Let this section take you on a marvelous journey through \JAustralia\j's fascinating history, from its birth as a continent to its development as a modern nation. Learn about \JAustralia\j's Aboriginal peoples and live the adventure of the First Fleet. Share the experiences of the first European settlers as they take the momentous steps that led to the creation of today's \JAustralia\j.
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"Australia, Formation of",2,0,0,0
In time beyond all dreaming, out of any mind - perhaps about 300 million years ago, when the present South America, Africa, \JArabia\j, \JIran\j, \JTibet\j, New Guinea, \JAustralia\j, New Zealand and \JAntarctica\j were joined in one immense continent lately called \JGondwanaland\j - the world began to give \JAustralia\j its features. Vegetation spread over the whole continent. In the next 50 million years, soils formed, forests appeared and animals moved from sea to land.
About 250 million years ago, the supercontinent began to break up, as the tectonic plates on which its sections rested drifted apart, with New Guinea remaining attached to \JAustralia\j, forming the larger entity now known as Sahul, and this whole attached to \JAntarctica\j. It was then that the Australian animals began their slow evolution to their distinctive prehistoric and historic forms.
In the early Cretaceous period, about 125 million years ago, there was widespread flooding of the continent. The eastern coastal area remained above water, separated from other dry areas in the centre, west and south by a large inland sea, a separation which encouraged specific adaptations.
\ITurmoil in Development\i
In the next 30 million years, Sahul and \JAntarctica\j broke apart, with Sahul beginning its slow northward drift, bringing with it the primitive \Jrainforest\j cover it had shared with \JAntarctica\j. Some 80 to 50 million years ago, the ocean floor to the southeast of Sahul opened, making the Tasman Sea, while another such opening in the north created the \JCoral\j Sea 62-56 million years ago.
Then, between 55 and 38 million years ago, as the continent's northern drift accelerated, its tectonic plate ground against that underlying the Pacific Ocean, producing the uplifts now known as the New Guinean Highlands, and the Great Escarpment of Eastern \JAustralia\j, on which the Great Dividing Range marks the west/east watershed.
And, in a conflagration that continued into the recent past, volcanoes erupted along an arc corresponding roughly to the Great Dividing Range, a pattern seemingly determined by steady northward drift over a single fissure in the earth's crust up to another, lesser fissure nearer the equator. The conflagration resulted in large deposits of silcretes and basalts.
\IAustralia Forms\i
The formation of the \JCoral\j and Tasman Seas and the subsequent rifting of the sea between Sahul and \JAntarctica\j about 40 million years ago produced the anti-cyclonic systems of winds and currents, a major effect of which was to bring rain to the coastal fringes but to leave the interior arid.
As this climatic pattern developed, the broad-leaved \Jrainforest\j vegetation contracted north from an increasingly unsympathetic continental environment. As the continent's continued drift brought it within the tropics, and made it subject to the action of the summer (northwest) monsoon, this process intensified.
Thus \JAustralia\j moved towards its present configuration. About two million years ago, the corals of the Great Barrier Reef began to form.
\BAdditional information provided by Cambridge Dictionary of Scientists\b
The Exploration of Australia
Australia was first colonized from Asia at least 40 000 and probably 100 000 years ago, but it remained unknown to Europeans until the east coast was charted by Portuguese sailors during the 1520s. Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603ûc.1659) made two voyages to Australia, in 1642 and 1644. He was the first person to discover Tasmania (which he named after the Governor of Batavia, Antony Van Diemen) and New Zealand. However, he failed to discover whether Australia was an island or not, or what the relationship was between the pieces of land he had discovered.
The major work of charting Australia and New Zealand was carried out by COOK. On his first voyage (1768û70), he charted the coast of New Zealand and the entire east coast of Australia. He landed on Possession I off the tip of Cape York on 22 August 1770, and claimed the east coast for Britain under the name of New South Wales. BANKS sailed as a botanist with Cook, and was later largely responsible for the establishment of the Botany Bay penal colony.
The first fleet landed in Botany Bay during Cook's third voyage, on 26 January 1788, commanded by Arthur Phillip, first Governor of New South Wales. Expeditions were sent to fill in the gaps in the charts of the coastline. George Bass (?û1812) circumnavigated Tasmania in the late 1790s, while his associate Matthew Flinders (1774û1814) later charted the coastline of South Australia and, during 1801û3, was the first person to circumnavigate the continent.
During the governorship of Lachlan Macquarie, the interior of New South Wales was explored by William Charles Wentworth (1793û1872) and other explorers were quick to follow into the depths of the continent. During 1824û5 Hamilton Hume (1797û1873) discovered the Murray River, and in 1827 Allan Cunningham (1791û1839) carried out a good deal of exploration of the remoter parts of New South Wales in the search for botanical specimens.
Charles Sturt (1795û1869), together with Hume, discovered the Darling and lower Murray rivers between 1829û30, but failed to find the inland sea which he believed to exist west of the Darling. Thomas Livingstone Mitchell (1792û1855) discovered the rich grazing lands of Victoria, which he called Australia Felix, and settlers moved into them to raise ever-increasing numbers of sheep.
Settlements had already been established in Western Australia, and much energy was expended on trying to find a practical stock route between South Australia and Western Australia. Finally, in 1840û1, Edward John Eyre (1815û1901 ) established that there was no such route, but discovered Lake Eyre and Lake Torrens in the process. Later in the decade, Ludwig Leichhardt (1813ûc.1848) explored the coastal region of N Queensland and the Northern Territory. His methods were somewhat haphazard, and he disappeared in 1848 while on an expedition into the interior of Queensland. No trace of his party has ever been found .
The fate of Leichhardt illustrated that Australia was not a safe place for inexperienced and ill-prepared explorers. The most disastrous expedition was that, in 1861, of Robert O'Hara Burke (1820û61)and William John Wills (1834û61)who managed to cross Australia S-N with relative ease, because it was an unusually wet season; but having left most of their supplies at base camp, they died of starvation on the way back. The sole survivor of the expedition, John King (1838û72), was the only one to accept help offered by local Aborigines.
The fate of Burke and Wills encouraged other explorers of the centre of Australia to be much more cautious. Over the course of several years (1858û60), John McDouall Stuart (1815û66) established a practical route S-N, supplied throughout with waterholes and passing by Alice Springs. Further exploration of the centre was carried out by Peter Egerton Warburton (1813û89) and John Forrest (1847û1918, later premier of Western Australia), and especially by William Ernest Powell Giles (1835û97) who crossed the centre of Australia twice (1875û6), travelling E-W and back again.
Sukie Hunter
#
"Australia, Early Inhabitants of",3,0,0,0
No one really knows precisely when humans came to \JAustralia\j. Pre-historians now generally agree that they had spread throughout \JAustralia\j and New Guinea by c.40,000 BP, though they may have done so much earlier. Both the limitations of the radio-carbon dating technique and the inundation of coastal sites with the rising of the sea from about 16,000 BP make precision impossible. Nor is it clear which peoples then came, nor whence.
The Kow Swamp skeletons suggest that there may have been two distinct races inhabiting \JAustralia\j into recent prehistoric times. What is clear is that by c.23,000 BP, humans had spread into all areas of \JAustralia\j, from the tropical north through the desert to the moist southwest and southeast corners, along the escarpments of the Great Dividing Range and in the fertile river valleys below them to the coastal and \Jalpine\j habitats of \JTasmania\j.
\IAdaptation to Environment\i
In time, the cultures of these peoples came to show distinct adaptations to the regions they inhabited. The people on Lake Mungo's shores in western New South Wales developed the earliest \Jcremation\j ritual yet discovered, dating to about 30,000 BP; western desert peoples adapted genetically to their \Jbiosphere\j; and upland Tasmanians to their cold environment.
Those about \JTasmania\j's seashores, who became isolated from the mainland c.23,000 BP, gave up using canoes, and perhaps eating fish. Maintaining some links with New Guineans until the rising sea created Torres Strait c.8000 BP, the inhabitants of the \JQueensland\j \Jrainforest\j used wooden 'swords', and those of the littoral built outrigger canoes. The people of the western plains of Victoria built stone houses and eel weirs, and harvested grass seeds.
\IEarly Aboriginal Population\i
What the Aboriginal population of \JAustralia\j was prior to the arrival of the Europeans remains a matter of great uncertainty. It is now generally conceded that Radcliffe Brown's old figure of 'over 250,000 and quite possibly, or even probably, over 300,000' is too small by far.
More recently, John Mulvaney and Peter White have suggested c.750,000; but there are others who are willing to contemplate a figure in excess of 1,000,000.
In the absence of reliable records, estimates must be derived from demographic modelling, which involves assumptions about average size of families, regional food supplies, and the presence or absence of diseases, about which it is easy to make mistakes.
Over millennia, then, the Aboriginal peoples of \JAustralia\j established viable cultures throughout the continent. It is easy to romanticise the lives of individuals within those cultures. We may doubt that they were as carefree, free of violence, hunger and disease as some would have us believe. Whatever the extent of these drawbacks, however, for \JAborigines\j, the coming of the Europeans constituted an infinitely greater one.
#
"Australia, Early Navigators",4,0,0,0
The arrival of Europeans in \JAustralia\j was one of the culminations of the expansion which began early in the fifteenth century. As they refined ship-building and rigging techniques, and developed new methods of navigation, Europeans began to sail into oceans as well as to skirt coastlines.
By the mid 1480s, the Portuguese had reached south along the coast of Africa to the mouth of the \JCongo\j River. In 1487-8, sailing into the central Atlantic then turning east in 40 degrees S latitude, Bartholomeu Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope, thus indicating the possibility of a sea route to the East.
In 1497-9, pioneering this route, Vasco da Gama reached and returned from India. Then Magellan's circumnavigation of 1515-19 gave rise to a route across the Pacific Ocean from the southeast to the northwest, the wind and current systems pushing ships above the equator to the east of New Guinea.
\IRecorded European Sightings\i
These routes kept ships away from \JAustralia\j though there are some reports of European sightings of the continent in the 1520s, either by Portuguese sailing out of Malacca, or Spanish crossing the Pacific. The evidence in support of such sightings remains too fragmentary and uncertain for us to be able to credit them confidently.
What is certain is that, sent to investigate the south coast of New Guinea and other lands that might lie near it, the Dutch navigator Willem Jansz coasted some 320 kilometres of the western side of Cape York in 1606. His is the first recorded European sighting of \JAustralia\j.
The Dutch had followed the Portuguese into the East Indies at the end of the sixteenth century. Initially, once past the Cape of Good Hope, they had followed a northeast route across the Indian Ocean to the Indonesian islands, but uncertain winds and currents made for arduous voyages, with \Jscurvy\j causing high mortality among crews.
Dirk Hartog, captain of a Dutch East India Company ship, the \IEendracht,\i landed on an island off the coast of Western \JAustralia\j near Shark Bay in 1616. This crew left a plaque, made of a flattened \Jpewter\j dinner plate, nailed to a post as a record of their visit.
In 1610, one navigator suggested that a better route would be found by sailing 1000 mijlen [c.6000 kilometres] due east from the Cape of Good Hope, before turning north for \JSumatra\j. This became the favoured route from 1617 onwards.
However, as it was then impossible to calculate longitude accurately, it was all too easy for navigators to leave too late the turning north; and accidental landfalls on \JAustralia\j's western coast soon accumulated.
Interested in developing trade in the Pacific and with the Spanish colonies in South America, the Dutch East India Company sent a number of deliberate exploring expeditions to the Southland (or New Holland, as it came to be known) between 1620 and 1700. That by Jan Carstensz in 1623 led to the delineation of the Gulf of Carpentaria and \JArnhem\j Land.
That by Abel Tasman in 1642 resulted in the discovery of \JTasmania\j, which he called Van Diemen's Land, and the western coast of New Zealand. Tasman sailed again in 1644 and, during the voyage of which only scanty details survive, followed the coastline west from Cape York approximately to Northwest Cape. In 1697-8, Willem de Vlamingh sailed from the Swan River up to North-West Cape.
In 1688 an English adventurer, William Dampier, visited the coast of Western \JAustralia\j, making the first recorded English landing in \JAustralia\j. He published an account of his journey on his return to England and was sent on a second voyage to New Holland in 1699. He charted the coast of Western \JAustralia\j but published a report which was unfavourable to both the country and its inhabitants.
\IJames Cook\i
The result of these voyages was that, by the end of the seventeenth century, much of the Australian continent's northern, western and southern outline was known to Europeans.
What remained unknown was the eastern coast, and the relationship of \JTasmania\j to the mainland. The eastern coast was revealed by the voyage of the English navigator Lieutenant James Cook in the \IEndeavour\i in 1770.
Having sailed across the Pacific via Tahiti, Cook circumnavigated and charted the main islands of New Zealand, then crossed the Tasman sea to sight the Australian coast at Point Hicks on the east of what is now the state of Victoria. For four months he charted this coast northwards, landing at a number of places, including Botany Bay just to the south of Sydney, before almost losing the ship on the Great Barrier Reef.
After effecting makeshift repairs at the Endeavour River (Cooktown), he passed through the strait between \JAustralia\j and New Guinea found by Torres in 1606, to Batavia, thence home to England. (George Bass and Matthew Flinders established the insularity of \JTasmania\j in 1797-8.)
Though the observing of the transit of Venus at Tahiti was the announced purpose of Cook's voyage, it had also the secret one of discovering a supposed continent of vast extent in the southern hemisphere, a discovery which the British hoped might give rise to extensive trade in the Pacific, and between Europe, China and South America. In keeping with this aim, Cook landed on an island in Torres Strait late in August 1770:
'Having satisfied my self of the great Probability of a Passage thro' which I intend going with the Ship, and therefore may land no more upon this Eastern coast of New Holland, and on the Western side I can make no more discovery the honour of which belongs to the Dutch Navigators; but the Eastern Coast of the latitude of 38 degrees South down to this place I am confident was never seen or viseted by any European before us, and Notwithstanding I had in the Name of His Majesty taken possession of several places upon this coast, I now once more hoisted the English Coulers and in the Name of His Majesty King George the Third took possession of the whole Eastern Coast from the above Latitude down to this place by the name of New South Wales, together with all the Bays, Harbours Rivers and Islands situate upon the said coast, after which we fired three Volleys of small Arms which were Answred by the like number from the Ship.'
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"Convict Policies of Britain",5,0,0,0
The subsequent colonisation by Britain of New South Wales with convicts has tended to obscure imperial purposes. From the late sixteenth century, the British sent their criminals to the North American and West Indian colonies, but they did not make this form of punishment permanent until 1717-18, when Parliament enacted transportation to North America for a range of non-capital felonies.
One purpose of this move was to introduce more flexibility into penal practice, for hitherto there had been little provision for punishments between the extremes of death, on the one hand, and branding on the hand, whipping, exposure in the pillory, fine and imprisonment on the other.
In providing for transportation for seven of fourteen years (and, later, for life), Parliament not only broadened the range of punishment, but also gave justices the means of taking account of previous good character and mitigating circumstance, and of distinguishing between degrees of violence and callousness.
A second purpose was to obtain some benefit from the labour of the convicts. A third was to offer these a chance to reform in a new environment, one where fewer temptations to crime supposedly existed.
\INorth American Convicts\i
As it developed, the system of punishment by transportation to North America came to exhibit a number of distinctive features. First, the punishments were fundamentally exile from Britain, and the (temporary) loss of the right to the labour of their bodies, for once in North America the felons were required to work for the unexpired terms of their sentences, and were forbidden to return before that time. However, they were not otherwise punished - for example, by being confined or shackled.
The second striking feature is that central government had only a minimal role in the business. The merchants who agreed to receive convicts sentenced to transportation had to meet all expenses for shipping, food, medical care and supervision incurred in carrying them over the Atlantic Ocean, and they were responsible for landing them in the colonies. In return, the merchants acquired the legal right to the labour of the convicts, which they could sell in the place of transportation prescribed in the sentences.
Sometimes, central government and county authorities paid contractors 5 pounds per person for transportation. At times of high labour demand in the colonies, however, merchants were willing to carry the convicts for nothing, making their money instead from the sale of their labour, and from outward and return cargoes.
This system constituted a neat penal practice, from which central government gained in three ways: by 'exporting' a social problem; by doing so at little cost; and by obtaining a benefit for the nation from the convicts' labour. Then, the system was suddenly disrupted. As the standard account has it:
'In 1775, the American colonies revolted. For the time being at least, England could not send her convicts there. Those sentenced to transportation perforce had to remain at home, unless the government could find some other destination for them, but perhaps they could be punished in some other way.'
\INew Convict Policies\i
The 'other way' the British government adopted as an interim measure was to vary the punishment for those felonies that previously brought transportation to labour at harbour works and to accommodate those so convicted on ships moored in the Thames.
Again the standard account has it, it was when these ships ('hulks') had become impossibly overcrowded that the British government decided - 'in a fit of absence of mind', as it were - to solve the problem by transporting the convicts to New South Wales.
This standard account needs some revision. The hulks were never as overcrowded or unhealthy as historians have thought; and when the government of William Pitt the Younger decided in August 1786 to establish a convict colony at Botany Bay, the ministers had more in mind than simply removing the convicts from the realm.
Other motives were the obtaining of naval materials from the islands of the southwest Pacific for the Indian dockyards; and the creation of a strategic outlier on the edge of the great ocean. There was also an intention of creating a trans-Pacific trade. Concern about the expansion of the French maritime empire was a serious consideration.
#
"Australia, First European Settlement",6,0,0,0
On 13 May 1787 Captain Arthur Phillip took the eleven ships of what has become known in Australian history as the First Fleet, out from Portsmouth. They carried a handful of civil officers, 250 marines with some wives and children, and 759 convicts, a few of whom also had children.
Calling at \JTenerife\j, Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope, these ships reached Botany Bay in mid-January 1788.
With environs not nearly as attractive at the height of summer as they had been to Cook in May 1770, Phillip quickly decided to shift the settlement sixteen kilometres north to Port Jackson; and on 26 January 1788 he hoisted the British flag on the shores of Sydney Cove near where the Sydney Opera House now stands.
In the next days and months, the first European settlement in \JAustralia\j took shape. Inevitably, the business was rather chaotic at first - as one person observed:
'[the confusion] will not be wondered at, when it is considered that every man stepped from the boat literally into a wood. Parties of people were every where heard and seen variously employed; some in clearing ground for the different encampments; others in pitching tents, or bringing up such stores as were more immediately wanted; and the spot which had so lately been the abode of silence and tranquillity was now changed to that of noise, clamour, and confusion.'
#
"Colony of New South Wales Prospers",7,0,0,0
Gradually, some 'order' prevailed, and the colony began to prosper. By the end of 1792, the centre of the Sydney settlement occupied more than three acres. In and about it were brick cottages of the officers roofed with shingles or tiles, a Government House of brick windowed with glass, brick storehouses and a brick \Jhospital\j, and a number of convict huts.
The officers of the New South Wales corps each had two acres for cultivation, the \Jhospital\j had a large garden, and there were over six acres of gardens about Government House. The buildings were placed with some regularity, so that there was an embryonic township, shaped by roads and streets, delimited by fences. At the Government Farm, there were stables and storehouses, and convicts grew vegetables, fruits, and \Jmaize\j.
\IParramatta Settlement\i
At the second settlement at Parramatta, at the head of the harbour, there was a Government House, about which were six acres under \Jmaize\j and other grains, four acres under vines, and two of potatoes.
There was a village, with about one hundred officers' cottages and convict huts, a barracks, \Jhospital\j, hall and storehouses forming a street one and a half kilometres long.
Spread about were government cultivations of 100 acres, and private ones of 400 acres; a track joined this settlement to Sydney.
\IProgress With Problems\i
This progress had not been easily achieved. Initially, many of the convicts had declined to work; and the military officers had declined to supervise those who did. Hundreds of the convicts who arrived on the Second and Third Fleets (1790,1791) had been very ill; and there was a long \Jdrought\j from mid 1790 until the spring of 1791.
Also, presaging subsequent events throughout the entire continent, relations between the Europeans and the \JAborigines\j had fluctuated from wary tolerance, to friendly cooperation, to open hostility.
\IProgress Continues\i
This progress continued in the next dozen years. By 1805, the colony was in reasonably comfortable circumstances, having spread over the Cumberland Plain, that bulbous lowland to the north, west and southwest of Sydney.
Its European population had risen (by new arrivals and births) to about 6,000. These enjoyed a good standard of living, and what with agriculture and trading activities in the Pacific and to India and China, they seem to have had a production rate approaching that in Britain.
There were also a handful of settlements elsewhere - at Norfolk Island (1788-1814), Newcastle (1801), Hobart (1803/4) and Launceston (1804). Slowly but surely, the British were establishing themselves in \JAustralia\j.
While settlers spread up and down the valleys of the Derwent and Tamar Rivers in \JTasmania\j between 1810 and 1820, those on the mainland essentially were confined to the Cumberland Plain. Approximately 29,000 convicts were transported to New South Wales and \JTasmania\j up to 1820.
One feature above all others distinguished this phase of transportation from the earlier one to North America. With the exception of small numbers of civil and military officers who stayed after their terms of service had finished, and ex-convicts who become farmers, merchants, or manufacturers, there was no body of planters to utilise the convicts' labour.
In New South Wales and \JTasmania\j, it was essentially the government which employed the convicts, on buildings and road works, and at the Government Farms.
In 1798-1799 George Bass and Matthew Flinders made a journey from Sydney down the coast of New South Wales through Bass Strait and circumnavigated \JTasmania\j proving it to be an island.
Setting out from Sydney in July 1802, Flinders circumnavigated the continent adding greatly to the knowledge of the coastline and the flora and fauna of the country.
#
"Governor Macquarie's Program",8,0,0,0
This feature was most marked during the governance of Lachlan Macquarie (1810-21), who pursued an extensive building program. On his departure, he listed 265 items whose construction he had overseen.
These included the 'Rum' \JHospital\j, the Hyde Park Barracks, the Government Stables (now the Conservatorium), Government House Parramatta, the Court House at Windsor, St. James's Church at Sydney, St. John's at Parramatta, St. Matthew's at Windsor and the South Head Lighthouse.
He had also founded the 'Five Towns' (Castlereagh, Richmond, Wilberforce, Pitt Town and Windsor), built fourteen public roads, and encouraged the development of Hobart.
People both in the colony and in Britain criticised Macquarie for the extravagant cost of these buildings, and also for his withholding skilled convict labourers from private employment in order to complete them.
Nonetheless, these buildings gave the European settlements a substance they had previously lacked, and encouraged their now quite substantial populations (30,000 and 7,000 respectively in 1821) to think of New South Wales and \JTasmania\j as home.
\IMacquarie's Liberalism\i
Macquarie's time is notable for another reason. Extending a system instituted by Governor Philip Gidley King (1800-6), he liberally granted tickets-of-leave (which freed convicts to work for themselves), and also conditional and free pardons. He appointed former convicts ('emancipists') to civil and judicial posts, and received them socially.
Macquarie's justification for what seem to us enlightened policies, was that, in a society forming from a convict population, it was desirable to reward good behaviour by restoration to former status. However, Macquarie's critics charged that, not only had he restored people to status, he had also elevated them to positions that they would never have enjoyed in Britain.
The argument brought to a head fundamental issues that had been slowly gathering force. What was to be the legal status of convicts upon emancipation, and of their children? Were they to enjoy fully the rights of British citizens elsewhere? Or were they to suffer under (as it were) an hereditary disadvantage? In other words, were the New South Wales and Tasmanian settlements to develop as civil colonies, or were they to continue as places of convict punishment?
\IFurther Convict Arrivals\i
Giving added need to find answers to these questions were social conditions in England. There, with the demobilisation after the Napoleonic Wars, and as the full effects of the Industrial Revolution were felt, crime rates (or at least conviction rates) rose sharply. For example, whereas 839 male convicts reached New South Wales in 1814, 2,845 came in 1818, 2,372 in 1819, and 2,283 in 1820.
In 1819, the British government sent T. J. Bigge to report in detail on the conditions of the Australian settlements, and to recommend how they should henceforth be allowed to develop. Bigge spent seventeen months in New South Wales and \JTasmania\j, gathering copious oral and written evidence.
While his gentry background and legal training do seem to have conditioned him to viewing things in ways not entirely sympathetic to a society growing from convictism, his recommendations in three areas were to be of great significance in the emergence of modern \JAustralia\j.
#
"Convict Punishment in Australia",9,0,0,0
First, while Bigge did suggest that the Australian settlements should become civil ones, he also recommended the continuation of transportation, with administrative refinements to make it a greater punishment than it evidently had been under Macquarie. These changes marked the convict system between 1823 and 1840, when c.84,000 convicts reached eastern \JAustralia\j.
The emphasis swung to placing convicts in private assignment, both to lessen the cost to government, and to locate the convicts in the country, away from civilian populations. (In 1838, for example, 26,000 of the 38,000 convicts in New South Wales were privately assigned.)
Next, those privileges that convicts had previously enjoyed, such as task work and payment for their own-time work, were abolished. Third, a range of punishments for offences committed in the colonies was instituted, including hard labour in chain gangs, and sentencing to a place of secondary punishment.
These places - Port Macquarie (1821), Moreton Bay (1824), Norfolk Island (1825), and Port Arthur (1830) - quickly became notorious for their severity.
As one 'old lag' lamented:
'I've been a prisoner at Port Macquarie, at Norfolk Island and
Emu Plains,
At Castle Hill and at cursed Toongabbie, at all those settlements I've worked in chains;
But of all the places of condemnation and penals stations of New South Wales,
To Moreton Bay I have found no equal; excessive tyranny each day prevails.
For three long years I was beastly treated, and heavy irons on my legs I wore;
My back with flogging is lacerated and often painted with my crimson gore.
And many a man from downright starvation lies mouldering now underneath the clay;
And Captain Logan he had us mangled at the triangles of Moreton Bay.'
\INorfolk Island and Convicts\i
And the composer of this \Jballad\j did not exaggerate. At its peak, Norfolk Island for example, held 2,000 re-offenders. They were compelled to rise at dawn and to labour until dark. They were forced to feed without utensils.
When they became recalcitrant, they were punished by being given only bread and water; by labour in chains; by hundreds of lashes together; by confinement to dark cells where they could neither stand nor lie, and to which came no sound from the world. When in their anger and despair they killed, they were hanged.
Sent to Norfolk Island in the expectation that they were 'forever excluded from all hope of return', those who endured this regimen took on the appearance of \Jghosts\j exhibiting 'sunken glazed eyes, deadly-pale faces, hollow fleshless cheeks and once manly limbs, shrivelled and withered up as if by premature old age'. Deprived of women, many became homosexual.
Nor was it uncommon for prisoners to draw lots to see who might kill whom, for the charge of murder meant trial in Sydney, and thereby some faint hope of escape; and in any case, death by hanging was preferable to an indeterminate sentence to life on the island.
In January 1834, there occurred the most serious of the numerous convict rebellions on Norfolk Island, in which some 160 men joined. Nine were killed in fighting, thirty others were sentenced to death, fourteen of whom were eventually hanged. One convict told the judge who sentenced them:
'Sentence has been passed upon us before, and we thought we should have been executed, and prepared to die, and wish we had been executed then. It was no Mercy to send us to this place; I do not ask life, I do not want to be spared, on condition of remaining here; life is not worth having on such terms.'
\INo More Convicts\i
With reports of the horror of the convict system reaching authorities in England, with their ideas of what was desirable penal practice changing anyway, and with the Australian colonists themselves increasingly opposed to it, transportation to New South Wales ceased in 1840, and to \JTasmania\j in 1853.
It was reinstituted to Western \JAustralia\j 1850-1868, when the colonists there insisted that they needed a cheap labour force in order to succeed.
Altogether, between 1788 and 1868 approximately 165,000 convicted men, women and children came to \JAustralia\j. While some suffered grievously, others found a healthy climate, good food supplies and, upon emancipation, opportunities for economic advancement. It is no exaggeration to say that their labour was the base on which modern \JAustralia\j rose.
#
"Australian Settlements, New Administrative Changes",10,0,0,0
In the second major change, and in line with Bigge's suggestions, the British Government instituted extensive administrative changes to pave the way for the settlements to develop as civil colonies.
In 1832/5, New South Wales and \JTasmania\j were separated, each with its own governor, advisory council and supreme court. Each colony was ordered to be surveyed into counties and parishes; and in 1826 the New South Wales Church and Schools Corporation was established.
These reforms continued through the 1830s into the 1840s, with trial by jury being introduced, and in New South Wales in 1842 and \JTasmania\j in 1851, the announcement of a legislative assembly two-thirds elected (on a male property franchise) and one-third nominated.
In the 1820s, two strategic and commercial outliers began - on Melville Island (near Darwin) in 1824, and at Albany in Western \JAustralia\j in 1826.
In 1829 the British Government annexed the entire continent; and other civil settlements soon followed - Swan River (Western \JAustralia\j, 1829), Adelaide (South \JAustralia\j, 1836), Port Phillip District (Portland Bay, Melbourne and other places from 1834 onwards) and Moreton Bay (Brisbane, \JQueensland\j, 1842).
Some of these settlements (particularly those in Western \JAustralia\j and South Australia) struggled at first, but gradually the British established themselves all about the shores of the southern half of the continent.
\IPastoral Expansion\i
Simultaneously, the settlers spread rapidly into the interior, a move which also followed from another of Bigge's recommendations, that the settlements' economic future lay in \Jpastoralism\j, particularly in the production of fine wool, which British manufacturers, their capacity increased enormously by the Industrial Revolution, were then clamouring for.
The foundations for this development had been laid some decades earlier, when colonists such as John Macarthur and Rev Samuel Marsden had begun cross-breeding with Spanish \Jmerino\j rams, to produce sheep carrying fine wool. This experimentation continued throughout the 1820s into the 1830s. Increased flocks needed more extensive pastures, however, and these too were now located west of the Blue Mountains which had been crossed in 1813.
#
"Australia, Early Inland Exploration of",11,0,0,0
The program of inland exploration which had begun under Macquarie continued in the decades following, with Hamilton Hume and William Hovell travelling overland from Sydney to Port Phillip in 1824; Allan Cunningham pushing up from the New England tableland to locate the Darling Downs in 1827; Charles Sturt tracing much of the Murray Darling river systems, 1828-30; and Thomas Mitchell exploring western New South Wales and Victoria, 1831-6.
Mitchell's comments on the area of Victoria he names \JAustralia\j Felix epitomises European response to these grasslands:
'A land so inviting, and still without inhabitants! As I stood, the first European intruder on the sublime solitude of these verdant plains, as yet untouched by flocks or herds, I felt conscious of being the harbinger of mighty changes; and that our steps would soon be followed by men and animals for which it seemed to have been prepared.'
\IMore Pastoral Expansion\i
With such prospects, it was hardly surprising that the advice to new settlers to 'put everything in four feet' became ubiquitous. At first, colonial and imperial authorities tried to control the pastoral expansion by land grant policies.
However, as free immigrants arrived in ever increasing numbers from Britain, people spilled out beyond the boundaries of the Twenty Counties of New South Wales, northwest up the Hunter River valley into the New England tableland and across to the Liverpool Plains, west over the Bathurst Plains to the Darling River, southwest into the Yass Plains, and into what is now central and western Victoria.
Other pastoralists (increasingly known as 'squatters') brought their flocks from \JTasmania\j across Bass Strait to Victoria. As Governor George Gipps wrote in 1840:
'As well might it be attempted to confine the \JArabs\j of the Desert within a circle, traced upon their sands, as to confine the graziers or Woolgrowers of New South Wales within any bounds that can possibly be assigned to them; and as certainly as the \JArabs\j would be starved, so also would the flocks and herds of New South Wales, if they were so confined, and the prosperity of the Country be at an end.'
Despite such vicissitudes as scab, footrot and catarrh ravaging flocks, \Jdrought\j (1838-9) and Depression (1839-41), the Australian wool industry developed extremely rapidly. Whereas in 1810, Australian wool had constituted 3.8% of that imported into Britain, by 1840 this proportion had risen to 22%, and by 1850 to 47%.
\IAboriginal Problems\i
This rapid pastoral expansion brought extensive ecological change to southeastern \JAustralia\j. Hundreds and thousands of hard-hooved ungulates destroyed native grasses and trampled the banks of watercourses, salt-laden water tables rose, and more rapid runoff led to widespread erosion.
This depletion of indigenous resources, together with the more general competition for land, brought Europeans and \JAborigines\j into sharp conflict.
The general results were that Aboriginal populations were decimated and dispossessed; in Victoria, for example, many Aboriginal groups were reduced to perhaps a quarter of their pre-contact population in a generation. Although official government policy was that \JAborigines\j should be protected, settlers often took horrific reprisals against natives who tried to protect their land.
At the same time, there was some accommodation between the races, as some pastoralists recognised \JAborigines\j' needs, and as \JAborigines\j adapted to domestic and station work.
#
"Gold Discoveries in Australia",12,0,0,0
From the 1850s onwards, another factor greatly influenced the development of the Australian colonies. Though there had been some earlier finds, knowledge of which was suppressed for fear of social and economic disruption, gold was officially discovered at Bathurst in New South Wales, and at Ballarat, Bendigo and other places in Victoria in 1851.
\IGold Brings Immigrants\i
When news of these discoveries spread, tens of thousands of immigrants flocked to \JAustralia\j in the hope of striking it rich. These included people from the Californian fields, Europeans (numbers of refugees from the political and social upheavals of the 1840s), and Chinese.
There were many more mineral discoveries in the next decades - gold in the mountains of central Victoria in the 1860s; in the Barossa Valley of South \JAustralia\j in 1868; at Gympie, Ravenswood, Charters Towers, the Palmer River and Mount Morgan in \JQueensland\j in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s; at \JKalgoorlie\j and Coolgardie in Western \JAustralia\j in the 1890s.
\IOther Minerals\i
Copper was found at Kapunda in South \JAustralia\j in the 1840s, and later at Cloncurry in \JQueensland\j and Mt. Lyell in \JTasmania\j.
Extensive tin mining developed in New South Wales and \JQueensland\j in the 1870s; silver was found at Broken Hill in 1883. All over the continent coal mining expanded in the second half of the century.
\IPopulation Increase\i
The European population of \JAustralia\j increased massively as a consequence of the gold discoveries. Between 1851 and 1860, that of New South Wales almost doubled, from c.200,000 to c.350,000, while that of Victoria increased seven-fold, from 77,000 to c.540,000. The general total rose from c.400,000 to c.1,200,000.
Containing as it did labourers, farmers, artisans and domestic servants and urban middle class, this population was much more diverse than the earlier one of squatters and present and former convicts, and it made new political demands.
#
"State Governments in Australia, 19th Century",13,0,0,0
The Imperial Parliament in Britain granted responsible government (i.e., a fully-elected lower house able to legislate independently) to New South Wales, Victoria and \JTasmania\j in 1855, to South \JAustralia\j in 1856, to \JQueensland\j in 1859, and to Western \JAustralia\j in 1890. Other reforms soon followed.
Adult male franchise for lower house (Legislative Assembly) elections was introduced in Victoria in 1857, and in New South Wales in 1858. Women acquired voting rights in South \JAustralia\j in 1861, and full suffrage in 1894. Western Australian women gained full suffrage in 1899.
\IGrowth of Education\i
By the end of the century all the colonies had instituted 'free, compulsory and secular' primary education - Victoria in 1872, \JQueensland\j and South \JAustralia\j in 1875, New South Wales in 1880, \JTasmania\j in 1885, Western \JAustralia\j in 1895.
State universities were founded in Sydney in 1849, Melbourne in 1853, Adelaide in 1874 and Hobart in 1890. Women were unable to attend universities until the late nineteenth century, although Melbourne University admitted women to degree courses other than medicine in 1880. In 1876, women were allowed to attend classes at Adelaide University but not get a degree.
\ISale of Land\i
Pressure from the new arrivals also resulted in significant changes to land policies. With tens of thousands of disappointed diggers needing alternative livelihoods, one by one from the later 1850s into the 1870s, the colonial legislatures passed 'Selection' Acts permitting the sale of Crown land in lots, much smaller in size than the older pastoral leases. This change had the effect of drawing more people into the interior of the country, and of fostering the growth of agriculture.
Hence it was in the second half of the nineteenth century that we see the emergence of the third great Australian staple, with the extensive cultivation of wheat in \JQueensland\j, New South Wales, Victoria, South \JAustralia\j and Western \JAustralia\j.
#
"Explorations of Northern Australia, Early",14,0,0,0
Another consequence of the Selection Acts was to diminish the pastoralists' economic and political dominance. This caused many in the south to look northwards. As before, inland exploration preceded the second stage of pastoral expansion in \JAustralia\j.
In 1844-5, Ludwig Leichhardt had moved up along the Great Dividing Range to the Gulf of Carpentaria, then followed the coast westwards to cross \JArnhem\j Land and reach Port Essington.
In 1845-6, Mitchell had explored into central \JQueensland\j. Starting from the Victoria River on the northwest coast, Augustus Gregory crossed east, south of \JArnhem\j Land, through the Gulf Country and south inside the Great Divide to strike the coast at Gladstone.
The Burke and Wills expedition almost succeeded in crossing the continent from south to north before disaster overwhelmed it in 1860-1. In 1862, John McDouall Stuart did so. These and other expeditions led to the discovery of much good pasture land.
One of Leichhardt's companions said of the Dawson Valley, for example:
'I wish I could do justice to the beautiful country through which we now passed - my feeble description will fall very short of what it really was. For upwards of 100 miles we passed through a most splendid, open country, consisting of plains and downs - plains stretching out as far as the eye could reach on one side and beautiful grassy slopes running down from a long and high range of mountains on the other. With only a tree to be seen every 500 or 600 yards, the whole face of the country was covered with the finest grasses and richest herbage, with wildflowers of every tint and colour.'
\INew Industries Develop\i
As pastoralists followed the explorers into these regions, a new primary industry developed. By the end of the 1850s, experience of central \JQueensland\j had shown that the northern reaches of the continent were too hot and wet for sheep, but were well-suited to beef \Jcattle\j production.
At first, this industry struggled, variously as a consequence of lack of capital, \Jdrought\j, disease and lack of access to markets. However, as the gold discoveries and Selection acts brought more people into the interior, as railways were built, and as from 1879 the new technique of refrigeration was developed, the market problem diminished.
By century's-end, drovers were bringing hundreds of thousands of animals along thousands of kilometres of stock routes to the railheads or directly to the capital cities, and meatworks were exporting tens of thousands of frozen beef. The last decades of the nineteenth century also saw the growth of the \JQueensland\j sugar industry and, with railways and refrigeration, of dairying all about the continent.
\IMore Aboriginal Conflict\i
As had the southern one, the northern pastoral expansion brought Europeans and \JAborigines\j into conflict. An undeclared war raged in \JQueensland\j for some decades, and continued sporadically in the Northern Territory and the Kimberley area of Western \JAustralia\j into the twentieth century.
Inevitably, given the Europeans' weapons, the \JAborigines\j were the losers. Yet, as earlier, if there was \Jmayhem\j there were also accommodations.
With white labour often in short supply, pastoralists utilised \JAborigines\j. Aboriginal labour was vital to the development of the grazing industry in the Northern Territory and the Kimberleys.
#
"Australia Develops in the 19th Century",15,0,0,0
\ICommunications\i
There were important developments in communications in \JAustralia\j in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Regular steamship services commenced between Sydney and Newcastle in the late 1830s, and between Sydney and Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane in 1843.
By the late 1860s, all the major ports were linked, and there were services to and from Europe. In 1875, a service was opened between Sydney and San Francisco. Municipalities and colonial governments extended road and bridge-building programs.
By the 1850s, there were regular mail services in all the colonies, The American Freeman Cobb introduced the 'Concord' coach to Victoria in 1854, and by the 1870s Cobb & Co. serviced 11,000 kilometres of routes stretching from South \JAustralia\j to the Gulf of Carpentaria, harnessing up to 6,000 horses per day.
In these same decades, paddle steamers plied the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Darling Rivers. Railway lines were first laid in the 1850s and 1860s, and steam services begun. In 1869, Sydney was linked by rail to Goulburn, and Melbourne to Wodonga in 1873. The Goulburn line was extended to Albury in 1881. By the 1880s, all colonies had at least an embryonic rail network.
In the various colonies and between them, there was also an extensive telegraph network. On 29 October 1858, the first telegraph message had passed from Sydney through Melbourne to Adelaide; a cable was laid across Bass Strait in 1859; Sydney was linked to Brisbane in 1861; Brisbane to \JTownsville\j in 1869; and Adelaide to Perth in 1877.
In 1872, the completion of the line from Adelaide to Darwin had joined \JAustralia\j to the world, via the \JSingapore\j cable. By the end of the 1880s, Australians were sending millions of telegrams each year.
The cumulative effect of all these developments was to shrink Australian distance as never before. For example, it had become possible to travel from Sydney to Melbourne in eighteen hours, and from Sydney to London via the United States in about forty days.
The result of the 1888 Melbourne Cup was known in Auckland before the judge had posted the place-getters' numbers.
\IUrban Centres\i
The second half of the nineteenth century also saw the substantial growth of Australian cities, with the general increase in population, and with the ports becoming the points of interchange between the country's interior and the world.
To Sydney, Melbourne, Geelong, Hobart, Adelaide and Perth came people and goods from Europe, Asia and America; from them went wool, minerals and wheat.
In the southern colonies, this meant that the cities also became the centres of the new networks of communications. From them into the interior, like spokes from the hub of a wagon wheel, radiated the roads, railways and telegraph lines.
Only in \JQueensland\j, where pastoral expansion spread north inland in advance of the settling of the coast, was this pattern not evident. There, ports at Brisbane, Gladstone, Rockhampton, \JTownsville\j and Cairns, grew to service the pastoral, mining and agricultural regions about them, so that while from the 1870s and 1880s a series of railway lines probed westward from the coast, it was not until 1924 that Brisbane and Cairns were finally linked.
Together with the growing realisation that there were distinct limits to the extent to which Australian soils would support agriculture, this development meant that \JAustralia\j became a highly-urbanised country - by 1906, for example, 34% of Europeans on the mainland lived in the capital cities alone.
\IThe Growth of Unionism\i
The increasing opposition of \Jcapitalism\j and labour in the cities, on the mining fields, in the growing manufacturing sector, and in the pastoral industries, together with the growth of the communication networks (which enabled organisers more easily to reach members) created a climate in which unionism might flourish. The growth of unionism in \JAustralia\j was also aided by the fact that some of the convicts sent to \JAustralia\j were transported for union activities e.g. Tolpuddle Martyns in 1834.
In 1856, the Sydney Stonemason's Society demanded an 8-hour day, and won; in 1858, building workers in Melbourne followed suit. The shortage of labour in the colonies gave the workers more bargaining power than workers had in Britain and some European countries.
A Mining Workers' Union was formed in Bendigo in 1872, which spread colony-wide two years later. A Seaman's Union was formed in Sydney and Melbourne in 1874, and the Sydney Wharf Labourers' Union in 1882.
In 1886, after earlier attempts had ended in failure, shearers unionised in Victoria, New South Wales and \JQueensland\j.
The major concerns of these unionists were the 8-hour day, better pay and conditions, and the prohibition of non-European labour. In the early 1890s, there was a series of bitter, sometimes violent clashes between employers and unionists.
In 1890, the shearers attempted to force pastoralists to hire only union members, and when employers refused, the shearers enlisted the help of the Seaman's Union, whose members refused to load ships with wool shorn by non-union labour. However, with unemployment widespread because of the depression, the strike collapsed.
Queensland shearers struck again in 1891 and 1894; and Broken Hill miners in 1892. From this turmoil emerged the Australian Workers' Union (in 1894) and the Australian Labor Party (from 1891 onwards), and formal conciliation and \Jarbitration\j procedures.
#
"Australian, the Authentic",16,0,0,0
Early in the twentieth century, the 1880s and 1890s came to be seen as the periods when the incipient nation at last found an authentic, Australian, voice.
With their skills, freedom and independence, mateship and egalitarianism, the 'overlanders' who drove \Jcattle\j and sheep over thousands of kilometres, and the shearers who began the season in \JQueensland\j sheds in the middle of the year, working their way down through New South Wales to finish in western Victoria in October, seemed to epitomise the real, true Australian.
Accordingly, Australians came to consider that the best Australian literature and art was that which evoked bush life - the short stories of Henry Lawson, for example, the poems of 'Banjo' Paterson, the paintings of Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton. The most powerful expression of this view was Russell Ward's \IThe Australian Legend\i (1958).
More recently, historians and sociologists have seriously questioned its premises, finding life in the bush to be a good deal less egalitarian and more violent than the legend would have it, pointing to the predominantly urban nature of settlement, and to the legend's male bias.
Still, the upholding of the male bush worker as the true Australian was important in the emergent \Jnationalism\j of the late nineteenth century.
#
"Federation, Australian History",17,0,0,0
With the spread and democratisation of responsible government, with the emergence of a better-educated population and one, moreover, brought increasingly together by modern communications and a sense of Australian identity, there developed a sense that the colonies' problems might require common solutions.
From mid-century, there had been suggestions that the colonies should federate; in the 1880s, politicians in a number of them took up these suggestions with renewed vigour.
In the 1880s, at a conference to discuss the levelling of customs duties, the New South Wales politician Henry Parkes suggested that a federal council be established, which was done formally in 1885.
While this body could not enact legislation, it represented the beginning of Australia-wide deliberation. In the later 1850s, the need for some coherence in defence had also highlighted the issue.
In October 1889, in a public speech at Tenterfield, Parkes argued for the creation of a bicameral federal parliament, to deal with 'great' (i.e. national) matters, and suggested that a constitutional convention be set up. This the colonial premiers agreed to in 1890, and the first convention met in Sydney in 1891.
In 1897-8, a second convention drafted a national constitution, which was then, though not without considerable opposition, ratified by each of the colonies. The Imperial Parliament in Britain passed the Commonwealth of \JAustralia\j Act in 1900; and the new nation came into being on 1 January 1901, the first year of the new century.
\IFederal Parliament\i
The inauguration of the Commonwealth of \JAustralia\j (European population: c.4,000,000) on 1 January 1901 was a momentous event, with a crowd of 100,000 people witnessing the ceremony in Sydney's Centennial Park.
The first election for Federal Parliament was held at the end of March 1901, and the returned members sat for the first time on 9 May in the Exhibition Building, Melbourne (where Federal Parliament continued to meet until the opening of the first Parliament House in \JCanberra\j in 1927). Edmund Barton was the first prime minister.
\INew Issues Addressed\i
In the next years and decades, the parliaments of the Commonwealth and the States continued to address issues that had emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as well as, of course, others raised by the formation of the nation.
For example, a High Court of \JAustralia\j was created in 1903, with appeal in some matters to the Privy Council in Britain. The first Commonwealth Departments were set up, and a national defence force planned (though for some time, \JAustralia\j continued an annual payment to Britain to help meet the cost of naval protection).
In 1902 a Conciliation and \JArbitration\j Court was set up, which in 1907 established the principle of a 'basic' wage for Australian workers. An old age pension for those who did not own their own homes and who had no income was legislated in 1908. In 1911, the Commonwealth assumed control of the Northern Territory.
From 1902 onwards, adult women were able to vote in federal elections; and they also received the vote in New South Wales in 1902, \JTasmania\j in 1903, \JQueensland\j in 1905 and Victoria in 1908. \JQueensland\j founded a state university in 1909, Western \JAustralia\j in 1912.
\ITariffs Levied\i
The first Federal governments pursued two policies whose influence was to last well into the twentieth century. Tariffs of between 15% and 25% were levied on imported goods and manufactures, and \Jimmigration\j restricted.
The colonial \JQueensland\j government had banned the use of Chinese and Melanesian labourers in the cane fields in the early 1890s; and now the Commonwealth government continued this 'White \JAustralia\j' policy, enacting a requirement that intending immigrants had to be able to pass a fifty-word dictation test in a 'prescribed' (i.e., European) language.
\IConflicting Characteristics\i
The young Australian nation exhibited a number of conflicting characteristics in its early years. Its social welfare and industrial programs were among the most enlightened in the world, while its \Jimmigration\j and protectionist policies were deeply conservative. And if it was xenophobic, it was also jingoistic.
#
"Australia During World War I",18,0,0,0
Young Australian men had cheerfully volunteered to further Britain's military causes before 1901, in \JSudan\j (1885) and in South Africa (1899-1902). In 1914, they volunteered again, and went to fight in World War I. But they fought in the newly-formed all Australian army - the Australian Imperial Force - the AIF.
For much of the twentieth century, public \Jrhetoric\j held that the infant nation had received its 'baptism of blood' on the beaches of \JGallipoli\j in 1915, and again in the battlefields of \JFrance\j in 1916-18. Whatever its justification, such a view obscures other important realities.
\IConscription Problems\i
The question of conscripting young Australian men to serve overseas in Britain's cause deeply divided \JAustralia\j during World War I, with Prime Minister William Hughes losing two referenda on the issue, and with it bringing into the open the old English/Irish, Protestant/Catholic antagonism that had festered since early convict days.
To some extent, too, the opposition to conscription arose from the Australian public's becoming more aware of the ravages of war, of young men dying or returning home limbless, gassed and shell-shocked.
\IThe 1920s\i
The 1920s were generally good years for \JAustralia\j. Manufacturing and primary production expanded, and wages rose. An \Jimmigration\j program brought hundreds of thousands of people from Britain, which, together with a healthy birth rate, saw the population increase from 5.4 million in 1921 to 6.4 million in 1930.
The Commonwealth Government laid the foundations of a stronger Australian navy and an air force. The fore-runner of the CSIRO was established. More people enjoyed the convenience of electricity and motorised transport.
Qantas began its first flights in western \JQueensland\j in 1922. Dance halls proliferated, radio broadcasting became widespread, cinemas opened.
The Federal parliament moved to the new city of \JCanberra\j, purpose-built to be the administrative centre of the nation, and hence the most carefully planned of all Australian cities.
Greater prosperity and improved transport meant greater leisure, which enabled Australians to achieve more at sport.
#
"Great Depression in Australia",19,0,0,0
Then, in common with the rest of the industrialised world, Australian suffered terribly in the Great Depression of 1929-33, with exports falling by 50%, businesses failing, unemployment becoming widespread, farmers forced from their land in droves, people from homes they could no longer afford.
As the war had done, these dislocations exacerbated underlying tensions, with workers and small business people protesting angrily about their circumstances, conservatives secretly forming an 'army' to preserve the nation from a communist takeover, and with the Governor Sir Phillip Game dismissing the New South Wales Labor government of Jack Lang.
\IDepression Years\i
Among the lighter spots of the Depression years were the feats (broadcast to the nation via radio) of Don Bradman, the great cricketing batsman, and the remarkable \Jracehorse\j Phar Lap.
For much of this time, James Scullin was the Labor Prime Minister, with the United \JAustralia\j Party winning power at the end of 1931, and Joseph Lyons retaining the prime ministership until his death in 1939.
As much through external causes as through Australian government policies, the Depression ended. Scarcely had it done so, however, when \JAustralia\j was once more burdened with war.
#
"Australia Declares War, 1939",20,0,0,0
When Britain declared war on Nazi \JGermany\j on 1 September 1939, \JAustralia\j automatically did so too, with the new Prime Minister Robert Menzies announcing two days later:
'Fellow Australians, it is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that, in consequence of persistence by \JGermany\j in her invasion of \JPoland\j, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and that as a result, \JAustralia\j is also at war.'
\IAustralian Troops Overseas\i
Australia's small existing armed forces were mobilised, and plans to augment them significantly developed. By late 1940, three Australian infantry divisions were fighting Italians and Germans in the deserts of northwest Africa, and in \JGreece\j and \JCrete\j.
In this, \JAustralia\j was following a now well-established pattern of supporting Britain about the world as needed. However, the entry of \JJapan\j into the war in December 1941 brought about a radically new situation.
\IAustralia Faces Invasion\i
With the prospect of invasion looming, the new Labor Prime Minister John Curtin insisted, against British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's wishes, on the return of the Australian troops. Curtin did so in full knowledge of the historical importance of his stance:
'Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that \JAustralia\j looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinships with the United Kingdom.
We know the problems that the United Kingdom faces. We know the constant threat of invasion. We know the dangers of dispersal of strength, but we know, too, that \JAustralia\j can go and Britain can still hold on.
We are, therefore, determined that \JAustralia\j shall not go, and we shall exert all our energies towards the shaping of a plan, with the United States as its keystone, which will give to our country some confidence of being able to hold out until the tide of battle swings against the enemy.'
Summed up, Australian external policy was to be shaped towards obtaining American aid, and working out with the United States as the major factor, a plan of Pacific strategy, along with British, Chinese and Dutch forces.
#
"Australia and War in the Asia Pacific",21,0,0,0
Things went badly for \JAustralia\j and its allies in Asia and the Pacific in 1942. The Japanese captured \JSingapore\j, and advanced through the Dutch East Indies, \JMelanesia\j and New Guinea towards \JAustralia\j.
Many Australian servicemen and servicewomen were killed or captured. On the Australian mainland, Darwin and Broome were bombed, and there was a midget submarine attack in Sydney Harbour.
In mid-1942, the American General Douglas Macarthur was made Supreme Allied Commander in the Southwestern Pacific having escaped from the \JPhilippines\j and reached \JAustralia\j, which then became the springboard for turning the Japanese back, as more than 100,000 American personnel arrived and \JAustralia\j increased its war effort.
After a large Japanese fleet was defeated in the \JCoral\j Sea in May 1942, the tide began to turn for the Allies, with Australian and American forces slowly pushing the Japanese out of New Guinea and the Melanesian islands, then up the Pacific. Because of the seriousness of the threat to \JAustralia\j, conscription for overseas service in a specific Pacific area was introduced by the Curtin Government without all the objections that had surrounded the conscription issue in World War I.
The war in the Pacific ended shortly after the dropping of atomic bombs on \JHiroshima\j and \JNagasaki\j in August 1945.
\IDifficult Years\i
As they were for most of the Allied countries, the World War II years were difficult ones. In \JAustralia\j itself, there was food and petrol rationing. There was also much social dislocation, because of the absence of large numbers of young men overseas, the arrival of tens of thousands of Americans, and the often unjust treatment of Australian citizens of Italian and German origin.
Overseas, Australian personnel suffered terribly in battle or in prisoner-of-war camps. Some of these difficulties continued in the years immediately following the war, with food and other goods still in short supply, and with massive labour unrest, which culminated in the New South Wales coal strike of 1949, when Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley called in the armed forces to maintain essential services.
#
"Australia in the 1950s",22,0,0,0
\IMenzies Wins\i
Leading the Liberal Party, whose formation he had overseen in 1944, Robert Menzies became Prime Minister in 1949, and set about the task of post-war reconstruction. The 1949 election inaugurated a period of combined Liberal-Country Party governments that lasted until 1972.
The 1950s saw the continuation of high tariff protection and the White \JAustralia\j policy; and with renewed exports of wheat, wool, frozen meats and minerals, and an expanding manufacturing base (seen, for example, in steel works, ship building and \Jautomobile\j manufacture), the nation became prosperous again.
\IAustralia Begins the 1950s\i
Some serious social tensions remained. \JAustralia\j sent troops to the Korean War; and, while it failed in a referendum, Menzies' attempt to ban the Communist Party in 1950-1 deeply divided the country, and led to the fragmentation of the Labor Party after the Petrov Royal Commission in 1954.
On the face of things, given Menzies' deep attachment to Britain, and his Liberal government's policies, it might seem that the 1950s marked a resurgence of an older, conservative, subservient \JAustralia\j. However, underneath the conservative surface, there were currents swelling that would in time quite transform the nation.
\ICommonwealth Powers Increase\i
As part of the World War II effort, the states had agreed to relinquish to the Commonwealth powers to levy taxes and custom duties; and in 1942 the Federal government had instituted a nationwide standard income tax.
This centralisation of power continued after the war, and, indeed has never stopped.
\IImmigration Increases\i
Though \Jimmigration\j continued to be restricted, in the great diaspora following the war, hundreds of thousands of migrants from northern, eastern and southern Europe reached \JAustralia\j from the late 1940s onwards, substantially changing the nature of the Australian population. Post-war migrants brought with them customs and attitudes which had a profound effect on the development of Australian society.
\IForeign Policy Changes\i
Developing on the provisions of the Statute of Westminister (1931), whereby the British Parliament had decreed that the dominions might be fully responsible for their own external affairs, and following on the wartime swing to the United States, \JAustralia\j began to grow independent of Britain in matters of foreign policy, as evidenced by, for example, its participation in the Colombo Scheme (1950), ANZUS (1951) and SEATO (1954).
It became no longer automatic that Australian university graduates would pursue further studies in Britain. Gradually, numbers chose rather to go to the United States.
And with the growth of the research schools of the Australian National University (founded 1946) in \JCanberra\j, and the granting of doctoral degrees by the older universities, it was finally possible for students in some fields of knowledge to complete their training in \JAustralia\j, an endeavour in which they were now joined by Asian students under the Colombo Plan.
\IOwn Identity\i
Sport - cricket, tennis, \Jathletics\j and especially the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne - put \JAustralia\j more closely in touch with the larger world. And with increased prosperity, young Australians began to travel abroad as their parents had not done.
All these things together meant Australian society gradually became less attached to its British past, more diverse, and more interested in the region where the country lay geographically.
\IAustralia and the Arts\i
In 1939, with war gathering in Europe, the poet A. D. Hope described \JAustralia\j in the most uncomplimentary terms, castigating it for being 'without songs, \Jarchitecture\j, history', for scorning things of the intellect.
These sentiments were powerfully enunciated again by the novelist Patrick White in 1958, when he wrote that he found on return to \JAustralia\j that:
"In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes, in which human teeth fall like autumn leaves, and the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake and steak, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves."
Yet even as he said this, White himself and others such as Christina Stead and Randolph Stow were producing novels that invalidated his view. In doing so, they were contributing to a creative blossoming which had begun in the previous decade, with the paintings of Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Russell Drysdale, Albert Tucker and in the poetry of Hope and Judith Wright. Donald Horne produced one of the best known critiques of Australian society in the 1950s and 1960s in his book \IThe Lucky Country,\i published in 1964.
\ICreative Blossoming\i
This blossoming, seen also in the expansion of the ABC state orchestras and the Commonwealth Literary Fund and in the establishment of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, culminated in the 1960s in the building of the striking Sydney Opera House.
At last, in voices at once international and local, Australian artists were elaborating the subconscious of their nation - consider, for example, Nolan's Burke and Wills and Ned Kelly series, or Judith Wright's evocation of the New England tableland in \ISouth of My Days:\i
South of my day's circle, part of my blood's country, rises that tableland, high delicate outline of bony slopes wincing under the winter, low trees blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite - clean, lean, hungry country. South of my days' circle I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country full of stories that still go walking in my sleep.
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"Australia in the Years 1966 to 1975",24,0,0,0
\INew Menzies Initiatives\i
Sir Robert Menzies remained Prime Minister until 1966; and while he himself was conservative, and committed Australian troops to fight in Vietnam, nonetheless he helped usher in the new - for example, by overseeing the introduction of \Jtelevision\j and decimal currency and other measures, and by understanding the need to find new markets in the face of the restrictions imposed on imports by the European Economic Community (EEC).
Menzies also had a keen sense of the general value of education, and during his time secondary and technical education expanded, and the Murray report paved the way for the founding of a large number of new universities - developments that further increased the role of the Commonwealth government.
\ITurbulent Years\i
The years between 1966 and 1975 were turbulent ones for \JAustralia\j, as it moved towards the realities that would characterise it at the end of the twentieth century.
Opposition to the Vietnam War became intense; pressure grew to liberalise \Jimmigration\j, and also to make the economy more efficient by reducing tariffs and developing new avenues of trade. Demands for Aboriginal Land Rights increased and government policy on \JAborigines\j changed from one of assimilation to \Jintegration\j. The Women's Liberation Movement and increasing higher education for women led to more participation of women in the workforce and in public life. The Women's Electoral Lobby was formed in 1972.
\IWhitlam Elected\i
Led by E. G. Whitlam, and espousing the 'It's time' slogan, a re-invigorated Labor Party won office in 1972, and immediately began a series of reforms.
These included the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam and the abolition of conscription; more access for non-European migrants; the condemnation of the oppressive racial policies in South Africa; the diplomatic recognition of Communist China; the granting of independence to Papua New Guinea; the reduction of tariffs; and the promotion of trade with \JJapan\j.
\IWhitlam Initiatives\i
Subsequently, the government set up the Medicare health system, and advocated and obtained equal pay for many women. Many of these policies acted to increase further the role of the Commonwealth. More money was directed to schools on a 'needs' policy and university fees were abolished. Arts grants were increased.
The 1970s also saw a fundamental re-alignment of political forces, with Labor becoming less radical, the Country (i.e., National) Party less influential, and new parties, such as the Australian Democrats, emerging.
\IConstitutional Crisis\i
Though many of the reforms the Labor government instituted were clearly necessary (and, in some cases, long overdue), the pace of change alarmed many in the Australian community. Also, partly because of external factors (such as the increase in the price of oil), Labor's handling of the economy deteriorated and \Jinflation\j increased.
When the Senate, dominated by the Liberal and National parties, refused to vote supply (i.e., to pass money bills) in late 1975, governor-general Sir John Kerr dismissed the Whitlam government, thus precipitating a constitutional crisis that fundamentally remains unresolved.
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"Australia, Changes Since 1975",25,0,0,0
After 1975, both Conservative and Labor governments continued the general process outlined above, deregulating financial markets, promoting trade with Asia, reducing tariffs, and pursuing domestic economic reform.
In the 1980s, depressed commodity prices and high \Jinflation\j led to chronic balance-of-trade deficits, high interest rates and high unemployment.
In the mid 1990s, with commodity prices rising again, with macro- and micro-economic reform policies working and \Jinflation\j low, and with the export of manufactures increasing, \JAustralia\j may be on the way to achieving a fundamental improvement in its circumstances. However, balance of payment deficits remain a serious concern in the Australian economy.
\IAborigines Included in Census\i
Since the mid 1960s, there have been notable developments which will continue to have important effects.
Though notoriously reluctant to vote 'Yes' to questions put in referenda, in 1967 the Australian people approved of \JAborigines\j being included in the \JCensus\j, and of the Commonwealth Government's legislating in Aboriginal affairs (an area previously the prerogative of the states).
From these decisions followed the granting of equal pay to Aboriginal pastoral workers, and to the assumption by all \JAborigines\j of full citizenship rights, including access to social welfare.
\IOther Aboriginal Advancements\i
In the 1970s, the Commonwealth and Northern Territory governments began to give \JAborigines\j title to land. The states did so in the 1980s (though some legislated for long leases rather than for freehold title).
In 1992, in the Murray Island ('Mabo') case, the High Court ruled that in certain circumstances native title survived the extension of British sovereignty over \JAustralia\j, and therefore legally overturned any concept of 'Terra Nullius'.
Thus \JAborigines\j have been brought into modern Australian society, and some historical wrongs at least partly corrected.
\IConstitutional Changes\i
Constitutional changes have also been initiated. The Whitlam government abolished appeals to the Privy Council, thus making the High Court the final arbitrator of Australian judicial matters.
In the mid 1980s, the Hawke government established a commission to enquire into what constitutional changes might be appropriate at the end of the twentieth century.
Paul Keating, prime minister 1993-1996, declared his interest in seeing \JAustralia\j become a republic by the centenary of Federation in 2001. This step would mean that the British monarch would cease to be \JAustralia\j's Head of State: but by what alternative means the nation should fill this office remains unclear.
\IAustralia Today\i
As \JAustralia\j (its population now c.18,000,000) approaches the twenty-first century it shows itself to be a diverse nation made up of peoples of many different ethnic backgrounds, races and religions, one surprisingly tolerant of diversity. It continues to enjoy a good standard of living.
As well as remembering its historical links with Europe, it is finding a place in Asia. A further expansion of its tertiary education sector is preparing people for more complex employment.
Displayed and performed in a new generation of galleries, concert halls and theatres, and a host of private venues, its flourishing art, music, dance and literature amply demonstrate its vibrancy.
