Garibaldi in Australia

Abstract

One of the most famous public figures in later nineteenth-century Australia was Giuseppe Garibaldi. The man known as the 'hero of two worlds' - Europe and South America - was in fact also the hero of a third. The nature of Garibaldi's iconic status in the Australian colonies was complex, multi-faceted, and fractured and it occurred at a moment when the notion of celebrity was being transformed amid what was effectively a fundamental democratization of the public sphere in the Anglophone world. As such, it provides an important opportunity to ponder the implications of what has been called 'intimacy at a distance'.