The Invisible State: The Formation of the Australian State 1788-1901.

The negative Commonwealth: Australia as ‘laboratory’, then and now

“…The polity to come, the home of Australia's 'new man', was a fundamentally conflictless social body, an exceptional Commonwealth in the context of a political sensitivity that assumed that conflict fundamentally defined social relations elsewhere (whether Australia was actually conflictless, and of course it never was, is somewhat irrelevant to this analysis of the negative Commonwealth as a political idea). Thus, the Australian state, a state formation that relied on the judiciary more than other branches (Davidson, 1991), was designed to perpetuate the settlement by way of spatial exclusion. Exclusion was underpinned by anxiety but resulted in an exceptionally stable political framework.…”

“…The first set of anxieties required that the nationalist political imagination adopt a radical version of settler-colonial 'indigenisation' (Tout, 2017a(Tout, , 2020Veracini, 2016). Responding to the second set of challenges required an increasingly interventionist state -the state's direct involvement would make settling the land possible again, and the state could be interventionist because in many ways the state preceded society itself (see Clark, 1906;Davidson, 1991;Lake, 2019). Both innovations were crucial departures in the context of the global political traditions of the world turned inside out: previously, the ideal-typical settler had to remain themself as they moved across space (i.e.…”

“…That was before; now the settlers relied on the intervention of the state. Then again, in Australia the state had always been interventionist (on the peculiarities of the Australian settler state and its historical development, see, for example, Davidson, 1991Davidson, , 1997.…”