Abstract
In May 1920, on the occasion of the visit of the Prince of Wales to the Antipodes, Wellington’s Evening Post took the opportunity to reflect on the nature of the relationship between the Dominion press and the Empire. It noted that it had played a significant role in ‘binding the Empire together and promoting good understanding between the many and most varied parts of the King’s Dominion [and that] the best traditions [of the British press] are followed as closely as possible here, having regard to local circumstances’.1 It concluded that: ‘As there is but one language, so there is but one great press ideal – the welfare of the British Empire and its peoples as a whole, even though different papers may express themselves in different terms.’2 Whilst the paper boasted the strength of imperial unity at the time of a royal visit, it nevertheless was capable of demonstrating a rather different attitude towards the Empire, which was founded on more instrumental factors, such as defence and race. In 1908, for example, a year when there was neither a royal visit nor an evident imperial crisis, the paper contemplated both dimensions. In May 1908, for example, it had considered a series of articles issued by the British Board of Trade. In its articles, it noted the absence of what it called the ‘Imperial Idea’, since the prevailing sentiment appeared to be ‘the main chance of improving British business and increasing British profits’.
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Notes
H.E. Turner, The Imperial Press Conference in Australia (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925), pp. 68–75.
H. Mayer, The Press in Australia (Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1968), p. 98.
A. Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 1.
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G. Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1968).
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See P.W. Pike, The Royal Presence in Australia 1867–1986 (Adelaide: Royalty Publishing, 1986).
M. McKenna, ‘Monarchy: From Reverence to Indifference’ in D. Schreuder and S. Ward (eds), Australia’s Empire (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 274.
G. Scholefield, Visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to the Dominion of New Zealand April–May 1920 (Wellington: Government Printers, 1926).
L.E. Nym Mayhall, ‘The Prince of Wales versus Clark Gable: Anglophone Celebrity and Citizenship between the Wars’, Cultural and Social History, 4(4) (2007), pp. 529–43.
P. Cape, ‘The Abdication: New Zealanders and Royalty’, New Zealand’s Heritage: The Making of a Nation, 6 (1973), pp. 2381–6.
Quoted in I.R. Hancock, ‘The 1911 Imperial Conference’, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 12 (1966), p. 371.
K. Tsokas, Making a Nation State: Cultural Identity Economic Nationalism and Sexuality in Australian History (Melbourne University Press, 2001), p. 299.
J. Tomlinson, ‘The Empire in Economic Thought’ in A. Thompson (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 219.
See, for example, J.B. O’Brien, ‘Empire v. National Interests in Australian- British Relations During the 1930s’, Historical Studies, 22 (1987), pp. 569–86
T. Rooth, British Protectionism and the International Economy: Overseas Commercial Policy in the 1930s (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
A. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow: Pearson, 2005), p. 169
R. Ovendale, Appeasement and the English Speaking World: Britain, the United States, the Dominions and the Policy of ‘Appeasement’ 1937–1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975)
J. Crawford and J. Watson, ‘“The Most Appeasing Line”: New Zealand and Nazi Germany’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38(1) (2010), pp. 75–97.
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Griffiths, J. (2014). Integration or Separation? Attitudes to Empire in the Antipodean Press c. 1880s–1930s. In: Imperial Culture in Antipodean Cities, 1880–1939. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137385734_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137385734_5
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