In colonial Australia, the meanings of politeness were continually contested. The urban centres held a world of strangers of dubious origin. Social edifices erected to deal with the question of who was `in Society' became ever more elaborate and unstable. To the elite, English manners represented a last bastion of civilisation in a wilderness of social disintegration. To self-made Australians, seeking acceptance rather than exclusion, they were absurd remnants of a class-ridden `Old World'. Important issues of class, gender, social organisation and identity clustered around the problem of comportment and shaped a redefinition of politeness in a colonial world.