panton, PM240. Rear-Admiral Jessen, Gromoboi

(Rep Russian Government)241. Mr D Anderson242. Mr Henry J Saunders243. Mr T J Milligan244. Mr J M’A Howden245. Mr M G B Jefferson246. Miss Deakin247. Mr W M Fehon (NSW Railways)248. Mr A Webb

(Supt Sydney Fire Brigades)249. Mrs G H Reid250. Madame Pinschoff251. Mr Fred M’Cubbin252. Lady McMillan253. Mrs Hugh Dixson254. Hon A W Meeks

GALLERYA. Mr E G FitzGibbon, CMG

(Met Board of Works)B. Mr W H CrokerC. Lady BonythonD. Mr Geo MusgroveE. Mr L A WatchornF. Mr Reginald BrightG. Mr Edward TrenchardH. Sir Adye DouglasI. Mr J A BoydJ. Sir Edwin SmithK. Lady Smith

110

Many members of ANA and AWA became involved in public life,

following the aims of their association “to take an interest in matters

affecting Australia as a whole.” This list includes some of them.

Sir Edmund Barton was Australia’s first prime minister

(1901–1903) and was appointed to the High Court in 1903.

He was an honorary member of Waratah branch NSW.

John Moore Chanter was the first president of the

ANA in New South Wales and a member of the first

federal parliament.

James Hume Cook was chief president of the ANA in

Victoria 1896 and a member of the first federal parliament.

Richard Armstrong Crouch was a member of the first

federal parliament for the seat of Corio.

Alfred Deakin was Australia’s second prime minister

and served three terms in office (1903–1904, 1905–1908

and 1909–1910). He was a member of Prahran branch ANA.

Vida Goldstein was an honorary member of Fitzroy branch

AWA, which supported her first bid as an Independent

candidate for the Senate in 1903.

Sir Samuel Griffith was premier of Queensland (1883–1888)

and first chief justice of the High Court (1903–1919).

Harriet Hooton was a member of Perth branch ANA and

a foundation member of the Women’s Service Guild.

Sir Isaac Isaacs was federal attorney-general (1905),

appointed to the High Court (1906) chief justice of the

High Court (1930) and the first Australian born governor-

general (1931–1936). He was a member of Prahran

branch ANA.

Charles Kingston was president of the Australian federal

convention 1897–1898. He travelled to London in 1900 with

Deakin and Barton to ensure passage of the Commonwealth

of Australia bill through the imperial Parliament.

Sir William Lyne was a New South Wales politician and

delegate to the federal convention. Unable to form the first

federal ministry when Deakin, Barton and Kingston

declined to serve with him, he was appointed minister for

home affairs in the first federal parliament.

Kitty McKillop was president of the Brisbane ANA Women’s

Auxiliary and superintendent of the juvenile branch.

Dame Nellie Melba was an honorary member of both

Fitzroy and Clifton Hill branches of AWA.

Sir Alexander Peacock was premier and treasurer of

Victoria (1901–1902) and also chief president of the ANA

in 1885, 1886 and 1893.

Alicia Teresa Jane O’Shea Petersen was a social activist and

political candidate. In 1909, she founded and presided over

the AWA in Tasmania.

Notable members


William Bispham Propsting was premier of Tasmania

in 1903 and a federation advocate.

Thomas O’Callaghan joined the ANA in 1876 and served

as foundation chief president in 1877–78. He was Victoria’s

chief commissioner of police in 1902.

Sir John Quick was a member of Bendigo branch ANA and

established the Bendigo Federation League in October 1893.

A federal convention delegate, Quick was a member of the

first federal parliament.

Charles Carty Salmon was a federation advocate and chief

president of the ANA in 1898. He was elected to first federal

parliament and became speaker of the House of

Representatives (1909–1910).

William Slater was a Victorian lawyer and politician.

He was attorney-general (1924) and served in various

ministries in 1927–1932 and 1952–1955). Slater was

chief president of the ANA in 1926 and in 1935 he founded

the firm Slater & Gordon with his brother-in-law

Hugh Gordon.

Sir William John Sowden founded the ANA in South

Australia in 1887. His pamphlet, Australia: A Native’s

Standpoint, argued for Australian-born governors and

promoted things Australian.

Mary Hynes Swanton was a foundation member of

the AWA in Perth and foundation president of the Perth

Tailoresses’ Union.

Sir George Turner was premier of Victoria (1894–1899,

1900–1901) and first federal treasurer (1901–1905).

William Watt was premier of Victoria (1912–1913), acting

prime minister in 1818 and federal treasurer (1918–1920).

He was a member of North Melbourne branch ANA.

Ivy Weber was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly

seat of Nunawading at the 1937 State election. She was an

AWA member.

Annie Margaret Wheeler travelled to London at the

beginning of WW1 where she joined the London branch of

the ANA. She was a nurse and soldiers’ advocate and was

given a hero’s welcome when she returned to Rockhampton

in 1919.

George Wise was a solicitor and politician who entered

federal parliament in 1906 and became postmaster general

in 1920. He was chief president of the ANA in 1887 and

member of Sale branch for 59 years.

SourcesThe Advance Australia journal

Australian Dictionary of Biography http://adb.anu.edu.au/

112

The evolution of

Australian Unity


114

Sources

IntroductionFor the ‘of no personal influence or importance’ quote, see

The South Australian Odd Fellows’ Magazine, Jan 1845, p.1,

as quoted in David Green and Lawrence Cromwell’s Mutual Aid or

Welfare State: Australia’s Friendly Societies (Allen and Unwin, 1984).

Entrepreneurs, egalitarians and the workingfamily’s paradise

Friendly originsThe Friendly Societies entry in the 1911 edition of the

Encyclopaedia Britannica (accessed via Wikisource) proved

illuminating, as did early chapters of Green and Cromwell’s Mutual

aid or welfare state: Australia’s friendly societies and Nancy Renfree’s

PhD thesis, Migrants and Cultural Transference: English Friendly Societies

in a Victorian Goldfields Town (Latrobe University, 1983).

Transplanted to AustraliaSee J.H. Ross, A History of the Manchester Unity Independent Order of

Oddfellows Friendly Society in Victoria, 1840–1910 (Manchester Unity,

1911) and C.I. Watt and W.L. Walmsley, A history of the Manchester

Unity, Independent Order of Oddfellows in Victoria Friendly Society:

1840–1971 (Manchester Unity, 1972) for origins of Manchester

Unity in Melbourne. Murray W Campbell’s Manchester Unity

Independent Order of Oddfellows in Victoria 1972–2001: Through the eyes

of a Grand Secretary also helped with details of founding members

of MUIOOF. See Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on George

Arden and early 1840s editions of the Port Phillip Patriot and Port

Phillip Gazette for Thomas Strode. See 100 Grand United Years:

Centenary of the Grand United Order of Oddfellows Friendly Society (Grand

United, 1948) for information on James Reid and the founding of

Grand United Sydney in 1848.

Gold avalanche and the colonial start-up cultureSee Geoffrey Blainey, A History of Victoria (Cambridge University

Press, 2006); T.A. Coghlan, Labour and Industry in Australia, vol.2,

(Oxford University Press, 1918); Alex McDermott, Australian History

for Dummies (John Wiley & Sons, 2011); and Geoffrey Serle,

The Golden Age: a history of the colony of Victoria, 1851–1861, (Melbourne

University Press, 1963). For the reappearance of affiliated lodges

in the late 1850s, see Renfree. For Westgarth quote, see R.N.

Ebbels, The Australian Labour Movement 1850–1907 (Hale and

Iremonger, 1983).

Mutual aidFor the inner workings of the health, funeral and other funds,

see Green and Cromwell Mutual aid or welfare state: Australia’s friendly

societies. For the superior capacity of affiliated orders to spread

risk, see Renfree, Green and Cromwell and Blainey, Odd Fellows:

a history of IOOF Australia (Allen & Unwin, 1991). For evidence given

at 1876 Victorian Royal Commission into the Friendly Society Law,

also see Green and Cromwell. For radical change in social

composition of friendly societies once transplanted to Australia,

see Renfree.

New homeworlds for oldFor degree of determined community-building and suburban

localism in colonial era, see Geoffrey Curr, ‘Liberalism, localism

suburban development in Melbourne 1870–1900’, Australian

Historical Studies, vol.19, no.74, April 1980. For John Hirst’s

arguments on local committees, associations, friendly societies

and mechanics institutes as nurseries for active democratic

citizenry, see ‘Colonial Society’ in Sense and Nonsense in Australian

History (Black Inc., 2005) and Australia’s Democracy: a short history

(Allen & Unwin, 2002). For schools as progressive equalisers, see

McDermott, Australian History for Dummies.


A workingman’s paradiseFor 1880s boom and effects on workers and middle classes,

see Serle, The rush to be rich: a history of the colony of Victoria, 1883–1889

(Melbourne University Press, 1971), and Blainey’s History of Victoria.

For Charles Dilke comment, see extract from a lecture to the

Chelsea and Fulham Co-operative Society, reported in

Williamstown Chronicle, 28 June 1890. For Blainey on 1880s as

friendly societies’ golden age, see his Odd Fellows: a history of

IOOF Australia.

The ANA emergesFor ANA in colonial and Federation periods, see Marian Aveling’s

PhD thesis, ‘A history of the Australian Natives Association

1871–1900’, (Monash University, 1970) and John Hirst, The

Sentimental Nation: the making of the Australian Commonwealth (Oxford

University Press, 2000). For the best analysis of the generational

conflict between British-born elders and younger Australian-born

colonials, see Bob Birrell, Federation: the secret story (Duffy and

Snellgrove, 2001). For Alfred Deakin’s speech to Prahran branch

of ANA, see The Age, 10 May 1888. See also John Menadue’s

A Centenary History of the Australian Natives Association, 1871–1971

(Horticultural Press, 1971).

Dealing with divisionFor Irish, English and Scott relations, see Judith Brett, Australian

Liberals and the moral middle class: from Alfred Deakin to John Howard

(Cambridge University Press, 2003); Hirst, ‘A nation of

immigrants’, Looking for Australia: historical essays (Black Inc, 2010);

and Hirst, ‘Australia’s absurd history’ in Sense and Nonsense. For

Eight Hours Day procession, see the Argus, 22 April 1890. Beryl

Armstrong, archivist and librarian at Australian Unity, scanned

the records of historical member and minute books to conclude

that members of both Chinese and Jewish communities were

frequently members of the antecedent organisations.

Nationhood and the new social laboratory

The big collapseFor economic collapse and class conflict, see Melissa Belanta,

‘Rethinking the 1890s’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, vol.1

(Cambridge University Press, 2013); McDermott, Australian

History for Dummies; and various newspaper reports of the period.

For 1890s depression, see W.A. Sinclair, The process of Economic

Development in Australia (Cheshire Publishing, 1976) and Ian

McLean, Why Australia Prospered: the shifting sources of economic

growth (Princeton University Press, 2013).

Against trend, friendly societies survive and thriveFor friendly society numbers generally, see appendices of Green

and Cromwell, Mutual aid or welfare state: Australia’s friendly societies.

For Manchester Unity figures, see Ross, A history of the Manchester

Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows Friendly Society in Victoria,

1840–1910; and Watt and Walmsley, A history of the Manchester Unity,

Independent Order of Oddfellows in Victoria Friendly Society: 1840–1971.

For branch secretaries bending rules in depression years, also

see Green and Cromwell. For friendly societies leisure activities

and free and easy evenings, see Blainey’s Odd Fellows: a history of

IOOF Australia. For ANA’s Foundation Day celebration see The Age,

7 Feb 1893.

An ANA nationFor the definitive account of the ANA’s central involvement in

Federation, see Hirst, Sentimental Nation and Aveling, ‘A History

of the Australian Natives Association’. For John Quick’s biography,

see his entry in Australian Dictionary of Biography.

116

The social laboratorySee Paul Kelly’s introduction to The End of Certainty: the story of the

1980s, (Allen & Unwin, 1992) for cogent synthesis of this era of

emergent nationhood, which he calls ‘the Australian Settlement’.

For the ‘social laboratory’ see McDermott, Australian History for

Dummies. For the connection between new citizenship and the

radical progressives of new nationhood, see the extensive

discussion in Bob Birrell, Federation: the secret story. See Birrell also

for Higgins and the Harvester Judgement, and Fisher’s

acclamation of it as ‘a new charter’.

Fraternalism, women and nationFor women being driven out of the workforce by governments and

unions in the 1890s, see Melissa Belanta, ‘Rethinking the 1890s’,

in The Cambridge History of Australia, vol.1. For the maternalist

welfare state ideal, see Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: the history of

Australian feminism (Allen & Unwin, 1999). See Lake also for feminist

nationalism (note: this descriptor is my own) and the career of

Millicent Stanley.

The race issueFor the White Australia Policy, see Marilyn Lake and Henry

Reynolds, Drawing the global colour line: white men’s countries and

the question of racial equality (Melbourne University Press, 2008).

For contrast between American and colonial Australian racial

attitudes, see Andrew Markus, Fear and Hatred: Purifying Australia

and California 1850–1901 (Hale and Iremonger, 1979). For contrast

of these attitudes as it manifested in a friendly society context,

see Blainey, Odd Fellows: a history of IOOF Australia. For ANA’s

anti-Chinese stance in this period see Aveling. For discussion

of the impact of colonisation, see Noel Pearson’s Quarterly

Essay 55, A Rightful Place, 2014.

From closed to open Australia

The Great War and afterFor Australia in the First World War, see Stephen Garton and

Peter Stanley, ‘The Great War and its aftermath, 1914–1922’,

The Cambridge History of Australia,vol.2. For Irish sectarianism, see

McDermott, Australian history for Dummies. See Watt and Walmsley,

A history of the Manchester Unity, Independent Order of Oddfellows in

Victoria Friendly Society: 1840–1971 for details of Manchester Unity.

For the debate on conscription at the ANA annual conference, and

its approval by a large majority, see major newspapers—Sydney

Morning Herald, The Age, Argus—dated 23 and 24 March 1916. (Also

note that at a simultaneous Manchester Unity annual conference

debate on conscription was repeatedly shut down by presiding

grand master James Chittick, on grounds that it constituted

political debate).

Friendly societies versus the doctorsSee ‘Medical Care in a Free Market’ and ‘The Battle of the Clubs’

in Green and Cromwell’s Mutual aid or welfare state: Australia’s friendly

societies for much of the material sourced in this chapter.

Modern times: friendly societies in search of a new roleFor the struggle of friendly societies to make the transition to

modern times and the proliferation of competing leisure and

social activities, see Blainey’s Odd Fellows: a history of IOOF Australia.

For effects on friendly society membership numbers of these

cultural changes and BMA policies see Blainey, Green and

Cromwell Mutual aid or welfare state: Australia’s friendly societies.


The Great DepressionFor Australian approaches to dealing with unemployment, see

Hirst, ‘Colonial Society’ in Sense and Nonsense in Australian history.

For the construction of the Manchester Unity building in

Melbourne in 1932, see Bill Hitchings Grand Dreams and Grand Men,

(Caribou Publications, 1988). For the effect of paying aged pension

on government revenue, see Rob Watts, ‘The origins of the

Australian welfare state’, Australian Historical Studies, vol.19, No.75,

October 1980.

The Second World War and the national welfare fundFor the definitive account of the emergence of the National

Welfare Fund from the various political squabbles and debates

of the first four decades of the Commonwealth, see Rob Watts,

‘The origins of the Australian welfare state’. For an account of

Chifley’s initiatives as treasurer, see David Day’s biography,

Ben Chifley: A Life (HarperCollins, 2007).

Triumph of the welfare stateFor the liberal state, see John Micklethwait and Adrian

Woolridge, The Fourth Revolution: the Global Race to Reinvent the State

(Allen Lane, 2014). For the Beveridge Report and its impact,

see Nicholas Timmins, The Five Giants: a Biography of the Welfare

State (HarperCollins, 1995). For United Nations founding charter,

Churchill’s 1942 budget and American Employment Act, see

Nicholas Wapshott, Keynes/Hayek: the clash that defined modern

economics (Scribe, 2011). For Menzies’ ‘Forgotten People’ radio

transcript, see the first chapter of Judith Brett, Robert Menzies’

Forgotten People (Pan Macmillan, 1992). For the description of the

Foresters’ coat of arms, see their 150th anniversary pamphlet,

‘Foresters Friendly Society 150 Years: a brief historical survey’

(1984) held in the Australian Unity Library.

Adapting to the post-war boomFor the National Health Insurance scheme, see the minister who

negotiated and introduced it: Earle Page, in his chapter ‘National

Health’ in Earle Page (Angus and Robertson, 1963). For the effects

on friendly societies in particular, see Blainey, Odd Fellows: a history

of IOOF Australia and Green and Cromwell, Mutual aid or welfare state:

Australia’s friendly societies. For post-war boom, see Judith Brett, ‘The

Menzies Era, 1950–1966’ in The Cambridge History of Australia, vol.2,

and McDermott, Australian History for Dummies.

The end of certaintyFor the argument about a long-term reopening of the Australian

economy from the 1950s, see Ian McLean, Why Australia Prospered:

the shifting sources of economic growth. For 1970s stagflation and

failure of post-war Keynesianism, see Nicholas Wapshott, Keynes/

Hayek: the clash that defined modern economics. For the economic

reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, see Paul Kelly, The End of Certainty:

the story of the 1980s and The March of Patriots: the struggle for modern

Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2009).

Towards tomorrow

The new millennium: challenge and opportunityFor nano-degrees and shift in education, see Schumpeter column,

‘Got skills?’ p.62, The Economist, 23 August 2014. For effect of social

media technology on banking, see Alan Kohler, ‘Banks Facing a

Double Disruption’, The Australian, 16 September 2014. For Amartya

Sen quote, see his Development as Freedom, (Arnold Knopf, 1999),

p.26. For central role of innovation in economic growth, see Joseph

Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Allen & Unwin,

1943). For an excellent distillation of Schumpeter’s ideas, see the

relevant chapter in Jerry Z. Muller’s The Mind and the Market:

Capitalism in Western Thought (Anchor Books, 2002).

118

Mutual enterprise: a renewed local andglobal contribution?For an exploration of stakeholder welfare and social infrastructure

policy experiments in the Australian context, see Noel Pearson’s

essays, especially ‘Our right to take responsibility’ and ‘The

welfare pedestal’ in Up From the Mission: Selected Writings (Black Inc.,

2011) and Mark Latham’s essays ‘Ownership for all’ and ‘The myths

of the welfare state’ in From the Suburbs: Building a Nation from our

Neighbourhoods (Pluto Press, 2003). For the cooperative movement

as international phenomenon, and attendant stats and figures,

various published materials from the Business Council of

Cooperatives and Mutuals were considered.

Household stress and golden triangles:an index to wellbeingAristotle’s description of wealth as ‘flourishing’ and ‘capacity’

is taken from Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom. Material on

the Deakin University—Australian Unity Wellbeing Index provided

in-house. Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Australia Day quote from

his official website.

Boxes and captionsInformation used in captions is derived from material associated

with the image sources. Text in boxes, separate to the main text,

were derived from mostly internal sources. Murray W Campbell’s

Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows in Victoria 1972–2001:

Through the eyes of a Grand Secretary provided material referred to

in the box discussing the impact of universal healthcare on

Manchester Unity and the ANA, along with the discussion of the

Essentials book. Annual reports from the Australian Friendly

Societies Association helped with facts for the discussion of

friendly society bonds. Other material, such as information about

PANCH hospital and the Kelleher family, comes from sources

retained in the Australian Unity archive and library.

Information about “The Big Picture” was informed by art historian

Andrew MacKenzie’s summary on artistsfootsteps.com

Picture creditsApollo Bay Historical Society: p78 bottom

Australian Unity Archives: p14, 17, 18, 19, 24, 26, 27, 31, 34, 36,

48, 51, 53, 60, 61, 69, 72, 79, 80, 81, 89, 93, 97, 98, 102, 103, 105

Australian War Memorial: p50, 63, 75

Capricorn Coast Historical Society: p70

City of Sydney Archives: p55

Fairfax Media: p88

John Olsen/Viscopy: p94–95

Mary Evans Picture Library: p15, 16

National Archives of Australia: p65

National Gallery of Victoria: p66-67

National Library of Australia: p106-107

Parliment House Art Collection: cover detail and p42–43

Public Records Office Victoria: p32, 68

Recognise: p96

St Vincent Hospital Archives: p78 top

State Library of New South Wales: p12–13,

State Library of Queensland: p44, 59

State Library of Victoria: p21, 22, 25, 28, 39, 40, 41, 46, 49, 84, 85

Victorian Parliamentary Library: p61


Index

Aborigines see Indigenous Australians

affiliated orders 16-25

age of acceptance of members into friendly societies 24–5

aged care facilities 102

aged pension 57, 80, 101

ageing population, impact of increasing 99, 101

Ancient Order of Foresters 16, 17, 86

Anzac Day 70

Arts Health Institute 105

Australasian Federal Convention 50

Australasian Women’s Association (AWA) 9, 60

Australia

conflict over conscription and strikes, war years 71–2, 75

economic collapse, 1890s 41, 44–50, 54

Federation 9, 27, 34, 50–4

First World War 68, 69–72, 75

Great Depression 79–80

imports and exports, crippled by strikes 44–5

legislation implemented before First World War 56, 57

national welfare fund 80–2

overseas trade 90–1

post-Federation 54–7

post-WWII boom 86–90

revenue from land sales for big infrastructure projects 83

Second World War 80–3

Australia Day/Foundation Day 37, 48, 49–50, 69, 97

Australia Felix Lodge of Manchester Unity Independent Order

of Oddfellows 18, 19

Australian Federation League 52

Australian Federation of Women’s Voters 61

Australian Friendly Societies Association 76, 92

Australian Labor Party 45, 71, 82

Australian Natives’ Association (ANA) 34–8, 47

National Health Insurance Scheme 87

Australia Day/Foundation Day 37, 48, 49–50, 69

divisions over conscription 71–2

early branches 27, 34

establishes Australasian Women’s Association 9, 60

establishes branches of Australian Federation League 52

establishes permanent building society 89

Federation and Australian nationhood campaign 9, 34, 37, 50–4

London Branch 69, 70

merges with Manchester Unity to form Australian Unity 93

Australian Unity

antecedent bodies 9, 16, 47, 102

Australia Day activities 97

formation 7, 93

Heritage Fellowship Grants 98

members, customers and staff 101

Sing out Loud program 105

see also Australian Natives Association (ANA); Manchester Unity

Australian Unity Wellbeing Index 103–4

baby-boomers, embracing of social change 98

banks and banking 92, 96

collapse of 44, 46, 47, 101

Commonweatlh Bank established 56

Barton, Edmund 53, 62

Beveridge, Sir William 83–4

Big Sky Building Society 89, 93

Blainey, Geoffrey 34, 78

Britain

education 84, 85

export trade during gold rush 22

fear of ‘affiliated orders’ 16, 17

friendly societies see friendly societies (Britain)

investment in Australia 33

welfare state 83–5

British Empire 53, 71

British Medical Association (BMA), Australian branch 74–77

building societies 44, 47, 89

120

Catholics 31, 38, 39

Chifley, Ben 80, 82, 87, 92

Chinese 62, 63, 64

churches 29, 31, 39

Churchill, Winston 84, 85

citizenship 54, 60

Indigenous Australians 65

and national identity 63

Commonwealth Bank 56

Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme 84

conscription 71–2, 75

convalescent homes 89

cooperative housing societies 89, 100

Cummins, Robert 104

Curr, Geoffrey 29

Curtin, John/Curtin government 80, 82, 83, 84

Deakin, Alfred/Deakin government 9, 35, 37, 52, 53, 57, 60, 63, 64

Deakin University’s Australian Centre on Quality of Life 103

dispensaries 24, 48

Druids 17, 25, 47, 53

Easter Uprising against British rule, Dublin 70–1

economic collapse, 1890s 44–6, 54

impact on friendly societies 46, 47–50

strikes and riots 41, 44–5

economic growth

1980s and 90s 91–2

from gold rush 22–3

post-war years 86–90

education

Britain 84, 85

Catholic hierarchies views 31, 39

free, secular and compulsory 31, 35

tertiary 57, 96

women teachers 58, 60

egalitarianism 23, 27, 31, 104

eight-hour day 33, 34, 41

employee credit cooperatives 89

employment

Great Depression 78, 79, 80

United States 85

women 58, 60

Engels, Friedrich 21

English Protestants 38

enterprise bargaining 92

exports 22, 44–5, 91

Fawkner, John Pascoe 18

Federation

ANA campaigns for 9, 27, 34, 50–4

ANA members at forefront of campaign 51–4

Australian Federation League branches established by ANA 52

celebrations Centennial Park, Sydney 54, 55

Deakin’s ‘call to arms’ speech 52

George Syme supports constitution 52

new constitution comes into being 53

opening of First Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia

42–3, 44

feminist nationalism 61

First World War 68, 69, 70–72

Fisher, Andrew 56

Foresters 25, 34, 47, 53, 77, 89

Foundation Day 37, 48, 49–50, 69

fraternalism 58–61

Freemason lodges 15

French Revolution 15, 16

friendly societies (Britain) 7, 15–16, 25, 27

Friendly Society bonds 92

funeral funds 30, 34, 48

Gardeners 17, 25, 47

General Strike 71, 75

global financial crisis 101, 103


gold rushes 21–29

Goldstein, Vida 9, 60

Goods and Services Tax 92

Goold, Archbishop James 39

government


national welfare fund 80–2

post-Federation legislation 56, 57

post-WWI financial assistance to families who lost

breadwinners 70

and the welfare state 10, 41, 57, 80–5, 87, 90

Grand United (Order of Oddfellows) 16, 17, 25, 47, 93

Great Depression 79–80

Great Disruption 96, 99

Great Strikes 44–5

Great War 68, 69, 69–72, 75

Greeves, Dr Augustus 18, 19, 98

Griffith, Samuel 54

Harvester Judgement 56

Hawke, Bob 91

health insurance schemes 74, 82

health services 30, 48, 72–8, 83

Heritage Fellowship Grants 98

Hibernians 39, 47, 77

Higgins, Justice 56

Hirst, John 30

home-building 22, 87, 88

home-lending scheme 89

home ownership 29, 89

Howard, John/Howard government 92

Hughes, Billy 71

Immigration Restriction Act 1901 64

income taxes 80, 82, 92

Independent Order of Oddfellows (IOOF) 17, 25, 88

Indigenous Australians 37–8, 65, 96

industrial relations 92

invalid pensions 80

Irish Australians 70–1

Irish Catholics 38, 39

Isaacs, Sir Isaac Alfred 79

Japan, trade treaty 90

Keating, Paul 91

Kelleher family 72

Kingston, Charles 53

Kohler, Alan 96

Lake, Marilyn 60

land taxes 56

life insurance 87

Lifeplan Australia 47, 93

Manchester Unity 25, 34, 53, 77


establishes Patriotic Fund 69

establishes Widow and Orphans’ Fund 19

health education book 93

home for the aged and disadvantaged, Carlton 31

home-lending scheme 89

merges with the ANA to form Australian Unity 93

moves into home-building and life insurance markets 88

origins 7–8, 16

refuses to close medical institutes it opened 77

see also Australia Felix Lodge of Manchester Unity IOOF;

Melbourne Lodge of Manchester Unity

Manchester Unity building 79–80, 81

Mannix, Archbishop Daniel 71

Maritime Strike, 1890s 41, 44

Marshall, Caroline 98

Marzagor, John 18

122

maternal welfare state 60–1

maternity allowance 56, 80

Mauger, Samuel 76

means-testing

imposed by BMA doctors on friendly society members 73, 74, 75

private health insurance 76

medical care schemes 30, 48

Medicare 90

Melba, Dame Nellie 9, 60

Melbourne 22, 33

Melbourne and Hobsons Bay Railway Company 21

Melbourne Lodge of Manchester Unity 19, 20

membership growth and decline 26–7, 34, 47, 49, 57, 77, 90, 101

Menzies, Robert/Menzies government 85–7, 89

migrants 29, 30

post-war from Europe and Britain 41, 88, 90

minerals exports 91

miners’ strikes 44

mortgages 89

mutual aid organisations 7, 24–7, 86, 104

mutual companies 100–2


national identity 63, 64

national life insurance 84

national welfare fund 80–2, 83

nationalised health service 84

nationalism 54, 61

native borns 53, 54

new homeworlds 29–31, 53

new millennium, challenge and opportunity 96–100

New South Wales

friendly society membership 47, 49

sends troops overseas 69

new technology 10–11, 92, 96, 97, 98

‘night-watchmen state’ 83

non-union labour 44, 45, 46

oil embargoes 91

Old Age and Invalid Pension Bill (1908) 57

Parkes, Sir Henry 50

Patriotic Fund 69

pensions 80, 99

permanent building societies 89

pharmacy dispensers 24

Poor Law charity (UK) 15, 26

Preston and Northcote Community Hospital 85

private health insurance 76

private home purchasing 89

property market collapse 44, 46

Protection Boards (Aborigines) 65

Protestant Alliance 39, 47

Protestants 38, 39

public housing 89

Quick, John 51–2, 53

race issue 9, 62–5

railways and railway workshops 21, 29, 32, 33

Rathdowne Place aged care facility 102

Rattigan, Alf 91

Rechabites 25, 26, 47, 77

Renfree, Nancy 17

retirement villages 89

rituals and regalia, older friendly societies 16, 17, 30, 34, 39, 53

Salt, Bernard 97

schools and schooling, Victoria 29, 31, 35, 39

Scottish Protestants 38

Second World War 80, 85

secret oaths and passwords 16, 17, 30, 39

Sen, Amartya 97, 103


Shearers’ Strike, 1891 44–5

Shepperd, John 18

sickness benefits 30, 48–9, 80

Smith, John Thomas 19

social composition of members 27

social infrastructure 101

social justice 56

social laboratory 9, 41, 54–7, 85

social media 92

Stanley, Millicent 61

Stanner, William Edward Hanley 38

strikes 41, 44–6, 71

Strode, Thomas 18, 19

Sudgen, William John 19

Syme, George 52

tariff protection/cuts 56, 91, 92

tax base 80, 82, 92, 100

Temperance Orders 35

tertiary education 57, 96

trade 90–1

trade unions 33, 34, 40, 41, 44, 45 , 49, 58, 92

Trewin, Betty 85

Turner, George 52

unemployment benefits 80

United Friendly Society Dispensaries 24

United Nations charter 85

United States

friendly societies 8, 62

Unity Relief Fund 79

Victorian Royal Commission on the Working of the Friendly

Societies Statute 26

voting rights for women 9, 56, 60–1

wage-fixing 92

wages 33, 44

Harvester Judgement 56

for women 58

Wasley, Josiah 76–7

Watkins, A.E. 85

Watt, C.I. 46

Weber, Ivy Lavinia 61

welfare state 10, 26, 41, 57, 61, 80–6, 87, 90, 92, 99–100

wellbeing

personal sense of 50, 54, 96, 103, 105

Wellbeing Index 103–4

Westgarth, William 23

Wheeler, Annie Margaret 70

White Australia Policy 9, 62–3, 64, 91

Whitlam, Gough/Whitlam government 90, 91

Widow and Orphans’ Fund 19, 20, 58, 70

widows’ pension 80

Witton, George 50

women

employment opportunities 58, 60

excluded from direct membership of friendly societies 58

and feminist nationalism 61

friendly societies establish branches for women 9, 15

married, wages 58

right to stand in parliament 60, 61

single mothers 58

voting rights 9, 56, 60–1

women’s and children’s welfare 61

Working Man’s College (RMIT) 57

124

Marking 175 years

ISBN 978-0-646-93093-0



Alex McDermott

Ofno

personalinfluence…A

lexM

cDerm

ottA

ustralian

Un

ity

In 1840, a group of men of no ‘fortune… or importance’ sought

to create a society of mutual aid and self-improvement.

That society became the antecedent of today’s Australian Unity.

Armed with little more than the ideals of egalitarianism,

entrepreneurialism and cooperation, this society and others

like it grew with the fledgling colony and changed the nation.

Drawing on public records and private archives, historian

Alex McDermott captures the spirit of this 175-year history in

Of no personal influence: how people of common enterprise unexpectedly

shaped Australia. McDermott’s account examines the characteristics

and events that moulded the Australian friendly societies and

the world around them. In so doing, he reveals these groups’

little-known pattern of quiet, yet potent, influence on history,

community and democracy.

Documents

Of no personal influence