O my Canada, O my Newfoundland!

[steepholm]

Isn't it disconcerting when you find, at an advanced age, that you've been ignorant of a really basic fact in a subject about which you're supposedly reasonably well informed? I like geography and history, and if North America isn't exactly my area of special knowledge I'd still have expected to have heard that Newfoundland was, within living memory, an independent country. But until I happened to read it today, I had no idea.

Was I alone?

[Poll #1855055]

Have you had any similar ignorance depth-charges go off recently?

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I had in mind the period between 1931 and 1934, as the time when Newfoundland was independent in the same sense as Australia and Canada.

As far as I can gather, Newfoundland's independence was a victim of the Depression, an unusual fate.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It was, but what makes it less bizarre is that it wasn't really independence. No independence bells were rung in 1931, and as far as I know Newfies don't cherish the memory of their two-year (for that's what it came to) independence the way that citizens of, say, Texas or even California celebrate their brief independencies, not as a separate thing from the whole period of responsible Dominion government, which lasted 80 years. If Newfoundland had considered itself truly independent, the government wouldn't have taken the actions surrendering power to the British that they did.

Even in Canada, a sense of the country as an independent nation, and not merely a self-governing British dominion, only began to dawn during World War 2. Canada didn't appoint its first separate Foreign Secretary until 1946.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

Australia's independence was foisted upon us by London. We still complain about that, from time to time.