‘Seven Colonies’ was a phrase used in nineteenth century Australia and New Zealand to refer to the six Australian colonies and New Zealand in the run up to federation, which formed a little squabbling group of British polities a long way from any other British colony.

I wanted to try and gain some sort of handle on how popular the phrase was.

If you search Trove for occurrences of the phrase in newspaper articles you get over four and a half million hits suggesting that the phrase was reasonably popular.

Using QueryPic to make sense of the data you end up with the following chart

where the phrase becomes increasingly popular in the run up to federation, and then rapidly drops out of use especially as it became clear after 1907 that New Zealand was unlikely to ever federate with Australia.

The New Zealand data gets drowned out by Australia, but graphing the data from New Zealand separately one ends up with much the same curve

showing that by 1910, the phrase had more or less dropped out of use in New Zealand as well.

So what other evidence do we have?

Postcards for one.

Prior to the early 1890’s the header strap on prepaid penny postcards issued by the colonial post office in Victoria looked like this

While after the early 1890’s they looked like this

quite explicitly saying that they were valid for use not only within Victoria but also for mail to the other Australian colonies plus New Zealand.

I havn’t been able to find images for postcards from WA, Queensland or NSW, so I can’t say if they also included a similar strap line, but South Australia and Tasmania did not

but as smaller colonies with smaller volumes of mail it’s possible they simply didn’t bother reprinting the card blanks. After all everyone knew the validity of penny postcards, didn’t they?

Interestingly, New Zealand also made the validity of their penny postcards explicit

However, this story is slightly complicated by the advent of the Imperial Penny Post – a movement from 1898 onwards to introduce a flat rate of one penny (or the equivalent in local currency such as Canadian dollars and Indian rupees) to send a letter or postcard anywhere in the British Empire.

Australia never adopted the Imperial Penny Post, but New Zealand did from 01 January 1901, much to the chagrin of the Argus.

Even though the Imperial penny post as such ended in 1918, its ghost hung around to the early 1960’s when it was still cheaper to send a letter or postcard from England to a Commonwealth country than a neighbouring European country such as France …