NOW that Scotland have expressed an inclination, but not a preference, to secede from the Union with England (the UK), it would be interesting to take a gander at other secession attempts both closer to home and around the world. The impulse for or advocacy of secession by a section or part of an established, multi-ethnic nation state is a recurring feature in contemporary international relations.
The enthusiasm with which so many Scots embraced the notion of “going it alone” and their, so it seemed up to polling day, excellent prospect of pulling it off, is a fillip for long-lingering secessionist movements around the world – Catalonia, the Basque Country, Québec, Flemish Belgium, Kurdistan (although some of the several Kurdish groups seek only autonomy, not outright independence) [“The Kurdish Conflict: Aspirations for Statehood within the Spirals of International Relations in the 21st Century”, www.Kurdishaspect.com]
In the Southern Hemisphere, on this very continent indeed, in the state of Western Australia, an air of secessionism has tended to linger, much like the relieving breeze visited upon Perth in the afternoon from the Indian Ocean’s “Fremantle Doctor”. The Western Australians, from the very outset in 1900, were reluctant to join the Commonwealth of Australia…in fact the state’s name was conspicuously omitted from the original Federation document of 1 January 1901! A special provision (Section 95) guaranteeing that a planned inter-colonial tariff would only be gradually phased in, had to be added to the Constitution before the West would sign up. A further inducement that clinched it was the prospect of a transcontinental railway to be built linking WA with the eastern states.
The proposed colony of ‘Auralia’ – an irredentist goldfields colony
In the end, what swayed WA in joining (as argued by Tom Musgrove) was the affinity with the East held by recent settlers lured to WA by the goldfield discoveries. The huge population surge in the 1890s in WA, due to the influx of these Eastern fortune-seekers made them more numerous than the established residents on the coast who were, conversely, distinctly isolationist in their outlook. The miners formed a pressure group advocating that the eastern goldfields area (calling itself the colony of ‘Auralia’) break away from the rest of WA and unilaterally federate with the Commonwealth. The WA Parliament eventually succumbed to the threat of being splintered and losing the goldfields, and committed to the Federation [T Musgrove, ‘Western Australian Secessionist Movement’, The Macquarie Law Journal, www.austlil.edu.au; ‘Separation Movement on the Eastern Goldfields, 1894-1904’, West Australian Historical Society 1949, 4(5) 1953]. So, even prior to Federation, a bent for Western secession was evident.
Black Swan State
The secessionists succeed…or do they?
The threat of ‘Westralian’ succession has been a recurring theme in the state’s history since the early days of colony… lying dormant for years before being triggered into prominence by the emergence of some economic upheaval or issue (more recently over the distribution of mining revenues by the Commonwealth). In 1933 the issue of secession was actually put to the electorate of WA in a referendum held concurrently with the state election. The pre-conditions leading up to such a momentous development were brought about by the Great Depression. Wheat, WA’s top primary product export-earner was decimated (the price per bushel declined by less than half in three years) and unemployment in Perth reached 30 per cent. The WA Dominion League spearheaded by H Keith Watson agitated from 1930 for secession in the West. As a result of the League’s vigorous campaign (contrasting with the lacklustre campaign of the Federal League’s ‘No secession’ campaign), the referendum resulted in a greater than two-thirds vote (68 per cent) in favour of secession. Interestingly, the only region of the state to oppose the secession motion was again the goldfields!
The Electorate’s each-way bet!
Paradoxically at the same time, the WA electors dumped the incumbent Nationalist/Country Party Coalition from power (even though the NCPC had backed the ‘Yes’ camp), and elevated the Labor Party opposition, who had opposed secession, into office in the state. The apparent contradictory behaviour of the electors has been explained thus: support was given to the ‘Yes’ case because there was widespread dissatisfaction with WA’s situation vis-à-vis the eastern states (WA had long identified itself as the “Cinderella State” of the Commonwealth, it’s perception being one of it contributing more to federal funds than it receives back). At the same time, the unacceptable state unemployment situation in 1933 resulted in voters seeking to punish the incumbent conservative government by turfing them out (as was done federally to the Scullin Labor Government in 1932) [‘Secession 1929-39: Western Australia & Federation’ www.slwa.wa.gov.au].
The WA delegation bringing the petition to secede to London
Westminster or “Yes Minister”!
The new WA premier, Philip Collier, after some prevarication, appointed a delegation which took a petition for WA secession to the UK. Westminster, in a farcical turn of events which the writers of the popular 1980s TV series Yes, Minister would be proud to put their name to, simply sat on the issue! The British Government after a lengthy delay informed the WA Government that it could not act on the petition without the assent of Canberra. By 1935 the economy had recovered somewhat, the secessionist movement and the Dominion League lost momentum and the issue petered way for ordinary West Australians as they got on with the day-to-day task of making the best of what they could with the status quo[ibid.].
Western successionism, a simmering pot!
The media in WA helps to keep the issue alive with periodical appeals to the spectre of “secessionist redux” (with regular articles appearing with titles like “Why the West should secede” and “Secession still on our mind”). Secessionism has remained a rallying cry for disgruntled Western Australians whenever they feel aggrieved about what they see as the excesses and encroaching powers of Canberra. In the 1970s maverick millionaire/WA mining magnate Lang Hancock tried to revive the state’s secessionist trajectory with his short-lived “Westralian Secessionist Movement”, in effect a political campaign against the allegedly ‘socialist’ policies of the Whitlam Labor Government.Most recently this reared its head again in the concerted opposition to the Rudd and Gillard Labor Governments’ mining taxes.
‘Prince’ Leonard & his consort – in the ‘Principality’
PostScript: Fringe micro-secessionists – seceding from the secessionist state!
In 1970 West Australian wheat farmer Leonard Casley declared his 18,500-acre agricultural property near Northampton (south of Geraldton) to be ‘independent’ of the Commonwealth and the state of Western Australia when Canberra and the WA government tried to limit the size of his wheat crop. In true “comic-opera” style, the eccentric Casley turned his farm into the Hutt River Province Principality, adopting the title of “His Majesty Prince Leonard I of Hutt”, and in so doing spawned a whole new wellspring of tourism for the locality. Enthused with the spirit of commercial opportunity Leonard and his Hutt River ‘micro-nation’ has gone the whole hog…flag, coat-of-arms, royal seal, coins, stamps, medallions, passports, souvenirs, etc. The response from the Australian authorities to such a “bold act” of “unilateral independence” has been a “softly-softly” approach, not seeking to unduly push the matter, a bit surprising as the Hutt River ‘Principality’ purportedly owes the Commonwealth many years of unpaid taxes (although it does make rate payments to the local government authority, the Shire of Northampton)…the state and the federal governments seem to gravitate between being nonplussed and amused by the eccentric entity❈ and generally try to ignore it! [M Siegel, “Micronation Master: Prince Leonard of Hutt River”, 17 May 2012, www.businessweek.com]; ‘Principality of Hutt River’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wiki.org
﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋
❈ the Prince’s pattern of bizarre and idiosyncratic behaviour includes trying to seize government land surrounding his farm to increase his wheat quota; invoking the 1495 British Treason Act as proof of Hutt River Province’s status as a de facto monarchy; and declaring war on Australia (for four days in 1977!)
Most Australians have at some time or other glimpsed the grainy old Cinesound newsreel footage or the still pictures of the dramatic events of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in March 1932. What should have been a moment of glory for the NSW Premier, Jack Lang, declaring open Bradfield’s engineering wonder of a bridge, was turned into a minor public relations coup for a shadowy fringe paramilitary group called the New Guard through an audacious act by one of its members.
De Groot’s ‘coup’
Just as the Bridge ribbon was about to be cut by the NSW Premier, Captain Francis De Groot who had attached himself undetected to the escort cavalry, rode forward and pre-emptively slashed the ribbon. In doing so he declared the bridge open “in the name of all decent and respectable people of New South Wales”. De Groot, the Irish-born antique dealer, furniture restorer and part-time soldier, with one outrageous swipe of his sword, secured his “15 minutes of fame”, embarrassed the Lang Labor Government and thrust the New Guard deeply into the consciousness of Sydneysiders at large!
Primrose’s ceremony at the Northern Pylon
Now all this is well known, but what is largely not known is what was happening at the northern end of the Bridge whilst attention was focused on the high drama at Dawes Point. Soon after De Groot “opened the bridge” in unorthodox fashion at the southern pylon end, another member of the New Guard cut the ribbon at the northern pylon. Hubert Leslie Primrose, Mayor of North Sydney, was an assistant adjunct and quartermaster-general in the New Guard. Primrose as mayor had organised his own bridge-opening ceremony from the North Sydney side. Although NSW Police (and Premier Lang) had decided reservations about Alderman Primrose’s Northside celebration of the Bridge, because of his involvement in a suspect para-military movement that was under investigation (the New Guard), they ultimately made no attempts to stop the municipal representative going ahead with his act of public ceremony.
So, remarkable as it may seem to us today, the opening of both ends of that most iconic of Sydney symbols, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, was accomplished by the New Guard. These deeds (one undertaken officially and the other without state sanction) were achieved by a small, para-military organisation that at best was only ever a marginal player in provincial Australian politics.
Harbour Bridge from Kirribilli
Primrose’s fascination with the New Guard, like many of its initial supporters, was short-lived. In June 1932 he was one of many New Guardsmen elected to the Legislative Assembly for the new conservative force in party politics, the United Australia Party (forerunner to the Liberal Party of Australia), later rising to the rank of UAP Minister for Health, and later Minister for National Emergency Services. Primrose Park in the northern Sydney suburbs of Cremorne and Cammeray is named in his honour, but clearly not for his activities on behalf of the New Guard!
Footnote: Apart from his right wing, para-military enthusiasms, Captain De Groot, the stealer of Premier Lang’s thunder on thatillustrious day, had a respectable day job as the proprietor of a successful antique furniture business in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. The plaque below stands on the site of the former shop in Rushcutters Bay.
␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣
[Refs: Australian Dictionary of Biography (Vol 11) 1988, HL Primrose, ADB, (Supp. Vol) 2005, FE De Groot, both artls by Andrew Moore]
I have long thought that one of the more intriguing back stories of 20th century Australian history is the rise and (rapid) fall of the New Guard movement. The New Guard which flourished in the early 1930s was Australia’s own home-grown, ‘wannabe’ fascist organisation, one of a number of disgruntled, peripheral Australian Alt-Right groups in the Depression years.
The New Guard was a fairly obscure fringe organisation in early 1931, formed by ex-World War I army officers who broke away from an existing organisation (the Old Guard) deemed by them to be too cautious in its anti-socialist methods❈. The singular incident associated with the New Guard that resonates most clearly in the public consciousness today is the intervention by Francis De Groot (divisional commander in the New Guard) in the opening ceremony of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in March 1932. The fanatical, sword-wielding De Groot, on horseback, upstaged the State Labor government by dramatically cutting the ribbon at the southern pylon of the bridge before NSW Premier JT Lang could do so officially.
At its height the New Guard had somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 members in New South Wales❅ (men only, women were not permitted to join the New Guard). Included in these numbers were prominent Australians such as the famous aviators, Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, Sir Thomas Henley (Nationalist Party MP), Hubert Primrose (Mayor of North Sydney, later NSW UAP Minister for Health), and leading business figures in industry and agriculture such as the Patricks (Patricks Stevedore and Shipping Lines) and the MacArthur Onslows (sheep barons). Interestingly, it has been alleged (though not substantiated) that Lyall Howard, the garage owner-father of former PM John Howard, was very likely to have been a New Guard member (Andrew Moore, ‘The New Guard & the Labour Movement 1931-35’, Labour History, No 89).
JT Lang in typical demagogic mood
.The background to the New Guard’s emergence was the societal dislocation caused by the Great Depression and the sudden and calamitous level of unemployment of the early 1930s. This gave the New Guardsmen the impetus to thrive as it did to right-wing authoritarian political forces in Europe during the same period. In October 1930 a left-leaning Labor Government was elected in NSW under the demagogic nationalist Jack Lang. Lang’s scheme to tackle the state’s catastrophic economic crisis comprised repudiating Australia’s international loan obligations and refusing to make any further interest payments to British bondholders (and re-channelling those retained monies into job creation for the state). This polemical stand not only enraged Big Capital interests but also made fringe groups on the right, especially the New Guard, flare up in hostile opposition to Labor.
Lt.Col Campbell
The leader of the New Guard (NG) was a Sydney North Shore solicitor, company director and WWI army officer of patrician stock, Eric Campbell. The attraction of men who followed Campbell into NG was that it appeared to offer a fresh, alternative solution to the problems of society to those espoused by the democratic parliamentary parties of the day⊚. NG viewed communism and socialism as having a corrosive and degenerative effect on Australian society. Campbell characterised the incumbent Lang government as avowedly socialist, and thus tried to relegate the Labor Party to the status of being abject co-conspirators with the communists working against the liberties of loyal Australians.
Lt-Colonel Campbell asserted that New Guard was “staunchly patriotic”, but by this he meant patriotic to the British Empire, so intricately linked in his mind was Australia with the ‘mother country’, Britain. In effect the New Guardsmen were undisguisedly über-British loyalists. So, when Lang signalled his intent to default on loans to British banks, this infuriated Campbell and loyalists to the Crown generally. Campbell and his executive redoubled the movement’s efforts to bring Labor down. NG believed in minimalist government and individualism, in “sane finance” as Campbell put it, in freeing up private enterprise to get on with business…Lang’s plans to expand the public sector to alleviate the unemployment crisis, put ‘Langism’ very squarely in the ideological cross-hairs of NG.
Campbell & his NG acolytes giving a familiar salute at a Sydney rally
By late 1931, disillusioned with parliamentary party politics, the New Guard adopted more aggressive tactics in the fight against the left. New Guardsmen also started to display some of the trappings of fascist parties (military uniforms and armbands, the Nazi salute, ID badges) and began to break up meetings of communists and the unemployed. NG’s unleashing of its paramilitary arm provoked the left into forming communist and Laborite militias which eventually led to pitched street battles with the NG forces.
The most significant, physical confrontation between these groups, occurring in early 1932, became known as the “Battle of Bankstown”. The New Guard in its coercive actions in Bankstown and elsewhere in Sydney did succeed in its aim to disrupt meetings of the labour movement, but these mobilisations ultimately proved counterproductive to the NG leaders’ attempts to consolidate the new movement. The Bankstown mêlée had two adverse effects for NG. First, the leadership’s decision to up the ante in NG’s strong-arm tactics against their ideological opponents alienated a lot of the movement’s rank-and-file and many disaffected members resigned in the aftermath of Bankstown. At an NG meeting soon after some members moved motions of no confidence in the leadership of Führer (the leader) Eric Campbell, ibid.
Secondly, the level of New Guard violence exhibited at Bankstown, and to a lesser extent at other NG mobilisations like Newtown, Drummoyne and Canterbury, following upon De Groot’s bridge antics, convinced NSW Police of the need to take the threat to law and order posed by Campbell’s organisation seriously. The promotion by Premier Lang of an uncompromising, aggressive Glaswegian, Big Bill MacKay, to Acting Metropolitan Superintendent, was the catalyst for a much tougher police line taken against the right-wing paramilitary groups. MacKay intimidated Campbell and De Groot and other NG leaders and exhorted the State police to respond with unrestrained force every time the New Guard initiated a public fracas.
Given free rein by Supt MacKay, the white-helmeted state police launched a savage assault on the trouble-making New Guardsmen, especially in an incident that became known as the “Liverpool Street Police Riot”. Campbell’s enthusiastic but volunteer guardsmen proved no match for a well-trained, disciplined and highly motivated police force. The largely middle class NG members who clashed with the police found the experience distinctly not to their liking. Under instructions from MacKay, the police went at the New Guardsmen full-tilt and absolutely brutalised Campbell’s militia. MacKay’s tactics of intimidation and savage counter-violence against NG paramilitaries kept the agitators in check and dissuaded many from continuing their active involvement in the right wing organisation (Moore, ibid).
Berrima Gaol, NSW
NSW Police in early 1932 undertook investigations aimed at unearthing a possible plot by Campbell to use his so-called Secret Army to launch a coup d’être against Lang’s Labor Government. It was widely rumoured in the press that the New Guard planned to overthrow the Government, kidnap and imprison Lang and his senior cabinet ministers in the disused Berrima Gaol in country NSW. ‘The revolution that wasn’t’ (www.matthewleecunningham.com). Whether Campbell was planning such a strike on democracy or not (he publicly denied it, whereas Major Treloar, disaffected NG deputy commander, informed police that this was indeed Campbell’s true intention)(Robert Darlington, Eric Campbell & the New Guard). The question became academic in May 1932 when the Governor, Sir Philip Game, sacked the Lang Government for withholding revenues deemed owing to the Commonwealth as part of the debt to British financiers. The incoming State UAP Government quickly shelved the CID’s investigation into the alleged New Guard plot.
⇓Gov. Game, co-conspirator?
In what sense could the New Guard movement be said to be fascist in nature? Historians have long debated whether the New Guard organisation was a fascist one or even a quasi-fascist one – as they have done with regard to Franco’s Falange Party in Spain and other authoritarian-right movements. If we stack the New Guard up against the classic Italian and Germany models of inter-war fascism, it is of course a ludicrous comparison. The New Guard movement, in addition to lacking a totalitarian systemic structure, falls well short even of fulfilling the criteria for a semi-fascist organisation like the British Union of Fascists, whose leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, Campbell expressed great admiration for. Campbell visited Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in 1933 and came away deeply impressed by the Nazi and Fascist systems of rule, and subsequently did integrate some aspects of Mussolini’s Italian Corporatism into the New Guard’s ideology. The most that can be said about Campbell’s organisation however was that it was heavily influenced by the success of the European fascist movements and was openly sympathetic to fascism (Matthew Cunningham, ‘Australian Fascism? A Revisionist Analysis of the New Guard’, Politics, Religion & Ideology , 13(3)).
Real fascists ⇓
Nor can it be said that the New Guard had any claims to be considered as a mass movement in NSW politics. NG remained fundamentally a middle class organisation, the core of its base were urban professionals and small businessmen, like Campbell himself (Cunningham, Ibid.). Unlike many other fascist/authoritarian parties in Europe, it lacked for significant working class participation (Moore, op.cit.). Moreover, geographically, the New Guard was very limited in scope. It was confined almost entirely to one state, NSW, and even more, was essentially a Sydney metropolitan phenomena with only around 3,000 members from rural areas outside of Sydney (Cunningham, ibid.).
The staunchly pro-monarchist and pro-capitalist (and distinctly non-radical) positions of the New Guard demonstrates that the organisation didn’t cross over into a fascist character…contrast the monarchist fervour of Campbell and NG with the positions of Hitler and Mussolini in their countries, Hitler had no interest in restoring the exiled Kaiser during his Reich, and Il Duce merely ignored the powerless Italian King. Rather, the retention of these allegiances shows that the NG movement retained an essentially conservative authoritarianism in appearance (Cunningham, ibid.).
1930s New Guard propaganda against Premier Lang
Why did the New Guard decline and dissolve so swiftly in the mid 1930s? As alluded to above, one reason for the disaffection and eventual alienation of much of the respectable, middle class membership from the New Guard was the resort to more extreme violent means by the leadership from around the end of 1931. Vigilante action by the Fascist Legion, a splinter grooup within NG, did nothing to assuage the doubters in the organisation. In May of that momentous year a number of the Fascist Legion members, clad in black Ku Klux Klan style hooded capes, attacked and bashed Jock Garden, a prominent communist and trade union official in his Maroubra home (Garden was a close associate of Premier Lang). This violent act of what we now would call home invasion brought disastrous publicity to the New Guard (Richard Evans, ‘A menace to this realm’: The New Guard & NSW Police, History Australia, 5(3). This coming on top of the general perception that NG leadership was seriously contemplating taking extra-legal action against the elected Lang Government, made many people distance themselves from the increasingly extremist actions of the New Guard. Interestingly, afterwards the Deputy Leader of the opposition Nationalists came out in parliament denying any involvement by NG in Garden’s bashing, alleging it was a Labor “put-up job” in which Garden himself was complicit! (Darlington, op.cit.).
The ‘Maroubra incident’ 1932 Garden’s bashing by NG thugs
One week after the Maroubra bashing of Jock Garden, the State Governor dismissed Lang and at the subsequent election Labor was soundly beaten by the UAP led by Stevens. The removal of Lang-Labor had been the New Guard’s overriding objective, so with Lang gone and the conservatives firmly in control, a large part of NG’s raison d’être was at an end. The sacking of Lang released the tension that had been building up between the various opposing forces in the political crisis of 1932.
The gradual recovery of the economy starting from late 1932 encouraged many who had joined the movement from a fear of socialism to drop their political allegiance to NG (Darlington, op.cit.). The New Guard’s strength dwindled after 1932 and by 1935 the NG support base had largely eroded. In that year Campbell tried to revive the movement’s fortunes by forming a new political group, the Centre Party, and contesting the state elections. Campbell’s last despairing grab at some semblance of power, a electoral bid for the seat of Lane Cove, went nowhere, and soon after, he faded into political obscurity.
PostScript: The New Guard – the Mini-series? A few years ago I suggested to SBS that the story of the New Guard and its ambitious if deeply flawed leader, Eric Campbell, would have the makings of a first-rate mini-series for television, and that they might like to explore the possibilities of this. They never got back to me!
I think this episode in Australian history has the same kind of dramatic ingredients and appeal as the successful Bodyline mini-series made for TV in the 1980s where the English cricket captain’s s breaching of the rules of the “Gentlemen’s game of cricket” forced many Australians (momentarily at least) to question their loyalty to Crown and Empire. Lang’s refusal to back down and the establishment’s uncompromising response was the makings of a high political stakes drama set against the turbulent background of the depression and a very real chance of a bitterly antagonistic explosion of class conflict; the violence of the New Guardsmen and the counter-violence from organised labour, and the unleashed mayhem and retribution of the NSW Police; there are the colourful and complex personalities in the story, larger than life figures such as Jack Lang and Bill MacKay, the paradoxical and enigmatic Campbell. There was also Sir Philip Game – was he the political executioner of the rebellious Lang to safeguard the interests of international capitalism or was he the dutiful King’s representative, an honest broker bring to heel a dangerously out of line state premier?
Was there a conspiracy or not? – a coup, behind-the-scenes, shadowy figures intent on usurping by whatever means the premier, an arrogant demagogue but nonetheless a democratically elected head of a provincial government (a forewarning of 1975?). How far did NG infiltrate the Sydney establishment and the conservative Nationalist Party? Then there was the question of the bashing of the communist union official Jock Garden, who was really behind it? Many questions to explore.
The New Guard had something of a chameleon-like character, many in society and in the press didn’t take it very seriously with its pompous and overblown leader and his supporters who at times resembled a ‘Dad’s Army’ trying to imitate the real thing in Germany and Italy (the Labor press regularly referred to them as the ‘Boo Guard’). Some however were concerned, especially on the left, including European émigrés with an insight into the threats to liberty a nascent fascism might pose – these sectors viewed the New Guard’s brief ascendancy very gravely. Others in the community of a more traditional, conservative bent, well-connected politically and socially and often from the North Shore and the Eastern Suburbs, took a different and more sanguine view of the New Guard and endorsed the fringe group’s need and right to inject some new energy into the stalled world of parliamentary politics.
Drama, tension, intrigue, civil unrest, all set against an international context of fascism and communism on the rise. Unfortunately, SBS did not express any interest in this proposition, but I still maintain that the subject conveyed through a mini-series remains a most worthy project – done well! An expert academic history consultant for the period (such as Andrew Moore or Robert Darlington) working with a good screenwriter and some money, could produce a very good product, both as entertainment and as historical reconstruction of a not terribly well-known chapter of our history. Perhaps the ABC … budgetary constraints in the reality of a national Liberal government permitting.
_____________________________________________ ❈ the New Guard in rhetoric also distanced itself from the establishment conservative parties as well, the National (or Nationalist) Party and the Country Party (despite there being a good amount of conspicuous cross-membership!), seeing them as failing to take action against the communists and trade unions, and seeing itself as a legitimate, alternative right-wing movement ❅ an active membership of around 36,000 was claimed by NG leadership ⊚ Campbell himself had impeccable establishment credentials…a professional man, a Freemason, a company director, the Turramurra resident was a member of all the right clubs (Imperial Services, the Union, the NSW, Rotary, Royal Sydney Golf and Killara Golf), [Keith Amos, ‘Campbell, Eric (1893–1970)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/campbell-eric-5487/text9331, published first in hardcopy 1979, accessed online 31 May 2014].
NOW that Scotland have expressed an inclination, but not a preference, to secede from the Union with England (the UK), it would be interesting to take a gander at other secession attempts both closer to home and around the world. The impulse for or advocacy of secession by a section or part of an established, multi-ethnic nation state is a recurring feature in contemporary international relations.
The proposed colony of ‘Auralia’ – an irredentist goldfields colony
Black Swan State
The WA delegation bringing the petition to secede to London
‘Prince’ Leonard & his consort – in the ‘Principality’
