To Constitute a Nation. A Cultural History of Australia's Constitution.(Review)

To Constitute a Nation. A Cultural History of Australia's Constitution. By HELEN IRVING (Cambridge: U.P., 1999; pp. xiii+257. 40 [pounds sterling]; pb. 13.95 [pounds sterling]).

THE impending centenary of the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January 1901 -- and the possibility that the centenary might be marked by the establishment of a republic -- rekindled interest in the painstaking process by which six separate colonies agreed, in the course of the 1890s, to federate. Helen Irving's excellent `cultural history' of the making of the Commonwealth, first published in 1997, is neither a chronological narrative nor an evaluation of the individual contributions of the `founding fathers'. It is first and foremost an analysis of Australia's fin de siecle political culture within which the idea of federation was nurtured; and in addition …