The history of Australia - a guide for travelers
Prehistory: the continent and its indigenous people
Geologically, Australia is one of the oldest, most stable parts of planet earth, and the rocks, soil and general land features have remained largely unchanged since the dawn of time. The Australian continent itself separated from Gondwanaland approximately 55,000,000 years ago (when the Americas and Africa were still joined) and it has remained pretty much isolated ever since, so a huge array of bizarre animals have managed to evolve in that time (most notably the famous Australian marsupials; kangaroos and koalas).
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| Engraving of Aborigines, c. 1790 |
Around 40,000-50,000 years ago Australia and New Guinea were still joined by a giant land bridge, which was used by the first people to migrate to Australia, presumably after they'd traveled by boat to New Guinea from other parts of southeast Asia. When sea levels started to rise in around 35,000BC most of Australia (and the offshore islands in the Timor Sea to the north) had been colonised. Once the sea levels rose, the population remained fairly isolated from the rest of the world until European explorers arrived in the 1600s (although Indonesian fishermen did make regular, but evidentially brief trading and fishing visits before then).
The indigenous Australian population continued to grow up until the period of European exploration, but remained almost unchanged technologically. Food was hunted, fished and gathered from seasonal sources and tribes were mostly nomadic within specific geographical areas. The temperate regions of south eastern Australia were the most populous (as they are in modern Australia) because of the good sources of food and water and the generally agreeable weather. Because the indigenous population had the country to themselves, pretty much unchanged, for 35,000 years, a strong affinity developed with the land and indigenous culture and rituals are tied incredibly closely with the natural environment.
The first European explorers: 1600-1788
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| Engraving of Aborigines, c. 1790 |
By 1600 numerous explorers, mostly Dutch, had made it across the Indian Ocean and in 1606 the first undisputed landing by Europeans took place on Australian soil when Willem Janszoon stepped off his ship Duyfken onto the north western coast of the continent. Other Dutch, French and English explorers followed suit over the next 250 years, but all they managed to find was the coastline of Western Australia - 4000km of desert, which even today is scarcely populated and mostly not worried about (goodness knows why Australia appeared on the first charts as 'New Holland').
It wasn't until 1770, on the expedition of the Endeavour under command of British Royal Navy Lieutenant James Cook, that the east coast of Australia was finally charted and set foot upon by European explorers. Cook was actually on a mission to record the orbit of the planet Venus over the Pacific Ocean, but on the way managed to sail almost the entire length of a previously 'undiscovered' continent, securing himself a firm place in Australian, and Commonwealth history. Cook formally claimed the eastern coastline he had discovered for the British Crown, naming it New South Wales (which was a fairly loose comparison considering Wales is mostly wet, green and good for farming, while the east coast of Australia is mostly dry, bushy and not particularly good for farming, but it's an awful lot more accurate than 'New Holland').
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| Replica of the HMS Endeavour |
When Cook returned home and told everyone he'd found a giant version of South Wales, located roughly 10,000 miles south west of England, with a potential capital he'd named 'Botany Bay', they thought it sounded like a fantastic place to send everyone who was too annoying or criminal to be of use in proper society, particularly since the Americans had made it very clear that they didn't want to be part of Britain anymore, and the French were showing all the poor people how to overthrow the government. New South Wales sounded like the perfect place for a new colony of convicts, and 17 years later, the first fleet arrived under the charge of Naval-officer-turned-Hampshire-farmer Captain Arthur Phillip.
The first European settlers: 1788-1850
No one is quite sure what the weather was like in Sydney on January 20, 1778, but being the middle of summer, it would be a safe bet that it was absolutely nothing like Wales. For the 750 or so young British petty criminals stepping off a ship for the first time in eight months it would have been a nice sunny change from the rancid, lice-infested holding cells they'd been used to on their trip around the world (in fact they had so much in common with modern British backpackers it's a wonder they didn't head straight to Bondi Beach ), but given that they were only the second lot of Europeans ever to see the east coast of Australia and none of them knew anything about hunting or farming (in fact a the majority of them had lived in London slums their entire lives), it would have quickly become pretty bloody daunting. Making matters worse, Botany Bay was a terrible place for a new settlement, despite Captain Cook's earlier glowing praise. It offered little protection from invading ships (and believe it or not, a few days after the fleet had landed a couple of French exploration ships sailed into the harbour behind them, highlighting the need for security), there was no reliable water source, and the soil was, well, sand.
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| Early map of Sydney Cove |
After a week, which probably involved a lot of the usual whinging about the boffins in London, Captain Phillip decided to check out another harbour around the corner from Botany Bay which Cook had named Port Jackson, but not explored. Luckily, he hit the jackpot; Port Jackson had good water, reasonable soil, good strategic security and bloody marvelous views. In fact, in a later letter, Phillip described Port Jackson in the following words: "the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security ..." Suffice to say, the colony was quickly moved there, and on January 26 1788, a little bay called Sydney Cove became home to the first European Settlement in Australia1.
Sydney quickly became one of the most important new cities in the Southern Hemisphere and other similar colonies were started around Australia as England kept sending more and more convicts. As European settlement encroached, the indigenous population quickly fell in number from around 500,000 to only a few thousand as foreign diseases took their toll. To an indigenous immune system, which hadn't been in contact with the rest of the world for 35,000 years, the plethora of diseases brought over on the ships was overwhelming and devastating.
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| Sydney in 1796 |
Early colonial governors knew that the "native's" knowledge of the Australian land would be beneficial to the settlement and endorsed severe penalties for killing them, but even in a pre-enlightenment age, London convicts and Royal Marines had little respect for (and a great deal of fear of) the indigenous people, so murders weren't uncommon.
In the Myall Creek Massacre of 1838, 28 aborigines (mostly women and children) were murdered by a group of ex-convicts, who were later charged and became the first people to be convicted of crimes against aborigines under European Law (bear in mind this was 50 years after settlement, and was certainly not the first crime). Australia's attitude at the time to the indigenous people, and other non-European cultures was neatly summed up in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper in which one writer commented on the Myall Creek trials: "the whole gang of black animals are not worth the money the colonists will have to pay for printing the silly court documents on which we have already wasted too much time."
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| Convict Prison, Port Arthur |
While the aboriginal population was in danger of being wiped out completely, the new settlers managing to multiply and spread out across the land. By the 1830s individual penal settlements, military outposts and civilian settlements had sprung up in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Perth, and by the late 1840s most of the British colony of New South Wales had been carved off to create five new, autonomous British colonies: Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, Queensland and Western Australia (these colonies made up the continent of Australia, which was formerly named as such back in 1824 after the explorer Matthew Flinders circumnavigated the continent and named it Australia, after the Latin term Terra Australis, meaning 'land of the south').
Useful maps from this era
- View a map of the extent of European exploration up to 1832
- View a map of Australia as it was in 1860
The emergence of an Australian culture
Convict transportation started being phased out in 1840 and by 1850 the population of Australia was now mostly made up of white farmers and shearers who had either settled by choice from England, Ireland and Scotland, or were descendants of (or themselves) former convicts. Up until this point Australia was a dry, remote collection of British colonies which all kept mostly to themselves. Distances between cities were measured in how many weeks it took to travel by ship, and the rest of the world had little interest in an outpost of struggling British farmers on the other side of the planet.
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| 'No Chinese' banner from the Gold Rush Era race riots |
When gold was discovered in Victoria in 1851, and word got out that Australia had more of the shiny stuff than just about anywhere else in the world, everything changed.
Within a decade of the gold discovery, the population of Victoria skyrocketed from 75,000 to 500,000, and a large portion of the new immigrants were Chinese. There was plenty of nationalistic tension between the new English, Irish and Scottish settlers, but the introduction of Chinese immigrants put a whole new spin on things. The white Australians had little knowledge or experience of anything other than (mostly lower class) British society, but their exposure to a whole new culture was confronting to say the least - race riots broke out when white miners realised that Chinese workers were happy to get paid less than them, and further Chinese immigration was subsequently banned.
By the 1860s the Australian population was in the millions, and there were three generations of people born in Australia, most of whom had never even been to England, so it was only natural that the colonies started developing a collective, national, identity.
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| Ned Kelly's Armour |
Tales of infamous outlaw bushrangers (essentially highway robbers who preyed on banks and wagons transporting Gold) like Ned Kelly and Captain Moonlight started capturing the public's attention. Poets like Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson wrote about the hardships of the Australian bush and the heroes of the land; shearers, farmers, thieves, police troopers, almost all of them hard-drinking larrikin descendants of crazy Irishmen.
Independence from Britain
By the 1890s it was clear to most Australians that they really needed their own Government and their own country to officially call home. It took about ten years of debate and generally stuffing around, but on 1901, The Commonwealth of Australia was officially proclaimed and Australia peacefully gained independence from Britain. The British Queen remained as Australia's head of state (and she still is, see the government section), and Australia remained loyal to the United Kingdom, but for all intents and purposes, it had become in independent nation.
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| ANZACs evacuating Gallipoli, Turkey |
For the next 15 years not much changed - Australia developed as a modern western nation and its economy grew on the back of wool sales and wheat crops, but to most people Australia was still as British as a bulldog, albeit one with a suntan and a cold beer. When Britain went to war with Germany tens of thousands of young Australian men signed up to fight, many of them doubtful the war would still be going when their ship arrived. When the Australian and New Zealand Army Core (The ANZACs) returned home after four years of fighting World War I in Turkey, Europe and the Middle East they had become a new breed of uniquely Australian heroes who had fought under an Australian flag and defended (albeit ideologically) the nation of Australia. When World War II erupted 20 years later, and Britain could do nothing to prevent Japan from invading Australia, the country had no choice to stand up and fight for itself, and waged war in the Pacific side by side with the United States.
White Australia
When World War II ended, Australia had managed to escape Japanese invasion and had gone on to help liberate much of southeast Asia. It had been a daunting task though, and the reality of Australia's lonely position on the globe and the distance between it and its major allies — America and Britain — had highlighted the need for the country to boost its population and become a true regional power. Australia had always felt isolated, but the prospect of invasion and occupation by Japan had really hit home. 'Populate or perish' became the country's mantra.
For 100 years Australian governments had maintained a 'white Australia policy', which essentially restricted immigration to people of white, Anglo-Saxon background. The policy was never officially documented in the same way as South Africa's apartheid system or America's racial segregation laws, but the use of biased immigration processes meant that when the war ended, Australia's population was almost exclusively white (one example of bias in the immigration process was that potential immigrants could be given a dictation test in a language of the Australian immigration officials' choice2; inevitably English people would have to dictate in English, Italians and Greeks got Italian and Greek, and Chinese immigrants would have to dictate in ancient Gaelic, or pig-latin, or some other form of gobble-de-gook).
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Australia's first plan to boost the population post-war was the introduction of the 'Ten Pound Poms' scheme3, which was designed to get as many British citizens to immigrate to Australia as possible. The government promised good work prospects in Australia's booming post-war economy, arranged all the travel details, subsidised the fare and only charged 10 pounds to each immigrant over 18; kids got in for free. Once the migrants arrived they were housed in meagre hostels and, in most cases, given shit jobs in factories (which wasn't all that fun, but it was better than a shit job in an English factory). The scheme was in place from 1945 to 1960 and to its credit, managed to bring in over 1,000,000 immigrants.
Much like the rest of the western world, post war Australia remained conservative Caucasian suburban bliss. There were enough jobs for virtually anyone who wanted one, the economy was steaming along quite nicely, and everything was nice and white. While the problem of increasing Australia's population without dirtying the gene pool from non-white overseas immigrants seemed to have been solved, there were considerable problems on the home front with the Aborigines, who just wouldn't go away, no matter how much their human rights were ignored.
As Brisbane's Telegraph newspaper reported in 1937: "Mr Neville [the Chief Protector of Western Australia] holds the view that within one hundred years the pure black will be extinct. But the half-caste problem was increasing every year. Therefore their idea was to keep the pure blacks segregated and absorb the half-castes into the white population ... Perhaps it would take one hundred years, perhaps longer, but the race was dying..."4
Statements like these from public officials led to official policies and legislation which allowed over 35,000 'half-caste' children to be removed from their families and placed into state care, right up until the early 1970s. Some children were given up by their parents, some were taken away by welfare workers because they weren't being adequately cared for, but many, many others were simply 'stolen' from their families and whisked away to foster homes and orphanages. While the half-caste children were being taken away to 'assimilate' with white Australia, the remaining full-blood indigenous population was essentially propped up on welfare so they could be kept as a novelty until they died out altogether (and many believed that the sooner this happened, the better). In hindsight, these policies showed an ignorant and appalling lack of respect for the planet's longest surviving culture and it could be reasonably argued that Indigenous Australian were victims of government-sponsored genocide.
Modern Australia: 1950-2006
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| Soldiers in Vietnam |
As the 1950s turned into the 1960s and the world fell deeper into a Cold War, it was only natural that Australia turned to America for protection from the Communists to the North. While it is actually doubtful that Japan was really planning on invading Australia during World War II, it's safe to say that Australia felt a hell of a lot safer with America hanging around. By the same token, while it was unlikely that Korea, Vietnam or Russia would have ever posed a serious security threat to Australia during the Cold War, Australia definitely wanted America on their side, so as part of the Australia, New Zealand, United States (ANZUS) Security Treaty, troops from The Australian Army, Air Force and Navy all fought in the Korean and Vietnam Wars alongside the US. 'All the way with LBJ (in reference to the American President Lyndon B Johnson)' became the catch cry and by the start of the Vietnam War it was clear that Great Britain was no longer the closest, or most useful ally to Australia.
At the same time (and perhaps as a result) it had become clear that Australia was shifting much closer towards American culture and away the traditional English influence. Television, music and cinema played as strong a role in the cultural shift as politics and national security, and by the end of the sixties Australia was watching American Television, eating American hamburgers and fighting American wars. This is not to say Australian became a clone of America, just that the pervasive influence no longer had a British accent or a British face.
But, as fate would have it, just as the left-wing peace movement in the United States gained momentum, so to did the left-wing peace movement in Australia. In 1972, after 26 years of conservative government, Labor politician Gough Whitlam was elected prime minister and suddenly the face of Australia changed, literally and metaphorically, forever.
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| Gough Whitlam, Pissed Off |
Whitlam quickly ended military conscription, got Australia out of Vietnam, abolished the last remnants of the White Australia Policy, established diplomatic relations with China, made university education free, abolished the death penalty, lowered the voting age, introduced single-parent welfare support, created language programs for non-English speaking Australians and mandated a raft of equal opportunity laws for women.
In a very short space of time Australia had become a very different country. The left-wing loved it, but the conservatives hated it, and three years after he was elected, Whitlam was controversially dismissed from office by the Governor General (the Queen's representative as head of state in Australia - see the politics section for more information).
Regardless, Australia had irreversibly changed. Waves of Vietnamese and South East Asian migrants and refugees flooded into the country and over the next two decades Australia's population started looking, sounding and even eating differently. This multiculturalism, that was by now taken for granted in many parts America, became an inextricable part of Australian culture. While the larrikin convict spirit, born of the Australian bush, pervaded, and meat pies, cold beers, cricket, football, barbecues and the beach remained the building blocks of Australian society, by the 1990s every small town in the country had a Thai restaurant.
Politically, the bureaucrats followed suit. In the 1980s Australia stopped seeing itself as a British/American colony on the western edge of the Pacific, and began to see itself as an extension of South East Asia. Governments began working towards establishing closer ties with the region and slowly, the region started to respond. In the late 1990s there was a backlash against the 'Asianisation of Australia' and right-wing, nationalist representation in government suddenly grew with the rise of the One Nation party, however, without any real policies or direction for the country (other than not particularly liking anyone who didn't speak with a broad Australian accent), One Nation quickly faded and by the 2000s, the Australian Green Party (a socialist environmental group) had become the major minority political party. In 1999 Australia played its first truly significant international peace-keeping role when it took military responsibility for ensuring that East Timor achieved independence from Indonesia after pro-Indonesian militia groups waged civil war following a successful independence referendum.
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| Australian and Indonesian flags outside The Sari Club, Bali |
When the age of terror arrived with a bang on September 11, 2001, Australia, as a western capitalist nation, immediately saw itself as a potential target and in 2002 this fear was realised when Indonesian-based Islamic terrorists attacked a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia (a popular Australian holiday spot), killing 89 Australians. The motivation for the attack was essentially Australia's affiliation with American culture, but in the aftermath of the bombings, Australian and Indonesian authorities worked extremely closely together and the event actually served to forge closer ties between the two nations. Indonesia is now one of Australia's closest allies and since the bombings, the two countries have fought side-by-side to improve border security and put a stop to terrorism, (and drug trafficking) in the South East Asian region.
References
This history of Australia was first published by Matt Granfield and is Copyright © 2006, all rights reserved. Certain specific facts are referenced in the footnotes, other elements are common knowledge. (Go back to where you were reading)
- The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes; published by Collins Harvill in 1987
- http://www.immi.gov.au/facts/08abolition.htm - URL accessed March 13, 2006
- Ten Pound Poms - Australia's invisible migrants, by Hammerton and Thomson; published by Manchester University Press in 2005
- Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families; tabled in Federal Parliament on 26 May 1997
Useful links
- Australian immigration fact sheet - Information from the Australian Government on the various waves of immigrants to Australia
- Australian history - At the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Website
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