William Wentworth waxed eloquent in 1823 about ‘a new Britannia in another world’. In 1881 recruiting agents were telling East Anglian farm labourers that Queensland was ‘England over the water’. They attracted more migrants to that colony with free passages than in any other decade before or since. The founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, favoured emigration of the poor because ‘it would be absurd to speak of the colonies as if they were a foreign land’. By 1966 Australia House in London was issuing recruiting material claiming that Australia was a British country ‘and we aim to keep it that way’. This was in the middle of the greatest avalanche of assisted English immigrants to Australia in any decade before or since.

Yet in 1999 the High Court decided, in the contested Senate election case of Helen Hill of One Nation, that Britain was a foreign power for the purposes of section 44(i) of the Constitution. This barred those owing other allegiances from sitting in the national parliament. The section was, of course, introduced when Australians had no citizenship of their own and were, like one-quarter of the world's inhabitants, British subjects.