ABSTRACT
Even before the federation of the British colonies to create the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 there was a strongly emerging sense of independent Australian foreign policy concerns which were different from, and at times at odds with, those of the imperial government in London. These arose largely from the sense of vulnerability explored in the previous chapter. Especially as expressed frequently from the early 1890s by Henry Parkes, the Premier of New South Wales, there were concerns that the British government was not making sufficient provision for the security of its Australian colonies in the face of interest in the region by other European imperial powers, and potentially by Japan. There was also an acute concern to ensure the preservation of the British composition of the population and prevent the establishment of an Asian component in it. For the British government, which had other interests to pursue with China and Japan, it was an unwelcome inconvenience to receive protests and representations against this discrimination from the governments of the affected major Asian powers. These nineteenth century concerns produced assertions of an independent Australian point of view and independent Australian interests at variance with imperial policies, while at the same time emphasizing the strongest possible attachment to the British composition of the population and the British character of the Australian colonies. It was a dichotomy which produced in time a qualified and curtailed nationalism. The Australians wanted to have and to be seen to have their own voice, and they had an increasingly vigorous sense of their separate identity. But that identity was asserted as a British identity and the assertion of their own interests took the form of assertion of the rights and interests of loyal British subjects.
