When Deakin launched the Commonwealth Liberal Party at the Melbourne Town Hall in 1909 he stood in front of a map of Australia to help his audience imagine the vastness of ‘the 3 000 000 square miles of territory which is your possession – for whose present and future you and you alone are responsible’. Deakin was not using the map to draw attention to Australia's long coastline, nor to its isolation from Britain, but to its internal differences and divisions. Within the vastness were eight or nine distinct centres, ‘each speaking with its own voice to its own surroundings’, but the men and women in his audience needed to keep their eyes on the map to remember that the proposals they were about to hear were to be applied right across it.

Deakin and his Liberals were nation-builders attempting to develop policies that would transcend local and geographically based loyalties and draw Australians into a heightened awareness of themselves as citizens of a national polity. Theirs was the language of citizenship, of independent men and women bound together by their recognition of reciprocal rights and obligations and their loyalty to the symbols and institutions of the state. But in the decade since Federation a new way of imagining the divisions of Australia had been gaining ground – one which saw Australians as divided not by state and regional loyalties but by differences of class and economic interest.