The Free and Independent Republic of Australia

They'd probably need saboteurs to bomb the rails carrying the British policemen and soldiers if the revolt was going to succeed.

Okay there is literally so much wrong with that paragraph that I have to headdesk. I sincerely hope that wasn't written by an Australian. For starters the police weren't any more or less "British" than the general population, in that while most of them had been born in Britain and regarded themselves as British so do most of the population. Secondly "the British" return to massacre the townspeople for rebellion? Once again another headdesk. Look up British policy in Australia and Canada, massacres were much rarer than other frontier societies and never happened to white people.

I'm trying to figure out how exactly Ned marries a wealthy duchess and becomes a dictator?:confused:
:( It was written by an Australian. And there are many fictional elements in the story. Including steam powered gatling guns provided by Americans!:D I only shared this b/c it fits the theme of this thread and I didn't mean for the material of this novel to be taken seriously.

Also alow me to add some corrections. I didn't mean to say they were police from Britain since most of the officers were of Irish decent but the British did authorize them. The Duchess that Ned marries in the book is named Catherine von Stolzberg who was visiting Australia and joins him due to viewing him as a liberator of the proletariat. I can't find any record of a woman like her in OTL so I assume she's fictional. And the novel's account of the police's retaliation at Glenrown is few in details and is mainly remebered as a 'massacre' by the Australian's in the book's TL even though only 6 people died.
 
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What about having a different life for Ned Kelly in addition to him being a bushranger? Say he could serve as a mercenary overseas. If in case Ned Kelly does have military service, he could also have recruited more bushrangers and deal some heavy damage to the British authorities.
 
Your best bet for a Kelly insurrection is for the Jerilderie Letter to get distributed widely- it's not going to lead to the countryside igniting, but it's possible that a few disaffected young men or Fenian-sympathisers will take to the hills.
Coupled with Kelly managing to derail the police train at Glenrowan, which would have been the greatest act of crime committed against the colonial authorities since Eureka, you might panic the authorities into thinking the situation was much worse than it was.

Lets be generous and say that there's six months of seven or eight Bushranger gangs nominally acting as confederates of Kelly. A few constables get shot, a few of the wealtheir landowners have their farms burned. Eventually the British arrest everyone.

If they followed this with a legal overreaction, say wide-ranging sedition laws, then it could lead to a few incidents with the small but potent current of fenianism in the country.

If United States Fenians tried for a second Catalpa rescue, for example- let's say it ends horribly for the perpetrators, with the British putting a dozen people on trial for treason and so on, as well as various Australian accomplices- it could create a perception of British heavyhandedness that will strengthen the emerging Republican movement.


I want to stress that I don't think this would lead to any violent uprisings- someone upthread was wondering what would happen to NZ if Australia became independent and if the smaller colony would be cut off from Britain.
If Australia becomes a Republic in the later nineteenth or early twentieth century, it will be a firm ally of Britain. There's no POD at this late stage that can change that.
There will be constitutional differences which could lead to a serious diplomatic changes as the twentieth century progresses, but even Irish-Australian Nationalists were deeply proud of their imperial heritage.

Take 1898: 100, 000 people go onto the streets of Sydney (a huge proportion of the population) to take part in the commeration of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. They transfer the corpse of Michael O'Dwyer to a new memorial in Waverly that celebrates the heroes of the uprising.

They do this while holding banners of Robert Emmet, Charles Parnell... William Gladstone, and Queen Victoria.


You're not getting an Australian revolution in the nineteenth century.
 
What's the Jerilderie Letter? And what is the Catalpa Rescue? Even if republican Australia becomes a British ally, their relationship with each other might mirror that of Britain and Ireland. On the other hand, couldn't republican Australia annex New Guinea but leave New Zealand alone?
 
What's the Jerilderie Letter? And what is the Catalpa Rescue? Even if republican Australia becomes a British ally, their relationship with each other might mirror that of Britain and Ireland. On the other hand, couldn't republican Australia annex New Guinea but leave New Zealand alone?
Catalpa rescue Jerilderie Letter
Also how might the treatment of the aboriginal people living within Australia change if either the whole continent becomes independent or is shared by two nations?

Your best bet for a Kelly insurrection is for the Jerilderie Letter to get distributed widely- it's not going to lead to the countryside igniting, but it's possible that a few disaffected young men or Fenian-sympathisers will take to the hills.
Coupled with Kelly managing to derail the police train at Glenrowan, which would have been the greatest act of crime committed against the colonial authorities since Eureka, you might panic the authorities into thinking the situation was much worse than it was.
What if they stop the train before it reaches the point that the broke up the tracks, and hold the people within hostage in exchange for Ned's mother being released from jail. I understand that some believe this was the original plan.

There will be constitutional differences which could lead to a serious diplomatic changes as the twentieth century progresses, but even Irish-Australian Nationalists were deeply proud of their imperial heritage.
Proud? That goes against my understanding of Irish culture. I though that almost all Irish people hated the British then.
 
Proud? That goes against my understanding of Irish culture. I though that almost all Irish people hated the British then.


Nope, that's the romanticised myth put about since 1916. There was an extremely strong nationalist movement, which included a vocal anti-British minority, but the majority of nationalists wanted an Ireland that remained within the Empire.

Remember, it was the British Empire not the English Empire. You'd find Scots, Welsh and Irish all across the globe- and not just as soldiers, sailors and labourers. One of the things that gets lost in the Kelly mythos was that a huge proportion of the colonial constabularly was Irish, and often Catholic- go and look up the surname of the policeman the gang killled.

The real break-down in relations didn't come about until the aftermath of the rising. Even the fall of Parnell didn't destroy the pro-monarchist sentiment.

Also, remember- at this time, Irish people in the rest of the empire were more likely to be anti-republican than the Irish at home were. If you were an Irish-Australian or an Irish-Canadian who was feeling discriminated against because people suspected the Irish weren't loyal, you wanted to prove that just because you were Irish that didn't mean you couldn't be British or Australian or what have you as well.

Don't get me wrong, the exceptions are good fun to talk about- the Hokitika funerals in NZ, for example- but they are exceptions.


I envisage the relationship between a Republican Australia and the UK as being not dissimilar to the one in OTL. There'd be a more of an emphasis on gestures of independence- if a war breaks out, then expect actual deliberations in the Australian parliament (or equivalent) before Australia joins the UK's side. No Menzies as-Britain-is-at-war-Australia-is-at-war-also. But Australia would still join the war.


If the Royal Navy wanted to base a squadron in Freemantle, than this Australia would expect a formal request to be made. And then it would be promptly granted.

There's a movement for Australian independence, but not really one for Australian seperatism, if you follow.


As for including PNG but not NZ- that's unlikely. The British kept slapping down Queensland's attempts to get Papua because they saw that it was being driven to a large extent by anti-German paranoia, and that it would require British shipping and investment to make possible. An independent Australia might make the attempt to get Papua, but I doubt they have the resources- expect it to be even more undeveloped. On the other hand, the plight of the pacific islanders in the plantations might get far worse which is an unpleasant thought.

Moreover, Australia doesn't have the population to colonise in force. If you read newspapers of the time, one of the most obvious things you'll take away is the huge paranoia about the lack of population. People thought that the Russians or the Chinese or the Mongols (yes, really) were going to come and wipe out the empty cities.
If there's enough surplus population in, I don't know, Brisbane to go and colonise somewhere than it's far more likely that they'll just be given land grants in the interior.

This brings us to the question of the relationship with the Aboriginals- expect it to be just as bad, if not worse. Those contemporary Australians in favour of the republic were mainly of the type catered to by The Bulletin, whose slogan was "Australia for the White Man." They believed that the Aboriginals were all going to die out by halfway through the twentieth century, and the most that could be done was to ensure that their passing was not too painful.*

NZ is far more likely to be an integral part of Australia than Papua, but it's difficult to say what will happen. As someone upthread said, it all depends on Australia. If Australia's been driven to Republicanism by some major POD in Britain, that might affect NZ. If it's all about who Victoria does or doesn't send to the Federation conferences, little might change.

Hope there's something useful in all of this- my main point is that there's no one flash point that would take Australia to being a republic- you'd need something that would affect the various colonial societies on a systemic level.

*Our most brilliant writers and thinkers of the ninteenth century, ladies and gentlemen. How depressing is that?
 
The Glenrowan hostage crisis gone worse with the British authorities botching up the rescue attempt, or gone wrong in a sense that Ned Kelly's mother gets killed, forcing Kelly to kill one of the hostages?
 
The Glenrowan hostage crisis gone worse with the British authorities botching up the rescue attempt, or gone wrong in a sense that Ned Kelly's mother gets killed, forcing Kelly to kill one of the hostages?

That isn't going to cause a Revolution. Australia in the 19th century is too full of people who regard themselves as British and Australian, just like when they were in England they regarded themselves as English and British. Even the Irish in Australia were more loyal than you would expect as most of the real firebreathers were either US or still in Ireland. Australia got the Irish who didn't mind the British Empire. If you want an independent Republic of Australia you need much less British immigration and several massive PoD's. Much bigger than a hostage crisis going worse, Ruby Ridge didn't cause Idaho to secede.
 
Could a more succesful Bunuba Uprising lead by more people than just Jandamarra lead to further rebellions of native people accross Australia? Or perhaps ending in the Bunuba's land being declared a protectorate similar to Basutoland?
 
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