Colonial and Provincial Separation Movements in Australia and New Zealand, 1856–1865

This article examines separation movements in Britain’s Australasian colonies during the first decade of responsible government, 1856–65. Separation movements sought to carve new colonies from the territory of existing ones or, in the case of a number of New Zealand movements, to create new provinces within that colony’s quasi-federal system. Their demands rested upon assertions that a colonial or provincial government neglected large and prosperous hinterlands from which considerable revenue was collected. Only one colonial separation movement achieved its goal, but four provinces succeeded. I argue that responsible government played a major role in the success or failure of these movements. Responsibility concentrated authority in a remote capital; colonial separatists desired to exercise this privilege within a smaller new colony that they controlled, but its operation within the larger existing colony provided London with justification to reject most appeals. Further, it allowed New Zealand’s parliament to frame a mechanism that enabled discontented regions to become provinces without referral to local or imperial legislatures. Thus, I provide new insights into the formation of colonial polities and the influence of responsible government on settler political campaigns.     

Globalising Economic Governance,Political Projects,and Spatial Imaginaries: Insights from Four Australasian1 Cities

This paper explores how territorial economic governance is discursively constituted in a globalising and neoliberalising world. It acknowledges both the increasingly recognised formative role of spatial imaginaries in economic interventions and the workings of co‐constitutive political projects that link particular imaginaries with political ambitions and policy strategies. Embracing recent calls for comparative ethnographic urban research at the local‐global interface, it explores currently dominant spatial imaginaries across the four Australasian cities of Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. Based on multiple qualitative methods, this study claims that a considerable number of actor's spatial associations and reference points can be related to particular city‐specific governmental projects; Auckland's Super‐City, Sydney's Global and Green City, Melbourne's Liveable City, and Perth's Vibrant City. It is demonstrated how discursive governance techniques such as ‘story‐telling’, benchmarking, and policy transfer have been pivotal in the activation, circulation, and performance of those spatial imaginaries and their transformation into temporarily dominant visions for strategic urban interventions aimed at repositioning urban actors, spaces, and activities. While spatial imaginaries can be related to differently framed global aspirations, the effects of spatial political projects on urban governance and investment trajectories differ significantly across space. Theoretically, the paper stresses the importance of particular conceptions of territorial relations and time‐ and place‐specific institutional mediation in shaping context‐dependent discursive material governance alignments.