We Swear By The Southern Cross

Alternate history map. I was inspired by an alternatehistory.com thread about the possibility of a 19th century independent Australia and reading up on Ned Kelly, particularly the declaration of a "Republic of the North-East of Victoria" said to have been found in his pocket when he was captured at Glenrowan.

Apparently textures found off the internet can make anything look high quality in a jiffy!

"While the police on his tail had thought Ned Kelly but a garden variety bushranger, Glenrowan would prove them wrong. With the police unable to reach the settlement after their train derailed en route, Kelly read to the inn he had held hostage a declaration of an independent republic in northeastern Victoria on June 28th, 1880, a date still celebrated today as the birth of the republic. News of the declaration soon reached Kelly's supporters throughout the area, and the region, already suffering unrest, exploded into outright rebellion. The news spread quickly throughout Australia, panicking the elites in Melbourne and Sydney but arousing the interest of Irish Catholic immigrants and the liberal German settlers in South Australia.

While the police and militias attempted to root out rebel sympathies in the northeast, unrest began to swirl in other parts of Victoria and in South Australia. Soon in the heat of the souther hemisphere summer, the revolt got it's Boston Massacre; in February of 1881, violence broke out in Melbourne between republicans and loyalists, leaving nine dead. The liberal press made it a rallying cry; "Remember Eureka! Remember Glenrowan! Remember Melbourne!" and revolutionary sympathizers published pamphlets accusing the British of bigotry and discrimination against Catholics, hoping to goad formerly neutral Germans and Irish to fight. By the time 1882 had come, most of Victoria and the southeastern regions of South Australia were in open revolt. By 1886, Britain had conceded South Australia within the 132nd meridian east and 31st parellel south to the rebels and an independent Australian Republic had been declared. Triumphant, Ned Kelly stepped off the train in Melbourne to great fanfare, and by the end of the year had been elected President of a new nation."