This year, Americans marked 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. For Dr Daniel Carrigy, Senior Lecturer in Modern History and English Literature at Avondale University, the anniversary was a chance to reflect on a relationship between Australia and the United States that runs far deeper, and far further back, than most of us realise.
Dr Carrigy recently presented his research at the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Conference in Philadelphia, fittingly in the very city where the Declaration was signed. His work traces the influence of American revolutionary ideals on the Eureka Stockade of 1854, long regarded as the birthplace of Australian democracy.
"What I'm particularly interested in is the extent to which the miners, or diggers as they termed themselves, were inspired by American revolutionary ideals," he explains. Leaders like Peter Vern, treasurer of the Ballarat Reform League, invoked Thomas Jefferson's "tree of liberty," while the Reform League's own charter echoed the Declaration of Independence almost word for word, speaking of citizens' rights to throw off an oppressive government.
His Philadelphia paper, titled "Stars, Stripes, and the Southern Cross," argued that colonial Australians did far more than simply host American migrants during the goldrush era, they absorbed and repurposed the memory of 1776 itself. Dr Carrigy traced how, well before Eureka, American expatriates in the colonies held lavish Independence Day banquets, complete with framed copies of the Declaration and busts of George Washington, while visiting Americans lectured publicly on the US constitution. By the early 1850s, he showed, this steady exposure had produced a colonial society increasingly conscious of American revolutionary rhetoric, evident in agitators like John Dunmore Lang, who branded colonial governance "taxation without representation" years before Eureka, and in the Ballarat Reform League's own charter, whose language of inalienable rights and the duty to resist tyranny closely mirrors the Declaration of Independence. He also pointed to fierce debate in the colonial press after Eureka over whether the rebellion truly was Australia's "Bunker Hill", a debate, he argued, that reveals just how embedded the memory of the American Revolution had become in colonial Australian political thought, among monarchists and republicans alike. In presenting this research to fellow historians of the early American Republic, Dr Carrigy is pushing back against a purely nationalist telling of Eureka, building on recent scholarship that restores the American and migrant contribution to a story many Australians still think of as uniquely their own.
The connection runs deeper still, right back to the First Fleet. As Dr Carrigy notes, Britain's decision to settle New South Wales was itself a consequence of American independence: having lost its colonies, Britain needed a new destination for convicts, and one of the scheme's chief architects was an American loyalist who had hoped Australia might become a haven for those who'd remained faithful to the Crown. Decades later, colonial minister and would-be republican John Dunmore Lang looked to the United States as "this profound model of representative democracy," while Federation figure Alfred Deakin, Australia's second prime minister, was so drawn to the American model that colleagues joked he could "speak like an American."
Values in Common
Why has this bond endured? For Dr Carrigy, it comes down to shared values, liberty, representative government, and an enduring political and cultural closeness despite geographic distance. He notes that Joe Biden once declared the US had "no closer ally than Australia," while polling around the same time found Republican voters ranked Australia as America's most valuable partner.
That same American thread runs through Avondale's own story. The University was founded by Ellen White, an American who saw in colonial Australia a nation of "similar culture… similar ideals," shaped, like the US, by settler colonialism and a complex relationship with its First Nations peoples. "I think we can very clearly and distinctly trace [Avondale] back to Ellen White's vision," Dr Carrigy says, a vision, he suggests, that borrowed something of the founders' own revolutionary language: an institution as "a shining beacon," dedicated to a greater public good.
Learning from the Failures, Not Just the Ideals
Dr Carrigy's research provides fertile ground for considering not what Australia might imitate, but what it might learn. He describes America as "the most fascinating nation in the world" precisely because of the gap between its ideals and its history. "At the same time that Thomas Jefferson is writing the Declaration of Independence… he is, of course, a slave owner," he observes. The same nation that spoke of liberty and freedom also enacted the forced removal of Native peoples. "That fundamental chasm between these lofty ideals and American liberty in practice," he says, is what drew him to American history, and what continues to demand scrutiny.
Yet Dr Carrigy remains positive. Quoting Bill Clinton, he believes that "there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America." The ideals themselves — liberty, equality, government by consent — remain worth aspiring to. Where America has failed is in living up to them consistently, not in holding them.
That, he suggests, is the real lesson for Australia: not to follow America's example uncritically, but to learn from where it has fallen short. He points to increasing polarisation in American politics, and to the respectful 1960 Kennedy–Nixon debates as a reminder of what once was possible. "We are all Australians," he says, "and we all want the betterment of this nation… let's actually celebrate that diversity, and not admonish people for having different opinions, but let's actually work together."
For Avondale, a university founded on an American vision but shaped by Australian soil, that balance, of admiration without imitation, closeness without uncritical loyalty, feels like exactly the kind of critical, globally-informed thinking Dr Carrigy hopes his students will carry into the world.