Robert Garran - Federation Movement

Federation Movement

Garran, like his father, was strongly involved in the Australian Federation movement, the movement which sought to unite the British colonies in Australia (and, in early proposals, New Zealand) into one federated country. The first Constitutional Convention was held in 1891 in the chamber of the Legislative Council of New South Wales in Macquarie Street, Sydney, around the corner from Garran's chambers in Phillip Street; Garran regularly attended and sat in the public gallery to see "history... in the making under my very eyes." Garran would later recall with approval that the 1891 convention was the first with the courage to face the "lion in the path", the issue of customs duties and tariffs, which had previously divided states such as Victoria, who were in favour of protectionism, and states such as New South Wales, who were in favour of free trade. In Garran's view a clause proposed at the convention, which allowed for tariffs against international trade while ensuring free trade domestically (the predecessor to the final section 92 of the Constitution of Australia), "expressed the terms on which New South Wales was prepared to face the lion."

Garran became involved with the work of Edmund Barton, who would later be the first Prime Minister of Australia but at the time was the de facto leader of the federation movement in New South Wales as Sir Henry Parkes declined into poor health. Garran, along with others such as Atlee Hunt, worked essentially as secretaries to Barton's federation campaign, drafting correspondence and planning meetings. At one late night meeting, planning a speech Barton was to give in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield, Barton coined the phrase "For the first time, we have a nation for a continent, and a continent for a nation"; Garran recalled that the now famous phrase "would have been unrecorded if I had not happened to jot it down."

In June 1893, when the Australasian Federal League was formed at a meeting in the Sydney Town Hall, Garran joined immediately and was made a member of the executive committee. He was one of the League's four delegates to the 1893 Corowa Conference and a League delegate to the 1896 Bathurst Conference, informal conferences held between members of the League (primarily based in Sydney), the Australian Natives Association (mainly Victorian) and other pro-federation groups. At Corowa he was part of an impromptu group organised by John Quick which drafted a resolution, passed at the Conference, calling on the colonial parliaments to hold a directly elected Constitutional Convention to be charged with drafting the Bill for the Constitution of Australia. The proposal, which came to be known as the Corowa Plan, was later accepted at the 1895 Premiers' Conference and formed the basis for the federation process over the following five years.

In 1897, Garran published The Coming Commonwealth, an influential book on the history of the Federation movement and the debate over the 1891 draft of the Constitution of Australia. The book was based on material he prepared for a course on federalism and federal systems of government, which he had planned to give at the University of Sydney, but which failed to attract a sufficient number of students. Nevertheless, the book was both unique and popular, as one of the few books on the topic at the time, with the first edition quickly selling out. Soon after its publication the Premier of New South Wales George Reid, who had been elected as a New South Wales delegate to the 1897–1898 Constitutional Convention, invited Garran to be his secretary. At the Convention, Reid appointed him secretary of the Drafting Committee, at Barton's request; he was also a member of the Press Committee.

Garran recorded in a letter to his family during the convention's Melbourne sitting that:

"The committee professes to find me very useful in unravelling the conundrums sent down by the finance committee... The last two nights I have found the drafting committee fagged and despairing, and now they have pitched the conundrums at me and gone out for a smoke; and then I worked out algebraic formulas to clear the thing up, drafted clauses accordingly, and when the committee returned we had plain sailing."

Garran joked that the long work of the drafting committee breached the Factory Acts, the group (primarily Barton, Richard O'Connor, John Downer and Garran) often working late into the night preparing drafts for the convention to consider and debate the next morning. On the evening before the convention's last day, Barton had gone to bed exhausted in the small hours, Garran and Charles Gavan Duffy finishing the final schedule of amendments at breakfast time. The convention concluded successfully, approving a final draft which would ultimately, aside from a small amendment arranged at the last minute in London, become the Constitution of Australia.

Throughout 1898, following the completion of the proposed Constitution, Garran participated in the campaign promoting Federation leading up to the referendums at which the people of the colonies voted whether or not to approve the Constitution. He contributed a daily column to the Evening News, and had humorous poems critiquing opponents of federation published in The Bulletin. The following year, he began working with Quick on the Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, a reference work on the Constitution including a history, and detailed discussion of each section analysing its meaning and its development at the Conventions. Published in 1901, the Annotated Constitution, commonly referred to simply as "Quick & Garran", soon became the standard work on the Constitution and is still regarded as one of the most important works on the subject.