MATESHIP
Around 1900, the first writers to speak of 'mateship' related it to the up-country workers, shearers and shed-hands. A century on, the term is more likely to be related to soldiers.
The 'tramping hero' was popularised by the bush poets as a natural larrikin and 'jack-of-all-trades.' This myth was no more accurate than any other, and when such men went to the South African War against the Boers, and to Europe in 1914, the myth began its slow drift towards 'the digger.'
Today it's easier to see that the idea of 'mateship' was a marketing strategy for the newly-formed ALP, and by conservatives for Australian nationalism which made Federation easier to introduce.
The 'tramping hero' was popularised by the bush poets as a natural larrikin and 'jack-of-all-trades.' This myth was no more accurate than any other, and when such men went to the South African War against the Boers, and to Europe in 1914, the myth began its slow drift towards 'the digger.'
Today it's easier to see that the idea of 'mateship' was a marketing strategy for the newly-formed ALP, and by conservatives for Australian nationalism which made Federation easier to introduce.
Today, the term is a political football, to be used whenever and wherever someone seeks to paint themselves as 'good', 'strong', 'brave' or 'reliable'
None of which is to say that surf life savers, or soldiers in Afghanistan, say, can't be noble and heroic just as the myth says, or that Australians don't help one another at every opportunity, especially at crisis time. It's just that there isn't anything especially unique about Australian being mates.
And more than that, 'the tramp' has a very long history.
None of which is to say that surf life savers, or soldiers in Afghanistan, say, can't be noble and heroic just as the myth says, or that Australians don't help one another at every opportunity, especially at crisis time. It's just that there isn't anything especially unique about Australian being mates.
And more than that, 'the tramp' has a very long history.
The concluson from my 2011 book, They Call Each Other Brother :
Why is it necessary to state the obvious about history? So that we are properly impressed by the
local profession's most recent accomplishment - to have made Australian history so dull and
seemingly irrelevant that our children do not want to study it.
- Don Watson, 'Back to the Past', Australian Review of Books, July, 1987, p.7.
Almost every person of mature age I've spoken to in the last 25 years about fraternal societies has told of family upsets, and worse, resulting from the Catholic-Protestant divide. My own family was no exception. Interviewees tell of neighbourhood slanging matches, priestly intervention into family intimacies, pitched battles between school-age children, which were clearly much more common than today's 'ethnic' riots, and of relationships devastated by entrenched hatreds. Such history has clearly helped to shape many of the major literary works of the period, not to mention its politics, yet none appears in 'History', popular or academic.
'Sectarian passion' amongst school children of the late-1920's in north Queensland appeared briefly in Ward's 1988 autobiography but even capturing his own personal experiences made no impact on his understanding of 'mateship'. He used the term 'secret society' after 1945 only for government-sponsored spy networks:
Behind the state and federal governments of the day, and behind the secret police and counter-espionage
organisations nominally responsible to them, there were and are in Australia powerful secret societies the members
of which are responsible to no-one but themselves.
The guild system was created by, and operated within a context which provided it with an integrated organisational purpose. The 'official' exponents of twentieth-century fraternalism, driven and shaped by managerial/national considerations, have fought against a need for context and have denied continuity.
It's not understood today that 'individual choice' once stood for local autonomy and the virtues of good neighbourliness, as well as personal freedom. Nor that at the very time when mateship, mutuality and benign larrikinism were being romanticised, they were being repudiated in practice. A plea, 'Why the Guild System Must be Restored' by UK author Orage and reprinted in The Age in 1907 was swimming against a very strong tide:
Under the Guild system each craft in return for specific public privileges undertook certain specific public responsibilities. The privileges were those of self-government, the regulation of their own rules of work, the regulation of their own standards of workmanship, the right to exclude the non-efficient and the right to control
their own members. In return for these privileges they undertook a corporate responsibility for workmanship and
price. In other words, they guaranteed as skilled (craftsmen) in their own mystery, the excellence and general
workmanship of all their members.
As governments have taken over more and more welfare functions, and the managerial/bureaucratic approach has become more entrenched, the worker's identification with 'his' secret society, has turned into child-like embarrassment at being seen in regalia. Even in Freemasonry, where ritual gives the impression that traditions are being maintained, the once-sturdy reverence, awe and mysticism have become confused fingerings of 'stuff' that almost no-one understands.
Amongst Friendly Societies the centralisation and specialisation imperatives, first sighted in the 1793 Rose Act, have achieved their implied goals. Most 'Orders' have 'de-mutualised' or have been swallowed in 'mergers' with other private health funds, often mere finance and investment houses. All have left fraternalism far behind. The'friendlies' were major losers in the 20th century struggle for control of 'the State' and thus of its agenda and resources, including those of health and welfare. In 1984 Green and Cromwell correctly reported that:
By the turn of the [19th-20th] century it was common in some circles to see social progress as almost synonymous with
growing State intervention, with Australia widely seen as progressive...
The romance of 'the State as the People' appeared with definitions such as this by Deakin:
A colonial Liberal is one who favours state interference with liberty and industry at the pleasure and in the interest of
the majority, while those who stand for the free play of individual choice and energy are classed as conservatives.
Trade unionists' concentration on working conditions and on influencing policies of the Australian Labor Party, has meant their industrial strength, mostly exercised behind a State-centrist model of social organisation, has been measured only in materialist terms. 'Brotherhood', 'mutuality' and genuine welcoming of an initiate can still be found in the odd Masonic lodge but even there it's becoming a rarer and rarer phenomenon.
In the gap left by the lack of an authentic history, the literary/intellectual community has adopted a romanticised 'mateship' and a de-contextualised Lawson, et al, because fanciful history has suited its agendas. Horne in 1964 and Max Harris in 1973, are just two well-known late-20th century authors who recycled the radical myth rather than engage in primary research. Ward's The Australian Legend was to hand, so they took it at face value and entrenched its flaws. The consequences of self-satisfaction and a lack of scepticism have been the already-observed neglect and superficiality. There have been exceptions - Sylvia Lawson concluded her book on Archibald and The Bulletin with a lament that neither of her subjects had been better understood:
Australia did not see itself as needing new ways of reading or using its own past..In the early 1980's [as she was writing the land seems more than ever in the grip of the Philistines.
Gerster pointed out in 1987:
Australian war writers - especially from the time of the Anzac landings at Gallipoli in April 1915 - have written more in the manner of publicity agents for the 'Digger' as an exemplar of heroic racial characteristics than as disinterested observers of human conflict.
On the other hand, Gascoigne's 2005 thesis on the Enlightenment in Australia is only a gentrified variation of 'the radical illusion':
The thin elite who largely determined the direction of events (from 1788 to 1850, when European Australia was largely
formed) generally assumed that society's problems could be solved by the exercise of reason and that if such a path were followed improvement would naturally follow..(Such) beliefs..still largely determine the agenda for politics in Australia.
Along the way, both (Henry) Lawson's idealised 'mateship' and the fraternal original have been bastardised, as in well-known usages by both major political parties. Although he came to prominence well after 1945, it's probable that the 'colorful' NSW Liberal Party politician, Bob Askin received his grounding attitudes well before, in the Depression years when mobsters such as 'Tilly' Devine and detectives such as Noel Kelly defined 'mates' somewhat differently to members of 19th century lodges. Said to be 'strong in the Masons' by someone who knew him fraternally, he has been credited with having given organised crime an enormous boost in the 1960's and 70's, along with his 'mate' Percy Galea, 'a pillar of the Catholic Church', and inducted Knight of the Order of St John by the Vatican in 1977.
The protective barriers around lodges originally were to safeguard sacred knowledge. The protective barriers around each of the strands of 'modern' fraternalism have been used to dismiss any suggestion that it was linked via a common context to the others, that fraternal societies might actually be siblings.
Each of the strands has insisted its history was separate and should be, indeed could only be, written by insiders. Supposedly, only initiates could know what was truth. Only initiates would know which other true believer might be trusted to know and keep the record. Because those insiders had already misplaced the context, the descriptions provided of themselves and their actions have been strong on self-service and weak on illumination.
It would seem probable that the well-read Archibald knew of the guilds and their connections with more recent fraternal societies, and that Lawson, Paterson, et al were at least aware of fraternalism's underlying principles. Future research may well turn up relevant memberships. Recent superficial and derogatory generalisations such as 'black arm band' have further colonised the space.
That the void where genuine history might have been has been available is not totally the fault of the writers who've attempted explanation of modern Australia. 'History' has been a prize and a weapon in social conflicts for a very long time. In Australia's short, white period, and in the absence of an authoritative narrative, 'history' has been a jig saw puzzle the pieces of which could be assembled and dis-assembled as many times as there were aspirants for 'the truth.'
One cannot argue that revision should be prohibited. But it would seem necessary that at least the largest pieces be known. Hitherto, fraternalism and the fraternal societies have been missing, equally unavailable to compilers of a full picture and to policy makers.
Volunteers from the general population can be easily found to carry Olympic programs or to maintain community health, sporting and educational initiatives, attesting that the urge to engage in mutual aid remains strong. Perhaps this also attests to the presence of a reservoir of support for mutuality. And perhaps, as many will argue, there is no longer any need for the rites and regalia of fraternalism as defined here, in order for 'mateship' to thrive.
Not being a soothsayer I can only say in response that the future is more dangerous and more difficult without an understanding of the past. Fraternal societies did exist, they did provide sinew and gristle for what we now have. Fraternal societies were the means by which 'mateship' was available at all. They may well have no future part to play, but can we afford to lose an understanding of their underlying principles as well?
The period of innovation and cataclysmic change we now call the 'industrial revolution' was actually a time of loss, a time when the glue holding the five functions of fraternal societies together in an integrated whole was being lost. In the longer sweep of history the industrial revolution was not the creator of working class organisation, nor even a dynamic field which 'forced' ordinary people to organise, rather it is a collective name for the forces of dis-integration wearing 'community' away.
The fraternalism which came to and spread throughout Australia was already ill with the managerial virus when it arrived, if we compare it to the medieval original. The 19th century concentration on finances and investments, what in-house authors have said were the indicators of strength and importance of 19th century fraternalism, was actually evidence of antibodies already present and multiplying. Yet fraternalism proved adaptable to its new surroundings, achieved rapid and remarkable growth:
* At the personal and family level it made survival possible and enhanced positive development of many individuals;
* At the local, community level, fraternal societies instituted or made possible the creation of infrastructure, from houses to schools and bridges, and
* At the national level, fraternalism has been a major creator of the 'Australia' we have all experienced.
A lack of understanding of their own history and irresponsibility towards their material heritage have been common factors in the decline of fraternal societies, possibly to nothing. Public projection of their historical image, in Harry Kellerman's terms - 'passing on fraternal ideals' - was the one factor over which the fraternals had most control and which at least had the potential to slow the 'modernist' purge of meaningful ceremonial. The insular, self-serving 'histories' which I've critiqued may be seen as an attempted response to this need, but they were not the only possible response.
A more effective alternative would have been to accept, cultivate and celebrate the heritage, as well as adapting to the new administrative demands. At the very least, knowledge of their authentic history may have enabled them to confront their various opponents more convincingly, and may well have resulted in very different outcomes. This can only be speculation.
However, the conclusion seems inescapable. At the very time that 'mateship' was being romanticised, fraternalism's sustaining organisations flirted briefly with a fantastic version of mediaevalism, only to turn and walk away, not just from the fanciful deceits but from meaningful history as a whole.
In the 20th century, while still sufficiently strong, trade-oriented societies did not care enough to attempt this path to renewal. Friendly societies had been fraternally impotent for some time. It remains to be seen, as I write these last words in 2010, whether Australian Freemasonry has the wit and the strength to join the push for renewal being articulated by their brothers, and sisters, in Europe and North America.
Why is it necessary to state the obvious about history? So that we are properly impressed by the
local profession's most recent accomplishment - to have made Australian history so dull and
seemingly irrelevant that our children do not want to study it.
- Don Watson, 'Back to the Past', Australian Review of Books, July, 1987, p.7.
Almost every person of mature age I've spoken to in the last 25 years about fraternal societies has told of family upsets, and worse, resulting from the Catholic-Protestant divide. My own family was no exception. Interviewees tell of neighbourhood slanging matches, priestly intervention into family intimacies, pitched battles between school-age children, which were clearly much more common than today's 'ethnic' riots, and of relationships devastated by entrenched hatreds. Such history has clearly helped to shape many of the major literary works of the period, not to mention its politics, yet none appears in 'History', popular or academic.
'Sectarian passion' amongst school children of the late-1920's in north Queensland appeared briefly in Ward's 1988 autobiography but even capturing his own personal experiences made no impact on his understanding of 'mateship'. He used the term 'secret society' after 1945 only for government-sponsored spy networks:
Behind the state and federal governments of the day, and behind the secret police and counter-espionage
organisations nominally responsible to them, there were and are in Australia powerful secret societies the members
of which are responsible to no-one but themselves.
The guild system was created by, and operated within a context which provided it with an integrated organisational purpose. The 'official' exponents of twentieth-century fraternalism, driven and shaped by managerial/national considerations, have fought against a need for context and have denied continuity.
It's not understood today that 'individual choice' once stood for local autonomy and the virtues of good neighbourliness, as well as personal freedom. Nor that at the very time when mateship, mutuality and benign larrikinism were being romanticised, they were being repudiated in practice. A plea, 'Why the Guild System Must be Restored' by UK author Orage and reprinted in The Age in 1907 was swimming against a very strong tide:
Under the Guild system each craft in return for specific public privileges undertook certain specific public responsibilities. The privileges were those of self-government, the regulation of their own rules of work, the regulation of their own standards of workmanship, the right to exclude the non-efficient and the right to control
their own members. In return for these privileges they undertook a corporate responsibility for workmanship and
price. In other words, they guaranteed as skilled (craftsmen) in their own mystery, the excellence and general
workmanship of all their members.
As governments have taken over more and more welfare functions, and the managerial/bureaucratic approach has become more entrenched, the worker's identification with 'his' secret society, has turned into child-like embarrassment at being seen in regalia. Even in Freemasonry, where ritual gives the impression that traditions are being maintained, the once-sturdy reverence, awe and mysticism have become confused fingerings of 'stuff' that almost no-one understands.
Amongst Friendly Societies the centralisation and specialisation imperatives, first sighted in the 1793 Rose Act, have achieved their implied goals. Most 'Orders' have 'de-mutualised' or have been swallowed in 'mergers' with other private health funds, often mere finance and investment houses. All have left fraternalism far behind. The'friendlies' were major losers in the 20th century struggle for control of 'the State' and thus of its agenda and resources, including those of health and welfare. In 1984 Green and Cromwell correctly reported that:
By the turn of the [19th-20th] century it was common in some circles to see social progress as almost synonymous with
growing State intervention, with Australia widely seen as progressive...
The romance of 'the State as the People' appeared with definitions such as this by Deakin:
A colonial Liberal is one who favours state interference with liberty and industry at the pleasure and in the interest of
the majority, while those who stand for the free play of individual choice and energy are classed as conservatives.
Trade unionists' concentration on working conditions and on influencing policies of the Australian Labor Party, has meant their industrial strength, mostly exercised behind a State-centrist model of social organisation, has been measured only in materialist terms. 'Brotherhood', 'mutuality' and genuine welcoming of an initiate can still be found in the odd Masonic lodge but even there it's becoming a rarer and rarer phenomenon.
In the gap left by the lack of an authentic history, the literary/intellectual community has adopted a romanticised 'mateship' and a de-contextualised Lawson, et al, because fanciful history has suited its agendas. Horne in 1964 and Max Harris in 1973, are just two well-known late-20th century authors who recycled the radical myth rather than engage in primary research. Ward's The Australian Legend was to hand, so they took it at face value and entrenched its flaws. The consequences of self-satisfaction and a lack of scepticism have been the already-observed neglect and superficiality. There have been exceptions - Sylvia Lawson concluded her book on Archibald and The Bulletin with a lament that neither of her subjects had been better understood:
Australia did not see itself as needing new ways of reading or using its own past..In the early 1980's [as she was writing the land seems more than ever in the grip of the Philistines.
Gerster pointed out in 1987:
Australian war writers - especially from the time of the Anzac landings at Gallipoli in April 1915 - have written more in the manner of publicity agents for the 'Digger' as an exemplar of heroic racial characteristics than as disinterested observers of human conflict.
On the other hand, Gascoigne's 2005 thesis on the Enlightenment in Australia is only a gentrified variation of 'the radical illusion':
The thin elite who largely determined the direction of events (from 1788 to 1850, when European Australia was largely
formed) generally assumed that society's problems could be solved by the exercise of reason and that if such a path were followed improvement would naturally follow..(Such) beliefs..still largely determine the agenda for politics in Australia.
Along the way, both (Henry) Lawson's idealised 'mateship' and the fraternal original have been bastardised, as in well-known usages by both major political parties. Although he came to prominence well after 1945, it's probable that the 'colorful' NSW Liberal Party politician, Bob Askin received his grounding attitudes well before, in the Depression years when mobsters such as 'Tilly' Devine and detectives such as Noel Kelly defined 'mates' somewhat differently to members of 19th century lodges. Said to be 'strong in the Masons' by someone who knew him fraternally, he has been credited with having given organised crime an enormous boost in the 1960's and 70's, along with his 'mate' Percy Galea, 'a pillar of the Catholic Church', and inducted Knight of the Order of St John by the Vatican in 1977.
The protective barriers around lodges originally were to safeguard sacred knowledge. The protective barriers around each of the strands of 'modern' fraternalism have been used to dismiss any suggestion that it was linked via a common context to the others, that fraternal societies might actually be siblings.
Each of the strands has insisted its history was separate and should be, indeed could only be, written by insiders. Supposedly, only initiates could know what was truth. Only initiates would know which other true believer might be trusted to know and keep the record. Because those insiders had already misplaced the context, the descriptions provided of themselves and their actions have been strong on self-service and weak on illumination.
It would seem probable that the well-read Archibald knew of the guilds and their connections with more recent fraternal societies, and that Lawson, Paterson, et al were at least aware of fraternalism's underlying principles. Future research may well turn up relevant memberships. Recent superficial and derogatory generalisations such as 'black arm band' have further colonised the space.
That the void where genuine history might have been has been available is not totally the fault of the writers who've attempted explanation of modern Australia. 'History' has been a prize and a weapon in social conflicts for a very long time. In Australia's short, white period, and in the absence of an authoritative narrative, 'history' has been a jig saw puzzle the pieces of which could be assembled and dis-assembled as many times as there were aspirants for 'the truth.'
One cannot argue that revision should be prohibited. But it would seem necessary that at least the largest pieces be known. Hitherto, fraternalism and the fraternal societies have been missing, equally unavailable to compilers of a full picture and to policy makers.
Volunteers from the general population can be easily found to carry Olympic programs or to maintain community health, sporting and educational initiatives, attesting that the urge to engage in mutual aid remains strong. Perhaps this also attests to the presence of a reservoir of support for mutuality. And perhaps, as many will argue, there is no longer any need for the rites and regalia of fraternalism as defined here, in order for 'mateship' to thrive.
Not being a soothsayer I can only say in response that the future is more dangerous and more difficult without an understanding of the past. Fraternal societies did exist, they did provide sinew and gristle for what we now have. Fraternal societies were the means by which 'mateship' was available at all. They may well have no future part to play, but can we afford to lose an understanding of their underlying principles as well?
The period of innovation and cataclysmic change we now call the 'industrial revolution' was actually a time of loss, a time when the glue holding the five functions of fraternal societies together in an integrated whole was being lost. In the longer sweep of history the industrial revolution was not the creator of working class organisation, nor even a dynamic field which 'forced' ordinary people to organise, rather it is a collective name for the forces of dis-integration wearing 'community' away.
The fraternalism which came to and spread throughout Australia was already ill with the managerial virus when it arrived, if we compare it to the medieval original. The 19th century concentration on finances and investments, what in-house authors have said were the indicators of strength and importance of 19th century fraternalism, was actually evidence of antibodies already present and multiplying. Yet fraternalism proved adaptable to its new surroundings, achieved rapid and remarkable growth:
* At the personal and family level it made survival possible and enhanced positive development of many individuals;
* At the local, community level, fraternal societies instituted or made possible the creation of infrastructure, from houses to schools and bridges, and
* At the national level, fraternalism has been a major creator of the 'Australia' we have all experienced.
A lack of understanding of their own history and irresponsibility towards their material heritage have been common factors in the decline of fraternal societies, possibly to nothing. Public projection of their historical image, in Harry Kellerman's terms - 'passing on fraternal ideals' - was the one factor over which the fraternals had most control and which at least had the potential to slow the 'modernist' purge of meaningful ceremonial. The insular, self-serving 'histories' which I've critiqued may be seen as an attempted response to this need, but they were not the only possible response.
A more effective alternative would have been to accept, cultivate and celebrate the heritage, as well as adapting to the new administrative demands. At the very least, knowledge of their authentic history may have enabled them to confront their various opponents more convincingly, and may well have resulted in very different outcomes. This can only be speculation.
However, the conclusion seems inescapable. At the very time that 'mateship' was being romanticised, fraternalism's sustaining organisations flirted briefly with a fantastic version of mediaevalism, only to turn and walk away, not just from the fanciful deceits but from meaningful history as a whole.
In the 20th century, while still sufficiently strong, trade-oriented societies did not care enough to attempt this path to renewal. Friendly societies had been fraternally impotent for some time. It remains to be seen, as I write these last words in 2010, whether Australian Freemasonry has the wit and the strength to join the push for renewal being articulated by their brothers, and sisters, in Europe and North America.
MATESHIP AND FRATERNALISM
In The Australian Legend Russell Ward argued that:
a specifically Australian outlook grew up first and most clearly' among Australian bush workers
and that this outlook then spread outwards to the whole Australian community.
He asserted that both 'the myth of the typical Australian' and the historical reality on which it was built had one central element:
(Above) all, (he) will stick to his mates through thick and thin.
Readers have taken this to mean that Ward was arguing that 'mateship' began 'in the bush' around the 1890's. But later he said that it had appeared much earlier and not 'in the outback':
(The) effect of the outback environment was perhaps not so much to 'reform' those who went
thither, as to accentuate and develop certain characteristics which they brought with them.
Take for example, the strongly egalitarian sentiment of group solidarity and loyalty
which was, perhaps, the most marked of all convict traits. This was recognised as the prime
distinguishing mark of outback workers fifty years before Lawson and others wrote about
mateship.
Other scholars have since searched feverishly for the origins of mateship, mainly in bush culture and in shearing sheds. All have reported failure because they couldn't see the answer staring them in the face - it wasn't labelled mateship. Ward's use of folk music and bush tales to support his argument has thrown them completely 'off the track', or into less-important side issues such as anti-authoritarianism.
To approach the same issue from a different direction - Bolton & Hudson, writing in 1997, pointed out a major gap in Australia's historical record:
...many Australians had hidden or covert identities hard to guess from their public
personas.
Many men joined the Freemasons, a body whose influence in Australian society has been grossly neglected by historians.. Lodges, such as the Druids, the Rechabites, the Buffaloes and the Oddfellows, provided support systems of considerable strength and durability. Catholics had their own religious orders and lay sodalities.(Their) diversity and importance for Australian political and cultural life is little studied...
These are not the first to suggest that, like the fabled Inland Sea, there is something missing at the heart of Australians' understanding of themselves. In this case, however, the feeling is backed up by the evidence lying just where these two western Australian scholars were pointing. Fraternalism is not exactly the same thing, but our notions of 'mateship' have grown in the context created by fraternalism. Keneally was probing the same 'something missing' when he wrote in 1986 that there was a
certain self-censorship on the part of Irish Australians,..a willingness to forget certain sections of Irish and Australian history.
Spann was looking at another part of the same gap when he pointed out in 1961:
No work seems to have been done in Australia on Protestant political behaviour, which is a pity, as any account of religion and voting is one-sided that concentrates on the oddities of a single religious group.
In 1972, Bollen wrote:
Beyond the political parties are sections of colonial society of which little is known: groups and institutions which helped determine the climate of public opinion.
He nominated the Protestant Churches as the most prominent of the neglected 'groups and institutions', but accepted that even his attempt at rectification would fail since
The sociology of the Churches is a formidable subject calling for sustained co-operation between historians and sociologists of a kind, regrettably, not yet in sight.
Of course, it's only 65 years since Manning Clark could refer to 'such a young subject as the writing of Australian history' and simultaneously contemplate its revision by way of tasks he set himself:
To show why the comforters of the past should be dropped, and to put forward new ideas for this (Australian) generation.
Clearly, his belief at the time he began his famous six volumes was that there was an old history of Australia, which wasn't Australian history. There were three 'comforters' used by previous authors which he particularly wished to discard:
* that our past has irrevocably condemned us to the role of materialistic, cultural barbarians for whom democracy is a weapon against non-conformity;
* that the convicts were, in the main, innocent victims of a brutal system, rescued by middle-class politicians with liberal reforms;
* that the 1880's and 1890's were a time of progressive social movements which shaped 'modern' Australia for the better.
Harping on the pursuit of material gain had left 'our history' with the idea that there have been no important social differences, eg, between socialists and Christians, or between Catholics and Protestants when, in reality, the differences and thus the conflicts have been profound. During the decades from the 1880's-1920's, advocates of nationalism had replaced 'home' values with local versions, Liberals had hailed an Australia supposedly free of 'superstitions, traditions, class distinctions and sanctified fables and fallacies of the older nations', while radicals within the labour movement had produced the creed of the bushman:
All three trends are anti-English: the last two believe in brotherhood, in being mates, and in equality. Gradually the men holding these opinions built up their own ideas of the past..
(including) the Eureka rebellion of 1854; (and the idea that) Australia was the political and social laboratory of the world..
Perhaps the most striking example of the way in which this belief in a radical tradition distorts and warps our writing of Australian history is in the interpretation of the labour movement..
An illusory radical tradition, 'the ideal of mateship..the great comforter of the bushman' had led too easily to xenophobia and racism:
There was no attempt to make mateship universal in application - to extend it from the people they knew to all people - nor was there any attempt to find universal reasons for believing in it..
The 'new history' will not come, he thought, from the universities which have become 'the most persistent defenders' of 'the bankrupt liberal ideal', nor from 'the measurers', and not from the radicals who 'are either tethered to an erstwhile great but now excessively rigid code', or 'they are frightened by the self-appointed inquisitors of our morals and political opinions.'
While I believe that Australians should drop the comforters of the days of their youth and innocence, I believe even more strongly that the historians should come back to the great themes they abandoned when they joined in the vain search for a science of society.
Sixty-five years later, the writing of Australian history has improved only marginally. For his part, in 1978, Clark expressed a sense of failure after much of his 'History' had been completed and published:
By writing it all down instead of just talking about what it would be like..the author wanted to show that Clio, the muse of history could do for Australia what it had done with such splendour for other parts of the world..But as Henry Lawson might have said.."That's the whole bloody trouble..I couldn't bring it off."
I can only wonder what he might have accomplished if he had not been dazzled by the thought of Australia as a meeting place for three ideologies, 'Catholic Christendom, Protestant Christianity and the Enlightenment' and had sought proof beyond official records, public statements and such obvious things as headstones. All around him, he may have been able to 'see' the evidence for fraternalism, and thus much which was essential to his tasks. He might have seen through his own comforter, 'the Enlightenment', and appreciated that it was not the origin of his favourite metaphor:
(At) any given moment I was like a man looking for a chink of light at the end of a very dark tunnel, or like a man seeking the way in a heavy fog. Occasionally a shaft of light showed the way forward, but it took years to get out of that fog. Sometimes..I wanted that fog back rather desperately. Men, we have been told, prefer the darkness to the light, because madness is in their hearts while they live.
He may have prevented the radical illusion from continuing to gather moss, as in the 2008 version from Boucher and Sharp which credits John Howard with 'a total reversal of the progressive principles on which modern Australia was based', to quote one reviewer.
Charles Darwin and Alexis De Tocqueville
When Darwin set sail in 1831 on the Beagle as a raw 22 year old he had no idea of where his dual journeys, marine and intellectual, would take him, but he was prepared to allow the evidence, whatever it might be, to lead him to its own, natural conclusions.
Perceived wisdom about the creation of life on earth was at the time, comparatively, settled. Science was not yet a respectable pursuit from which professional careers could be wrung. 'Natural Science' was a barely recognised term still to be given a shape and a purpose.
Darwin recognised the newness of his endeavour and therefore the need to collect everything he could. He accepted that the first step to understanding was to gather and preserve evidence. That done, the future could be pressed to provide time for examination, analysis and debate.
When I consider today the state of fraternal history, I see a number of illuminating parallels with the position Darwin was in in 1831.
I see that the neglected fraternal memorabilia must be collected and made safe, as a matter of urgency.
I see that collection policies must be comprehensive and arguments about priorities postponed until future examinations can determine levels of importance.
I see that entrenched religious views are a major obstacle to both conservation and to analysis, and must be overturned.
Freemasonry, for example, must give up its view of itself as being uniquely close to God, if not literally 'divine truth.' It must stop depicting itself as a doctrine of perfection, akin to the 'Garden of Eden', and accept that as a man-made creation it is subject to cycles of decay and renewal, and to the weaknesses inherent in being an earth-bound social phenomenon.
The notion of God's immutable laws has led believers in Man's place at the pinnacle of creation into an unworthy and un-scientific arrogance which has defined 'learning' as a process of locating hidden truths, rather than an open-ended search driven by curiosity.
Similarly, obviously secular concepts such as 'mateship', 'solidarity' and 'community spirit' are in great danger of being sanctified, and rendered immune to examination or question.
Another 'natural historian' making his name in the 1830's is relevant here, Alexis de Tocqueville. This Frenchman travelling in the USA developed an argument that to achieve and to hold democratic freedoms, citizens needed to be able to think and to act independently of all institutionalised authority, whether elected or not:
(If citizens) never (acquire) the habit of forming associations in ordinary life, civilisation itself would be endangered.
and that to understand 'modern' democratic society:
Nothing...is more deserving of our attention than the intellectual and moral associations of America.
Many of the combinations to which he was drawing attention would now be called 'friendly' or 'mutual benefit' societies, and it is relevant here to note that of all the strands of fraternalism, the friendly societies have been the most neglected by historians. So great has been the neglect, that the only general account of 'friendlies' in Australia is not a history as such at all. It is an argument about the importance of people's self-help and mutual aid to the construction of Australian society. The authors, Green and Cromwell concluded in 1984:
Clearly we think it is not good that the history of mutual aid has been ignored. We think that its mistaken absence from any general sense of Australia's past leads too easily to thinking that there are only two political alternatives: centralised socialism or profit-seeking capitalism.
They linked their central focus, on health services and health insurance, to the broader social context:
This neglected part of the Australian story ought to engage not only those who wish to see the record put straight, but also those searching for an Australian identity. The spirit of self-reliance described in these pages has consistently been a prominent part of the Australian make-up.
Centring the burden of their assertions on the situation at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, what these well-meaning authors did not do was to explore in depth the earlier decades. And they did not ask themselves why 'the friendlies' were so little known at the time they were writing. Attempts at renewal notwithstanding, 'medical history' has been restricted to accounts of dominant insiders, the doctors, and their cleverness.
Three highly regarded volumes on the development of NSW's local government describe a vacuum at the point of NSW municipal decision-making for a large part of the 19th century. The author, Larcombe, argues that the British Government wished to drastically reduce its expenditures on the colony after 1831, that the Sydney-based commercial elite strongly opposed its wealth being taxed to pay for services, and the majority of the citizenry, being without much in the way of personal assets and without leadership or education in the required directions, were apathetic about social possibilities. Even the fact that laissez-faire attitudes by all concerned had public health implications did not produce a momentum for citizen initiative. Larcombe quoted an 1850 editorial from the Sydney Morning Herald:
Along these undrained, unlevelled, unshaped ways and passages, misnamed 'streets', human habitations are springing up by hundreds and thousands, many of them quite inaccessible to wheeled vehicles, and the whole of them exposed to the nuisance and dangers generated by the want of drainage.
In other words, it seems the colonists had imported their general approach to civil administration from 'the old country', where the government and the civil bureaucracy prided themselves on knowing more about 'the problems' than anyone else. 'Stand back, and let the experts get on' was the prevailing British view, while taxation was just a way-of-life, however regretted.
Larcombe does not notice the logical disconnect, but for him the only way in which the colonial governance vacuum could be filled was by a centralised government, and it is this he documents. In one place he comments:
The colonists were becoming more opulent and were eager to increase their land holdings, herds and other forms of personal wealth, but they were most unwilling to contribute towards a police force to protect them, or towards roads to facilitate the marketing of their produce.
De Tocqueville wrote about US citizens at about the same time:
The citizen of the United States is taught from infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon the social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he claims its assistance only when he is unable to do without it...
..If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare and the circulation of vehicles is hindered, the neighbours immediately form themselves into a deliberative body..
De Tocqueville prepared his thesis before the bulk of the 10,000 plus fraternal associations which sprang up in the USA had reached their peak, indeed many had not yet seen the light of day. True also, that the golden era of fraternals in the UK came after he had written that he had observed nothing like the USA associations anywhere before. There were 'intellectual and moral associations' in France similar to those he was observing but since European history had been part of the problem from which the American colonists had sought to escape, the societies did not occupy the same place socially and they did not announce themselves as those in the USA did.
Recent northern hemisphere scholarship has begun to make comparisons of fraternal histories easier, even that of Australia where so little has been done. Most relevant at this point is the work of Stephen Bullock and Jessica Harland-Jacobs. Bullock, for example, has made plain how Freemasonry in the United States achieved independence from 'British' control before 1788 and thus avoided a major problem which, despite its invisibility to 'our' historians, beset 'Australian' lodges throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th:
The (Freemasonry) that emerged from the (War of Independence) was stronger than ever before. This rather unexpected result came…because the fraternity, despite the uncertainties created by the war, was able to align itself with both the Revolutionary cause and the republican society it attempted to create.
Bringing Mateship into the Light:
For the convicts to have been 'mates' as Ward suggested, they must have brought 'mateship' with them from the northern hemisphere, and that indeed is where this story begins.
Western Europeans have known about 'being mates' for centuries but they first called it being a 'gildsman' or a 'brother':
To become a gildsman,..it was necessary to pay certain initiation fees,..(and to take) an oath of fealty to the fraternity, swearing to observe its laws, to uphold its privileges, not to divulge its counsels, to obey its officers, and not to aid any non-gildsman under cover of the newly-acquired 'freedom.'
In 1388, a Gild of Palmers summarised their fraternity's rules for assisting poverty-stricken 'mates':
When it happens that any of the brothers or sisters of the gild shall have been brought to such want..that they have not enough to live on; then once, twice, and thrice..as much help shall be given to them..as the rector and the stewards shall order; so that whoever bears the name of this gild, shall be upraised again, through the ordinances, goods and help of his fellows.
Already in this guild charter is the structure of 'brotherhood', on which Freemasons, friendly societies and trade unions have subsequently rested. It's not accidental that both socialists and Freemasons have called colleagues 'brother', that coal miners have organised in 'lodges' and printers in 'chapels', or that recent visitors to Sydney's World Youth Day were titled 'pilgrims'.
It's not unusual for people working together to develop a camaraderie, nor is it hard to find European examples of actual 'co-operation, mutual aid and a sense of fraternity' pre-dating 1788. In the case of British colonies, particular fraternities are of interest because they were already strong 'at home.' Harland-Jacobs has recently written about Freemasonry:
My argument that the modern world's first and most successful fraternal organisation was, from its very beginnings, intimately bound up in imperialism suggests that to a very great extent the British Empire was a fraternal enterprise. (My emphasis)
In her terms :
By fulfilling a variety of needs - ranging from homosocial association to easing men's transition from one colonial society to another - belonging to the fraternity made life easier for Britons who ran, defended and lived in the Empire.
For 'homosocial association' read 'mateship' which, of course, came ashore with the First Fleeters in the form of Freemasonry, but also in the form of the United Irish Brotherhood and, it seems certain, in trade-oriented 'secret societies.' In Sydney Town in the 1830's and 40's it took the form of Odd Fellows, Rechabites, Druids and Foresters, and of the Australian Trade Union Benefit Society. By then it was already established in Van Diemens Land, at the Hunter River, at the Swan River Settlement and Port Phillip. It subsequently spread into the interior of the continent, where it continued to exhibit far more than just a sense of friendly association. The 'closed shop' of an allegedly new unionism in the 1890's was just one example of the very old idea of fraternalism re-asserting itself.
The many fraternities were secret societies because they had secrets known only to insiders, and maintained a barrier between insiders and outsiders. Those secrets were based on practical requirements and made possible the distribution of society benefits. Big and small, they contributed to the role which Harland-Jacobs has attributed just to Freemasonry.
Two examples, neither of which are Masonic, will underline the practicalities of the 'homosocial association' point. Firstly, the Laws of the Princess Royal Lodge No 2, of the Ancient and Independent Order of Odd Fellows, printed in Adelaide in 1857:
They call each other Brother, from the strong union that subsists among them in everything connected with themselves, individually and collectively; and they are bound by a solemn obligation, not to injure anyone, either in a word or action; the same principle must operate with him out of lodge, as well as within it.
In the various Australian colonies at this time the word 'mate' was already widely used for male friendship because it was part of the practice of fraternalism, for example, by gold miners at Ballarat. But it was not the only term used.
The second example is from the 1827 London-based General Union of Carpenters and Joiners. Its Rules also emphasise the importance of personal affection within the group to the attainment of political objects. They list a number of goals, all equally important:
..the amelioration of the evils besetting our trade; the advancement of the rights and privileges of labour; the cultivation of brotherly affection and mutual regard for each other's welfare.
Fraternalism has not been class, religion, race or gender specific, and its expressions have not been confined to any one group, caste or social strata. Inevitably, fraternal organisations have been directly involved in events of consequence throughout Australian history, sometimes positively, sometimes not and, at times, in defence of conflicting positions. Individuals with fraternal connections have repeatedly played roles of significance in line with the aspirations of that fraternity locally, and nationally.
In any assessment of fraternalism, there is first the prevalence of the societies which were its vehicles to consider, there is then their variety, and then there is the fact that whether religious, political, secular or social in tone, all involved their members in secrecy, ritual and mutuality as parts of an integrated package. They all, at least originally, intended to deliver their memberships from the darkness of ignorance into the light of enlightenment, a variable state of mind not always equated with 'rational enquiry and (material) progress.'
In The Australian Legend Russell Ward argued that:
a specifically Australian outlook grew up first and most clearly' among Australian bush workers
and that this outlook then spread outwards to the whole Australian community.
He asserted that both 'the myth of the typical Australian' and the historical reality on which it was built had one central element:
(Above) all, (he) will stick to his mates through thick and thin.
Readers have taken this to mean that Ward was arguing that 'mateship' began 'in the bush' around the 1890's. But later he said that it had appeared much earlier and not 'in the outback':
(The) effect of the outback environment was perhaps not so much to 'reform' those who went
thither, as to accentuate and develop certain characteristics which they brought with them.
Take for example, the strongly egalitarian sentiment of group solidarity and loyalty
which was, perhaps, the most marked of all convict traits. This was recognised as the prime
distinguishing mark of outback workers fifty years before Lawson and others wrote about
mateship.
Other scholars have since searched feverishly for the origins of mateship, mainly in bush culture and in shearing sheds. All have reported failure because they couldn't see the answer staring them in the face - it wasn't labelled mateship. Ward's use of folk music and bush tales to support his argument has thrown them completely 'off the track', or into less-important side issues such as anti-authoritarianism.
To approach the same issue from a different direction - Bolton & Hudson, writing in 1997, pointed out a major gap in Australia's historical record:
...many Australians had hidden or covert identities hard to guess from their public
personas.
Many men joined the Freemasons, a body whose influence in Australian society has been grossly neglected by historians.. Lodges, such as the Druids, the Rechabites, the Buffaloes and the Oddfellows, provided support systems of considerable strength and durability. Catholics had their own religious orders and lay sodalities.(Their) diversity and importance for Australian political and cultural life is little studied...
These are not the first to suggest that, like the fabled Inland Sea, there is something missing at the heart of Australians' understanding of themselves. In this case, however, the feeling is backed up by the evidence lying just where these two western Australian scholars were pointing. Fraternalism is not exactly the same thing, but our notions of 'mateship' have grown in the context created by fraternalism. Keneally was probing the same 'something missing' when he wrote in 1986 that there was a
certain self-censorship on the part of Irish Australians,..a willingness to forget certain sections of Irish and Australian history.
Spann was looking at another part of the same gap when he pointed out in 1961:
No work seems to have been done in Australia on Protestant political behaviour, which is a pity, as any account of religion and voting is one-sided that concentrates on the oddities of a single religious group.
In 1972, Bollen wrote:
Beyond the political parties are sections of colonial society of which little is known: groups and institutions which helped determine the climate of public opinion.
He nominated the Protestant Churches as the most prominent of the neglected 'groups and institutions', but accepted that even his attempt at rectification would fail since
The sociology of the Churches is a formidable subject calling for sustained co-operation between historians and sociologists of a kind, regrettably, not yet in sight.
Of course, it's only 65 years since Manning Clark could refer to 'such a young subject as the writing of Australian history' and simultaneously contemplate its revision by way of tasks he set himself:
To show why the comforters of the past should be dropped, and to put forward new ideas for this (Australian) generation.
Clearly, his belief at the time he began his famous six volumes was that there was an old history of Australia, which wasn't Australian history. There were three 'comforters' used by previous authors which he particularly wished to discard:
* that our past has irrevocably condemned us to the role of materialistic, cultural barbarians for whom democracy is a weapon against non-conformity;
* that the convicts were, in the main, innocent victims of a brutal system, rescued by middle-class politicians with liberal reforms;
* that the 1880's and 1890's were a time of progressive social movements which shaped 'modern' Australia for the better.
Harping on the pursuit of material gain had left 'our history' with the idea that there have been no important social differences, eg, between socialists and Christians, or between Catholics and Protestants when, in reality, the differences and thus the conflicts have been profound. During the decades from the 1880's-1920's, advocates of nationalism had replaced 'home' values with local versions, Liberals had hailed an Australia supposedly free of 'superstitions, traditions, class distinctions and sanctified fables and fallacies of the older nations', while radicals within the labour movement had produced the creed of the bushman:
All three trends are anti-English: the last two believe in brotherhood, in being mates, and in equality. Gradually the men holding these opinions built up their own ideas of the past..
(including) the Eureka rebellion of 1854; (and the idea that) Australia was the political and social laboratory of the world..
Perhaps the most striking example of the way in which this belief in a radical tradition distorts and warps our writing of Australian history is in the interpretation of the labour movement..
An illusory radical tradition, 'the ideal of mateship..the great comforter of the bushman' had led too easily to xenophobia and racism:
There was no attempt to make mateship universal in application - to extend it from the people they knew to all people - nor was there any attempt to find universal reasons for believing in it..
The 'new history' will not come, he thought, from the universities which have become 'the most persistent defenders' of 'the bankrupt liberal ideal', nor from 'the measurers', and not from the radicals who 'are either tethered to an erstwhile great but now excessively rigid code', or 'they are frightened by the self-appointed inquisitors of our morals and political opinions.'
While I believe that Australians should drop the comforters of the days of their youth and innocence, I believe even more strongly that the historians should come back to the great themes they abandoned when they joined in the vain search for a science of society.
Sixty-five years later, the writing of Australian history has improved only marginally. For his part, in 1978, Clark expressed a sense of failure after much of his 'History' had been completed and published:
By writing it all down instead of just talking about what it would be like..the author wanted to show that Clio, the muse of history could do for Australia what it had done with such splendour for other parts of the world..But as Henry Lawson might have said.."That's the whole bloody trouble..I couldn't bring it off."
I can only wonder what he might have accomplished if he had not been dazzled by the thought of Australia as a meeting place for three ideologies, 'Catholic Christendom, Protestant Christianity and the Enlightenment' and had sought proof beyond official records, public statements and such obvious things as headstones. All around him, he may have been able to 'see' the evidence for fraternalism, and thus much which was essential to his tasks. He might have seen through his own comforter, 'the Enlightenment', and appreciated that it was not the origin of his favourite metaphor:
(At) any given moment I was like a man looking for a chink of light at the end of a very dark tunnel, or like a man seeking the way in a heavy fog. Occasionally a shaft of light showed the way forward, but it took years to get out of that fog. Sometimes..I wanted that fog back rather desperately. Men, we have been told, prefer the darkness to the light, because madness is in their hearts while they live.
He may have prevented the radical illusion from continuing to gather moss, as in the 2008 version from Boucher and Sharp which credits John Howard with 'a total reversal of the progressive principles on which modern Australia was based', to quote one reviewer.
Charles Darwin and Alexis De Tocqueville
When Darwin set sail in 1831 on the Beagle as a raw 22 year old he had no idea of where his dual journeys, marine and intellectual, would take him, but he was prepared to allow the evidence, whatever it might be, to lead him to its own, natural conclusions.
Perceived wisdom about the creation of life on earth was at the time, comparatively, settled. Science was not yet a respectable pursuit from which professional careers could be wrung. 'Natural Science' was a barely recognised term still to be given a shape and a purpose.
Darwin recognised the newness of his endeavour and therefore the need to collect everything he could. He accepted that the first step to understanding was to gather and preserve evidence. That done, the future could be pressed to provide time for examination, analysis and debate.
When I consider today the state of fraternal history, I see a number of illuminating parallels with the position Darwin was in in 1831.
I see that the neglected fraternal memorabilia must be collected and made safe, as a matter of urgency.
I see that collection policies must be comprehensive and arguments about priorities postponed until future examinations can determine levels of importance.
I see that entrenched religious views are a major obstacle to both conservation and to analysis, and must be overturned.
Freemasonry, for example, must give up its view of itself as being uniquely close to God, if not literally 'divine truth.' It must stop depicting itself as a doctrine of perfection, akin to the 'Garden of Eden', and accept that as a man-made creation it is subject to cycles of decay and renewal, and to the weaknesses inherent in being an earth-bound social phenomenon.
The notion of God's immutable laws has led believers in Man's place at the pinnacle of creation into an unworthy and un-scientific arrogance which has defined 'learning' as a process of locating hidden truths, rather than an open-ended search driven by curiosity.
Similarly, obviously secular concepts such as 'mateship', 'solidarity' and 'community spirit' are in great danger of being sanctified, and rendered immune to examination or question.
Another 'natural historian' making his name in the 1830's is relevant here, Alexis de Tocqueville. This Frenchman travelling in the USA developed an argument that to achieve and to hold democratic freedoms, citizens needed to be able to think and to act independently of all institutionalised authority, whether elected or not:
(If citizens) never (acquire) the habit of forming associations in ordinary life, civilisation itself would be endangered.
and that to understand 'modern' democratic society:
Nothing...is more deserving of our attention than the intellectual and moral associations of America.
Many of the combinations to which he was drawing attention would now be called 'friendly' or 'mutual benefit' societies, and it is relevant here to note that of all the strands of fraternalism, the friendly societies have been the most neglected by historians. So great has been the neglect, that the only general account of 'friendlies' in Australia is not a history as such at all. It is an argument about the importance of people's self-help and mutual aid to the construction of Australian society. The authors, Green and Cromwell concluded in 1984:
Clearly we think it is not good that the history of mutual aid has been ignored. We think that its mistaken absence from any general sense of Australia's past leads too easily to thinking that there are only two political alternatives: centralised socialism or profit-seeking capitalism.
They linked their central focus, on health services and health insurance, to the broader social context:
This neglected part of the Australian story ought to engage not only those who wish to see the record put straight, but also those searching for an Australian identity. The spirit of self-reliance described in these pages has consistently been a prominent part of the Australian make-up.
Centring the burden of their assertions on the situation at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, what these well-meaning authors did not do was to explore in depth the earlier decades. And they did not ask themselves why 'the friendlies' were so little known at the time they were writing. Attempts at renewal notwithstanding, 'medical history' has been restricted to accounts of dominant insiders, the doctors, and their cleverness.
Three highly regarded volumes on the development of NSW's local government describe a vacuum at the point of NSW municipal decision-making for a large part of the 19th century. The author, Larcombe, argues that the British Government wished to drastically reduce its expenditures on the colony after 1831, that the Sydney-based commercial elite strongly opposed its wealth being taxed to pay for services, and the majority of the citizenry, being without much in the way of personal assets and without leadership or education in the required directions, were apathetic about social possibilities. Even the fact that laissez-faire attitudes by all concerned had public health implications did not produce a momentum for citizen initiative. Larcombe quoted an 1850 editorial from the Sydney Morning Herald:
Along these undrained, unlevelled, unshaped ways and passages, misnamed 'streets', human habitations are springing up by hundreds and thousands, many of them quite inaccessible to wheeled vehicles, and the whole of them exposed to the nuisance and dangers generated by the want of drainage.
In other words, it seems the colonists had imported their general approach to civil administration from 'the old country', where the government and the civil bureaucracy prided themselves on knowing more about 'the problems' than anyone else. 'Stand back, and let the experts get on' was the prevailing British view, while taxation was just a way-of-life, however regretted.
Larcombe does not notice the logical disconnect, but for him the only way in which the colonial governance vacuum could be filled was by a centralised government, and it is this he documents. In one place he comments:
The colonists were becoming more opulent and were eager to increase their land holdings, herds and other forms of personal wealth, but they were most unwilling to contribute towards a police force to protect them, or towards roads to facilitate the marketing of their produce.
De Tocqueville wrote about US citizens at about the same time:
The citizen of the United States is taught from infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon the social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he claims its assistance only when he is unable to do without it...
..If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare and the circulation of vehicles is hindered, the neighbours immediately form themselves into a deliberative body..
De Tocqueville prepared his thesis before the bulk of the 10,000 plus fraternal associations which sprang up in the USA had reached their peak, indeed many had not yet seen the light of day. True also, that the golden era of fraternals in the UK came after he had written that he had observed nothing like the USA associations anywhere before. There were 'intellectual and moral associations' in France similar to those he was observing but since European history had been part of the problem from which the American colonists had sought to escape, the societies did not occupy the same place socially and they did not announce themselves as those in the USA did.
Recent northern hemisphere scholarship has begun to make comparisons of fraternal histories easier, even that of Australia where so little has been done. Most relevant at this point is the work of Stephen Bullock and Jessica Harland-Jacobs. Bullock, for example, has made plain how Freemasonry in the United States achieved independence from 'British' control before 1788 and thus avoided a major problem which, despite its invisibility to 'our' historians, beset 'Australian' lodges throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th:
The (Freemasonry) that emerged from the (War of Independence) was stronger than ever before. This rather unexpected result came…because the fraternity, despite the uncertainties created by the war, was able to align itself with both the Revolutionary cause and the republican society it attempted to create.
Bringing Mateship into the Light:
For the convicts to have been 'mates' as Ward suggested, they must have brought 'mateship' with them from the northern hemisphere, and that indeed is where this story begins.
Western Europeans have known about 'being mates' for centuries but they first called it being a 'gildsman' or a 'brother':
To become a gildsman,..it was necessary to pay certain initiation fees,..(and to take) an oath of fealty to the fraternity, swearing to observe its laws, to uphold its privileges, not to divulge its counsels, to obey its officers, and not to aid any non-gildsman under cover of the newly-acquired 'freedom.'
In 1388, a Gild of Palmers summarised their fraternity's rules for assisting poverty-stricken 'mates':
When it happens that any of the brothers or sisters of the gild shall have been brought to such want..that they have not enough to live on; then once, twice, and thrice..as much help shall be given to them..as the rector and the stewards shall order; so that whoever bears the name of this gild, shall be upraised again, through the ordinances, goods and help of his fellows.
Already in this guild charter is the structure of 'brotherhood', on which Freemasons, friendly societies and trade unions have subsequently rested. It's not accidental that both socialists and Freemasons have called colleagues 'brother', that coal miners have organised in 'lodges' and printers in 'chapels', or that recent visitors to Sydney's World Youth Day were titled 'pilgrims'.
It's not unusual for people working together to develop a camaraderie, nor is it hard to find European examples of actual 'co-operation, mutual aid and a sense of fraternity' pre-dating 1788. In the case of British colonies, particular fraternities are of interest because they were already strong 'at home.' Harland-Jacobs has recently written about Freemasonry:
My argument that the modern world's first and most successful fraternal organisation was, from its very beginnings, intimately bound up in imperialism suggests that to a very great extent the British Empire was a fraternal enterprise. (My emphasis)
In her terms :
By fulfilling a variety of needs - ranging from homosocial association to easing men's transition from one colonial society to another - belonging to the fraternity made life easier for Britons who ran, defended and lived in the Empire.
For 'homosocial association' read 'mateship' which, of course, came ashore with the First Fleeters in the form of Freemasonry, but also in the form of the United Irish Brotherhood and, it seems certain, in trade-oriented 'secret societies.' In Sydney Town in the 1830's and 40's it took the form of Odd Fellows, Rechabites, Druids and Foresters, and of the Australian Trade Union Benefit Society. By then it was already established in Van Diemens Land, at the Hunter River, at the Swan River Settlement and Port Phillip. It subsequently spread into the interior of the continent, where it continued to exhibit far more than just a sense of friendly association. The 'closed shop' of an allegedly new unionism in the 1890's was just one example of the very old idea of fraternalism re-asserting itself.
The many fraternities were secret societies because they had secrets known only to insiders, and maintained a barrier between insiders and outsiders. Those secrets were based on practical requirements and made possible the distribution of society benefits. Big and small, they contributed to the role which Harland-Jacobs has attributed just to Freemasonry.
Two examples, neither of which are Masonic, will underline the practicalities of the 'homosocial association' point. Firstly, the Laws of the Princess Royal Lodge No 2, of the Ancient and Independent Order of Odd Fellows, printed in Adelaide in 1857:
They call each other Brother, from the strong union that subsists among them in everything connected with themselves, individually and collectively; and they are bound by a solemn obligation, not to injure anyone, either in a word or action; the same principle must operate with him out of lodge, as well as within it.
In the various Australian colonies at this time the word 'mate' was already widely used for male friendship because it was part of the practice of fraternalism, for example, by gold miners at Ballarat. But it was not the only term used.
The second example is from the 1827 London-based General Union of Carpenters and Joiners. Its Rules also emphasise the importance of personal affection within the group to the attainment of political objects. They list a number of goals, all equally important:
..the amelioration of the evils besetting our trade; the advancement of the rights and privileges of labour; the cultivation of brotherly affection and mutual regard for each other's welfare.
Fraternalism has not been class, religion, race or gender specific, and its expressions have not been confined to any one group, caste or social strata. Inevitably, fraternal organisations have been directly involved in events of consequence throughout Australian history, sometimes positively, sometimes not and, at times, in defence of conflicting positions. Individuals with fraternal connections have repeatedly played roles of significance in line with the aspirations of that fraternity locally, and nationally.
In any assessment of fraternalism, there is first the prevalence of the societies which were its vehicles to consider, there is then their variety, and then there is the fact that whether religious, political, secular or social in tone, all involved their members in secrecy, ritual and mutuality as parts of an integrated package. They all, at least originally, intended to deliver their memberships from the darkness of ignorance into the light of enlightenment, a variable state of mind not always equated with 'rational enquiry and (material) progress.'
Long before Europeans settled in Australia, trade-oriented societies were assisting members to seek work 'out-of-town.' Fraternal federations of the 19th and 20th centuries are based on those 'tramping networks.' See Leeson's Travelling Brothers.