the tides of history, its once-proud cultural order slowly eroded by forces
that it could not control.

The rise and fall of Modern Australia is the tale of a cultural order, of
its hopes and aspirations, its triumphs and failures, and its ultimate demise
as fewer and fewer people found its values satisfying. It is out of the ashes
of Modern Australia that Contemporary Australia has emerged. Its failures
and weaknesses shape many of the preoccupations of Contemporary
Australia. Contemporary Australia is as much a response to those failures
and weaknesses as to the changing circumstances which have created what
is aptly described as an age of uncertainty. Modern Australia itself was a
response to an earlier decade of uncertainty and change -- a time of insta-
bility and a 'moment of possibility': the 1890s.

During the 1890s the Australian colonies underwent a crisis of moderni-
ty. The 1890s was a decade of conflict, change and instability. It began
with the great strike, economic depression and bank collapses. It ended
with federation and the first moves towards creating the Australian settle-
ment. Out of chaos order was born.

The 1890s is often portrayed as a time of great cultural vitality. It is
the decade of the Bulletin, of Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, and a whole
host of lesser lights. Uncertainty and vitality, however, are not strangers but
natural partners and allies. Times of crisis signal both that an old order is
coming to an end and that a moment of possibility has opened up. The
decay of the old is the fertile soil in which the new grows and blooms.

This conflict, change and uncertainty can be seen in three major
arenas: the economic, the social and the international. The depression of
the early 1890s was followed by the bank collapses of 1892 and 1893. After
the buoyant years of growth of the 1870s and 1880s, the depression was a
major jolt to the confidence which had accompanied that growth. Many
of the principles on which that confidence was founded lost their plausi-
bility. One can find scattered through the pages of the Bulletin in the 1890s
a fear and uncertainty that Australia and Australians had lost control of
their destiny. There was considerable concern about the level of foreign
debt and frequent diatribes against the practice of borrowing capital from
overseas. This was accompanied by the advocacy of the development of
local industries in the hope of achieving self-sufficiency.

Australians had ceased to believe in the old Free Trade vision of a
world bound together by the bonds of commerce and had replaced
this with a desire for independence and self-reliance. ² It was the war of
nation against nation, race against race; the weak would go to the wall.
The war of nations for survival encouraged xenophobia and racism. For

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