A voice against voicelessness: Lorenzo Veracini, Dan Tout, ‘The Negative Commonwealth: Australia as “Laboratory”, Then and Now’, Thesis Eleven, 2023 | settler colonial studies blog

A voice against voicelessness: Lorenzo Veracini, Dan Tout, ‘The Negative Commonwealth: Australia as “Laboratory”, Then and Now’, Thesis Eleven, 2023

11Oct23

Excerpt: This work appraises settler-colonial Australia’s strategic contribution to the transnational political traditions of what James Belich (2009) seminally called the global ‘settler revolution’. Specifically, this paper discusses settler Australia’s self-appointed role as sociopolitical ‘laboratory’ during the early decades of the twentieth century, after the settler revolution had entered a period of crisis elsewhere. The federal Commonwealth took this role seriously. The Torrens title, a mode of registering and transferring real estate that systematically erases all traces of prior ownership, the ‘Australian ballot’, identifying a specific settler-colonial form of democratic governance impervious to ‘Old World’ patronage, the constitutionally enshrined exclusion of Indigenous and exogenous alterities through the White Australia policy, and the Court of Arbitration were all institutional devices tested in Australia before being exported elsewhere. A cluster of interlocking political experiments, some older, some more recent, would coalesce in what Paul Kelly in another seminal intervention defined as the ‘Australian Settlement’ (1992). The Australian imperial nationalists loudly lamented the ‘Tyranny of Distance’ (see Blainey 1966), but in crucial ways ‘Australia’ was imagined as a globally relevant laboratory of sociopolitical experimentation precisely because of its assumed isolation. There is no laboratory without a controlled environment.

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