British Collection

Although nineteenth-century Australians - especially of Irish origin, were often assertively 'Australian', and in the twenty-first century the Queen of Australia still, somewhat confusingly, lives in Britain, by the 1950s the majority of Australians ceased to feel that they were British as well as Australian. The Haywards, however, like most Australians of their age group and their predecessors, took it for granted that to be Australian was simultaneously to be British; it would never have occurred to them that in the future it might seem difficult and confusing to be both.

Now their house, Carrick Hill, completed in 1939 in British sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century 'Jacobethan' style, has become a museum of their past British-Australian way of life. And their city, Adelaide, has established Australia's first university-based Centre for British Studies.