The Crimson Thread
In 1890, Sir Henry Parkes reminded Australians that they had a natural kinship and declared them ready to manage their own affairs.
1890
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
By Tom Roberts (1856-1931), via the Royal Collection and Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
The Duke of Cornwall and York (the future King George V) opens the Commonwealth of Australia’s first federal Parliament on May 9th, 1901, in Melbourne. The Duke’s grandmother, Queen Victoria, had died on January 22nd that year. Alas, Sir Henry Parkes did not get to witness the historic Parliament, having died in 1896. The first Governor-General was John Hope, Earl of Hopetoun, a former Governor of Victoria; the first Australian-born Governor-General was Sir Isaac Alfred Isaacs, who held office from 1931 to 1936.
Introduction
At a banquet in Melbourne on February 6th, 1890, a decade before the founding of the Commonwealth of Australia, Sir Henry Parkes, Premier of New South Wales, rose to reply to the toast ‘A United Australia!’, and spoke warmly of Australia’s ties of kinship and purpose.
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WE know that it is a wise dispensation that these large colonies sprang into existence, and we admire them when they were fighting their own battles and working out their own prosperity independently of New South Wales, but the time has come when we are no longer isolated. The crimson thread of kinship runs through us all. Even the native-born Australians are Britons, as much as the men born within the cities of London and Glasgow.*
We know the value of their British origin. We know that we represent a race – but time, of course, does not permit me to glance even at its composition – but we know we represent a race for the purposes of settling new colonies, which never had its equal on the face of the earth.* We are here a great people united by natural ties, and with all the capacities that civilised communities can possess. We are as capable of managing our own affairs as our Countrymen in any other part of the Empire.*
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Extracted from The Crimson Thread Speech at Foundation 1901. With minor emendations.
Parkes himself was born in Canley, now a suburb of Coventry, England. In 1901, New South Wales’s population of 1,354,846 included 220,401 born in the UK, 20,151 from Europe, and 14,208 from Asia. In Victoria, out of 1,201,341 inhabitants there were some 7,608 Germans, and 6,230 Chinese; 1,319 came from British India, and 461 from Africa. Figures taken from The Australian Bureau of Statistics: Census of NSW 1901 and Parliament of Victoria: Census of 1901.
This was Parkes’s way of acknowledging that in those heady days of Empire ‘British’ was not really a race or even a nationality, but an umbrella term for a diverse and worldwide family pursuing a vision of free trade and publicly accountable government that was without equal in the history of global adventure. See for example Parkes’s contemporary in Travancore, His Highness Sir Rama Varma Moolam Thurunal.
Commenting on Sir Henry’s speech a few days later, the Yorkshire Post pointed out that his words made a telling reply to those who wanted to break up the United Kingdom. “While the constituencies at home are being urged to seek refuge from passing troubles by repealing the Acts of Union with Ireland and Scotland, the people of the vigorous young States in the Southern Hemisphere have with more statesmanlike instinct resolved to consolidate their strength by closer union.” See Proceedings and Debates of the Australasian Federation Conference, 1890. What the Post would have made of today’s claim that, unlike Australia, listless Britain cannot manage her own affairs and must take directives from a new European empire, hardly bears thinking about. See Mischievous Interference, and The Central People of the World.
