Evening had come already, a June evening in the final winter of the century and the rain had not let up for a week. In Macquarie Street and College Street and Phillip Street the leaves lay in great damp, decaying piles, which was odd, the trees native to the colony being chiefly evergreens, but the settlers had brought their trees with them (or how would they know it was autumn, if the leaves did not turn brown and fall from the trees?). In nearby Hyde Park (for the settlers had brought their parks with them too) the wide avenue, along which in more clement weather elegant couples strolled, ran with torrents of rainwater and soon became impassable.

At a municipal hall a mile or two to the west of the city a meeting was in progress. At the doorway of the hall young women in neat white blouses and wide-brimmed straw hats quite unsuited to the weather handed out ribbons emblazoned in large bold letters with the words FEDERATION YES! Because it was wet, and because every man to whom they handed a ribbon was wet too, the ink on the ribbons ran and everyone’s hands turned black, but still the men took the ribbons, because the women were young and ardent and the men wished to be obliging. Already a quantity of the ribbons had found their way onto the floor of the hall and had turned to a sodden mass beneath the men’s boots and the legs of the chairs.

The hall was a functional one, distempered rather than panelled, a place of betterment and learning and, until the Methodist Hall was completed, of theological dissent too, where chairs and tables could be stacked and folded away to make room for dancing and music. This evening the chairs were in rows and the piano, a Charles Stieff upright that had not been tuned since the Queen’s Jubilee, had been pushed into a corner beneath a dust cloth. At one end of the hall was a raised dais, above which a banner proclaimed in the same large bold letters as the ribbons—only this time a foot high—ONE PEOPLE, ONE DESTINY, ONE FLAG. And here was the flag—snowy white with a pretty blue cross on it and the Union Jack stuck up high in the top left-hand corner—a thing hastily fashioned and poorly manufactured in the manner of a flag not yet officially adopted and likely to be changed at a moment’s notice once votes were cast and counted.