Chapter 19: Looking Outwards Again
Terra Australis, greatest kingdom of the South Seas, protector of Indonesia, bastion of liberty, industrial powerhouse, and any other self-praising epithet you could think of!
The centennial of New South Wales had went unfortunately under-appreciated due to the war with Britain, but new ones were coming up, and with a lengthy period of peace expected, the next few centennials were expected to draw larger crowds, as well as the 50 year anniversary of our first federation into the United Provinces of Australia. Many of our elders were nostalgic for those days, even when they cursed the (no longer new) British administration. Between our origins and our current political system, the intellectuals of Australia had to labor day and night to construct a new national identity with stronger concepts in it than pan-Europeanism in a distant land and the spirit of adventure. Needless to say, this lead to a lot of deliberate decisions on their part that would alter how they went about their daily lives.
One big example: Because the people of Britain now labored under a command economy, the people of Australia kneejerked their way to being one of the most anarchic economies in the south hemisphere - at least in some ways, as the environmentalist panics and worker's rights movements had warped us ("But it's okay because chemical spills are down and the Pilbara is as red as ever!")... either way, with an unending surplus of raw materials and deflated prices, the industrialists of Australia had to take some time out from their busy schedules of schmoozing and partying to implement more efficient means of production in order to keep their businesses afloat on what were now going to be rougher seas.
The revenge of classical liberalism! I guess Ragland-Baker was a bit of an isolationist...
To be fair, efficiency means profit, and more profit means more depraved parties, and if there's one thing industrialists of the 1890s liked, it was to cavort around in ridiculous costumes and detonate bombs in the desert. There'd be a few crazed moralist campaigns in the 1900s against this sort of thing, but what can I say? Australians like explosives. Nobody really complained about efficient factories, and I sympathize with their acceptance.
Besides, with the menfolk out of the way, the women could try their hands at capitalism, unlike in certain countries...
In fact, in 1893, fish offal tycoon Bjorn Saxon prided himself on his corporate investments' efficiency and claimed that he'd bring improvements from his native city of Melbourne to the rest of the country. Not a bad thing to base your campaign for prime minister around. Bjorn was, to put it lightly, very macho and outdoorsy, and had to be tracked down in the middle of a rafting trip down the North Johnstone River so that we could inform him he'd won the election. Upon being sworn into office, he immediately donned a stiff collared shirt and became indistinguishable from the rest of the pack... ...I kid! Bjorn was very focused on building up our corporations - notably in Indonesia, where he tried to get industrial conglomerates to embrace local manufacturing and turn the occasional non-farmer in the area into a loyal factory worker. On this issue, he was mostly ignored, because of how few Indonesians were interested in manufacturing. One major exception, though - in the town of Palembang, a few enterprising citizens began exploiting the local rubber industry to make electrical equipment like telegraph wires. Luckily for them, the upcoming century was on track to become an electric age, so while most of Australia expected little more than coffee and spices from the empire, Seni Elektronik kept turning out more and more wiring, then vacuum tubes, radios and recently televisions! Definitely one of the big success stories of Sumatra. I've been buying their TVs for years.
On the other side of the island, traditionalism was holding the former sultanate of Atjeh back. After the sudden and aggressive conquest of what was actually a fairly stable polity, the natives were... to say the least, a bit concerned for their way of life, but apparently resigned to their fate. They managed to recover their dissent once we started building Banda Aceh a major military port, once oil and rubber prospectors made their way into their villages, once the Anglican missionaries arrived to combat the "Muslim menace". "Remember Toraja!" shouted the elderly amongst them, at least until the newly galvanized Atjehnese slit their throats. Atjeh would see one separatist movement after another through the decade, lead by imams, plantation owners, even the occasional European mercenary. Now, you'll notice that Australians are pretty in favor of violence, but not when it doesn't strengthen the perpetrators... in this case, it definitely does not. Needless to say, they weren't particularly enthusiastic about the pan-Indonesian fervor that occasionally swept across the archipelago. Given that they lacked a minority to give preferential treatment, it's no wonder the idea was so unpopular with them.
Needless to say, besides industry, fraternity was Minister Saxon's other big buzzword. He recorded some memoirs during his ministry (said memoirs were published in 1905, some years after he'd left office) that shed some light on his motivations. Apparently, his parents were privy to the unification of Scandinavia under the house of Bernadotte; they then saw the waxing and waning of the various nations of continental Europe unfold before them and drilled the ideas of group power and cooperation into their son. Apparently they lay dormant for much of his adolescence; it wasn't until he'd gotten himself firmly entangled in the Australian fish trade that the concepts resurfaced. With the exception of a brief (if terrifying) lutefisk promotion, Saxon's attempts at promoting Australian brotherhood were relatively sane. In 1894, he received word of an impending international sports competition and not only signed up Australia, but also arranged a smaller "national Olympics" in order to keep up the spectacle that had launched him into office. He even competed in those games, winning second place in javelin throwing.
He would have won first, but for a youthful Scotsman who promptly disappeared when nobody was looking.
At this point, I feel I should mention that Bjorn was huge on the concept of meritocracy, since it seems to go undermentioned in most studies of Australian history. Bjorn lead several huge anti-corruption/anti-cronyism initiatives throughout the various governments of Australia that, while not always effective, wrought huge demographic changes in our leadership; arguably making them less openly British. The Australian military was actually more receptive to this sort of reform initiative; at the authorization of Bjorn's long-time friend and leading general Samuel Vermillion, the land forces gained a new elite in the form of the Bushmen, so called because most of their training took place in the deep interior.
The Bushmen tended to look down on their enlisted brethren. Because this was the 19th century (if only barely), their insults ranged from "slovenly" to such zingers as "undisciplined".
They were the first to mechanize and take advantage of automobiles, the first to receive dedicated amphibious assault training, and so forth. Recently, many of them have been deployed to various 'hot spots' in the Middle East and Iran as "advisers" for the various border conflicts in the area - to be fair, they've gained quite a reputation for desert warfare. Australians actually got a bit too excited about the Bushmen for their own good, as several dozen of them were shipped off to Göteborg for the 1895 World's Fair.
A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a telephone call from a friend asking, "Hey, do you want to go on a journey of a thousand miles?"
After the debacle of the 1851 fair, most of our attempts to participate in these had been relatively minor and definitely not befitting of our greatness (How many times have you heard that line in your life?). While not particularly grandiose, our exhibit at the 1895 Fair was a significant improvement over previous attempts, and I for one am willing to thank the Suez Canal for allowing us to ship more and better things to the roof of the world. Throughout the duration, there were protests in major cities, particularly in the west (Kalgoorlie, Perth, Darwin, etc.) against the use of communist British engineering, but the opportunities the Suez provided for shipping were so immense that only the most patriotic citizens bothered. Besides the Bushmen, Australians had an opportunity to show off the latest products of Bjorn Saxon's fish empire (guaranteed to taste fresh for 50 years), the latest exports of spices from Indonesia, and various other small trinkets for the benefit of the feuding Europeans.
The logistics of visiting the World's Fair briefly impressed upon Australia a great deal of news about the European world... and the non-European parts as well! The 1895 Fair was the first to see significant participation from non-Russian Asia, as Persia, Japan, China, and even the princely state of Hyderabad prepared exhibits in an attempt to show that they were civilized by the standards of Europeans. This didn't necessarily work to impress Europe, but it may have helped the actual nations in question to feel better about their industrial and military progress. We also got a rather shocking exhibit from China named "The Virtues of Republicanism". For a country known for the length and continuity of their imperial dynasties, it seemed a bit out of place. Then I did my research and learned that the Taiping emperor's cousin had deposed him and declared the entire monarchy abolished after a terrible flood on the Pearl River.
I think the Chinese were tired of getting showed up by the Mongolians. The actual emperor fled to Taiwan, of all places.
During the fair, Hong Kunjian was the despot of a slowly modernizing nominal republic with a suspended constitution, much to the chagrin of both traditionalists seeking the return of the Qing dynasty and liberals who vaguely remembered the Lanfang Kongsi. By relying on his guile (and imported Japanese weaponry), Kunjian was able to maneuver these factions against each other, but this was a delicate game at best.
In Europe, the 1890s had opened with several inconsequential wars of honor that distracted the locals and provided some brief entertainment for the kids. They were used this sort of thing by now - France and Germany would squabble over something, and Germany usually won. There were talks of attempting to annex more Germans to their empire and dominate the continent, but German-speaking Swiss citizens had insisted upon retaining their neutrality, and Austria-Hungary had for decades attempted to recast themselves as a multicultural federation, for better or worse. Ironically, both of these ideals were on the verge of collapse; the Swiss had become so skilled at diplomacy that they could exert control over world events merely by calling conferences, and Austria-Hungary's tenuous balance disappeared after a series of pro-German presidents had thoroughly alienated the Hungarian population, ruining their historic compromise.
Walking to the rhythm of the watchmakers.
Combined with their recent humiliations at the hands of Italy, huge swathes of the republic's population decided to quit the Empire. Most of the battered army was sent to Hungary, leaving not quite enough men to handle the other nations crying out for their own existence. By 1896, three (admittedly small) nations had achieved independence from Austria, and our aging king Rudolf could not help but be drawn to the tragedies befalling his fatherland. Meanwhile, Rudolf's son Felix Ferdinand, who had never so much as visited Vienna begged his father to avert his gaze from Europe and focus on bringing Habsburg virtues to Australia.
Romania celebrated its expansion quietly and subtly, lest its neighbors would file a noise complaint.
Two of the breakaway republics this time - those of Slovenia and the Banat - remained mostly ignored on the international scene; the Banat Republic in fact was almost immediately beset with a three-way conflict between its Hungarian, Romanian, and Serbian populations.
On the other hand, the larger republic of Galicia-Lodomeria in the northeast was able to secure almost immediate acceptance amongst the powers of Europe, if only for its productive oil fields. With Russia, decaying Austria, and even Germany wanting access to the oil, Galicia was trapped between foreigners who wished to exploit it and internal nationalists who also wanted to exploit it... and turn it into the center of a resurgent Polish state.
Meanwhile, Polish-Australians laughed vigorously at the tribulations of their continental brethren and occasionally wrote letters exhorting them to come to Australia and learn the meaning of true freedom. With a stable Australia and an unstable rest of the world, this was happening a bit more often than was strictly necessary...
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