Australia's 19th-Century world's fairs

Pretty amazing. In Wikipedia's List of world's fairs I count Australia no fewer than 25 times before 1900. (In fact, of the first ten major world's fairs, two were held in Australia.)

All the more remarkable when one considers that even by 1900 the country was populated by only about 4 million mostly poor people. (Well, Australia is reputed to have had in 1901 the world's second-highest standard of living after the USA, but the plain fact is that one in four children under five died, in Sydney's suburbs, and one in five in the inner city where the hospitals were more accessible.)

Also consider that it took quite a few weeks to sail here from the Northern Hemisphere; and that the towns and cities were separated by hundreds or thousands of miles connected by slow trains (in some cases), or by stage coaches travelling mostly on rough bush tracks masquerading as roads. Some of the places the international exhibitions were held in, I would find it difficult to get to even today. For example, Coolgardie: it would take me about five or six days and hundreds of dollars in petrol to drive there -- imagine driving from Paris to Afghanistan.

Melbourne's exhibition in 1888 had two million visitors and ran for six months. Zounds! That amazes me, because there's no way I could go if they had one today, because of the huge distance and the expense -- and in the 1880s this country had stopped being Britain's convict settlement only a generation before.

King O'Malley

Speaking of such things, this week I've been reading a biography of the very remarkable King O'Malley (1858 - 1953). He was an extremely flamboyant and individualistic American who came to Australia in the 1880s and showed up at the 1888 Melbourne Exhibition wearing a lavender suit and a 10-gallon hat.

He had made lots of money through salesmanship and probably embezzlement in the Wild West of the USA, and wanted a political career. To get into Parliament he lied that he was born in Canada (and thus a British subject, the only ones eligible), but get into Parliament he did, and became one of Australia's most important politicians at Federation in 1901, and for years after. In many ways, he might be called the father of the Commonwealth Bank, and of Canberra, Australia's capital city, and much more besides. Amazingly, he and I are coeval -- he was still alive when I was born. Many of his ideas were very far-sighted, and even though he was a great eccentric, he was a true visionary -- and a pacifist.

Tagged: trivia, australia, history