In English-speaking Australia it is always hard to determine which influences came from English ideas, practices and institutions, which came with English immigrants and which were passed on by them to their descendants. It is also very difficult to disentangle what is undeniably ‘English’ from other influences from the English-speaking world, which now includes the United States to a far greater degree than was true a century ago. Because of the regional and class divisions in England it is also hard to establish what constituted a common English culture, even within a limited period of time. This becomes more difficult over time as England changed from a rural to an urban and then a metropolitan society and from semi-literacy to universal education.

The English ‘fragment’

Forty years ago an attempt to determine the founding influences on Australia and other settler societies was made by two American academics, Louis Hartz and Richard Rosecrance. Their basic proposition was that the social and political character of ‘new societies’ was largely determined in the early years of settlement by the fragment of ‘old societies’ represented by the first settlers. With others they studied the United States, Canada, South Africa, Latin America and Australia. Rosecrance argued for Australia that: