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Australia The History
The Aboriginal people were the first inhabitants of the Australian continent. Most anthropologists currently believe they migrated to the continent at least 50,000 years ago and occupied most of the continent by 30,000 years ago. Subsequently, rising sea levels separated Tasmania and other immediate offshore islands from the rest of the continent. Although Chinese, Malaysian, Indonesian, and Arab seafarers may have landed in northern Australia well before ad 1500, Australia was essentially unknown in the West until the 17th century. For the history of the indigenous people of Australia prior to European settlement, see Aboriginal Australians.
Early European Exploration
Although Australia was not known to the Western world, it did exist in late medieval European logic and mythology: A great Southland, or Terra Australis, was thought necessary to balance the weight of the northern landmasses of Europe and Asia. Terra Australis often appeared on early European maps as a large, globe-shaped mass in about its correct location, although Europeans recorded no actual discoveries until much later. Indeed, the European exploration of Australia took more than three centuries to complete; thus, what is often considered the oldest continent, geologically, was the last to be discovered and colonized by Europeans.
Portuguese and Spanish Sailings
In the 15th century Portugal’s navigation around Africa in pursuit of a trade route to India rekindled European interest in the region. Historians have long speculated that the Portuguese may have reached eastern Australia, but the evidence, mainly 16th-century French copies of Portuguese charts, is tenuous. The continent lay off the main trading routes, and the prevailing winds made it difficult to approach.
In the 16th and early 17th centuries, Spain, having established its empire in South and Central America, began a series of expeditions from Peru to the South Pacific. The most notable of these, by Luis Vaez de Torres in 1606, passed within sight of the Australian continent along the strait that now bears his name, between New Guinea and Australia. But Spanish interests were farther north in the Philippines, and the voyagers did not return.
Dutch Interest
During the 17th century The Netherlands established a string of trading centers from the Cape of Good Hope in Africa to the archipelago of present-day Indonesia. Stationed chiefly in the ports of Bantam and Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), the Dutch quickly made the discovery of Australia a reality. Helped by better sailing ships and greater knowledge of global wind systems, they were able to overcome the challenges in the southern Pacific. In 1606, some months before Torres’s voyage, Dutch seafarer Willem Jansz sighted the Cape York Peninsula on the continent’s northern coast, calling the land he saw New Holland; however, he mistakenly believed that Australia was a southern extension of New Guinea. In 1616 Dutch sailor Dirk Hartog followed a new southern route across the Indian Ocean to Batavia. Winds blew his ship, the Eendracht, too far to the east, and Hartog landed on an offshore island of Western Australia. Before sailing north to Batavia, he left a pewter plate on the island inscribed with a record of his visit.
Encouraged by Jansz’s voyages, Dutch governors-general at Batavia commissioned expeditions into the southern oceans. The most successful was that of Abel Tasman, who in 1642 moved into the waters of southern Australia, discovering the island he named Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). Tasman then sailed farther east to explore New Zealand. Dutch ships sailing to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) often sailed off course, and their crews landed on the western and northern coasts of Australia. Despite their increasing knowledge of the continent, known to them as New Holland, the Dutch did not follow up their oceanic discoveries with formal occupation; in their contacts, they found little of value for European trade. Thus, the way was open for the later arrival of the British.
British Expeditions and Claims
At first British involvement in Australia appeared likely to go the way of the Spanish and Dutch. William Dampier, a crewman on the buccaneer ship Cygnet that briefly touched the northwestern coast in 1688, reported dismally on the land and the indigenous inhabitants. In 1699 Dampier returned as captain of his own expedition, further exploring the western and northern coasts of Australia. He failed to reach the eastern coast, however, and British interest in the continent subsequently waned.
The 18th century in Western Europe ushered in the Age of Enlightenment, when philosophers and scientists stressed the value of global exploration. British explorers voyaged far and wide in search of new fauna and flora, a mission that chimed well with Britain’s growing power as a maritime empire.
In 1768 Captain James Cook departed Britain in command of the ship Endeavour on a three-year expedition to the Pacific. Cook’s main objective was scientific—to make telescopic observations of the transit of Venus from the island of Tahiti. But he later sailed westward, first to New Zealand, which he circumnavigated, then to the eastern coast of Australia. He landed at Botany Bay (near present-day Sydney), charted the coast from south to north, and claimed British possession of the eastern part of the continent, which he named New South Wales. The botanist Sir Joseph Banks, who accompanied him on the voyage, later advocated the establishment of a permanent settlement at Botany Bay. Cook’s subsequent voyages (in 1772-1775 and 1776-1779) helped to cement British claims, although French explorers also surveyed the eastern coast, including Jean-Francois Marie de Surville in 1769 and Marion Dufresne in 1772.
Even with Britain’s sustained efforts, Australia’s coasts were not fully explored until the 19th century. Matthew Flinders was the first to circumnavigate the continent from 1801 to 1803. He charted most of the coastline, but it was mid-century before the continent’s major interior features were known.
Penal Settlements
Although its general boundaries were becoming known, Australia appeared to be a remote and unattractive land for European settlement. But Britain’s growing commercial and military ambitions in the Pacific, combined with its domestic social and political tensions, helped to draw Australia into the web of British strategic ambitions. British merchants and shipowners were looking for new trading opportunities in the East. Naval strategists were seeking fresh supplies of ship timbers and sailcloth. And as the Industrial Revolution got under way, the galloping crime rates in Britain’s crowded cities created a demand for more and harsher jails, or gaols. With the loss of its American colonies in 1783, Britain no longer had a convenient place to send its criminals. But Australia was a suitably distant and terrifying alternative destination for transportation (the British system of exiling convicts as punishment). In addition, nearby Norfolk Island, with its tall pine trees, offered a new supply of wood for ships’ masts and flax for rope and sailcloth. Although establishing a penal colony was probably the main motive, naval strategy reinforced the decision of the British government in 1786 to establish a permanent settlement at Botany Bay.
Sydney Founded
On May 13, 1787, retired Royal Navy captain Arthur Phillip set sail from Portsmouth, England, with the First Fleet. The 11 ships of the fleet arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788 with more than 1,450 passengers, including 736 convicts, more than 200 marines, 20 civil officials, and 443 seamen. Finding the bay a poor choice, Phillip moved the fleet north to Port Jackson, which he acclaimed as “the finest harbour in the world.” Here he founded the first permanent British settlement on January 26, now known as Australia Day. The settlement was named Sydney for Britain’s home secretary, Lord Sydney, who was responsible for the colony. As the appointed governor of the New South Wales colony, Phillip was responsible for a large portion of Australia (from the eastern coast to as far west as the 135th meridian), but his human resources were limited. In particular, he lacked the horticulturists, skilled carpenters, and engineers needed to develop a self-supporting colony. His major concern, until his departure in 1792, was ruling virtually single-handedly over the small penal settlement.
Three major problems confronted the early governors: providing a sufficient supply of foodstuffs; developing an internal economic system; and producing exports to pay for the colony’s imports from Britain. Land around Sydney was too sandy for suitable farming, and the colony faced recurrent food shortages through the 1790s. Local food sources were largely limited to fish and kangaroo. Phillip encouraged the establishment of farms on the more fertile banks of the Hawkesbury River, a few miles northwest of Sydney, but floods often spoiled the crops. Starvation was averted only by the arrival of ships bearing supplies of grain from Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. Norfolk Island, about 1,500 km (about 950 mi) east of Australia, had been claimed by Phillip in February 1788. Its soils, which were more fertile than those of the mainland, were extensively farmed and soon became depleted. The settlement there was abandoned in 1803, but in the 1830s the island was repopulated as a penal settlement for more hardened convicts.
The New South Wales Corps
In 1792 the Royal Marines were replaced with the New South Wales Corps, which had been specifically recruited in Britain. Given grants of land and convict labor, members of the corps became the colony’s best and largest farmers, but they also posed a serious threat to the governors through their power over the economy. With a sharp eye for enhancing their income, they specialized in controlling the price of rum (a term that denoted any kind of alcoholic drink), which served largely as a means of internal exchange. Originally sent to protect and help administer the colony, the corps soon gained control of almost all aspects of colonial life.
Captain John Hunter, who was named Phillip’s successor as governor of New South Wales in 1795, tried in vain to gain control of the rum traffic. He was recalled to Britain and replaced by Captain Philip G. King, who served from 1800 to 1806. King instituted reforms designed to weaken the corps’s virtual monopoly on trade and was partially successful in restoring power to the government. In 1804, however, he had to use the corps to put down a rebellion by Irish convicts. In 1806 Captain William Bligh replaced King. The captain had gained notoriety earlier, when the crew of his ship, the Bounty, had mutinied in the Pacific. Bligh now set his sights—and exercised his notoriously rough tongue—on the officers of the corps, challenging their monopoly of rum and their rapid accumulation of town and rural land. He was met with the so-called Rum Rebellion, and on January 26, 1808, officers of the corps arrested him.
Bligh was later sent to London, where he successfully defended his policies, but he was not restored to his governorship. For the time being, the leaders of the corps had won. One of their ringleaders, John Macarthur, had meanwhile helped to establish the foundations of a valuable export industry. In 1802 he had shown British manufacturers samples of Australian wool, and with his wife, Elizabeth, he was among the leading breeders of merino sheep, whose fine wool later became the foundation of a thriving local industry.
Macquarie’s Government
Bligh’s replacement, a Scottish-born military officer, Lachlan Macquarie, served from 1809 to 1821. The most talented governor since Phillip, he was also the most benevolently autocratic. The New South Wales Corps was disbanded, and the government gained stability. Macquarie began an extensive public works program and employed Francis Greenway to design churches, hospitals, and government buildings in Sydney.
The population, both convict and free, increased rapidly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Population pressures accentuated tensions already developing between convict and free colonists. As convicts completed their sentences or were given tickets-of-leave to work on their own account, they wanted land and opportunities. These freed convicts were known as the emancipists, and their leaders urged that they be given more rights. They also opposed convict transportation and lobbied for it to be abolished. The free settlers, like the corps before them, maintained that convicts, even after their release, should be kept in servitude and excluded from polite society. They were known as the exclusives. Macquarie, like Bligh, tended to support the emancipists, granting them land and appointing them to minor offices. Opinion among the exclusives gradually hardened against the governor.
Constitutional Reform
Macquarie’s government was expensive, and his policy of encouraging emancipists did little to deter British criminals or stem the flow of convicts. In 1819 the British government sent Judge John Thomas Bigge to inspect and report on Macquarie’s administration. He recommended cuts in expenditures and an increase in the severity of punishment. The effect of his report was to shift the balance of power from the autocratic governor toward the wealthy settlers, whose enterprises were sustained by the well-disciplined convict labor and lifted the burden of support from the British treasury. Bigge’s reports also brought a change in the constitution of New South Wales. An act of parliament in 1823 curbed the autocratic power of the governor by the appointment of a nominated legislative council.
In 1825 the island settlement of Van Diemen’s Land, until then part of New South Wales, became a separate colony. The island had first been settled in 1803 at Hobart on the Derwent River, partly out of fear that France might claim it. The lieutenant governor of the new colony, George Arthur, was faithful to Bigge’s policies. He strongly supported the continuation of convict transportation, and in the early 1830s he established a bleak penal settlement at the foot of the Tasman Peninsula. Named Port Arthur, it became the most notorious of Australia’s penal settlements.
Early Australian Society
The convicts, and those who ruled them, were the makers of early Australian history. More than 150,000 convicts were sent to Australia before the British government officially abolished transportation to all of the eastern colonies in 1852. Approximately 20 percent of the convicts were women, and about one-third were Irish; the majority came from the poorer classes of British towns, especially London. Many had been repeatedly convicted of petty crimes and many of the women had been prostitutes, but in other respects they were typical of the class from which they came. Probably no more than half could read or write, but this proportion was typical of the British working class. A minority, who came from well-to-do backgrounds and were serving sentences for crimes such as forgery, were able to use their training in business or government offices. Although convicts appeared to be unpromising material, economic historians argue that they formed a reasonably efficient labor force.
The majority of convicts worked as assigned laborers and could earn wages for work done on their own time. Some accumulated substantial wealth and a few founded prominent colonial families. Corporal punishment was rare when there were powerful monetary incentives to work. But colonial officials prescribed harsh punishments for those who committed crimes after their arrival in the colony. Flogging was common, with a penalty of up to 200 lashes for crimes of theft. The worst offenders were sent to places of secondary punishment such as Norfolk Island and Port Arthur.
Convict transportation reinforced a masculine and plebeian strand in Australian society. A code of solidarity known as mateship and a distrust of authority were common characteristics. The distinctive Australian nasal accent and slang also developed during this period.
Settlement of the continent proceeded gradually from the eastern coast toward the center. The first industries, such as sealing and whaling, were based on the rich waters of the Pacific and Bass Strait. Wool soon became the main export product, generating a rapid movement of men and flocks into the interior. In 1813 Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson, and William Charles Wentworth crossed the Blue Mountains west of Sydney into the rich grasslands of western New South Wales, probably following routes already known to Aboriginal people. Later, southward journeys by Hamilton Hume and William Hovell in 1824 and Thomas Mitchell in 1836 opened the way for the settlement of the Port Phillip District, later the colony of Victoria. Already the government had become concerned about squatters, settlers who illegally occupied government lands in order to graze sheep. The government had begun to phase out free land grants in the 1820s, just when the wool industry was rapidly expanding. Many sheep farmers, or graziers, simply ignored new land-purchasing regulations. Unable to check the movement, the government sought to regularize squatting by issuing licenses in return for the payment of annual license fees.
The drive to explore the interior of Australia was fueled by the hope that it, like the great inland plains of the United States, would be well watered and fertile. In 1828 Charles Sturt followed the course of Australia’s largest river system, the Murray-Darling, testing the hypothesis that it originated in a great inland sea. But that hope proved barren, a conclusion confirmed by Sturt’s 1844-1846 expedition into central Australia. The colonists often visualized the land as strange, hard, and unyielding—a graveyard of lost hopes. The fate of Robert O’Hara Burke and William Wills, who died of malnutrition and exhaustion at Cooper Creek on their return from the first south-to-north crossing of the continent in 1861, tragically reinforced that conviction.
The temperament of Australian society was more secular than its American counterpart, and church attendance was probably less prevalent than in Britain. The Church of England (later renamed the Anglican Church of Australia) initially enjoyed a privileged position. However, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches were also well represented in the colonies. The early colonial governments gave financial support to all these churches for church building and denominational schools. The Anglican and Catholic churches were the main providers of education during the early colonial period.
Although the majority of Australians were illiterate, the press played an influential role in early colonial society. Freedom of the press was among the first liberties claimed by an increasingly vociferous body of free colonists. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser was published from 1803. Its editor, George Howe, also published the first books in Sydney, including a volume of poetry by Judge Barron Field in 1819. Earlier, David Collins, who had been with Arthur Phillip on the First Fleet, had published in London the first history of Australia, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (2 volumes, 1798-1802). In 1824 William C. Wentworth began publication of the Australian, a strongly opinionated newspaper that campaigned for the emancipists.
Expanding Colonization
Between the 1820s and the 1880s Australia gradually outgrew its convict origins, developing the institutions of a free, democratic, and capitalist society. From their beginnings in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, Australians established new colonies covering the continent, expanded pastoral and agricultural industries in the interior, and began the exploitation of gold and other minerals, especially in the eastern colonies. Each of the new colonies bore the imprint of its distinctive origins.
New Settlements
As a prelude to increased British interest, Captain James Stirling explored the Swan River on the western coast in 1827 and led a group of British investors in the establishment of Western Australia in 1829. Underfinanced, Stirling’s new settlement of free settlers at Perth stagnated. In 1850 the colony requested convicts to increase its labor supply and received about 10,000 by 1868. Only with the discovery of gold in the 1890s, however, was the fortune of Western Australia reversed.
In 1829 a convict outpost was established in the far north of New South Wales at Moreton Bay. The settlement later moved to a more favorable site on the Brisbane River, where the town of Brisbane was established. This was to become the capital of the new colony of Queensland, which separated from New South Wales in 1859.
By the 1830s settlers had taken up the best grazing land in Van Diemen’s Land. In 1835 rival syndicates of land-hungry speculators ventured across Bass Strait and took preemptive possession of land on the Yarra River at the head of Port Phillip Bay. The leader of one party, John Batman, negotiated unofficially with the Aboriginal people for possession of some 243,000 hectares (600,000 acres) of land. The bargain was considered fraudulent and not ratified by the colonial government, which followed the practice elsewhere on the continent of assuming possession of land for the British crown by declaring it a terra nullius (“no one’s land”). This practice was based on the assumption that Aboriginal people were nomads with no fixed place of abode. Government officials from Sydney arrived later and laid out the town of Melbourne, which soon received a steady flow of sheep and settlers, particularly lowland Scots.
South Australia, with its capital of Adelaide, was established in 1836. It was founded, under British government supervision, by the South Australian Company, a band of colonizers inspired by the writings of Edward Wakefield. Under Wakefield’s theory of systematic colonization, they endeavored to create a colony that avoided the use of convict labor. Wakefield believed that by selling land at a “sufficient price,” rather than giving it away as had been the British colonial practice, colonies could generate enough income to sponsor the immigration of laborers, who would then work the land for the colonial investors. By controlling land prices, Wakefield assumed he could also regulate the supply of labor, and reproduce, in an ideal form, the class and family structure of British society. South Australia was the only colony that never received convicts from Britain. It became a more urbanized and less deferential society than its founders had planned, but the Congregationalists, Methodists, and Baptists of the South Australian Company helped to make it the most respectable of the Australian colonies. Wheat farming and tin and copper mining became its principal industries.
Wool, Gold, and Economic Development
Australian soils and climate, with the recurrent droughts, were better suited for large-scale livestock grazing than for farming. During the 1830s and 1840s the continent was rapidly transformed as squatters established huge sheep runs. Paying only a minimal license fee, squatters could claim virtually as much land as they wanted. From 1830 to 1850 wool exports rose from 2 million to 41 million pounds while the population of the colonies increased from 70,000 to 334,000. With new immigrants and the growth of the capital cities, each of which served as the major port for its region, the Australian colonies were poised to enter a new phase of development.
In April 1851 Edward Hargraves found gold at Summer Hill Creek, near Bathurst in New South Wales. Hargraves had recently returned from the California gold rush, and his find precipitated a new rush to the other side of the Pacific. After additional finds, the rush quickly became centered in Victoria at Mount Alexander (focused on the town of Castlemaine), Ballarat, and Bendigo. These concentrations of rich minerals offset the dispersion of sheep farming settlements and created Australia’s largest inland towns. Gold was later found elsewhere in New South Wales and Queensland.
In the following ten years, Australia exported at least 30 million ounces (850 metric tons) of gold. In a single decade the Australian population trebled from 400,000 to 1.2 million, and Melbourne, the gateway to the new goldfields, overtook Sydney as the largest city in Australia. British and Irish immigrants led the rush, but Americans, Germans, Italians, and Canadians also arrived in unprecedented numbers. In Victoria miners quickly became irritated with the high cost of mining licenses and the regulation of their right to search for gold. After miners staged an uprising at the Eureka claim at Ballarat in December 1854, the license fee for miners was replaced with an export tariff on gold (see Eureka Rebellion). Miners thereafter held a miner’s right instead of a license; for the fee of one pound per year, the miner’s right also gave them the right to vote.
Both miners and colonists responded with alarm, and fierce racial hatred, to the influx of Chinese immigrants attracted by gold. In 1856 Victoria restricted the entry of Chinese. By the end of the century, exclusionary legislation in several colonies had established the foundations of the so-called White Australia Policy, which was made explicit by the new federal government in 1901. For a while it seemed that Queensland, which began to bring in Polynesian laborers for its sugarcane plantations in the 1860s, might remain at odds with the other colonies; it eventually conformed, however, and small-scale sugar farms run by whites replaced the plantations. For many decades thereafter, the White Australia Policy continued to limit the number of non-Europeans immigrating to Australia for purposes of permanent settlement.
Development of Political Institutions
Unlike most other British colonies, those in Australia were slow to attain a significant measure of self-government. The colonial wealth generated by gold hastened the movement toward colonial independence. The abolition of convict transportation was also a factor, as the colonies transformed into free settlements. In 1842 New South Wales was granted an enlarged legislative council, with two-thirds of its members to be elected. In 1852 New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Van Diemen’s Land (which changed its name to Tasmania in 1856) were allowed to draw up new constitutions, and these were all approved by the British Parliament by 1856. (Similar constitutions were approved for Queensland when it became a colony in 1859 and for Western Australia in 1890.) The constitutions provided for bicameral (two-chamber) parliaments, with most of the membership elected on a franchise based on property qualifications. Property qualifications were lower for elections to the lower houses, or assemblies, than to the upper houses, or councils. Executive power was held in each colony by a premier and a cabinet or council of ministers, who were required to maintain the support of the lower house. Voting by secret ballot (instead of by raising hands) and other innovations made the new colonial governments quite democratic. In general, the more property-based upper houses tended to counter the reformist leanings of the lower houses.
The colonies then set out to gain control over their land policies. The gold rush generation—the most skilled, best educated, and politically aware in Australia’s colonial history—led demands to break the squatters’ hold on the land. Several colonies passed acts to enable settlers to acquire land on credit and establish small farms.
In the 1860s the gold rush ebbed, although deep-shaft mining sustained the main centers into the 1890s, and new mineral fields continued to be discovered in western New South Wales, Queensland, and Western Australia. Although wool exports kept the colonies fairly prosperous, colonial debate soon centered on the role of government in the economy. In particular, railroad construction became a government activity because of the huge costs involved.
In 1866 Victoria, followed by South Australia and Tasmania, adopted a policy of high tariffs on imported goods in order to protect its own small industries and markets. New South Wales (and Queensland to a lesser extent) maintained a free-trade policy.
Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, arguments over free trade versus protection divided the press, the political parties, and the colonies. This, together with the continuing jealousies among them, hindered any significant attempts at cooperation and possible union among the six colonies until the 1890s.
Colonial-Aboriginal Conflict
Phillip’s initial settlement at Sydney brought him into contact with Aboriginal people, many of whom used the surrounding lands as their campsites and hunting domains. The governor had sought “to conciliate their affections,” and relatively few major confrontations took place between colonists and indigenous people in the first decade. As more settlers arrived, however, conflict intensified. On the mainland, the Aboriginal communities were forced to retreat into the drier interior as graziers sought lands for their sheep runs. In the early 1820s troops were deployed near Bathurst, northwest of Sydney, in response to reports of an “exterminating war” between graziers and Aboriginal people. Conflicts were deadliest in Van Diemen’s Land, where in 1828 Lieutenant Governor Arthur proclaimed martial law in an attempt to drive Aboriginal people from the settled districts. Unable to overcome colonial arms and fears, and despite the official British policy of protection, the 5,000 Aboriginal people of the island were quickly reduced to a tiny remnant confined to Flinders Island in Bass Strait. See also Colonial-Aboriginal Wars.
In principle, the official colonial policy throughout the 19th century was to treat the Aboriginal people as equals, with the intention of eventually converting them to Christianity and European civilization. Governor Macquarie even established a school for Aboriginal children. Although official policy stressed good intentions, such acts were frequently not supported and were sometimes even actively resisted.
In the 1830s and 1840s Christian missions and protectorates were established throughout Australia, and many Aboriginal people were sent to them. The protectorates were created under British legislation requiring the protection of indigenous peoples throughout the British Empire. They were often formed under religious auspices, although most later came under state control. Mission life had a profound and lasting impact on the lives of Aboriginal families. Many, if not most, Aboriginal people lived under the influence of the missions, which in the early 20th century became the main conduit for Aboriginal children being fostered or adopted into white families.
The clash between whites and Aboriginal people was especially severe on the frontier. In the 1830s and 1840s, as settlers pushed inland, some Aboriginal people were employed on sheep stations, and others were used for police patrols, but even some active church efforts to serve and educate the Aboriginal people did not stabilize race relations. White settlers sometimes poisoned and hunted Aboriginal people and abused and exploited Aboriginal women and children. The primary causes of the catastrophic decline in Aboriginal population, however, were probably European-introduced diseases such as smallpox and measles, malnutrition, and alcoholism and its associated violence. Between 1788 and 1930 the Aboriginal population fell from as many as 500,000 to less than 100,000. By the 20th century Aboriginal people living in their traditional way were largely confined to remote areas of the Northern Territory, Queensland, and Western Australia. Not until the 1950s did the Aboriginal population begin to inch back to its level prior to European contact, and not until the 1970s did the federal government begin to review and correct past policies.
In addition, government-sponsored assimilation policies encouraged the eradication of Indigenous Australian culture. From 1910 to 1970 at least 100,000 indigenous children, especially those of mixed descent, were forcibly removed from their parents and communities. Placed in state institutions, church missions, or white foster families, they were completely cut off from their own culture and assimilated into white society. Those who were removed in this way later became known as the Stolen Generations. The practice officially ended in the late 1960s, but the effects would be felt for generations to come.
Cities and Suburbs
Between 1851 and 1891 the Australian population grew from 437,000 to 3.2 million. It became one of the fastest growing and most urbanized regions of the world. In 1891 more than one-third of Australians lived in the six capital cities. The largest cities, Melbourne and Sydney, were as populous as all but the largest European and American cities. The colonial cities sprawled; Melbourne’s 473,000 people occupied as much area as London’s 4.7 million.
People gathered in the cities in part because the staple industry, grazing, employed relatively few people. Mining, the next most significant industry, was based on exhaustible resources in remote locations and usually did not produce permanent settlements. Increased urbanization was also a reflection of the high demand for urban goods and services in a prosperous and increasingly suburbanized society. Australian per capita incomes exceeded those of the United States and other developed countries. Australia was arguably the first suburban nation. Working people, who formed the bulk of colonial immigrants, were often able to aspire to homes and gardens of their own. However, many of their houses were cheap and flimsy shanties built on low-lying, badly drained allotments. Sydney and Melbourne had typhoid rates equal to the worst-hit European cities.
Each capital served as the major port and administrative center for its respective colony. Perceiving others as rivals, each tended to emphasize its own identity. Newspapers and colonial politicians talked up their differences. The rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney was especially intense. Until the 1890s contacts between individual colonies were secondary to their ties with Britain. Even when transport and communications links were established between the colonies, these did as much to divide as to unite them. In fact, each of the eastern colonies—Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland—built its railways to a different gauge.
The capital cities were also the center of political change. In the 1850s merchants and professionals agitated for political reform and the drafting of new colonial constitutions. Small-scale manufacturers and early trade union leaders aided the passage of tariff and industrial legislation favorable to the urban working class. In 1856 Victoria’s stonemasons successfully struck in support of an eight-hour working day, the beginning of a movement that rapidly secured support across all the colonies. All the colonies established systems of free, compulsory, and secular primary education by the 1880s, making education primarily a government responsibility. The power base for most reforms crossed class lines, although by 1890 trade unionists were moving steadily toward the formation of their own political party. By the 1890s Australia was widely regarded as a pacesetter in progressive social legislation.
The culture of the cities was essentially British. Many colonial Australians read, with a three-month delay due to distance, the books and newspapers being read and discussed in London. However, a small number of Australian writers began to command a wider public. Local themes took precedence in For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) by Marcus Clarke and Clara Morrison: A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever (1854) by Catherine Helen Spence. Despite the dominance of the cities, by the 1880s Australians had begun to fashion a national identity based on the romantic images of the sheep shearer, small farmer (known as a selector), and miner. Short-story writer Henry Lawson and balladist A. B. “Banjo” Paterson became the leaders of a literary movement based in Sydney that celebrated the rugged countryside—known as the bush or outback—as the original source of Australian ideals. The movement was associated with the Sydney weekly journal the Bulletin. The true bushman, as portrayed by the Bulletin writers, was both an individualist who was a natural rebel against authority and a collectivist who was a loyal comrade, or “mate.” The archetypal bushman struggled against his boss and the squatter, but his most implacable enemy was the harsh, waterless country of the outback. As distinctive as these writers’ outlook was their vernacular style, which echoed the laconic speech and sardonic humor of the people they characterized.
Movement Toward Federation
Federation of the Australian colonies came later than similar movements elsewhere. The idea of unification appeared as early as 1847 in proposals by Earl Grey, Britain’s colonial secretary. In the 1850s John Dunmore Lang, a Scottish Presbyterian cleric in New South Wales, formed the Australian League to campaign for a united Australia. Conferences among colonial governments in the 1860s also considered closer cooperation and unification. With the formation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, British officials began to expect a similar effort among Australians. No plan, however, received serious attention, due to the intense rivalries among the colonies.
In the 1880s the prospect of European—as distinct from British—colonization of the Pacific triggered fears of Australia’s lack of defense. Queensland, anticipating German moves, claimed Papua on New Guinea in 1883 but, unable to support this claim, had to urge Britain to rule the territory and to claim other islands. Concerned that they might not be able to direct British policy in their interests and aware of the emergence of new powers in Europe, the Australian colonies created a Federal Council in 1885, but it was merely a consultative body, with no legislative or executive powers. The refusal of New South Wales to participate in the council meetings doomed this effort at federalism.
Other developments during the 1880s, however, served to keep the idea of unification alive. As trade and communications between the colonies advanced, pressure mounted for the lowering of the customs barriers between them. Debate over the White Australia Policy demonstrated the need for uniform immigration rules. As more Australian workers unionized, trade unions became more centralized, suggesting the attractiveness of a single economic and political system. Unstable economic conditions and outright depression by 1892 contributed to the development of labor parties in each colony to represent worker interests.
In the early 1890s the long economic boom that had sustained the colonies’ progress since the 1860s came to an abrupt end. The crash hit Melbourne especially hard, and helped to shift the initiative in the federal movement from Victoria, where it had been strong during the 1880s, to New South Wales. In 1889 the premier of New South Wales, Henry Parkes, announced his support for a new form of federalism that was not based on the Federal Council model. In 1891 a convention of colonial delegates in Sydney began drafting a federal constitution, but political and regional rivalries slowed the process. It was 1897 before the policymakers agreed upon a draft constitution and 1899 before the Australian people finally approved it. The Commonwealth of Australia was accordingly approved by the British Parliament in 1900 and became a reality on January 1, 1901.
The federal constitution reflected both British and American constitutional models. It incorporated the British principle of parliamentary government, with cabinets responsible to a bicameral legislature, but, as in the United States, delegated only specific, limited powers to the federal government. The new House of Representatives, like the British House of Commons, was based on popular representation, but the Senate, like its American counterpart, preserved the representation of the six colonies, which now became states. As neither Sydney nor Melbourne was an acceptable federal capital, in 1911 the Australian Capital Territory was established for a new capital, Canberra—again based on the Washington, D.C., model.
The trade unions led the way in developing Australia’s political party system. Some larger unions of miners and sheep shearers were already federal in structure before 1901. The Labor Party, founded by the combined unions through the Trades Hall Councils, moved to adopt a national program and required its parliamentary representatives to carry out the party’s program by voting as a bloc. The effectiveness of this model of disciplined class-based party organization was demonstrated when Labor gained office nationally in 1904. Other parties quickly followed Labor’s lead.
Meanwhile, women in Australia were securing more political rights. In 1894 the women of South Australia won the right to vote, making them the first women of a British colony after New Zealand to do so. In 1902 the new commonwealth government extended that right to all Australian women.
The Commonwealth
Central to the history of Australia in the 20th century was the development of both a national government and a national culture. Commonwealth governments, led by architects of federation such as Alfred Deakin, quickly established a protective tariff to foster domestic development, introduced a system of arbitration for setting minimum wages in industry, and preserved the white immigration policy. Nevertheless, the old colonial political rivalries and factional alliances gave way only gradually.
Identity Forged by War
World War I (1914-1918), much more than federation itself, helped to create a sense of national identity in Australia. Responding to the allied call for troops, Australia sent more than 330,000 volunteers, who took part in some of the bloodiest battles. Suffering a casualty rate higher than that of many other participants, Australia became increasingly conscious of its contribution to the war effort. At Gallipoli an Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac), fighting alongside British and French troops, tried in vain to launch a drive on the Ottoman forces in the Dardanelles. The date of the fateful landing, April 25, 1915, became equated with Australia’s coming of age, and as Anzac Day it has remained the country’s most significant day of public homage. Through the writings of war correspondent and historian C. E. W. Bean, the Anzac legend became the basis for a new sense of national identity, one that united former servicemen and their families across class and geographical boundaries.
In 1915 William M. (“Billy”) Hughes became prime minister and leader of the Labor Party. Representing Australia at councils in London, Hughes personified Australian energies. When he failed to carry the electorate in the first of two attempts to institute the military draft, Hughes remained in power by joining his former conservative opponents and forming the Nationalist Party, much to the annoyance of his Labor colleagues. He attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, acquiring German New Guinea as a mandated territory and establishing Australia’s right to enter the League of Nations. The powers designated to the federal government in the constitution proved sufficient to allow a strong central government.
Interwar Years
After an internal backlash within the Nationalist Party forced the retirement of Hughes in 1923, Stanley M. Bruce became prime minister. The Country Party, founded in 1920 as a patriotic, conservative movement to protect the interests of farmers and graziers, joined the Nationalist coalition, although it kept its own identity. The chief opponent of the coalition was Labor, now committed to social-welfare objectives. To maintain wartime levels of production and expansion, the government sought to increase immigration, investment, and export industries (under the propaganda slogan “Men, Money, Markets”). However, the Great Depression that hit in 1929 cut deeply into the health of the Australian economy, increasing public and private debts at a time of massive unemployment.
Recovery from the economic depression, led from 1929 to early 1932 by James H. Scullin and the Labor Party, was extremely uneven. Deflationary economic policy contributed to economic effects that were far harsher than those felt elsewhere in the world. At its worst in 1932, unemployment reached almost one-third of the male workforce. Disagreement on government policy broke Labor again in 1931, and for the rest of the 1930s the United Australia Party, composed of former Nationalists and disenchanted Laborites, held the reins of power. The party was led by Joseph Aloysius Lyons.
Upon assuming responsibility for its own foreign affairs, Australia was guided by its cultural and political ties with Britain. Emphasis was therefore placed on following Britain’s leadership in solving the problems of the depression. Chief among these was an attempt to redirect more trade between Britain and the dominions. As early as the 1920s, however, Japan and the United States were among Australia’s best customers for its wool exports. Against its own interests, but motivated in part by fears of Japanese expansionism, Australia sought to reestablish British trade at the expense of its relations with Japan. In the League of Nations the Australian government tended to favor appeasement in order to avert war with the Fascist powers.
World War II
In April 1939 Lyons died in office and was succeeded by Robert Menzies. In September of that year Australia entered World War II, after Britain declared war on Germany. Menzies immediately placed Australia’s small armed forces at Britain’s disposal. The elections of 1941 returned the Labor Party to power for the first time since 1931, and John Curtin became prime minister. British Singapore, long regarded as one of the world’s strongest fortresses, fell to Japanese forces in February 1942, and shortly thereafter Britain’s Royal Navy suffered defeat in the Pacific. In March Japanese forces occupied the Dutch East Indies and landed on New Guinea. Japanese bombers raided Darwin several times, and Japanese midget submarines entered Sydney Harbour. However, Britain was no longer able to supply naval protection to Australia. Although Australian casualties were lighter than in World War I, Australians were more psychologically affected by World War II because of their fears of Japanese invasion. Curtin recognized that Australia relied more on the United States than on Britain for security, and he sought U.S. assistance to contain the Japanese advance. In May U.S. forces surrendered the Philippines; until the Allied liberation of the Philippines in 1945, U.S. general Douglas MacArthur and his staff used Australia for their base of operations.
Australian industry was again transformed by the needs of war. The economy was redirected toward manufacturing, and heavy industries ringed the capital cities. Drawing on wartime models of planning, Prime Minister Curtin’s administration laid the foundation for policies of postwar reconstruction. Curtin died in 1945, a few months before Allied victory in the Pacific. The new Labor government under Joseph B. Chifley continued the policies of full employment and state social welfare developed during the war years. It began a vigorous immigration program, drawing New Australians, as they were called, from continental Europe as well as from traditional sources in the British Isles. As the perils of war receded, however, Labor’s plans for the nationalization of key industries, such as banking, encountered growing opposition. As a charter member of the United Nations, Australia also agreed to the decolonization of the islands in the Pacific, including the preparation of Papua New Guinea for independence (achieved in 1975).
The Menzies Era
In 1949 Menzies became prime minister a second time, ushering in a long era of conservative rule. During the war, the old United Australian Party had disintegrated and Menzies was ousted as prime minister. In opposition he led the formation in 1944 of the new Liberal Party, which upheld principles of free enterprise against Labor’s inclination toward socialism. Menzies, who remained prime minister until 1966, dominated federal politics against an internally divided Labor Party. He stressed the sentimental link with the British crown but developed a strong relationship with the United States, formalized in the 1951 treaty that created the tripartite mutual-defense alliance known as ANZUS (acronym for Australia, New Zealand, and the United States); it led to greater policy coordination between the three countries. Beginning in the 1940s Australia took a more active interest in Pacific and Asian affairs. Under the Colombo Plan, Asians began studying at Australian institutions in the 1950s. Menzies maintained the White Australia Policy, but under his successors it was gradually discarded, and since the early 1970s the entry of immigrants has been based on criteria other than race.
The Liberals’ long rule (1949-1972) coincided with the most sustained period of economic prosperity since the 19th century. Despite the party’s devotion to free enterprise, however, government intervention in the form of assisted immigration, tariff protection, wage arbitration, state enterprises, and government assistance for health care and education, including university scholarships, remained important strands of policy. Foreign investment, especially from the United States, transformed the Australian manufacturing industry; “Australia’s Own Car,” the Holden, was designed and manufactured by a subsidiary of General Motors Corporation. The coastal cities and their sprawling suburbs were the main beneficiaries of this growth. Between 1901 and 1971 urbanization rapidly increased; the state capitals grew from 35 percent to 61 percent of the national population. By 1971 almost three-quarters of Australian house dwellers owned or were buying their own homes. “The Lucky Country”—a title applied ironically by social critic Donald Horne—was how Australians increasingly thought of themselves.
Menzies had clung to the British connection, but his government followed policies that were steadily weakening it. Between 1947 and 1970 more than 2 million immigrants arrived in Australia, more than 60 percent from countries outside the British Isles. In the inner suburbs of the cities Italians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, and Lebanese were creating their own distinctive ethnic enclaves. From the beginning, Australia stressed the goal of assimilation: New Australians were encouraged to quickly learn the English language and assume the Australian way of life. By the late 1960s, however, representatives of ethnic associations were winning increased support for more pluralistic policies based on multiculturalism.
After World War II Australia remained active in Western military alliances, contributing troops to the Korean War (1950-1953) and the Vietnam War (1959-1975) as a staunch ally of the United States. Though not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Western military alliance formed in 1949, Australia participated in its Asian counterpart, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), from 1954 until its dissolution in 1977. Meanwhile, Australia adjusted its domestic and foreign policies, which included recognizing its growing ties with Japan.
Times of Change
After Menzies the Liberals’ fortunes began to wane. Beginning in the late 1960s, Australia experienced the waves of cultural change that swept through many of the Western democracies: the coming of political age of the postwar baby boomers, movements for women’s liberation and indigenous rights, and a growing awareness of environmental issues. A succession of lackluster prime ministers, public disenchantment with the Vietnam War (and Australia’s official support of U.S. policies in the war), and political exhaustion sapped the Liberals’ support.
In 1972, uniting after years of internal disputes, the Labor Party under Gough Whitlam again came to power. “It’s Time,” the party’s campaign slogan, caught the mood of change. Whitlam immediately announced the return of Australian troops from Vietnam. In 1973 the government established an inquiry into Aboriginal land rights, the first step in a process that later led to commonwealth legislation on the subject. Whitlam’s ambitious program of social reforms, however, encountered strong opposition from Liberal state governments. In November 1975 the conservative majority in the Senate, alarmed by the government’s financial imprudence, precipitated a constitutional crisis that culminated in the dismissal of the Whitlam government by governor-general Sir John Kerr. In the ensuing election the Liberal-Country coalition was returned to power under Malcolm Fraser. He reinstated the domestic and foreign policies followed by the earlier Liberal Party governments but maintained Labor’s new emphases on multiculturalism and the environment. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia began to arrive on Australia’s northern shores. In the 1980s and 1990s the flow of immigrants from other parts of Asia, including Hong Kong and mainland China, increased.
Fraser’s coalition survived the 1980 election with a much-reduced majority. Further shaken by defections from Liberal Party ranks and by foreign trade scandals, Fraser suffered a sharp defeat in the elections of March 1983. His Labor successor, the charismatic former trade union leader Bob Hawke, sought to promote cooperation between workers and management and took the first steps toward the deregulation of the economy by floating the Australian dollar. He maintained a staunchly pro-American foreign policy, sending a small military contingent in support of the United States in the Persian Gulf War. Labor retained its majorities in the elections of 1984, 1987, and 1990. In December 1991, with Australia mired in recession and Hawke’s popularity waning, Labor chose Hawke’s former treasury minister, Paul Keating, as party leader and prime minister. Pledging to change Australia to a federal republic and underlining the need for a reorientation toward Asia, Keating led Labor to victory in the March 1993 election.
Among the larger cultural issues with which Australia grappled in the 1980s and early 1990s was the question of Aboriginal land rights. Like other colonial countries such as Canada, Australia was challenged to address the land claims of the indigenous inhabitants of the country, who had been largely ignored for centuries. In 1992, in the historic Mabo v. Queensland case, the High Court of Australia ruled that the people of the Murray Islands, in the Torres Strait, held title to their land, thereby acknowledging that Australia was occupied at the time of European settlement. In 1993 the government passed an act allowing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to file land claims. See also Aboriginal Land Rights Acts.
By the early 1990s public opinion polls showed that most Australians favored the establishment of a federal republic, with an Australian president replacing the British monarch as head of state. Prime Minister Keating had placed himself at the head of the republican movement, but by the parliamentary elections of 1996 many Australians perceived him as arrogant and his government as out of touch with the electorate. Campaigning on a platform of economic reform, and directing its appeal to the “battlers”—disenchanted working class electors of the bush and outer suburbs—the Liberal-National coalition won a solid majority in the House of Representatives. (In the Senate, however, independents and minor parties held the balance of power until the 2004 elections.)
The Howard Government
The new prime minister, John Howard, a veteran of the Fraser government, was a longtime advocate of labor-market and taxation reform. On social and moral questions, however, he was considered to be the most conservative prime minister since Menzies. His government’s repeated attempts to curb the rights to native title of land won by Aboriginal people under the Mabo judgment drew international criticism. His attempt in 1998 to break the union power of dockworkers encountered bitter opposition by unionists. Howard narrowly retained power in the parliamentary elections of 1998.
In 1999 the authoritarian Suharto regime crumbled in Indonesia. Howard sent Australian troops under United Nations auspices to secure the independence of East Timor. His decision reversed 20 years of Australian complicity in Indonesian rule over the former Portuguese colony.
Domestic Issues
Meanwhile, a constitutional convention voted to change Australia’s government to a republic. Howard, a monarchist, advocated the status quo in the popular referendum required to change the constitution. While opinion polls continued to indicate that most Australians favored a republic, the referendum of November 1999 failed to secure a majority, largely because many voters wanted the president to be popularly elected, instead of appointed by parliament as the convention had recommended.
In September 2000 Australia hosted the Summer Olympic Games at Sydney. In the opening ceremony Australia’s Olympic heroine, Aboriginal sprinter Cathy Freeman, became a central figure in a pageant celebrating a proudly multicultural Australia. The Olympics also turned national attention to many unresolved issues concerning Aboriginal Australians. However, the government chose to ignore these issues, and Howard drew criticism from religious leaders in May 2001 for failing to acknowledge the suffering of thousands of Aboriginal people under government-led assimilation policies of the past.
Meanwhile, Howard carried through his long-held ambition to reform the Australian taxation system by the introduction of a goods and services tax in 2000. The reforms were widely unpopular, and as the 2001 election approached Howard’s government seemed likely to be defeated. Two months before the election, however, Howard’s government won a surge of popular support for its stand against illegal immigration. The government refused a plea by the captain of a Norwegian cargo vessel, the Tampa, to land 450 asylum seekers from the Middle East, mostly from Iraq. In a process that drew international attention and criticism, but was soon repeated with other boatloads of would-be illegal entrants from the Middle East and Afghanistan, the refugees were transported to camps on remote Pacific islands to have their asylum claims processed. (Illegal entrants had previously been sent to detention centers in remote parts of the Australian continent.)
The September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States further rallied support to the Howard government, with voters favoring stability over change in a time of crisis. In the November 2001 election the Liberal-National coalition won a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, giving Howard a third term as prime minister.
War on Terrorism
Howard subsequently offered strong support for the war on terrorism declared by the United States. His offer took on new significance after 88 Australians were killed in a terrorist bombing in Bali, Indonesia, in October 2002. Howard contributed Australian troops to the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, his decision to send about 2,000 Australian troops to Iraq failed to gain widespread public support. In February 2003 the Senate passed its first-ever vote of no confidence against an Australian prime minister to express its disapproval of Howard’s decision. Nevertheless, Howard positioned himself as a strong ally of U.S. president George W. Bush and pledged to keep Australian troops in Iraq for as long as necessary. (By late 2004, about 850 noncombat troops remained there.) See also U.S.-Iraq War.
2004 and 2007 Elections
Meanwhile, the Howard government sustained a period of economic growth noted for low unemployment and inflation rates. The robust economy was widely credited with delivering a resounding victory for Howard’s Liberal-National coalition in the October 2004 parliamentary elections. The coalition won solid majorities in both houses of the Australian parliament, securing Howard’s fourth term as prime minister and giving the government control over the Senate for the first time in two decades.
However, the ruling coalition fared poorly in the 2007 elections. Vo |
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