Federation

The Federation of Australia — the union of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania into the Commonwealth of Australia, proclaimed on 1 January 1901 — was one of the most significant political events in Australian history and one of the most thoroughly documented in printed imagery. The illustrated press of the period covered the constitutional conventions, the referendums, the political debates and the inauguration ceremonies with an attention that reflects both the genuine historical significance of the moment and the commercial appetite of a public that followed the progress of Federation with intense interest. The prints that survive from this coverage are primary documents of the birth of the Australian nation.

The constitutional conventions of the 1890s — held in Sydney in 1891 and Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne in 1897–1898 — were attended by delegates from all six colonies and generated extensive illustrated coverage in the colonial press. Portraits of the leading figures — Edmund Barton, Alfred Deakin, Charles Kingston, John Forrest and their colleagues — appeared in illustrated supplements and commemorative publications that circulated widely, establishing the visual iconography of the Federation movement. These portraits are important historical documents as well as objects of collecting interest, recording the faces of the men who designed the Australian Constitution.

The referendums of 1898, 1899 and 1900, through which the people of the colonies voted on the draft constitution, generated promotional and documentary imagery of a different character. Federation leagues, public meetings and political campaigns produced printed material — posters, illustrated addresses, commemorative broadsheets — that deployed the visual vocabulary of patriotic politics to promote the case for union. The imagery of these campaigns draws on allegorical traditions that reach back to the era of the American and French revolutions, depicting Australia as a young woman being led to nationhood by the forces of federation.

The inauguration of the Commonwealth on 1 January 1901 — with the ceremonial swearing-in of the first Governor-General, Lord Hopetoun, in Centennial Park, Sydney — was covered by every illustrated publication in the country and by many in Britain. The images produced from this occasion — showing the vast crowds, the military pageantry, the architectural decorations and the formal ceremonies of the occasion — are among the most important in the entire history of Australian illustrated journalism. They preserve a record of the moment at which Australia became a nation with a specificity and immediacy that no other medium could provide.

Commemorative publications — special Federation issues of newspapers and magazines, illustrated histories of the movement, souvenir albums and similar productions — were issued in large numbers around the time of Federation and generated a substantial body of imagery that combines historical documentation with the promotional and celebratory intent of commemorative publishing. The best of these publications contain original illustrations of high quality that stand independently as antique prints of genuine historical interest.

For collectors of Australian history, political history and the history of Australian illustrated journalism, Federation prints offer material of exceptional significance. The moment they document — the founding of the Australian Commonwealth — is unrepeatable, and the prints that record it are primary evidence for one of the defining events of Australian national history.