Table of Contents
The glow of his campfire framed a simple tableau of pioneer life. Across this ‘untenanted land’, Edwin Brady mused, ‘little companies’, such as his own, sat by their ‘solitary fires’. ‘They smoked pipes and talked, or watched the coals reflectively’. Around them, the ‘shadowy outlines’ of the bush merged into the dark northern night, and ‘the whispers’ of this ‘unknown’ land gathered about. It seemed to Brady that this camp, this night, represented the ‘actual life’ of the Northern Territory as he had known it. But the future weighed heavily upon that quiet, nostalgic scene. The moment would soon fade, Brady reflected, as the ‘cinematograph of Time’ rolled on. It was 1912, and something new was coming.[1]
Staring into the flames of the campfire, Brady imagined he heard ‘the whistle of the Trans-continental Express’. The ‘rumble of freight trains’ followed, and the sound of water churning in the wake of ‘fast coastal steamers’. The night was filled with movement as Brady perceived an end to the north’s crippling isolation, the conquest of its ‘lonesome distances’. New industries too! The ‘chug-chug’ of sugar mills, ‘the buzzing of cotton jinnys’, ‘the clinking of harvesters’, ‘the hissing of refrigerators’—as Brady listened, ‘the thousand homely sounds of human progress’ joined in a triumphant ‘hymn of the Future’. The night’s subtle whispers were lost amidst the clamour of technology on the move. Not mere campfires, but ‘young cities’, electric lit and alive with enterprise’, would soon arise to defeat the darkness.[2] This was Brady’s dream. This was progress.
Edwin James Brady, poet and journalist, visited the Northern Territory in September 1912, gathering material for his ambitious compendium of Australian developmental opportunities, Australia Unlimited.[3] Brady was travelling the country, charting the outlines of Australia’s future with his typical optimistic zeal. His trip north was drawing to a close and, as he relaxed by his last campfire, he began to ponder the transformation of the Territory. The sounds and images conjured from the night reveal much about the spirit that invigorated his work. He imagined an end to isolation and emptiness, the growth of both population and production. The future was rising like a flood, lapping at the frontiers of settlement, ready to redeem Australia’s waste lands with the regenerative flow of human ingenuity and enthusiasm. Australia’s unlimited prospects lay both in the conquest of space and the fulfillment of time. Plotted against these two axes, the upward course of progress was clear.
The ‘cinematograph of Time’ was an apt metaphor. It portrayed the unfolding story of Australia’s national progress as a product of the latest technology, presented with an assured sense of inevitability – frame follows frame follows frame. In the early years of the century, confidence in the transforming power of science and technology was high. ‘The wealth of today’, Brady argued, ‘is but a beggar’s moiety of the unlimited wealth of the future which will be won by the application of modern knowledge to local conditions’.[4] His optimism is echoed still in the slogans of ‘knowledge nation’ and ‘new economy’. Science and technology remain as engines for change, cascading revolution upon revolution. The weight of inevitability that threatened to extinguish Brady’s isolated campfire continues to press upon our visions of the future –invigorating our hopes and intensifying our fears. We are all familiar with the story of progress, a compelling tale of growth and improvement that entwines national ambition with individual longing. But how are our journeys through life framed within this unrolling narrative? What choices do we have, and how do we make them?
For Brady, progress was measured in miles and acres, a story of continental conquest. Land figures less prominently in contemporary calculations of achievement, nonetheless, we continue to imagine progress in terms of distance travelled, as a journey, ever onwards through time. In a landscape of metaphors, amidst metaphors of landscape, the meaning of progress eludes easy analysis. Our future is constructed within the shifting space of time. This essay imagines an alternate journey, one that explores the terrain that separates the life of an individual from the destiny of Australia Unlimited; a journey that carries us from science, to nation, to citizen, venturing unsteadily along the boundary between hope and fear. If the topography remains unclear, the scale awry, we might at least hope to chart a few reference points along the frontiers of the future.
Arnold, Lorna 1987, A Very Special Relationship: British Atomic Weapon Trials in Australia, London : H.M.S.O: Available from HMSO Publications Centre.
Bashford, Alison 1998, ‘Quarantine and the Imagining of the Australian Nation’, Health, vol. 2, no. 4, October 1998.
Beadell, Len 1976, Blast the Bush, Rigby, Adelaide.
Bolton, Geoffrey 1990, The Middle Way, vol. 5, The Oxford History of Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne.
Boyer, Paul 1985, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, Pantheon Books, New York
Brady, Edwin James 1918, Australia Unlimited, George Robertson and Company, Melbourne.
—— 1949, 'E.J. Brady, by Himself', Life Digest, vol. 3, no. 3, June 1949, p. 23.
—— 1955, ‘Life’s Highway’, Southerly, vol. 16, no. 4, p. 201.
Buckley-Moran, Jean 1986, 'Australian Scientists and the Cold War', in Brian Martin, et al. (eds), Intellectual Suppression: Australian Case Histories, Analysis and Responses, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, pp. 11–23.
Burchill, D. E. 1955, ‘Rum Jungle Uranium Field – Building the Township of Batchelor’, Walkabout, vol. 21, no. 1, January, pp. 29–33.
Button, C.N. 1945, God, Man, and The Bomb, St Andrews Kirk, Ballarat.
Cain, Frank 1989, 'An Aspect of Postwar Australian Relations with the United Kingdom and the United States: Missiles, Spies and Disharmony', Australian Historical Studies, vol. 23, no. 92, April, pp. 106–202.
—— 1994, The Australian Security Intelligence Organization: An Unofficial History, Spectrum Publications, Richmond, Vic.
Carment, David 1977, 'The Making of an Australian Liberal: The Political Education of Littleton Groom, 1867–1905', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 62, no. 4, March, pp. 232–50.
—— 1983, ‘Groom, Sir Lilttleton Ernest’, in Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle (eds), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, pp. 130–1.
Cawte, Alice 1992, Atomic Australia: 1944–1990, New South Wales University Press, Sydney.
Christesen, Clem 1945, 'Editorial', Meanjin, vol. 4, no. 3, Spring 1945, p. 149.
Currie, Sir George, and John Graham 1966, The Origins of CSIRO: Science and the Commonwealth Government 1901–1926, CSIRO, Melbourne.
Davison, Graeme 1998, ‘Frontier’, in Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, pp. 269–70.
Deery, Phillip 2000, 'Scientific Freedom and Postwar Politics: Australia, 1945–55', Historical Records of Australian Science, vol. 13, no. 1, June, pp. 1–18.
Docker, John 1991, The Nervous Nineties: Australian Cultural Life in the 1890s, Oxford University Press, Melbourne.
Grant, Kerr and G. V. Portus 1946, The Atomic Age, United Nations Association, SA Division, Adelaide.
Griffiths, Tom 1996, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Groom, Jessie (ed.) 1941, Nation Building in Australia: The Life and Work of Sir Littleton Ernest Groom, Angus and Robertson, Sydney.
Hains, Brigid 1997, ‘Mawson of the Antarctic, Flynn of the Inland: Progressive Heroes on Australia’s Ecological Frontiers’, in Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, pp. 154–66.
La Nauze, J.A. 1965, Alfred Deakin – A Biography, 2 vols., vol. 1, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
Layman, Lenore 1982, 'Development Ideology in Western Australia, 1933–1965', Historical Studies, vol. 20, no. 79, pp. 234–60.
—— 1998, 'Development', in Graeme Davison, John Hirst, and Stuart Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, pp. 184–6.
Liberal Party of Australia 1958, Australia Unlimited: A Nation on the March, Liberal Party of Australia, Canberra.
Lieberman, Joseph I. 1970, The Scorpion and the Tarantula: The Struggle to Control Atomic Weapons, 1945–1949, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1970.
MacLeod, Roy 1994, ‘Science, Progressivism and Practical Idealism: Reflections on Efficient Imperialism and Federal Science in Australia 1895–1915’, Scientia Canadensis, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 7–26.
McKnight, David 1994, Australia's Spies and their Secrets, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Milliken, Robert 1986, No Conceivable Injury: The Story of Britain and Australia's Atomic Cover-Up, Penguin, Melbourne.
Morton, Peter 1989, Fire Across the Desert: Woomera and the Anglo-Australian Joint Project 1946–1980, AGPS, Canberra.
Murdoch, Walter 1999, Alfred Deakin – A Sketch, Bookman, Melbourne.
Reynolds, Wayne 2000, Australia's Bid for the Atomic Bomb, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
Rivett, Rohan 1972, David Rivett: Fighter for Australian Science, R D Rivett, Melbourne.
Roe, Michael 1984, Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought, 1890–1960, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia.
Rose, Deborah 1977, ‘The Year Zero and the North Australian Frontier’, in Deborah Rose and Anne Clarke (eds), Tracking Knowledge in North Australian Landscapes, NARU, Darwin, pp. 19–36.
—— 1999, ‘Hard Times: An Australian Study’, in Klaus Neumann, Nicholas Thomas and Hilary Ericksen (eds), Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand, University of NSW Press, Sydney, pp. 2–19.
Rowse, Tim 1978, Australian Liberalism and National Character, Kibble Books, Malmsbury, Victoria.
Saunders, Noel 1986, 'The Hot Rock in the Cold War: Uranium in the 1950s' in Ann Curthoys and John Merritt (eds), Better Dead than Red, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, pp. 159–65.
Sherratt, Tim 1985, 'A Political Inconvenience: Australian Scientists at the British Atomic Weapons Test, 1952–3', Historical Records of Australian Science, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 137–52.
—— 1993, 'A Physicist Would Be Best Out of It: George Briggs and the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission', Voices, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 17–30.
Shute, Neville 1957, On the Beach, Heinemann, London.
Simms, Marian 1982, A Liberal Nation: the Liberal Party & Australian Politics, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney.
Southall, Ivan 1962, Woomera, Angus & Robertson, Sydney.
Strahan, Lachlan 1996, 'The Dread Frontier in Australian Defence Thinking', in Graeme Cheeseman and Robert H. Bruce (eds), Discourses of Danger & Dread Frontiers: Australian Defence and Security Thinking After the Cold War, Allen & Unwin, Canberra, pp. 157–65.
Titterton, Ernest William 1956, Facing the Atomic Future, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne.
Walker, David 1999, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia.
Weart, Spencer 1988, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
White, Richard 1981, Inventing Australia, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney.