By the late nineteenth century, ideas of “American” and “Australian” nationality were “acquir[ing] their taken-for-granted status” for important groups in each country. The centennials they celebrated in 1876 and 1888 were often treated as significant and exciting crystallizations of existing national identity and experience. As an Australian journalist reflected about the ceremonial opening of “Centennial Hall” in Sydney, “the outward and visible sign arouses thought and ofttimes something more…it shows the place we have come in the march of our progress; it recalls the past; it suggests the future.” Many people in both countries took part in exhibitions, parades, ceremonies, and banquets for the centennials; they made speeches, wrote poems, gave sermons, built halls, published magazines, sent letters, and counted products to the greater glory of their nations. In some groups, people worked so intensively on making the celebrations that they may well have been as burnt out as the Connecticut woman who wrote to fellow organizers in 1875: “every one admits that commemorations have their uses; this will, it is hoped, be true of us, though we be done to death by over-commemorating.” She was unusual, though, in publicly admitting limit to the excitement of the celebration. How had people in these new nations come to this point? And how are we to interpret the beliefs about nationality they expressed?

Many people in each country were claiming shared identities which had hardly existed a century earlier. And in these settler countries, the changes which transformed new mixes of land, peoples, and political arrangements into “new nations” had been slow, subtle, and diffuse in their origins.