Learning together

Under the Pax Britannica the New Zealand and Australian colonies shared a common learning environment in the 19th century. Young, crude but maturing societies of convict and free immigrants, they learnt to shape their very different landscapes and agricultural terrains in an ecological experiment that is still running, and that has had far from benign effects. Science and colonial governments were allied from the middle of the century with the foundation of universities, and the knowledge shared across the Tasman through the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), established in 1888. Hand in hand with 'improvement' of the lands went the creation of social communities that would deliberately and systematically avoid the poverty and hierarchical class structures of the old world. Both New Zealand and Australia would be social laboratories founded on the prospects brought by gold, coal, rich grasslands, and the policies of colonial progressives allied to representatives of the working class. These experiments, for which the French observer Albert Métin coined the phrase 'socialism without doctrines', were not carried out in isolation from or hostility to the old world. They proceeded within the imperial framework of the British empire, connected through the Union Jack and their common Victorian heritage. Britain supplied the migrants, the capital and the Royal Navy to drive and protect the young economies. The irony was that each country proceeded to carve out a separate national story to explain its history during the 20th century