‘The spirit of local patriotism’: progress and populism in Sydney's northern suburbs in the 1920s

Abstract

Local patriotism emerged in Australia in the suburbs from the mid nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, influenced by progressivism, it was a populist reaction by emerging suburbs and municipalities to state power and the political and cultural dominance of the city. Promoting the local as the anchor for a chain of national and imperial being and the place where moral capital was renewed, local patriotism paradoxically elevated ties of community and locality above all else. It also exhibited a ‘reactionary modernism’ which embraced new technology while seeking to maintain traditional values linked to the land and a British inheritance. Ultimately, self-interest – driven by exclusivism, anti-urbanism and class quarantining – underpinned local patriotism in Australia. Although its currency was relatively short-lived, it remained persuasive in Australian political culture. This article examines local patriotism through a case study of Sydney's North Shore and northern suburbs in the first three decades of the twentieth century, drawing extensively on a local newspaper, The Suburban Herald.