An aphorism

From Resisting the Empire?  The Associated Board Comes to Melbourne, a paper I read at a conference over the weekend:

Music examinations were caught in a nexus of cultural and commercial concerns that were bound up in Imperial Federation.  This combined economic and defence policies that favoured British interests with notions of a pan-British identity, culture and destiny.  However, the underlying assumptions of Imperial Federation failed to address the paradoxical situation of the Australian colonies, where reflexive identification with British culture was tempered by a strong tendency to economic independence.