Or it was clear to Alasdair, and the smile he allowed himself was wry, for if they anticipated this crowd—indeed, any crowd—to be rational and consistent, then they had fundamentally misunderstood their fellow men.

And so he stood, unruffled, at the lectern. He smiled. He waited. He had brought no notes with him to the meeting. His tailcoat and waistcoat had been designed in Italy. This silk top hat cost more than the collected wardrobes of every man present. This was not his first such meeting nor indeed his tenth. He had lost count of the number of Federation meetings he had attended and, the human mind being what it is, and men being essentially the same whether they be at Bondi Beach or Emu Plains or any point between, the same questions came up. Oh, patriotism and slogans and flags were all very well, but what it all boiled down to was that men feared change.

And so he smiled, he waited for a pause, and when it came he seized it:

‘Gentlemen …’ (And, yes, there were women in the audience, but none of them had questioned the Federation, had they? None of them had questioned his sound reasoning. Besides, none of them had the vote.) ‘I understand your concerns. Indeed, I have shared them. New South Wales has always been a champion of free trade, and you want assurances it will remain so, that our Federation tariff policy will not be based on protectionism. Gentlemen, I can make that assurance. There is nothing in this draft constitution to suggest it. You are concerned about losing out—you worry that customs collected from your pockets will go into a central government coffer. Worse, that we in New South Wales will find ourselves subsidising our poorer cousins in the other smaller, struggling economies—’

‘Too right! Those South Australians, Tasmanians and Western Australians want to bleed us dry!’

‘—and that is why Mr Braddon inserted his clause into our bill which provides an assurance to us that customs revenue will be returned to each state for the first ten years. And that is why Mr Braddon assures us that there will be a new federal capital—a brand-new city!—and it is to be built not in Victoria, not in Tasmania, not in South Australia, but here in our own New South Wales!’

‘But a hundred miles away!’

‘Yes, a hundred miles away!’ (Alasdair pounded the lectern.) ‘And what is that in our country which is two thousand miles across? Our city, which has grown to half a million souls in less than a hundred years, will stretch out to the north and to the south and to the west to cover that hundred miles in less than a century!’

A cheer followed this prediction, as it generally did.

‘Before it is completed, this new federal capital will be part of our western suburbs!’

This brought another cheer and some laughter.