@BingTheWing Hey hey, I wasn't trying to stop you from playing Australia. You certainly could and they'd be relevant. Just your current history of British tyranny doesn't mesh well with my UK. If you want to be prominent in the Pacific you could say you worked with Westminster in getting your independence, joined the Commonwealth and formed an Australasian Confederation or something owning Australia, NZ and other pacific holdings such as British Malaysia. Alternatively you could have sought relations with Japan or the US if you wanted Australia to cut completely from Britain and expanded with their support.
Yeah, but I’d still be in some ways a political proxy of the UK, and that’s boring. And what would have made Australia cut off Britain and seek relations with other countries?
The Russian withdrawal in 1917 only served to strengthen British morale. It poured all of its resources into the Western Front, launching offensive after offensive into Austro-Hungarian lines, landing boot after boot onto Ottoman beaches, and firebombing the German colonies in Kamerun. All of this, of course, was being increasingly done with colonial lives. The manpower of the British isles was slowly being diminished, and in its place was spilt the blood of the sons of the British Raj, the Canadian commonwealth, the Egyptian protectorate, and the Land Down Under.
The UK was being quickly drained of its resources in iron and gold, and was looking to its colonies for more. From 1919 to 1924, the British carried out what would be forever known as the Rape of Australia. Farms were seized by the colonial government, fathers and sons were separated from their families and sent to Europe and the mines, and the local democratic parliament shut down and authoritarian rule instituted. The 1920 Melbourne riots and subsequent massacre only served to solidify the iron fist of the British government over the helpless Aussie settlers.
The Australian poor were rendered powerless, stripped of their right to suffrage and the might of their labor. The only citizens who survived the Rape with their former status intact were the Australian elite - the coal barons, the gentrified landowners, and the stockbrokers who were the middlemen between the British colonizers and their helpless assets. This special class of men therefore recognized that it fell to them to liberate their own country. One of these men was Sir Willard Clovis, the London-born owner of several iron mines in the Northern Territory. At first glance, Clovis would seem to be the last man you would expect to betray the empire.
But Clovis would not forget, especially after he had seen his son die in the war and the fruits of his labor go to killing more like him. In Sydney in 1920, he organized the Sydney Mineral Coalition, his new secret underground independence movement masquerading as a mine owners’ union. Rallying other dissatisfied Australian business owners, the SMC amassed small arms, funds, and other assets in secret to combat the colonial government. The movement grew southward, and Melbourne and Canberra also responded to the call. Then the masses were educated - secret meetings were held by mine owners at night to preach to their workers of the injustices committed by the devils from the continent. The revolution grew.
The glorious climax of the unrest occured in 1925 in the bombing of the General Post Office in Sydney. While the British constabulary instituted martial law along the coasts, guerilla warfare commenced in the outback. Several ‘armies’, one for each federal district, steadily marched coastward. In 1926, after more than twenty months of fighting, the British colonial government agreed to lessen its seizures of resources and privatized several large enterprises in the Treaty of Canberra. This sated the rebels for a while, but Australian nationalism had already taken root.
Sir Clovis and the rest of the SMC were exiled to the Shetland Islands, but their revolutionary influence lingered. Free from the iron grip of the British, local enterprises sprang to life, and as the British war machine clankered down in Europe, were more in a position to demand more autonomy.
I was expecting something along the lines of Spain for Britain, seeing as the former lost a lot of its colonial influence after the War of the Spanish Succession
@Lone Wanderer I was having it maybe 1925 thereabouts. The British morale would have flared up after the Russians withdrew, making the war even more bloody and costing Aussie lives.