This is the full version of a paper I presented at the National Digital Forum, 30 November 2011.

In 1901, one of the first acts of the Commonwealth of Australia was to create a system of exclusion and control designed to keep the newly-formed nation ‘white’. But White Australia was always a myth. As well as the Indigenous population, there were already many thousands of people classified as ‘non-white‘ living in Australia — most were Chinese, but there were also Japanese, Indians, Syrians and Indonesians.

Here are some of them…

The real face of White Australia

The administration of what became known as the White Australia Policy created a huge volume of records, much of which is still preserved within the National Archives of Australia. These photographs are attached to certificates that non-white residents needed to get back into the country if they decided to travel overseas. There are thousands upon thousands of these certificates in the Archives. Thousands of certificates representing thousands of lives — all monitored and controlled.

But is is too easy to see these people as the powerless victims of a repressive system. There were many acts of resistance. Some argued against the need to be identified ‘just like a criminal’. Others exercised control over their representation, submitting formal studio portraits instead of mug shots.

Most commonly and most powerfully, people resisted the policy simply by going ahead and living rich and productive lives.

My partner, Kate Bagnall, is helping to rewrite Australian-Chinese history by overthrowing the stereotype of the culturally isolated Chinese man living a lonely, meagre existence surrounded by gambling and opium dens. By mining the available records, by reading against the grain of contemporary reports and by working with family historians, Kate is documenting their intimate lives — their wives, their lovers, their families and descendants — the sorts of relationships that sent a shudder through the edifice of White Australia. Power can be reclaimed in many subtle and subversive ways.

‘The real face of White Australia’ is an experiment. It uses facial detection to technology to find and extract the photographs from digital copies of the original certificates made available through the National Archives of Australia’s collection database. The photographs you see here come from just one series, ST84/1. There’s no API to the collection so I reverse-engineered the web interface to create a script that would harvest the item metadata and download copies of all the digitised images. There are 2,756 files in this series. On the day I harvested the metadata, 347 of those files had been digitised, comprising 12,502 images. It took a few hours, but I just ran my script and soon I had a copy of all of this in my local database.

Then came the exciting part. Using a facial detection script I found through Google and an open source computer vision library, I started experimenting with ways of extracting the photos. After a few tweaks I had something that worked pretty well, so I pointed my aging laptop at the 12,502 images and watched anxiously as the CPU temperature rose and rose. It took a few emergency cooling measures, but the laptop survived and I had a folder containing 11,170 cropped images. About a third of these weren’t actually faces, but it was easy to manually remove the false positives, leaving 7,247 photos.

These photos. These people.

With my database fully primed and loaded it was just a matter of creating a simple web interface using Django for the backend and Isotope (a jQuery plugin) at the front. Both are open source projects. All together, from idea to interface, it took a bit more than a weekend to create, and most of that was waiting for the harvesting and facial detection scripts to complete. It would be silly to say it was easy, but I would say that it wasn’t hard.

What we ended up with was a new way of seeing and understanding the records — not as the remnants of bureaucratic processes, but as windows onto the lives of people. All the faces are linked to copies of the original certificates and back to the collection database of the National Archives. So this is also a finding aid. A finding aid that brings the people to the front.

According to Margaret Hedstrom the archival interface ‘is a site where power is negotiated and exercised’. Whether in a reading room or online, finding aids or collection databases are ‘neither neutral nor transparent’, but the product of ‘conscious design decisions’. We would like to think that this interface gives some power back to the people within the records. Their photographs challenge us to do something, to think something, to feel something. We cannot escape their discomfiting gaze.

But this interface represents another subtle shift in power. We could create it without any explicit assistance or involvement by the National Archives itself. Simply by putting part of the collection online, they provided us with the opportunity to develop a resource that both extends and critiques the existing collection database. Interfaces to cultural heritage collections are no longer controlled solely by cultural heritage institutions.

It’s these two aspects of the power of interfaces that I want to focus on today.

There are a growing number of examples where the records created by repressive or discriminatory regimes have, in Eric Ketelaar’s words, ‘become instruments of empowerment and liberation, salvation and freedom’. Nazi records of assets confiscated during the Holocaust have been used to inform processes of restitution and reparation. Government records have helped members of Australia’s Stolen Generations trace family members. Descendants of inmates incarcerated by American colonial authorities in what was the world’s largest leprosy colony in the Philippines, have embraced the administrative record as an affirmation of their own heritage and survival. Records can find new meanings. Power can be reclaimed.

Technology can help. Tim Hitchcock has described how something as simple as keyword searching can turn archives on their heads. Recordkeeping systems tend to reflect the structures and power relations of the organisations that create them. The ‘hierarchical and institutional nature of most archives’, Hitchcock argues, ‘contains an ideological component which is sucked in with every dust-filled breath’. But digitisation and keyword searching free us from having to follow the well-worn paths of institutional power. We can find people and follow their lives against the flow of bureaucratic convenience. We can gain a wholly new perspective on the workings of society. ‘What changes’, Hitchcock asks, ‘when we examine the world through the collected fragments of knowledge that we can recover about a single person, reorganised as a biographical narrative, rather than as part of an archival system?’

Projects such as Unknown no longer may help us answer that question.

Unknown no longer

It’s aiming to extract the names and biographical details of slaves from the 8 million manuscript documents held by the Virginia Historical Society. The documents include court records, receipts, wills and inventories. Here is a page from the ‘Inventory of Negroes at Berry Plain Plantation, King George County, Virginia’ for 1855, listing names, occupations and valuations.

Tim Hitchcock is one of the directors of London Lives a project that similarly seeks to find the people in 240,000 manuscript pages documenting the lives of plebeian Londoners in the 17th century.

London Lives

More than three million names have already been extracted from the records of courts, workhouses, hospitals and other institutions. Work is continuing to link these names together, to merge these various shards of identity and piece together the experiences of London’s poorest inhabitants.

Remember me from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum is working with photographs taken by relief agencies in the aftermath of World War Two. The photographs are of displaced children who survived the Holocaust but were separated from families. What happened to them? The project is seeking public help to identify and trace the children.

Remember me

These are all projects about finding people. Finding the oppressed, the vulnerable, the displaced, the marginalized and the poor and giving them their place in history. This is what Kate and I hope to do with Invisible Australians, the broader project of which our faces experiment is part.

Invisible Australians

‘Invisible Australians’ aims to extract more than just photographs. We want to record and aggregate the biographical data contained within the records of the White Australia Policy — to extract the data and rebuild identities.

But we want to do more, we want to link these identities up with with other records, with the research of family and local historians, with cemetery registers and family trees, with newspaper articles and databases we don’t even know about yet. We want to find people, families and communities.

It’s ridiculously ambitious and totally unfunded. But it is possible.

The most exciting part of online technology is the power it gives to people to pursue their passions. As with the faces, we don’t need the help of the National Archives. We need the records to be digitized, but that’s happening anyway and we can afford to be patient. Most of the tools we need already exist, and are free. In the past 12 months, for example, there have been a number of open source tools released for crowd-sourced transcription of manuscript records.

People with passions, people with dreams, people who are just annoyed and impatient, don’t have to wait for cultural institutions to create exactly what they need. They can take what’s on offer and change it.

Interfaces can be modified. It is amazingly easy to write a script that will change the way a web page looks and behaves in your browser. I was frustrated by the standard interface to digitized files in the National Archives of Australia’s Recordsearch database — so I changed it.

Before and after

Not only did make it look a bit nicer, I added new functions. My script lets you print a whole file or a range of pages and display the entire contents of the file on a pretty cool 3d wall.

I’ve shared this script, and a few other Recordsearch enhancements. Anyone can install them with a click and use them.

Wragge Labs Emporium

Interfaces are sites of power and we can claim some of that power for ourselves. Online technologies not only free us from the having to brave the physical intimidation of the reading room, they free us up to engage with the records in new ways. The archivist-on-duty would probably not be pleased if I pulled out some scissors and started snipping photos out of certificates. Or if I pulled a file apart and pasted it’s contents on the wall. But online we are free to experiment.

The power of cultural heritage organisations is perhaps expressed most forcefully in their ability to control the arrangement and description of their collections. ‘Every representation, every model of description, is biased’, note Verne Harris and Wendy Duff, ‘because it reflects a particular world-view and is constructed to meet specific purposes’. Archives, libraries and museums are already starting to share this power, by allowing tagging, or seeking public assistance with description through crowd sourcing projects. But most of the these activities still happen within spaces created and curated by the institutions themselves. Our cathedrals of culture might be opening their doors and inviting the public to participate in their ceremonies, but that doesn’t make them bazaars. The architecture stills speaks of authority.

In any case, people already have a space where they can explore and enrich collections — it’s called the internet.

It would be great to see cultural institutions doing more to watch, understand and support what people are doing with collections in their own spaces — following them as they pursue their passions, rather than thinking of ways to motivate them.

A quick example… You might have heard of Zotero, it’s an open source project that lets you capture, annotate and organize your research materials.

Zotero

One cool thing about Zotero is that you can build and contribute little screen scrapers, called translators, that let Zotero extract structured data from any old collection database. You might not be surprised to learn that I’ve created a translator for Recordsearch. Another cool thing about Zotero is that you can share the stuff that you collect in public groups.

Invisible Australians Zotero group

Put those two cool things together and what do you have? Well to me they spell out user generated finding aids — parallel collection databases created by researchers simply pursuing their own passions.

Linked Open Data greatly increases opportunities for collection description to leak into the wider web. If objects and documents are identified with a unique URL, then anyone can can make and publish statements about them in machine-readable form. These statements can then be aggregated and explored. Initiatives such as the Open Annotation Collaboration will hasten the development of these shared descriptive and interpretative layers around our cultural collections.

And of course all this descriptive and interpretative work can be harvested back to enhance existing collection databases. We could start doing it now — though I will spare you today my rant about the possibilities of mining footnotes.

As well as exploring the possibilities of user-generated content, cultural institutions are starting to open up their collection data for re-use. APIs are great (though Linked Open Data is better), and New Zealand is lucky to have an organisation like DigitalNZ which just gets it. People can and will make cool things with your stuff.

But again, we don’t have to wait for everything to be delivered in a convenient, machine-readable form. If it’s on the web anybody can scrape, harvest and experiment.

You probably all know about the National Library of Australia’s newspaper digitisation project — it’s building a magnificent resource. But I wanted to do more than just find articles. I wanted to explore and analyze their content on a large scale. So I built a screen scraper to extract structured data from search results, and then used the scraper to  power a series of tools. I have a harvester that lets you download an entire results set — hundreds or thousands of articles — with metadata neatly packaged for further analysis.

Harvester

Or what about a script that graphs the occurrence of search terms over time, and allows you to ask questions like When did the Great War become the First World War?.

When did the Great War become the First World War?

In the end I got a bit carried away and built my own public API to the Trove newspaper database.

Unofficial Trove newspapers API

I think it’s important to note that the tools I developed were guided by the types of questions I wanted to ask. While we should welcome APIs and celebrate their possibilities, we should also remain critical. APIs are interfaces, they too embed power relations. Every API has an argument. What questions do they let us ask? What questions do they prevent us from asking?

Even as we move from the age of lumbering, slow-witted data silos into the rapidly-evolving realms of Linked Open Data, we have to constantly question the models we make of the world. Ontologies and vocabularies are culturally determined and historically specific. Yes, they too are interfaces, complete with their own distributions of power and authority. But we can revisit and change them. And we can relate our new models to our old models, capturing complex, long-term shifts in the way we think about the world. That’s incredibly exciting.

All of this hacking, harvesting, questioning, enriching and meaning-making makes me think about the possibilities of grassroots leadership. Online technologies enable people to take cultural institutions into unexpected realms. They can build their own interfaces, ask their own questions, determine their own needs — they can point the way instead of simply waiting to be served.

You might wonder what the National Library of Australia thinks of my various scrapers and harvesters. I can’t speak for them, but I can say that they’ve awarded me a fellowship to explore further the possibilities of text-mining in their newspaper database.

The idea of grassroots leadership brings me back to the title of this talk — ‘It’s all about the stuff’. It seems to me that we tend to model the interactions between cultural institutions and the public as transactions. The public are ‘clients’, ‘patrons’, ‘users’ or ‘visitors’. But the sorts of things I’ve been talking about today give us a chance to put the collections themselves squarely at the centre of our thoughts and actions. Instead of concentrating on the relationship between the institution and the public, we can can focus on the relationship we both have with the collections.

It’s all about the stuff.

It’s all about the respect and responsibility we both have for our collections.

It’s all about the respect and responsibility we both have for people like this.

Presented at the Life of Information Symposium, 24 September 2010.
Slides are available on Slideshare.

This palm print belongs to a 12-year-old boy called Charlie Allen.

Charlie was born in Sydney in 1896.

His mother was Frances Allen (sometime sweet shop owner and brothel keeper), his father Charlie Gum (a buyer for Wing On company).

Charlie was raised by his mother, but in 1909, at the age of 13, he was taken to China by his father.

His father returned to Sydney, leaving Charlie in China. He lived with relatives in the town of Shekki (inland from Hong Kong) for 6 years.

Charlie was homesick, but had no means of getting back to Australia. His mother attempted to enlist government help but to no avail. Charlie finally returned in 1915.

The following year he enlisted in First AIF (well actually he enlisted three times, and was discharged as medically unfit each time).

Charlie married in Sydney in 1917 and had two daughters soon after. He returned to China in 1922 for 7 months.

Charlie Allen died in 1938 as the result of an industrial accident. He was 41.

How do we know all this about Charlie Allen?

We know this because there are fragments of Charlie’s life scattered throughout the holdings of the National Archives of Australia.

The CEDT from 1909 when he left Australia with his father:

NAA: ST84/1, 1909/22/41-50

NAA: A1, 1911/13854

NAA: B2455, ALLEN C A

NAA: SP42/1, C1922/4449

Charlie’s father was Chinese, he was therefore categorised as a ‘half-caste’, as someone who was not white, and fell under the restrictions imposed by the White Australia Policy.

The certificate from 1909 granted Charlie an exemption to the Dictation Test. Without it, he may not have been allowed back into the country.

Every time one of many thousands of non-Europeans resident in Australia sought to travel overseas and return home again they needed one of these certificates.

We’re all of course familiar with the general outlines of the White Australia Policy, and the way it underpinned conceptions of Australia as a nation in the first half of the 20th century.

But what we sometimes forget is that it was also a massive bureaucratic exercise.

Forms and certificates were printed, issued, used and filed. Regulations were modified, guidelines were distributed and administering officers were managed and advised. Individual cases were reviewed, policy was changed and new forms and certificates were printed, issued, used and filed…

For example, between 1901 and 1911, 400 circulars were issued to port officers about immigration restriction. The confidential manual on immigration restriction grew from one page in 1902 to more than 200 in 1912.

Much of this system is now preserved in the National Archives.

For the years between 1902 and 1948 there remain:

• More than 50,000 CEDTs
• 90 shelf metres of records
• 15,000 case files

And within those many thousands of files are the scattered fragments of lives such as Charlie’s — lives that were controlled, monitored and documented in a vain attempt to make Australia ‘white’.

We’ve already seen today some wonderful examples of how these fragments, these slivers of existence, can be found, extracted, aggregated and displayed. But I think it’s worth considering for a moment what happens when we do this.

The historian Tim Hitchcock, behind projects such as the Old Bailey Online and London Lives, has reflected on the impact of digitisation on our access to archives. Archives, he notes, tend to reflect the assumptions and practices of the institutions that created them.

But by providing new ways into these records systems, technology can undermine the power relations that persist within their structures.

‘What changes’, asks Tim Hitchcock, ‘when we examine the world through the collected fragments of knowledge that we can recover about a single person, reorganised as a biographical narrative, rather than as part of an archival system?’

I don’t know, but I think we should find out, don’t you?

**********

I hope you’ve all collected a mini card. These themselves provide a little glimpse at the real face of White Australia and I’d invite you all to head over to the National Archives website, do battle with the monster that is RecordSearch, and look up the file references that are on each card.

The cards are part of a project that Kate Bagnall and I are trying to develop — Invisible Australians.

I should note too that the cards, and most of the examples I’m showing you here today are the product of Kate’s long and detailed research into Chinese-Australian families. In modern project management parlance, Kate is the domain expert, while I am merely the technical resource.

If we look again at one of the CEDTs, we can see that there’s a lot of useful structured data:

• name
• place of birth
• age
• height
• destination
• date of departure
• name of ship

Invisible Australians has the modest aim of extracting this data from the 50,000+ forms in the National Archives. But of course that’s just the start, because each person might have used a number of certificates — so then it’s a matter of matching these identities.

http://invisibleaustralians.org

And then there are a range of other related forms, not to mention case files, alien registration documents, naturalisation applications…

Obviously we can’t do it alone. We’ll be creating a crowdsourcing tool to extract and link the data.

It’s ridiculously ambitious, totally unfunded and is likely to take over our lives.

Is it worth it?

Imagine being able to navigate the network of lives, families and relationships. To follow their journeys, to share their tragedies, to celebrate their small victories against a repressive system.

Imagine being able to watch them age.

Is it worth it? We think so.

**********

For Tim Hitchcock technology opens up the possibility of writing a new history from below, exploring how the poor, the marginalised and the powerless navigated the institutions of the modern state. But it’s not just about search engines and databases. He talks about making ‘best use of the technology of emotions and representation — how you use words and pictures and a story to impact, not just on what people think, but what they see in their mind’s eye’.

In this project, the photos matter. I hope the irony in our project title is obvious.

This is the real face of White Australia.

The photos remind us that the project is not just about shifting data around — these are lives, these are people.

But this brings its own challenge, for if we are seeking to liberate these lives from the fragmentation and obscurity of bureaucratic systems then we should be asking what are we liberating them into?

A database?

This is not just an exercise in data creation and management. We also have to think carefully and creatively about issues of representation, access and discovery.

We have to give these lives back their freedom to associate, to have relationships, to make connections.

We need to embed these lives in a variety of contexts and combinations. To make room for serendipity, celebration, sadness, and yes, even play.

We need to bring these lives into a rich and ongoing conversation with the world.

But how?

**********

I’ve been working on a little experiment for the National Museum of Australia called The History Wall. What the History Wall does is quite simple, it pulls together data on the fly from a variety of sources including People Australia, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the National Library’s newspapers project, historical population data from the Bureau of Statistics, photos from the Flickr accounts of the PowerHouse Museum and the National Archives, and the collection database of the National Museum itself. It chooses randomly from all this stuff, throws the results up into the air and then displays them however they happen to fall. No two views are ever quite the same.

http://defining.net.au/wall/

It’s something more than a timeline. To me it’s more like a celebration of context and serendipity. There’s a richness to it, a sense of discovery and fun, but there’s also fragility — next time you look it might be gone.

It’s a bit like history itself.

It’s a bit like the world.

How do we create spaces for our data to merge and mingle? How do we encourage the development of new contexts and connections?

I think the first thing we have to do is stop thinking about databases and dictionaries, registers and encyclopaedias. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being critical of the wonderful projects we’ve seen today. I just think we can use all this work better if we stop thinking about individual resources and start developing on a web scale, on a global scale.

Yes, we have the technology. Time today has spared you from a detailed discourse on the Semantic Web, but I do want to focus on one aspect.

You may have heard of Linked Data, it’s a set of guidelines to help you publish your data to the Semantic Web. There are only four basic principles and I’m only going to talk about one of them. It’s one of those deceptively simple things. You look at it and think, ‘yeah, ok’, but before too long it’s starting to turn your brain inside out.

Use URLs to identify things in the real world.

Yeah, ok…

You know what URLs are, web addresses, the things you type in your browser’s location field.

And hopefully you know what things in the real world are: people, places, objects, events, ideas…

Now you may have detected a problem here, because no matter how many times you click the refresh button, your web browser is not going to be able to use such a URL to magically deliver you the real world thing.

Well, unless you’re on eBay.

Fortunately, the Linked Data guidelines provide for a bit of technical trickery that allow your browser to retrieve not the real world thing, but some information about that thing — perhaps in the form of a web page.

Why bother?

Names are powerful.

We share and use names to talk about things. Computers are the same. If we use URLs to identify things in the real world, then computers can start talking about them.

We can define and explore real-world relationships in an online environment. We can create rich, meaningful linkages across databases, across disciplines, across the world.

We can start building and thinking on a web scale.

**********

Thanks to the People Australia project, I can confidently claim that this is me:

http://nla.gov.au/nla.party-479364#foaf:Person

I keep meaning to get it on a t-shirt.

The most exciting thing about People Australia is not the EAC records or the aggregation of resources — it’s the identifiers, because they enable us to say things about people anywhere on the web that computers can understand and relate back to a specific real world entity — a person.

You can start doing it now with Wragge’s Identity Browser.

http://wraggelabs.com/identities/

This is a little tool I built using the People Australia API. It makes it easy to find identifiers for people and organisations, and it supplies you with some code that you can drop into a blog post or web page that will tell a computer that a name relates to a thing called a ‘person’ , that this person’s name has a certain standard form, and that this person can be uniquely identified by People Australia.

Even if you don’t publish a website or a blog, you can use People Australia identifiers to build semantic linkages. Wragge’s Identity Browser also creates machine tags for you. Machine tags are like normal tags but with built in semantics. When coupled with identifiers they enable you to do some pretty powerful things.

You could for example use machine tags in Flickr to tell computers that a certain photo depicts a person uniquely identified by People Australia. In fact, people have been doing just that.

http://wraggelabs.com/fmtc/

The Flickr Machine Tag Challenge is a sort of scoreboard that I built to encourage people to start adding People Australia enriched machine tags to photos. More than 1200 tags have been added to over 1000 photos. Feel free to join in!

The point is that the technologies already exist to enable us to build web scale biographical resources. Not dictionaries or databases as we know them, but networks capable of constant expansion, elaboration, and cooperation.

What we need are more tools to make it simple, recipes to make it obvious, examples and applications to make it popular, and leadership to make it all seem possible.

**********

Of course most of the lives we hope to liberate through Invisible Australians will not be represented in People Australia.

Not yet.

But Invisible Australians will offer a point of aggregation and disambiguation that will enable our people to find their way from the bureaucratic recesses of the White Australia Policy to a place on the national stage.

And we will encourage others to do likewise. Basil can’t do all the work. The centralised system has to be fed through centres of aggregation and collaboration.

Similarly, there are many great resources already out there relating to Chinese-Australians. There are hordes of family and local historians compiling and publishing biographical data. We want to identify people in these resources and link to them.

We want to publish up to People Australia and link down to a single headstone in a lonely country cemetery.

But to do this we need to help people make their resources linkable. To help them create persistent, re-usable URLs, and expose their data in standard formats. To create Linked Data, even if they have no particular interest in the Semantic Web.

http://invisibleaustralians.org/

Invisible Australians is not just about extracting data from archives. It’s also about working with others to build capacities and demonstrate possibilities.

It’s ridiculously ambitious, totally unfunded and is likely to take over our lives.

Is it worth it?

We think so.

Amongst the holdings of the National Archives of Australia are some of the most visually arresting documents you’ll see — thousands and thousands of forms from the early decades of the twentieth century, each with a portrait photograph and palm print, each documenting the movements of a non-white resident. Along with many other certificates, regulations, correspondence and case files, these forms are part of the massive bureaucratic legacy of the White Australia Policy.

These certificates allowed non-white Australians travelling overseas to re-enter the country. NAA: ST84/1, 1906/21-30

But these are more than just interesting looking pieces of paper, they are snapshots of people’s lives. The forms capture data about an individual’s place of birth, physical characteristics and more. Over time a person might have submitted several of these forms, so by bringing them together we could trace their history, we could map their journeys — we could even watch them age.

The system which sought to render non-whites invisible has captured and preserved the outlines of their lives. By extracting and linking this data we could build a picture of another Australia, an Australia in which non-white residents lived, loved, struggled and succeeded, despite the impositions of a repressive regime.

I talked about these records at the AAHC conference last year, inspired in part by Tim Hitchcock’s chapter in the Virtual Representation of the Past. Tim Hitchcock argues that technology can allow us to restructure archives, looking beyond institutional hierarchies to the lives of individuals contained within:

What changes when we examine the world through the collected fragments of knowledge that we can recover about a single person, reorganised as a biographical narrative, rather than as part of an archival system?

I don’t know, but I’d like to find out.

During my AAHC talk, Dave Lester suggested that the extraction of data from these forms might make a good crowdsourcing project. It’s a great idea. As you can see, the data is generally well-structured and legible, it should be possible to construct a simple series of forms that would allow volunteers to transcribe the data. The next stage would be to try and match identities across forms. That’s more complicated, but projects such as Tim Hitchcock’s London Lives show how users can construct identities by connecting a range of historical documents.

Then there are connections to resources outside of the archives — photographs, local histories, newspapers, genealogies, cemetery registers and more. By keeping our system open and extensible, and by working with others to help them expose their information in standard ways, it should be possible to develop the framework for an evolving mesh of biographical data.

So, how do we get started? This is the point when you usually have to start thinking about money — how can I fund this? In Australia that generally means a journey into the arcane world of the Australian Research Council. The ARC suffers from all the problems of a peer-reviewed system, but added to this is a rather antiquated notion of what research is.

In the rules covering each of the main schemes it’s clearly stated that the ‘compilation of data’ and the ‘development of research aids or tools’ are not supported. I spend part of my life working for the Australian National Data Service, an organisation that seeks to highlight how the sharing and reuse of data can open up new research possibilities. The ARC, however, seems to think that data has little value beyond its original research context.

Of course you can still mount a case for such activities. Applicants for a ‘Discovery’ grant can argue that data creation is integral to their project and provide details of the ‘specific research questions to be addressed’. But what if you don’t yet know what the questions are? Part of the point of a project such as this is to try and find out what questions we are able to ask. Until we start to compile, link and explore the data, the ‘specific research questions’ will be little more than convenient fictions, dreamt up to satisfy the prodding of peer reviewers.

Tom Scheinfeldt wrote a fantastic blog post recently, responding to concerns about the failure of many digital humanities projects to make arguments or answer questions. Drawing examples from the history of science, Tom argues:

we need to make room for both kinds of digital humanities, the kind that seeks to make arguments and answer questions now and the kind that builds tools and resources with questions in mind, but only in the back of its mind and only for later. We need time to experiment and even… time to play.

The ARC does not fund play.

You might imagine that the ARC’s infrastructure funding scheme would offer more hope for a project such as this. And yes, there are many worthy projects involving databases and online tools that have been supported in this way (and I have benefited from some of them!). But it seems that in the minds of research funders infrastructure is always BIG. Grants start at $150,000, and applications are expected to involve multiple institutional partners. Projects have to be scaled up to fit the ARC’s definition of infrastructure, often resulting in complex, lumbering, long-term projects whose products are out of date by the time of their release.

There is no room in our current infrastructure models for agile, innovative, user-focused digital toolmakers seeking small amounts to experiment with apps, prototypes, datasets or visualisations. I often look with envy upon the US National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants.

In any case, neither I nor my partner in this endeavour, Kate Bagnall (@baibi), are currently in academic positions, so our chances of gaining any sort of research funding are next to none. We have the expertise — Kate has spent many years researching Australian-Chinese families and knows the records back-to-front, while I just can’t help playing with biographical data — but is that enough? How can you mount an ongoing research project without institutional support, research funding and the various badges and signifiers of academic authority?

I don’t know that either, but I have some ideas.

Mrs Ah Yin Pak Chong. NAA: ST84/1, 1907/321-330

I didn’t manage to get a contribution together for Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt’s crowdsourced-in-a-week book, Hacking the Academy, but watching the process from afar I did begin to wonder about how we might hack the way we build and run major research projects. This is what I have in mind:

• To strip down the large, lumbering beasts and design projects that are modular and opportunistic — able to grow quickly when resources allow, to bolt on related projects, to absorb existing tools.
• To follow the data freely across technological and institutional boundaries, developing open networks that invite participation and use.
• To develop a floating pool of collaborators, both inside and outside of academia, who are able to come and go, contributing whatever and whenever they can.
• To make everything public, accessible and standards-compliant, so that even if the project stalls it could be picked up and developed by someone else.

Most of all I just want to be able to do it. I don’t want to second-guess the ARC. I don’t want to spend months negotiating with potential partners or begging for an institutional home. I want to build, experiment and play. I want to make a start.

So that’s what we’re going to do.

We have a topic, plenty of raw materials, some basic principles and the beginnings of a plan. We even have a name — Invisible Australians: Living under the White Australia Policy.

As the project develops, I’ll be blogging here about some of the technical stuff, while Kate will be exploring the content over at the tiger’s mouth. I hope to have a prototype of the transcription tool ready to demo at THATCamp Canberra, while Kate is already at work putting together guides on using the records and developing an Omeka site that follows a number of Chinese-Australian families through the archives.

Can we hack together a major research project? Let’s find out.

The glow of his campfire framed a simple tableau of pioneer life. Across this ‘untenanted land’, Edwin Brady mused, ‘little companies’, such as his own, sat by their ‘solitary fires’. ‘They smoked pipes and talked, or watched the coals reflectively’. Around them, the ‘shadowy outlines’ of the bush merged into the dark northern night, and ‘the whispers’ of this ‘unknown’ land gathered about. It seemed to Brady that this camp, this night, represented the ‘actual life’ of the Northern Territory as he had known it. But the future weighed heavily upon that quiet, nostalgic scene. The moment would soon fade, Brady reflected, as the ‘cinematograph of Time’ rolled on. It was 1912, and something new was coming.

Staring into the flames of the campfire, Brady imagined he heard ‘the whistle of the Trans-continental Express’. The ‘rumble of freight trains’ followed, and the sound of water churning in the wake of ‘fast coastal steamers’. The night was filled with movement as Brady perceived an end to the north’s crippling isolation, the conquest of its ‘lonesome distances’. New industries too! The ‘chug-chug’ of sugar mills, ‘the buzzing of cotton jinnys’, ‘the clinking of harvesters’, ‘the hissing of refrigerators’—as Brady listened, ‘the thousand homely sounds of human progress’ joined in a triumphant ‘hymn of the Future’. The night’s subtle whispers were lost amidst the clamour of technology on the move. Not mere campfires, but ‘young cities’, electric lit and alive with enterprise’, would soon arise to defeat the darkness. This was Brady’s dream. This was progress.

Edwin James Brady, poet and journalist, visited the Northern Territory in September 1912, gathering material for his ambitious compendium of Australian developmental opportunities, Australia Unlimited. Brady was travelling the country, charting the outlines of Australia’s future with his typical optimistic zeal. His trip north was drawing to a close and, as he relaxed by his last campfire, he began to ponder the transformation of the Territory. The sounds and images conjured from the night reveal much about the spirit that invigorated his work. He imagined an end to isolation and emptiness, the growth of both population and production. The future was rising like a flood, lapping at the frontiers of settlement, ready to redeem Australia’s waste lands with the regenerative flow of human ingenuity and enthusiasm. Australia’s unlimited prospects lay both in the conquest of space and the fulfillment of time. Plotted against these two axes, the upward course of progress was clear.

The ‘cinematograph of Time’ was an apt metaphor. It portrayed the unfolding story of Australia’s national progress as a product of the latest technology, presented with an assured sense of inevitability – frame follows frame follows frame. In the early years of the century, confidence in the transforming power of science and technology was high. ‘The wealth of today’, Brady argued, ‘is but a beggar’s moiety of the unlimited wealth of the future which will be won by the application of modern knowledge to local conditions’. His optimism is echoed still in the slogans of ‘knowledge nation’ and ‘new economy’. Science and technology remain as engines for change, cascading revolution upon revolution. The weight of inevitability that threatened to extinguish Brady’s isolated campfire continues to press upon our visions of the future –invigorating our hopes and intensifying our fears. We are all familiar with the story of progress, a compelling tale of growth and improvement that entwines national ambition with individual longing. But how are our journeys through life framed within this unrolling narrative? What choices do we have, and how do we make them?

For Brady, progress was measured in miles and acres, a story of continental conquest. Land figures less prominently in contemporary calculations of achievement, nonetheless, we continue to imagine progress in terms of distance travelled, as a journey, ever onwards through time. In a landscape of metaphors, amidst metaphors of landscape, the meaning of progress eludes easy analysis. Our future is constructed within the shifting space of time. This essay imagines an alternate journey, one that explores the terrain that separates the life of an individual from the destiny of Australia Unlimited; a journey that carries us from science, to nation, to citizen, venturing unsteadily along the boundary between hope and fear. If the topography remains unclear, the scale awry, we might at least hope to chart a few reference points along the frontiers of the future.

all this paraphernalia

In July 1909, the Minister for External Affairs, Littleton Groom, introduced legislation for the Commonwealth takeover of the Northern Territory. Groom, a methodical and well-educated liberal MP from Queensland, briefly surveyed the history of the Territory and presented to the House ‘a few opinions of practical men’, all of whom were optimistic about the region’s potential. ‘[W]e have there’, Groom concluded, ‘some of the finest land in Australia’. Nonetheless, it was clear that the Territory’s ‘latent resources’ would not be extracted without effort. The investment of capital and a dramatic increase in population were essential, but so too was an increase in knowledge. ‘We are every year acquiring a better knowledge of our natural conditions and a better understanding of the laws of production’, Groom argued. It was through such an understanding, he continued, that ‘much of the land which is now despised will ultimately become very productive’. Where would this knowledge come from? Groom looked to a scientific agency whose establishment he had advocated since his entry into politics—a Federal Bureau of Agriculture.

Littleton Groom embodied much of the spirit of ‘new liberalism’, or ‘progressive liberalism’ as he termed it. By the late 19th century, traditional laissez faire policies seemed increasingly impotent in the face of growing threats to social cohesion and unparalleled opportunities for accelerated development. Responding to this challenge, new liberals sought to wield the power of the state to claim progress as their own, to enrich the character of their citizens, and to ensure the prosperity of their nation. ‘I want to see the individual and individuality developed to the full’, Groom argued, and wherever the state ‘can be used for the purpose of doing good for the people as a whole, then I believe in the State exercising its powers accordingly’. It was a creed carried into the first federal parliament under the banner of protectionism, defended most eloquently by Groom’s friend and colleague, Alfred Deakin.

The idea of a federal bureau to foster agricultural improvement was emblematic of the new liberals’ cause, a clear example of how government could employ ‘direct agencies’ in the manufacture of progress. Fashioned after the US Department of Agriculture, the proposed Australian bureau was expected to coordinate scientific investigations and collect ‘the very best and latest information’ for dissemination to primary producers. Such ‘intelligent legislation’, Groom maintained, brought ‘greater liberty’ to the farmer, while also boosting the country’s productive capacity. Both individual and nation would grow. Deakin, who himself had made a special study of irrigation, was a keen supporter of the measure, as were a number of other prominent protectionists. Isaac Isaacs argued passionately: ‘All this paraphernalia … is only the gold lace of the Constitution, unless we can make of it an engine for the promotion of the material, moral, and social welfare of the people’.

The Bureau of Agriculture was invested with many of the attributes of an ideal, progressive society. Scientist and farmer would work together, melding knowledge and practice, intellect and endeavour. Their cooperative efforts promised both an enlightened citizenry and a wealthy nation. This presumed interdependence and its implicit sense of balance was at the core of Groom’s liberalism. He quoted approvingly the Victorian Director of Education’s assessment that an ‘ideal education’ concerned itself with ‘physical fitness’, ‘mental fitness’ and ‘moral fitness’. ‘So it was with national life’, Groom added, ‘Industrial and intellectual capacity must be developed’. The nation’s greatest resources, he argued, lay in ‘the hand power, the brain power and the heart power of our manhood and womanhood’. There was no simple formula for progress. It was a property both of individuals and of nations. In a good society the two were closely linked, proceeding apace. But this could be achieved only through a complex set of balancing acts, by constantly tweaking the levels of authority and freedom, duty and reward, ideals and practice, knowledge and control.

the modern hayseed

The life and work of Littleton Groom was memorialised by his widow Jessie, in a biography she compiled under the title, Nation Building in Australia. A tad grandiose, but the title perhaps speaks more of Groom’s compelling sense of duty than it does of posthumous puffery. ‘Nation building’ was a commitment, an act of service, a life to be lived, not a victory to be won. However, the title also makes reference to one of the most significant periods in Groom’s political life. From 1905–8, he served as a minister in Alfred Deakin’s protectionist government. Although they were a parliamentary minority with a fragile hold on power, Deakin’s protectionists nonetheless embarked upon an ambitious legislative program that did much to define the nature of Australian federalism. The achievements of this administration were eulogised by Groom himself in a pamphlet also entitled ‘Nation Building in Australia’. It was a phrase that linked the personal and the political, a citizen’s duty and a country’s destiny.

As Minister for Home Affairs, and later Attorney-General, Groom contributed significantly to the government’s tally of ‘practical legislation’. But his achievements in areas such as meteorology, statistics and bounties were intended as part of a broader system of institutions and legislation, designed to manage Australia’s productive resources through the rational application of scientific knowledge. At the heart of this system he imagined his Bureau of Agriculture. With Australia’s economy heavily dependent upon primary industry, Groom argued that the establishment of such a bureau could ‘be justified on financial considerations alone’. Not only would existing farms be made more efficient, the frontiers of land settlement would be advanced. Immigrants would be rallied to Australia’s great nation-building crusade, inspired by the government’s support for small landholders.

But there was also a moral dimension to the promise of agricultural improvement. ‘We may trust the cupidity of mankind to develop our mineral resources’, Deakin remarked pointedly, ‘but agricultural, pastoral, and kindred pursuits need the superintending and assisting help of the States and of the Commonwealth’. Agriculture was not just about profit. Isaac Isaacs had argued for the need to ‘liberalise’ agriculture, ‘to raise it to a level higher than it has ever occupied before, to give it a dignity, a worth and a profit which may raise the Australian nation in the whole scale of civilization’. The application of science promised to ‘elevate’ agriculture and its practitioners. No more would the farmer be figure of ridicule, a ‘clodhopper’, a ‘hayseed’. On the contrary, Deakin argued, ‘The modern “Hayseed” is an up-to-date, keenly alive businessman, whose study is how to make the best of a small area with limited means but unlimited intelligence’.

Science was a potent addition to the regenerative elixir of frontier life. The idea that a new ‘type’ of man was being created at the nexus of European civilisation and Australian environment had gained considerable currency, infused by progressive assumptions about the benefits of rural living and the role of the frontier in the formation of national character. Edwin Brady warned that the land’s ‘ancient lineage forbids the familiarity of the unworthy’, and welcomed its ‘paradoxes and difficulties’ as a test of Australia’s physical and mental prowess. The establishment of a Bureau of Agriculture was a response to this continental challenge, offering further improvement of the Australian type through a reinvigorated assault on the vicissitudes of frontier existence. Groom quoted approvingly US President Roosevelt’s assessment, that as well as creating wealth, his own department must aim ‘to foster agriculture for its social results … to assist in bringing about the best kind of life on the farm for the sake of producing the best kind of men’.

But in the transfigurative furnace of frontier life, both man and land were forged anew. Just as Groom had looked to a future when the ‘despised’ lands of the Northern Territory would be revealed in their true productive glory, so other supporters of the Bureau of Agriculture believed that the accumulation of knowledge would ultimately redeem lands now defamed as ‘desert’. Deakin described the transformation wrought upon the desert plains of the United States, arguing that the answer was not simply irrigation, but intelligence: ‘Brains pay better than water, and brains are making farming pay to-day’. Australia’s ‘hope’, he continued, ‘lies in those enormous tracts which have yet to be brought into the service of man and made productive of wealth for the whole community’. Australia’s ‘Dead Heart’, Brady proclaimed memorably, was in fact a ‘Red Heart’ destined to ‘pulsate with life’. Brain and heart, mind and matter, man and nature – the golem of progress would arise, moulded from the continent’s red soil, in the image of the ‘modern hayseed’.

Groom imagined a nation made strong through the accumulation of knowledge and the occupation of land. The frontiers of science and of settlement would be brought into alignment by his Bureau of Agriculture, thence to move forward in their inexorable conquest of the continent. Australia’s ‘emptiness’ was no longer simply a location for scientific research, it was itself an object for study and transformation. ‘Altogether, a great realm of exploration lies open to us’, proclaimed Prime Minister Joseph Cook, introducing legislation for the Bureau in 1913: ‘A whole vista of duties and potentialities opens up when inquiry is made as to what there is to be done in Australia’. A new wave of discovery and possession was gathering momentum. ‘Little now remains for the geographical explorer to do’, Brady argued, ‘but for the scientific investigator there is still an almost limitless field in Australia’. Time and space were traded along the frontiers of the future. Science gained space, a ‘vista of potentialities’ to explore and conquer. The land, in return, won a sense of inevitable fulfilment – the gift of time, the power of destiny.

the battle of Australia

The campfire was slowly dying, as was the dream. Edwin Brady continued to ponder the Northern Territory’s future, but the sounds of progress filling his thoughts gradually yielded to the insistent ‘tramp of young Australian feet at drill’. Instead of ‘clinking’ harvesters, he now heard ‘the wireless keeping watch by night and day’; instead of rumbling freight trains there was the sound of ‘scouting aeroplanes coming home to their military hangars’. As the embers crumbled to ash, Brady concluded his campfire devotions, looking up at the stars ‘glittering like bayonet points’ and offering a prayer to the ‘God of Nations and of Battles’ that ‘this Northern State-to-be might put her young feet upon the paths of Destiny … in peace’. Brady’s hymn of the future was scored to a martial beat; Australia’s unlimited future could be assured only through determined vigilance and resolute defence.

Australia Unlimited was a ‘Book with a Mission’, not merely to sell Australia, but to save it. ‘A mere handful of White People’, perched uncomfortably near Asia’s ‘teeming centres of population’, could not expect to maintain unchallenged ownership of the continent and its potential riches, the book’s prospectus warned. Even as Australia was beginning to enjoy the first fruits of nationhood, its legitimacy, its very existence, seemed imperilled. Australia’s ‘empty north’ was widely perceived as an open door to potential Asian aggressors. The Deakin government was keen to remedy this vulnerability, and its move to assume control of the Northern Territory was justified both in terms of development and security. ‘We have in the north a rich, fertile country’, Groom argued, introducing the legislation, ‘and … that Territory, as it is to-day, especially in relation to other nations, is a menace to the Commonwealth’.

Offering both the promise of riches and the threat of invasion, northern Australia revealed the complexities of nation building – development and defence were closely entwined. The problem with the Northern Territory, Groom explained, was that it remained ‘unmanned’. But ‘manning’ the country was not simply a matter of numbers. What was required was ‘effective’ occupation, ‘by a people who are applying their energies and industry to developing the resources of the country’. Only when settled by sturdy, hardworking landholders would the north be made both productive and secure. With its promise to improve the quality and efficiency of rural life, science appeared ready and able to bulwark the nation’s defensive frontiers. The Bureau of Agriculture was an essential part of a system aimed at developing a strong, self-contained nation. Moreover, as part of a well-balanced civic education, science rounded out the armoury of Australia’s ‘citizen soldiery’. The nation’s best defence, Groom argued, lay in ‘the ideal of the intelligent proprietor of the land defending his own country’.

But defence meant more than just preparedness. Australia’s progress had to be won in an ongoing contest of legitimacy, with battles raging along the frontiers of race, land, identity and occupation. Groom’s 1901 election campaign was energised by his detailed and passionate advocacy of the principle of ‘White Australia’. Quoting C. H. Pearson on the dangers of Asian immigration and the threat of racial degeneracy, he warned his electors ‘we are not fighting the battle of Australia alone, …we are fighting the battle of civilised Europe’. Australia was seeking to defend, not only its land, but its integrity as a civilised nation. Fears of infiltration, contamination and degeneration constantly pricked at the confidence of White Australia, reflected in Commonwealth action to enforce quarantine and eradicate topical diseases. Groom’s Bureau of Agriculture was justified as a means of defence against the pests and diseases, which ‘have no respect for the border lines marked on our maps’. It was in the denial of borders, the negation of boundaries, that Australia’s dissolution threatened. The battle for racial integrity was both personal and national, moral and martial. ‘Can you allow your children to blend their blood with that of the alien races?’, Groom asked, ‘Can you imagine anything more pathetic than sad-looking almond eyes peeping out of the Caucasian faces?’

But the very notion of integrity, the fearfully imagined borders of White Australia, were themselves a denial of Aboriginal presence. The ‘waste’ and the ‘emptiness’ that Groom hoped to dispel through the application of science, were constructed out of a lingering sense of unease and illegitimacy. With its offer of life and renewal, science helped to legitimate possession, demonstrating the inevitability of civilised conquest. There was a place for Aboriginal people in this modern world, but it was not on the land. Opening the science section of the Austral Festival in Toowoomba, Groom noted that while the region’s ‘native tribes’ were virtually extinct, some of their weapons remained. He suggested that ‘out of love and respect for the black races that were passing away’ such implements should be preserved ‘as an historical lesson … as to the weapons of those who preceded civilisation’ and as a ‘permanent memorial’. With Aboriginal people apparently consigned to the museum showcase, it was the land itself that had to be subdued. Brady imagined the coming breed of farmers, ‘with library and laboratory behind them’, as a ‘silent conquering army’: ‘Led by the shining spirit of William Farrer, this Army of Invasion is preparing its assaults upon the outstanding citadels of Nature’.

Frontiers are uneasy places, juxtaposing the known and the unknown, civilisation and nature, us and them. Around and through the markers of geography, the imagined borders of knowledge and possession create place from race, gender and time. The splendour of nation is revealed against the dark, looming shadow of otherness. Unthinkingly we talk about the future in terms of our fears and our hopes, rarely pausing to consider how the two are related. Groom’s vision of progress, his mission to create a prosperous and fulfilling future through the application of science, encompassed both development and denial. Progress was both a triumphant quest for improvement and a fearful battle against the spectre of degeneration and dissolution. It is this tension that gives progress its power. The oppositions and dichotomies of frontier imagining energised the process of nation building, expanding the bubble of time to create a space into which the future could unfold. But this act of creation proceeds by destruction, obliterating alternatives. For Groom and Deakin the development of the north was both a fulfillment of destiny, and a vital necessity. There was no choice. Progress uses its own internal tensions to make itself seem natural, necessary, inevitable.

blast the bush

Len Beadell was leading a survey party through the mulga scrub of central South Australia, when he came across something unusual, even unnerving. ‘It was almost like a picket fence’, he described, with posts made from ‘slivers of shale’. Being in such an isolated location, he decided ‘it was obviously an ancient Aboriginal ceremonial ground built by those primitive, stone-age nomads in some distant dreamtime’ – an Aboriginal ‘Stonehenge’. As he scrabbled in the dust, searching for a piece of charcoal that might be used to fix this eerie structure in time, Beadell pondered the ‘ironic clash of old and new’: ‘only a few short miles away the first mighty atomic bomb ever to be brought to the mainland of Australia was to be blasted into immediate oblivion … and it was by-products of this very weapon which could be used for determining the age of the charcoal from these prehistoric fires’. Beadell’s expedition had set out from the British atomic test site at Emu Field, searching for a permanent testing range – one that would become known as ‘Maralinga’. It was 1953, and something new was coming.

The ‘clash of old and new’, the sense of disjunction, was a familiar characteristic of frontier experience. But with the coming of the atomic bomb, the sense of ‘newness’ seemed to have become more acute. The destruction of Hiroshima was revealed unto a shocked world as the harbinger of a new age – the ‘atomic age’. Media reports talked about ‘new vistas’, a ‘new era’ in world affairs, a ‘revolution’ in daily life. The atomic bomb, Clem Christesen wrote in Meanjin, had ‘severed the old world from the new with guillotine-like decisiveness’. Most importantly, the world faced new challenges, for the atomic age carried grave implications for the future of humanity. It was a ‘turning point’, ‘perhaps the most solemn turning point of all history’, Rev. Dr C. N. Button warned his Ballarat congregation: ‘Humanity is at the crossroads’.

The Sydney Morning Herald relayed the news from Hiroshima under a pair of significant subheadings: ‘Terrifying New Weapon’ and ‘Big Possibilities In Peace’. The ‘good’ atom/‘bad’ atom routine dominated much public understanding of this mysterious technology. It was a formula popularly represented in the image of the atomic crossroads, placing humanity at a fork in the road of destiny, with a signpost pointing one way to destruction and the other to progress. Which was it to be, apocalypse or utopia? There was no escaping; it was time to choose. The assumed imminence of the crossroads, the disjunctive dynamic of the atomic age, obscured much of its familiarity. Like the frontier, the crossroads gained its metaphorical power from the conjunction of opposites. The wonders of a techno-utopia shone invitingly amidst the menacing gloom of atomic obliteration. But there was no choice. The signpost to destruction was a warning, a lesson to be learnt. Just as it had in Groom’s plans for northern development, progress in the atomic age used the threat of dissolution to charge itself with the force of destiny. Both imagined a future fulfilled through the accumulation of space, whether by the inexorable expansion of Australia’s frontiers, or by a continuing march along the road to atomic nirvana. Both offered a journey from which there was no turning back.

In the glare of an atomic explosion, Len Beadell imagined, the mulga scrub around him would instantly ‘come to life’. At the dawn of this ‘new’ age, the image of vast expanses of idle and wasted land, silently awaiting the transforming power of science, continued to evoke enthusiasm. As Britain’s readied its big bang at Emu Field, the Sunday Herald keenly anticipated the moment when the ‘inland silence that remained unbroken for ages’ would be ‘shattered’ by the bomb. Australia’s desert lands had found a new destiny, for ‘the very poverty of these areas in surface resources made them valuable in the atomic field, either as a storehouse of uranium riches or as the kind of waste land where experiments can be most safely conducted’. Ivan Southall described the Woomera rocket range, established some years earlier, as an ‘open-air laboratory’: ‘one of the greatest stretches of uninhabited wasteland on earth, created by God specifically for rockets’.

Even as rockets were being propelled into ‘space’ (the final frontier), science presented the land with yet another chance for renewal. Woomera and the atomic tests brought science and land together with a familiar mix of imperial loyalties and national self-interest, development and defence. The Minister for Supply, Howard Beale, sought to justify the establishment of the Maralinga range by portraying it as ‘a challenge to Australian men to show that the pioneering spirit of their forefathers who developed our country is still the driving force of achievement’. These new pioneers had the opportunity to contribute to the deterrent power of the free world, while possibly winning Australia access to the secrets of the atomic age. Distorted echoes of Deakin’s ‘citizen soldiery’ rang down the years, charged with imminence of the crossroads challenge.

Australia Unlimited Ltd

In June 1957, the Sydney Morning Herald published the first in an annual series of supplements surveying ‘the great endeavours and achievement of Australian commerce and industry in the postwar years and the fabulous promise of future national development’. The supplements were titled Australia Unlimited. Edwin Brady would have been pleased by the overwhelming sense of optimism that suffused every page. ‘Confidence’, the supplement declared, was the ‘theme for the future’. It was a confidence born of postwar reconstruction, economic expansion, and a rise in the standard of living, but it was nourished also by a belief in the generative power of science and technology. The Chairman of CSIRO, Ian Clunies Ross, provided something of a keynote in his observation that ‘there are no problems so great that they cannot be solved once we marshal our resources for a resolute and sustained attack on them’. Clunies Ross’s ‘faith’, the supplement concluded, ‘articulates the endeavours of the planners and makers of Australia’s future’.

The Minister for Primary Industry, Billy McMahon, praised the work of Australia’s ‘modern explorers’, the ‘scientists and scientifically minded farmers’, who were ‘rolling back our farm horizons’ and revealing our ‘unlimited’ opportunities. He invoked a familiar catalogue of hopes, but one that was charged with an increasingly powerful sense of expectation. Attempting to define the ‘newness’ of the atomic age, the nuclear physicist Ernest Titterton suggested that ‘the funeral pyre of Hiroshima’ was ‘the symbol of an era in which science has become so important in our lives that all decisions, including political ones, must be made with scientific considerations in mind’. No nation, it seemed, could afford to ignore the implications of science. The power of science was the power of the bomb, the ability to change the world, to bring down the guillotine on the past, to erect the signposts at the crossroads of destiny. Progress, science and atomic energy were virtual analogues, each brought the promise of a future transformed.

Old dreams were invested with new hope. Atomic energy would power the reclamation of Australia’s ‘great spaces’. The Chairman of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, J. P. Baxter, described the possibility of ‘package power stations’ to serve ‘the remoter parts of the continent’, particularly those whose mineral wealth ‘will demand exploitation’. Uranium offered a solution at last to Australia’s ‘empty north’, propelling the nation into a new phase of ‘pioneering’. The mining and processing of this mysterious metal, it was argued, would give ‘the economic life of the Territory the transfusion of new blood it needs’. Progress was represented not only by the Rum Jungle uranium mine, but by the modern town of Batchelor, created specifically for miners and their families. Opening the project, Prime Minister Menzies declared it ‘something of a miracle’. ‘Not long ago’, he continued, the Northern Territory had seemed ‘almost worthless’: ‘But the history of Australia is the history of converting people from despair to hope and from hope to achievement’. With the discovery of uranium, the north seemed destined to host ‘one of the great communities of Australia’.

Edwin Brady always intended to write a sequel to Australia Unlimited, and if he had lived a few years longer, one could imagine him poring over accounts of the Rum Jungle project, thinking back to that campfire and his dreams of progress. But there was something rather different about this new style of pioneering. The town of Batchelor, with its individually styled family homes and its remarkable range of ‘comforts and amenities’, had brought suburban living to the frontier. More importantly, its inhabitants were not sturdy landholders working their properties, but wage earners, employees of Consolidated Zinc Pty Ltd. The Sydney Morning Herald’s version of Australia Unlimited was not the story of hardworking individuals creating national progress out of their own instinctive drive for improvement. In the wake of the Manhattan Project, the scale of progress had changed dramatically, represented now by huge developmental projects that married government-supplied infrastructure with foreign investment and expertise. Progress was measured not in the sweat of the yeoman farmer, but in the profits of large multinational companies.

The Liberal Party went before the electors in 1958 emphasising its achievements in national development and its success in attracting foreign capital. ‘Our slogan is “Australia Unlimited”’, Menzies asserted, ‘and we pronounce it with confidence’. The campaign theme was highlighted by a tour of key projects and facilities, including the opening of Australia’s first nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights. But behind the confidence of ‘Australia Unlimited’ lurked a new fear. Electors were urged, not to make, but ‘to conserve the forces of progress’. As the security enclosures at Rum Jungle and Lucas Heights demonstrated, while individuals had seemingly lost the power to create progress, they had somehow gained the ability to threaten it.

a change of heart

The war, when it came, only lasted for a month, but that was long enough. All life was quickly extinguished in the northern hemisphere, and the clouds of deadly radioactive fallout gradually diffused to shroud the whole globe. For the people of Australia, it was a lingering, drawn out journey to oblivion. Nevil Shute’s apocalyptic novel On the Beach was published the same year as the first Australia Unlimited supplement. Its theme was not confidence, but fear, resignation and confusion. There was a new threat from the north, invisible and unstoppable. ‘It’s going to go on spreading down here, southwards, till it gets to us?’, Moira asks, ‘And they can’t do anything about it?’ ‘Not a thing’, replies Commander Dwight Towers, ‘It’s just too big a matter for mankind to tackle. We’ve just got to take it’. All they can do is wait helplessly for their own death. In this final act of surrender the people of Australia are united with the rest of humanity: one world or none.

Just as atomic power promised to conquer Australia’s vast spaces, so the bomb seemed poised to obliterate national boundaries. There would be no winners in an atomic war. G. V. Portus from the University of Adelaide argued that the ‘only defence of the world against the threat of atomic warfare is political defence’, and called for the ‘abandonment’ of the ‘out-of-date’ concept of national sovereignty. Some looked with hope to the newly formed United Nations and its attempts to negotiate a system of control, but the UN Atomic Energy Commission soon descended into deadlock. Others sought more radical solutions, inspired by Einstein and his declaration in favour of world government. But the political fallout from our atom-bombed world soon settled, and the divisions became clear again. In this new age of oxymorons, war was cold, and the bomb was a weapon of peace.

The Cold War pushed Australia’s defensive frontiers ever northward, as the concept of ‘forward defence’ emerged to contain the threat of communism. ‘We must, by peaceful means extend the frontiers of the human spirit’, Menzies proclaimed, ‘We must, by armed strength, defend the geographical frontiers of those nations whose self-government is based upon the freedom of the spirit’. Menzies invoked the prospect of a looming third world war to justify his government’s defence preparation program, but increasingly Australia sought security in treaties and alliances, rather than men and guns. The nation’s defence was to be assured through the graces of its powerful friends, rather than the character of its citizen soldiery. Just like the characters in On the Beach, Australians were left to ponder a threat that they barely understood, and against which they could do very little.

But even as the frontiers of Australian security expanded, so they rebounded inwards, enclosing hearts and minds in an ever tighter grip. Long-held fears of infiltration were revived, with communism identified as a domestic as well as an international threat. Agents of the enemy were amongst us. The circumstances of the bomb’s creation and use focused much of this anxiety on the myth of the ‘atomic secret’. The CSIR, with its modest atomic energy program, proved a favourite target for political opportunists. Not only was it believed to be harbouring communists, its Chairman, David Rivett, had the temerity to suggest that good science entailed the free and open interchange of information. To prove their security credentials at home and abroad, both Labor and Liberal governments cranked up the legislative apparatus, providing new levels of protection for defence ‘secrets’, and creating new agencies to monitor the threat within. The common citizen was no longer the nation’s guarantee of security, but a potential weak link in its defensive perimeter.

It was, perhaps, human weakness that was most glaringly exposed by the bomb blast over Hiroshima. Even as the world marvelled at this new conquest of the forces of nature, they wondered if humanity had the maturity and wisdom to control it. ‘It is a challenge to the conscience of man’, the Argus considered, ‘to ponder gravely whether his intellectual achievements have not outrun his moral perceptions’. The ‘crossroads of destiny’ had brought a ‘moral test’ upon the world; science demanded ‘a change of heart’. And there was no time to get your breath back. Bomb tests followed bomb tests, and then the Russians had it, and so the Americans built the H-bomb, and there were more tests … The frontiers of science were running ahead, pushing ever deeper into unknown territory, leaving the world gasping, trying to catch up. In April 1954 a distinguished panel of speakers considered the latest menace under the title ‘The H-Bomb – A Challenge to Humanity’. Canon E. J. Davidson proclaimed: ‘Our civilisation stands at the point of decision … It must conform to the moral order of the universe or perish’.

Each new challenge brought its own sense of urgency, its own restatement of the crossroads choice – change or die. There was no ‘turning point’, no critical juncture on the road to progress, only constant reminders of our own fallibility and the apparent disconnection of science from the ethical life of humanity. The crossroads offered not the chance to change the future, but to conform to it. We were the ‘other’, able to occupy the future only through the courtesy of science. The destructive sense of inevitability that the frontier wreaked upon the land and its original inhabitants was turned upon us all. It was humanity itself that threatened progress.

a hapless mess of wreckage and misunderstanding

In May 1999, The Australian invited a range of ‘well-informed and influential’ speakers to examine the question: ‘How can we continue to build an open, competitive international economy while ensuring we develop a progressive society?’ The resulting conference was entitled – yes, you guessed it –‘Australia Unlimited’, and focused on the dangers and opportunities wrought by the latest in revolutionary forces – globalisation. Something new was here. The forum’s major sponsors provided a convenient summary of its themes in their half-page advertisements. Ansett offered ‘a world of destinations’, Foxtel brought the news of the world to you 24 hours a day, while IBM described the ‘treasure trove of products’ available on the Web. ‘Now it really is a small world’, they told us. But globalisation is simply progress rebadged, measured still in the conquest of distance, the colonisation of space. Science and technology continue to bolster its imagined momentum, pushing time beyond its limits, creating the fault-lines of the new.

Within each Australia Unlimited, there was an attempt to articulate the balance of forces that will ensure continued progress: the interplay of nation and citizen, knowledge and capital, freedom and control. In the latest version it was the balance between the ‘two competing imperatives’ of ‘economic growth and social harmony’ that most concerned the movers and shakers. Stuart Macintyre was the only contributor to comment on the link to Brady and Deakin, noting that ‘the principal object of Australian policy in the early years of the century was not the economy or social justice but the nation’. It was a point lost on most forum participants, who imagined progress to be found in the maintenance of a healthy, global economy. Nations are not built; they grow in the rich and fertile environment of globalisation – just keep piling on the manure. But all is not well in this garden of plenty, for the disintegration of social cohesion threatens continued reform. ‘Even at a terrible cost to themselves’, Dennis Shanahan wrote in his summary of the forum, ‘individuals and single nations have the potential to turn the advantages and underpinnings of globalisation against globalisation itself’. Unless governments and corporations can persuade individuals of the benefits of this new age, their ‘resistance … has the potential to … set off a chain reaction threat to general progress’. The danger is not ideological, resistance derives not from political commitment, but from ‘a sense of alienation, envy and resentment’. The problem is in being human.

In traversing these three versions of Australia Unlimited, it is tempting to imagine a linear narrative, to trace the progress of progress. That is the lie at the heart of this paper. Concepts such as the individual, the nation, even science, are never simple, and are always contested. There is no single stream of progress meandering through time, there are many countercurrents, eddies, backwaters and divergences. The point is not what progress has become, but that it has become, and is becoming still. Progress is not a belief, a hope, a naïve aspiration; one that we can in our supposed sophistication simply reject or deny. Within the meaning of progress there are many balances to be negotiated and boundaries to be drawn: a continuing process of accumulation and disjunction that shapes our perceptions of time and our awareness of change.

The process of future-making leaves its traces, and this brief, inconclusive sortie has tried to find the chisel marks in the smooth, worked surface of the new. Who makes the future? Groom’s idealised citizen seems to have been overtaken by the scientist, and both by the forces of global change, but all are fictions drawn from the battlefields of identity and authority. Where is the future made? Spatial metaphors are commonly invoked to illuminate the meaning of time, and so it is that progress is seen to be forged at the frontier, the crossroads, or in the networks of globalisation. Movement is taken for granted, we are on a journey, ever onwards. Is there a choice? Images of a future under threat, of a menacing otherness, of the imminent danger of annihilation, all work to deny alternatives. We are warned to keep to the main road for our own safety, for the safety of the future. But to understand our options, we have to explore the meaning of our journey, to chart its origins, to look again at the signposts. We have to find the frontiers of our future in our past.

In one of his last journal entries, Alfred Deakin struggled to stay within time: ‘Why babble more … I have shed, once and for all, my past as a whole – my present fruitless – my future a hapless mess of wreckage and misunderstanding’. His memory was almost gone, so too his words, his life. Groom lived on, but also battled to keep pace with progress. So thoroughly modern in his nation-building enthusiasm, he suffered the ultimate humiliation of being remembered by Robert Menzies as ‘old fashioned’. And Brady? Edwin Brady died in 1952, just short of his 83rd birthday. He spent most of his later years at his camp in Mallacoota, sandwiched between the bush and the sea. He was, he reflected ‘perhaps the most successful failure in literary history’. Barely able to make a living, he nonetheless persisted ‘in asserting that Australia is the best country in the world’. Most of his plans had come to nothing. There was no sequel to Australia Unlimited, no film version, his hopes for the economic development of East Gippsland had been thwarted, his utopian farming community had failed. ‘Should I end up, therefore, on a melancholy note?’, he asked. Brady’s journey along ‘Life’s Highway’ was coming to an end, but he would not submit to the inevitable, he would not surrender to time. ‘I decline to become mournful’, he answered, ‘I refuse to grow old’. There is no turning back. Is there?

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