the British colonies in Australia (and, in early proposals, New Zealand) into one federated country. The first Constitutional Convention was held in 1891 in the chamber of the Legislative Council of New South Wales in Macquarie Street, Sydney, around the corner from Garran's chambers in Phillip Street; Garran regularly attended and sat in the public gallery to see "history... in the making under my very eyes." Garran later recalled with approval that the 1891 convention was the first with the courage to face the "lion in the path", the issue of customs duties and tariffs, which had previously divided states such as Victoria, who were in favour of protectionism, and states such as New South Wales, who were in favour of free trade. In Garran's view a clause proposed at the convention, which allowed for tariffs against international trade while ensuring free trade domestically (the predecessor to the final section 92 of the Constitution of Australia), "expressed the terms on which New South Wales was prepared to face the lion." On joining the bar soon became involved with Edmund Barton Q.C., later the first Prime Minister of Australia, and the de facto leader of the federation movement in New South Wales. Garran, along with others such as Atlee Hunt, worked essentially as secretaries to Barton's federation campaign, drafting correspondence and planning meetings. At one late night meeting, planning a speech Barton was to give in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield, Barton expressed the phrase "For the first time, we have a nation for a continent, and a continent for a nation"; Garran later claimed that the now famous phrase "would have been unrecorded if I had not happened to jot it down." In June 1893, when Barton's Australasian Federal League was formed at a meeting in the Sydney Town Hall, Garran joined immediately and was made a member of the executive committee. He was one of the League's four delegates to the 1893 Corowa Conference and a League delegate to the 1896 "People's Convention", or Bathurst Conference, a conference attended by Barton, Reid, League members , the Australian Natives' Association (mainly Victorian) and other pro-federation groups. At Corowa he was part of an impromptu group organised by John Quick which drafted a resolution, passed at the Conference, calling for a directly elected Constitutional Convention to be charged with drafting the Bill for the Constitution of Australia. The proposal, which came