The Aborigines were the first inhabitants of Australia. Most anthropologists believe they migrated to the continent at least 40,000 years ago, and that most of the continent was occupied 30,000 years ago. 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.A. 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 no actual discoveries were recorded by Europeans 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.
A.1. Portuguese and Spanish SailingsIn the 15th century Portugal's systematic drive southward along the west coast of Africa, seeking trade with India, rekindled European interest in finding the as yet undiscovered Terra Australis. Portuguese mariners may have charted the east coast of the continent in as early as the 16th century, but they preferred to concentrate on India, East Africa, and Southeast Asia. Australia remained undiscovered by the West for other reasons as well. One was that the continent's location was off the Oceanic-island trading corridor of the Indian and South Pacific oceans. In addition, the winds in the Southern Hemisphere tend to veer northward in the direction of the equator west of Australia, whereas east of the continent the strong head winds discourage sailing into them.
In the 16th and early 17th centuries, Spain, having established its empire in South and Central America, began a series of expeditions from Peru into the South Pacific. Encouraged by the discovery of the Solomon Islands (northeast of Australia) by Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira in 1567, Spanish New World officials launched several expeditions in hopes of finding gold. After the failure of these voyages to find either precious minerals or significant new landmasses, Spain abandoned its interest in Terra Australis after 1605.
A.2. Dutch Interest
Portugal's involvement in India, and Spain's disenchantment, allowed the rising power of The Netherlands to establish a string of trading centers from the Cape of Good Hope in Africa to Indonesia during the 17th century. The Dutch, stationed chiefly in the Indonesian ports of Bantam and Batavia (Jakarta), 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 Willem Jansz sailed into Torres Strait, between the Australian mainland and New Guinea. (The strait was later named for a Spanish explorer, Luis Vaez de Torres, who sailed into the same area in the same year and determined that New Guinea was an island.) In 1616 Dutch sailor Dirk Hartog followed a new southern route across the Indian Ocean to Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia). Winds blew his ship, the Eendracht, too far to the east and Hartog landed on an offshore island of Western Australia, becoming the first known European to set foot on Australian soil. 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 now known as Tasmania. Tasman then sailed farther east and north to explore New Zealand. Dutch ships sailing to Indonesia often sailed off course, and their crews landed on the western and northern coasts of Australia. Despite their increasing knowledge of the continent, which they called 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 English.
A.3. British Expeditions and Claims
At first England's involvement in Australia appeared likely to go the way of the Spanish and Dutch, but in the late 17th century the English launched two expeditions. The first one, in 1687 to 1688, was led by a buccaneer, William Dampier, who landed in the northwest. When he returned to England, he urged further voyages in pursuit of the continent's supposed wealth. The second expedition—along the western coast in 1699—resulted in a rather dismal assessment of the land's potential. English interest in the continent declined accordingly.
The 18th century in Western Europe ushered in the Age of Reason, when philosophers and scientists stressed the value of global discovery, of learning more about the Earth, and in collecting unusual flora and fauna from around the world. These inquiries fit well with Britain's growing power as a maritime empire.
In 1768 Captain James Cook left England on a three-year expedition to the Pacific that also took him to Australia. Cook landed at Botany Bay on the eastern coast. He charted the region and named it New South Wales. It was he and his staff, including botanist Sir Joseph Banks, who later supported settlement in Australia. Cook's two additional voyages in the 1770s added information on the Australian landmass and cemented Britain's claims to the continent.French interest was less sustained than that of the British. Marion Dufresne, on his 1772 voyage, concentrated upon charting and describing the less hospitable western coast and Tasmania, and later French explorers investigated Australia's southern coast. By then, however, the British had established their first settlement and had claimed the eastern half of the continent.
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 midcentury before the continent's major interior features were known.
B. Penal Settlements
Australia was portrayed as a remote and unattractive land for European settlement. However, it had some social and strategic value for a nation with rising crime rates and commercial interests in the Pacific and East Asia. Britain moved quickly after the American Revolution ended in 1783 to establish its first settlement in Australia, since it could no longer ship British convicts to America. Food shortages, harsh penal laws, and the general displacement of people during the early stages in the Industrial Revolution in Britain added to its criminal population. Leading social reformers of the day assumed that the best way to eliminate crime was to remove these criminals from society. In 1786 the British government announced its intention to establish a penal settlement at Botany Bay in Australia.
B.1. Sydney Founded
On May 13, 1787, retired Royal Navy captain Arthur Phillip set sail from Portsmouth 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, 211 marines, 20 civil officials, and 443 seamen. Finding the bay a poor choice, Phillip moved the fleet north to Port Jackson, which he discovered to be one of the world's best natural harbors. Here he began the first permanent 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 horticulturalists, 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 perpetual food shortages through the 1790s. Natural food sources were largely limited to fish and kangaroo. Phillip established farms on the more fertile banks of the Hawkesbury River, a few miles northwest of Sydney, but this land was often flooded or still used by the Aborigines. Needed food supplies came mainly from Norfolk Island, nearly 1,600 km (about 1,000 mi) away, which Phillip had occupied in February 1788. The island later served as a jail for the more hardened criminals.
B.2. The New South Wales Corps
In 1792 the Royal Marines were replaced with the New South Wales Corps, which had been specifically recruited in Great Britain. Given grants of land, members of the corps became the colony's best and largest farmers, but they also posed a serious threat to the governors by their power over the economy. With a sharp eye for enhancing their income, they specialized in controlling the price of rum, which served largely as the colony's internal means of exchange.
Captain John Hunter, Phillip's successor as governor, who arrived in 1795, tried in vain to gain control of the rum traffic. The next governor, Captain Philip G. King, who served from 1800 to 1806, was no more successful. Both governors also had to house additional arrivals, and in 1804 King 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 threatened the corps with the loss of their monopoly. 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. The Rum Rebellion thus gave the leaders of the corps the immediate victory. Meanwhile, one of its ringleaders, John Macarthur, had found the solution to the colony's lack of valuable exports: In 1802 he had shown British manufacturers samples of Australian wool. It was only after 1810, however, with the breeding of the merino sheep, with its long staple wool, that sheep grazing gradually developed into a major economic activity.
B.3. Macquarie's Government
Bligh's replacement, Lachlan Macquarie, served as governor from 1809 to 1821. The most talented governor since Phillip, he also became the most powerful. The New South Wales Corps was sent home, and because the economy had improved, the government gained stability. Macquarie began an extensive public works program, employing ex-convict Francis Greenway to design churches, hospitals, and government buildings in Sydney. The population of the colony also increased after Britain's defeat of Napoleon in 1814. The arrival of more free settlers brought more claims to farmland on which more convicts could serve as laborers.
These two new groups of colonists, however, reflected a growing tension within New South Wales. As convicts completed their sentences or were eligible for release due to good behavior, they wanted land and opportunities. They were known as the emancipists, and their leaders urged that they be given more rights. The free settlers, like the corps before them, maintained that convicts, even after their release, should not be treated as equals. They were known as the exclusives. Macquarie, as had Bligh, tended to support the emancipists, granting them land and appointing them to minor offices. The exclusives, therefore, became critical of both Macquarie and the emancipists.
B.4. Constitutional Reform
Macquarie's government was expensive, and most of the burden had to be carried by the British treasury. Overseas punishment, however, did not appear to have reduced the number of convicts, and many wondered if New South Wales was the proper solution to Britain's crime problems. In 1819, the British Colonial Office sent Judge John Thomas Bigge to inspect and report on Macquarie's administration. He recommended slashes in government expenses but assumed that New South Wales should continue as a convict settlement. He also, however, recognized the colony's growing importance to the British Empire as a home for wealthy free settlers, and he popularized the name Australia for the southern continent. Bigge's reports resulted in a major change in the constitution for New South Wales in 1823. By an act of Parliament the governor's autocratic powers were reduced with the appointment of a nominated Legislative Council.
In 1825, by an executive order of the British government, the island settlement of Van Diemen's Land (present-day Tasmania) became a separate colony. A penal colony had been established there in 1803 out of fear that France was ready to claim the island. Although settlements south and north of Sydney had been attempted in the same period, only Van Diemen's Land became a large permanent settlement.
B.5. Early Australian Society
The convicts—and reaction to them—became the major theme of early Australian history. Although the sending of convicts to New South Wales was abolished in 1850 and to Van Diemen's Land in 1852, Britain had sent more than 150,000 to the two colonies. Approximately 20 percent were women, and about one-third were Irish; the majority came from the poorer classes of British towns. Many had been repeatedly convicted of petty crimes, and many of the females had been prostitutes. Most of the convicts were poorly educated; only about half of them could read or write. A minority of the prisoners were from the upper class and were serving sentences for crimes such as forgery; these convicts were often able to use their training in business and in government offices. In general, however, because they were unskilled and unaccustomed to the rigors of colonial or prison life, the convicts were an exceptionally difficult population with which to build a new society.
Until the 1830s, colonial officials endorsed harsh punishments for convicts who committed crimes in the colony. Flogging was a common penalty—up to 200 lashes for crimes of theft. Although most convicts were fed and clothed by the government, many were sent out to work for others. Those with cunning and skills might accumulate wealth, and a few became the founders of prominent colonial families.
Although seals were hunted before 1820 in the rich waters of Bass Strait, it was wool that connected Australian society with its counterpart in Britain. Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson, and William C. Wentworth opened up a route through the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, in 1813, and westward settlement of New South Wales was begun. Their explorations, followed by the southerly treks of Hamilton Hume and William Hovell in 1824 and Major Thomas Livingstone Mitchell (later Sir Thomas) in 1836 into what was later called Victoria, spurred the transfer of flocks and herds to inland pastures. By 1829 the government had become concerned about the dispersal of the sheep farmers, or graziers, who were known as squatters, since they obtained licenses to “squat” on the land they wanted rather than buying it. Efforts to control squatting failed, in part because of the continuing demand from British textile mills for more wool.
Like England, the Australian colonies were officially Anglican in religion. The authorities, however, neglected religious instruction, and the Anglican faith was not the religion of the bulk of the population; Roman Catholicism (maintained by the Irish) and Methodism vied with the official religion. Many of the early settlers tended to remain indifferent to religious creeds.
Education was also neglected by the government, which generally provided only a few schools for orphans. Wealthier colonists employed tutors for their children. The colony did develop a lively press, beginning in 1803 with the publication of the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser. The Gazette's editor, George Howe, also published the first books in Sydney, including a volume of poetry (1819) by Judge Barron Field. 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, born in the colony, began publication of The Australian, a more opinionated newspaper that campaigned for the emancipists.
C. Expanding Colonization
From the 1820s to the 1880s, Australia underwent major processes that laid the foundation for its present society. Among these were the establishment of new colonies along the coasts, the expansion of sheep and cattle raising in the interior, and the discovery of gold and other minerals in the eastern colonies.
C.1. New Settlements
As a prelude to increased British interest, Captain James Stirling (later Sir James) 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 until 1868. Only with the discovery of gold in the 1890s, however, was the fortune of Western Australia reversed.South Australia, with its capital of Adelaide, was established in July 1837. It was the plan of Edward Wakefield, a British reformer who wanted to create new colonies reflecting British cultural values. By selling land rather than giving it away (the past British practice), Wakefield hoped to use the income to sponsor the immigration of laborers to meet the needs of colonial farmers. By controlling land prices, he assumed he could regulate colonial expansion. The new colony eventually succeeded as a society of small grain farmers. Like each of the other colonies, it failed to recognize the rights of the Aborigines.
C.2. Growth of Sheep Grazing
Australian soils and climate, with the recurrent droughts, were better suited for large-scale grazing than for farming, and the most successful and dramatic transformation of the Australian continent occurred in the 1830s and 1840s, as squatters established huge sheep runs. Paying only 10 pounds a year for a license, squatters could claim virtually as much land as they wanted.
The expansion of sheep grazing resulted in the colonization of the Port Phillip district, which in 1850 became the colony of Victoria, with its capital at Melbourne (founded in 1836). To the north, graziers also gave the outlines to another colony, Queensland (with its capital at Brisbane), which was separated from New South Wales in 1859.
From 1830 to 1850 wool exports rose from 2 million pounds to 41 million pounds. With new immigrants and the growth of the capital cities, each of which served as the major port for its region, the Australian colonies began to agitate for more control over their governmental systems.
C.3. Development of Political Institutions
The transfer of more authority from Britain to the colonies was helped by Britain's adoption of free trade in the late 1840s. Free trade, which meant that Britain would buy from the lowest-price supplier and sell in the most profitable market, eliminated—at least in principle—the need for colonies. Thus, in 1850, without having to unite into a common front, the eastern colonies received new constitutions. Victoria, South Australia, and Van Diemen's Land (which changed its name to Tasmania in 1854) were given legislative councils, with two-thirds of the membership to be elected. New South Wales had been granted the same provision in 1842.
By the mid-1850s each of the four eastern colonies refashioned its governmental system and gained control over its land policy. The new systems vested power in a cabinet or council of ministers responsible to the legislature and provided a popularly elected assembly as a part of that legislature. Voting by ballot (instead of by the raising of hands) and other innovations made the new governments quite democratic. The new constitutions reflected the interests of the urban populations, who wanted to reduce the political power of the graziers, but the graziers still managed, during the 1850s and 1860s, to gain more security in their landholdings.
C.4. Gold Rush and Consequences
The gold rush of the 1850s sped up the development of the social and political systems. In April 1851, Edward Hargraves found gold at Summer Hill Creek in New South Wales. With the recent experience of the California gold rush in mind, others joined in the rush, which quickly became centered in Victoria at Mount Alexander, Ballarat, and Bendigo. Gold was later found elsewhere in New South Wales and Queensland.
In the following ten years, Australia exported more than 124 million pounds worth of gold alone. By 1861 the Australian population had reached almost 1.2 million, a threefold increase over the 1850 population of 400,000. Americans as well as Britons and Canadians joined the immigrants to the eastern colonies. In Victoria, miners quickly became irritated with the high cost of mining licenses and restrictions on their right to search for gold. Before the fees were reduced, a small band of miners staged an uprising at the Eureka stockade at Ballarat in December 1854.
Both miners and colonists responded with alarm to the influx of Chinese immigrants attracted by gold. In 1856 Victoria restricted the entry of Chinese. Eventually, the exclusion of all but European settlers gave the colonies a “White Australia” policy that was defended vigorously whenever there appeared to be new threats to Australian jobs or culture. On occasion it seemed that Queensland, which began to import Polynesian laborers (called Kanakas) for sugarcane plantations in the 1860s, might remain at odds with the other colonies, but it eventually conformed; the plantations were replaced by small-scale sugar farms run by whites, and the White Australia policy continued to provide an emotional link among the colonists.
C.5. Economic Controversy
In the 1860s the goldfields began to decline. Although wool exports kept the colonies fairly prosperous, colonial debate soon centered on the role of government in the economy. In particular, railroad construction, due to costs and the absence of internal market centers, became a government activity. 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) continued to stay with a free-trade policy.
Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the 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.
C.6. Treatment of Aborigines
Phillip's initial settlement at Sydney brought him into contact with Australian Aborigines, many of whom used the surrounding lands as their campsites and hunting domains. Only a few major confrontations took place between the colonists and the indigenous population in the first decade. With the settling of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), however, Aboriginal communities began to be destroyed on a large scale. Unable to overcome colonial arms and fears, and despite the official British policy of protection, the 5,000 Aborigines of the island were then reduced to a mere handful. On the mainland, where the graziers sought lands for their sheep runs, the Aboriginal communities of hunters were forced to retreat into the drier interior.
In principle, the official colonial policy throughout the 19th century was to treat the Aborigines as equals, with the intention of eventually converting them to Christianity and European civilization. Governor Macquarie even established a school for Aboriginal children. Such acts, however, stressing good intentions, were infrequently supported and always underfinanced. In fact, moving from a policy of protection to one of punishment was typical of the early colonial government.
The culture clash between whites and Aborigines was especially severe on the frontier. In the 1830s and 1840s, as the frontier pushed inland, some Aborigines were employed on sheep stations, and others were used for police patrols, but even some active church efforts to serve and educate the Aborigines did not stabilize race relations. White settlers poisoned and hunted Aborigines and abused and exploited Aboriginal women and children.
Forced to survive on even scantier supplies of food, the Aborigines were steadily reduced in number. By the 20th century their traditional lifestyles were confined to the Northern Territory, Queensland, and New South Wales. Not until the 1950s did their population begin to inch back to its pre-European level and the federal government begin to review and correct past treatment.
C.7. Cultural Life in the 19th Century
The rapid increase of Australia's population from 1830 to 1860 contributed to the growth of the six capital cities. Unable to support dense settlements within their interior, the colonies became increasingly urbanized around the initial points of colonization. With the decline of gold mining in Victoria and New South Wales in the 1860s, even the prospectors drifted to the cities. By the end of the century, Sydney and Melbourne were among the world's largest cities, even though Australia as a whole still had a small population.
Each capital served as the major port for its respective colony. Perceiving others as rivals, each city—and colony—tended to emphasize its own identity. Contacts between individual colonies were secondary to their ties with Britain, and rivalries among them were common; thus, Victoria and New South Wales each used a different gauge for their railroads. (Standardization was begun only in the 1960s.)
All the colonies, however, shared a culture that was heavily influenced by the capital cities. In the 1850s it was merchants and professionals who agitated for political reform and the making of new constitutions. Small urban manufacturers and early trade union leaders aided in the formation of cabinet governments and the passage of legislation favorable to the urban populations. Victoria's workers pioneered the eight-hour-day movement in 1856. Following the lead of New South Wales, the colonial political systems tended to keep the graziers and other families of wealth from controlling colonial life. Wool and the ever-occurring mineral discoveries nevertheless provided the economic base on which that way of life was based.
Enjoying midcentury prosperity, Sydney and Melbourne set the pace in cultural activities. Each founded a university and undertook major efforts in building museums, art galleries, and stately homes for the wealthier classes. Sporting events, especially cricket matches and soccer games, complemented the activities of clubs and societies. Joined by Adelaide, with its even stronger streak of British liberalism, the three cities succeeded in gaining free, compulsory primary educational systems for the colonies by the 1860s. Each city also had several major newspapers that championed its colony's uniqueness.
Despite intense loyalty to Britain, the colonists soon began to romanticize their frontier images of sheep shearer, farmhand, and miner. The image was that of an individual struggling against authority as well as the environment. By the 1880s and 1890s folktales and ballads were a major part of Australia's popular culture. Even earlier, the distinctive Australian slang had come into being as another variant of English.
Although British authors remained far more popular than Australian writers, colonial contributions to the arts kept pace with the increasing economic and social development of the six colonies. Two writers, Catherine Helen Spence, author of Clara Morison (1854), and Marcus Clarke, author of For the Term of His Natural Life (1874), produced distinctive novels that dealt with local themes. See also Australian Literature.
Australia held a special fascination for 19th-century scientists, and large numbers of botanists, zoologists, anthropologists, and geologists found ample material there for research. By the 1860s, Australians had also completed the initial exploration of the interior, including the deserts in the Northern Territory.
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