Suppose an Australian from 2026 could travel back exactly 125 years and materialise in Sydney or Melbourne in January 1901. He has come with a warning. He knows what will happen to the new Commonwealth: two world wars, Gallipoli, the fall of Singapore, the decline of Britain, the rise of America, the dismantling of White Australia, mass immigration from Asia and elsewhere, feminism, the sexual revolution, legal homosexuality, same-sex marriage, transgender politics, the internet, artificial intelligence and a society that the Australians standing around him would scarcely recognise as descended from their own.
Could he change anything? My guess is: very little.
He has arrived at an extraordinary moment. Federation has just been proclaimed. The first Commonwealth Parliament will soon sit, and one of its earliest major measures will be the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, the legislative foundation of what was openly called the White Australia policy. The racial character of the new nation is not some obscure concern confined to a political fringe. It is close to the centre of Australian politics.
So, our traveller begins with what he considers his great warning. This policy, he says, will eventually disappear. Australia will increasingly accept immigrants from Asia and throughout the world. By 2026 the population will exceed 27 million, and Sydney and Melbourne will be multicultural cities containing large communities whose ancestry lies in China, India, Vietnam, the Philippines and elsewhere.
He expects stunned disbelief, but instead encounters something more complicated. His listeners already fear precisely such a future. His prophecy might therefore be received not as an argument for accepting demographic transformation but as evidence that the new Commonwealth must make its restrictions stronger. That is the first great difficulty of travelling into the past: even if people believe your facts, they need not draw your conclusions.
Our traveller has problems before he even gets to politics. Everything about him is slightly wrong. His accent is Australian, but not quite their Australian. His vocabulary contains expressions that have not been invented. His manners are unusually informal. His teeth may be suspiciously good. His clothes, unless carefully prepared beforehand, contain strange fabrics, fasteners and labels. He has no recognisable papers, no local employer, no family anyone can identify and no convincing explanation of where he slept last night.
Then someone asks where he comes from.
"2026."
Things deteriorate rapidly.
Fortunately, he has brought proof. Out comes the laptop, and for several glorious minutes our traveller possesses what may be the most extraordinary technological object on Earth. He opens the screen and shows photographs of modern Sydney and Melbourne: skyscrapers, motorways, jet aircraft and spacecraft. Perhaps he has stored video of astronauts walking on the Moon or images taken from the International Space Station.
The room becomes very quiet. But what exactly has he proved? Not that he comes from the future. He has proved that he possesses an inexplicable machine.
That could make his position worse rather than better. Australians in 1901 were not technological primitives. They knew photography, telegraphy, telephones, electric lighting and electric trams. They lived in an age when astonishing inventions were already appearing. They therefore possessed enough technological understanding to recognise that the laptop was extraordinary, but nowhere near enough to understand what it was.
Was it an elaborate photographic apparatus? Some new electrical invention? A military device? A confidence trick? Foreign technology? Who made it?
"Apple."
Where?
"China."
That answer alone could take some explaining.
Then comes the fatal question: how does it work? Our traveller knows how to use a laptop. Unfortunately, like almost everyone in 2026, he has only the vaguest idea how to manufacture one. Explain the transistor and then make one. Explain the integrated circuit and then construct a semiconductor fabrication plant. Explain flash memory, lithium-ion batteries, liquid-crystal displays and a modern processor containing billions of transistors. The technological god from 2026 suddenly discovers that he could not manufacture a pocket calculator.
Meanwhile the battery indicator reaches 10 per cent. Charging might be possible with suitable equipment and sufficient electrical ingenuity, especially if he prepared carefully before leaving 2026. But if he simply arrived with his everyday laptop and charger, there would be no convenient modern socket waiting for him. Eventually the greatest technological artefact in Australia becomes a black rectangle.
He presses the button. Nothing happens. His audience looks at him.
Now tell them about transgender bathrooms.
Before reaching that point, however, he tries something surely more convincing: the wars. He tells them that in thirteen years Europe will descend into catastrophe. Australians will land at Gallipoli and fight on the Western Front. Tens of thousands will die. Then, barely two decades after the peace, another world war will begin. Singapore will fall. Japanese aircraft will bomb Darwin. Japanese submarines will enter Sydney Harbour. Britain will prove incapable of guaranteeing Australian security, and the United States will eventually replace Britain as Australia's principal strategic protector.
Surely this will get someone's attention. Perhaps it will, but it creates another problem. A stranger possessing inexplicable technology and detailed information about future military operations does not necessarily look like a prophet. He might look like a spy.
And how does he prove any of it? He can announce that Archduke Franz Ferdinand will be assassinated at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, but everyone then has only thirteen years to wait before discovering whether the strange fellow was telling the truth. He could make nearer predictions, elections, sporting results, political events, accidents and deaths, and successful predictions might establish that he possesses extraordinary knowledge. They still would not necessarily establish where that knowledge came from.
Worse still, if people begin acting on his information, history changes. Prevent one assassination, alter one election or save one important life and the timeline begins diverging. The more successfully the traveller changes the past, the less accurately he can predict its future. His greatest asset destroys itself through use.
Then comes the social revolution. Women already possess voting rights in some Australian colonies, and most non-Indigenous women will obtain the Commonwealth franchise in 1902. But our visitor describes what follows: women entering occupations overwhelmingly dominated by men, female judges and political leaders, married women routinely remaining in paid employment, easier divorce, reliable contraception, the sexual revolution and a transformation of marriage and family life. The crash of births.
Then he moves to homosexuality. Acts between men that are criminal offences in 1901 will eventually be decriminalised throughout Australia, and in 2017 the Commonwealth Parliament will legalise marriage between two men or two women. Then comes transgender identity, where language itself begins to fail. Our traveller possesses categories that do not map neatly onto those of 1901. He can describe gender transition, hormone treatments, legal changes of sex, pronoun disputes and arguments over women's sporting categories, but his listeners will translate these things into their own conceptual vocabulary: medicine, eccentricity, vice, insanity, costume, sexual inversion or moral disorder. The traveller is no longer merely predicting different laws. He is describing a different moral universe.
Suppose, however, that we make the experiment easier. Forget the police, the lunatic asylum and the dead laptop. Give our traveller an auditorium in Melbourne in 1901. Put the Prime Minister, parliamentarians, newspaper editors, generals, churchmen, union leaders, businessmen and university professors in the front rows. Give him perfect evidence and let everyone believe that he really comes from 2026.
Would that enable him to change history?
Here I remember a conversation many years ago with an old digger. We were talking about something like this: if you could go back knowing what the First World War would become, could you somehow turn things around? Could you warn people before millions were fed into the catastrophe?
His answer, as I remember it, was essentially no. What stayed with me was something he said about returning home on leave. He had been inside the reality of war, yet back home ordinary life simply continued. People worked, ate meals, worried about money, talked about neighbours and attended to the thousand small things that make up everyday existence. Someone would ask him casually, "How is the war going?"
Think about the gulf contained in that question. For the soldier, war was fear, exhaustion, wounds, dead friends and the possibility that he might shortly become one of them. For the person at home, the same war was simultaneously enormous and distant, absorbed through newspapers, rumours, casualty lists and occasional conversations with men returning from the front. They inhabited the same country at the same moment, yet psychologically they could inhabit different worlds.
The old digger's conclusion was that you could not simply turn history around by telling people what was happening. Life has too much momentum.
Give our traveller the auditorium. Let everyone believe him. Let him describe Gallipoli before Gallipoli exists, the Somme and Passchendaele before anyone has heard those names. Tell them about machine guns cutting down men advancing across open ground, artillery pulverising landscapes and young Australians returning blinded, crippled or psychologically destroyed. Everyone listens. Perhaps some are horrified.
Then the meeting ends.
The Prime Minister has appointments. The editor has tomorrow's newspaper to produce. The businessman has invoices to pay. The farmer is worried about rain. A mother has children to feed. Parliament has legislation before it. There are wages, strikes, debts, illnesses, marriages, funerals, football matches and arguments with neighbours. Tomorrow morning Australia wakes up and goes back to work.
That may be the greatest obstacle to changing history. We imagine historical disasters as though everybody living immediately before them was standing at a crossroads consciously choosing between catastrophe and safety. Usually, they were not. They were living Tuesday.
Even when catastrophe arrives, most people encounter only fragments of it. The soldier sees the trench, the mother the telegram, the politician the casualty figures, the factory owner the contracts and the newspaper reader the headlines. Nobody possesses the whole picture. Our traveller does, and that is precisely why he may be powerless. He is trying to communicate 125 years of consequences to people who still have to decide what to have for dinner.
Yet perhaps 1901 is the wrong year for the experiment.
If the purpose is actually to change Australia's future rather than merely astonish our ancestors, I would be tempted to send the traveller to the 1960s. In 1901 the cultural distance is so enormous that our visitor spends half his time explaining what he means. By the 1960s he speaks recognisably the same language, understands the institutions and can move through Australian society without immediately appearing to have fallen from another planet. More importantly, many of the great cultural changes are beginning or gathering momentum. There is still something to argue about because the eventual settlement has not yet been reached.
That thought reminds me of another experience from my own life. By the 1970s I could see cultural changes occurring around me, feminism among them. I remember discussing such things with older men at the pub my father went to. They could see some of it too, but their attitude, as I remember it, was essentially: it will pass.
That is fascinating in retrospect. They did not necessarily approve, nor did they fail to notice. They simply underestimated the permanence of what they were seeing. It looked like another fashion of the young, another burst of radicalism, another collection of ideas that sensible people could safely ignore until everyone eventually settled down.
But some cultural changes do not pass. They enter universities and bureaucracies, become legislation, alter professional standards and school curricula, and change the language through which the next generation understands questions that the previous generation regarded as settled. Eventually something that looked like a passing controversy becomes part of the institutional background.
That suggests another form of historical blindness. The people of 1901 might dismiss our traveller because his story is unbelievable. The people of the late 1960s and 1970s might be harder to warn precisely because parts of his story are already visible.
"I know about feminism," somebody at the pub says. "Don't worry about that. It will blow over."
"No," replies the traveller. "That's exactly what I came back to tell you."
Here the old digger's observation returns in another form. People rarely experience themselves as living through a great historical transformation. They experience themselves going to work on Monday morning. Wars can begin that way, and cultural revolutions can unfold that way too. The decisive period may not be when everybody consciously chooses a new world over an old one, but the long interval during which people who prefer the old arrangements assume that the new ones cannot possibly last.
By the time they discover otherwise, the argument has changed, the institutions have changed and another generation has grown up regarding yesterday's revolution as today's normality.
There is another irony. We naturally imagine ourselves going back to enlighten the supposedly primitive people of 1901. But suppose they could interrogate us in return. We tell them that we conquered diseases that routinely killed their children. We developed antibiotics, organ transplantation and modern surgery. We learned to cross the world in hours, walked on the Moon, sent machines to other planets, created instantaneous global communication and gave ordinary people access to more information than the greatest libraries of 1901 possessed.
They might reasonably expect that such a civilisation had become extraordinarily wise. Then we explain the twentieth century: the trenches, Stalin's terror, Mao's famines, Hiroshima, nuclear arsenals capable of destroying cities, totalitarian surveillance and industrialised warfare. We explain pornography available to children through the same miraculous machines that contain humanity's libraries, drug epidemics, collapsing fertility and governments and corporations capable of gathering information about ordinary people beyond the dreams of any police commissioner in 1901.
The traveller who expected to put the past on trial might unexpectedly find himself being cross-examined by it.
"You possessed all this knowledge and power. What did you do with it?"
There is no comfortable answer. Technological progress is comparatively easy to demonstrate. Put a 2026 laptop beside a 1901 typewriter and there is no serious argument about which machine has greater capabilities. Civilisational progress is another matter.
The Australians of 1901 possessed assumptions and prejudices that appear extraordinary to us. But if they could inspect 2026, they would certainly identify beliefs and practices of ours that appeared equally extraordinary to them. Every age finds it easy to recognise the peculiar assumptions of another age and extraordinarily difficult to recognise its own.
Our traveller thought his problem was getting people to believe him. It was not. His problem was getting millions of human beings, institutions and governments to stop doing what they were already doing because of consequences that had not happened yet.
Perhaps the old digger understood history better than the time traveller ever could. Perhaps the older men in the pub understood half of the same lesson: they saw change but assumed that time itself would correct it. One group could not make distant catastrophe real; the other could see cultural transformation beginning but could not imagine that it might become permanent.
So perhaps the traveller should not go back to Federation at all. Send him to an Australian pub in 1968. Give him a beer and put him at the table with half a dozen older Australians who assure him that all this strange new stuff will eventually pass.
Then let him quietly say:
"No. That's why I'm here."
And in a sense, that is exactly what we are doing at the ALOR blog now; warning about future consequences of policies as if we have already seen in our mind's eye where they go.