Australia: history to 1901

An expedition across the Australian desert in 1873, led by Peter Warburton. The gold rushes of the 1850s stimulated inland exploration by Europeans, including the crossing of the Blue Mountains by William Lawson and others.

Australia's first inhabitants, the Aborigines, arrived in Australia at least 50,000 years ago, according to present evidence. Their way of life, involving hunting and gathering and the use of Stone-Age technologies, was well adapted to the Australian environment and changed very little until the advent of the Europeans.

European discovery The actual date of the first sighting of Australia by Europeans is doubtful. Various claims have been made, among them the sighting of the west coast of Australia in 1522 by followers of the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, and it is likely that in the 16th century Spanish and Portuguese explorers sailed within sight of the coasts.

The first recorded sighting of Australia by Europeans, however, was in 1606, when the Dutch ship Duyfken, under the command of Willem Jansz, sighted the west coast of Cape York, and the Spanish ship of Luis Vaez de Torres sailed north of Cape York and through the Torres Strait, thus proving that New Guinea was separate from any southern continent. In 1616 Dirk Hartog left an inscribed pewter plate (Australia's most famous early European relic, now in Amsterdam) in west Australia.

Charting the coastline Belief in the existence of terra australis incognita (‘the unknown southern continent’) gradually strengthened as European trading vessels, on the way from the Cape of Good Hope to the East Indies, touched the western and northwestern shores. With the expedition under Abel Tasman, the northern and northwest coasts of Australia were accurately charted, and in 1642 Tasman discovered Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) and New Zealand. As far as is known, William Dampier in 1688 was the first Englishman to sight Australia, but his report on the northwest coast was not such as to encourage further interest.

It was not until 1770, when Captain James Cook explored the entire east coast of Australia and claimed New South Wales for Britain, that the eastern limits of the Australian land mass became known. Further contributions to the knowledge of the coastline were made by George Bass and Matthew Flinders. Bass and Flinders together had circumnavigated Tasmania in 1798, while in 1802 Flinders sailed right along the south coast of the continent, and in the following year circumnavigated Australia. By 1843 the exploration of the whole coastline had been completed, by Charles Darwin in the Beagle.

The establishment of New South Wales When Cook discovered the east coast of Australia in 1770, his scientist, Sir Joseph Banks, reported that the land in the vicinity of Botany Bay was fertile and suitable for settlement. Banks's report encouraged the British government to contemplate the establishment of a colony there for the British loyalists who had fled America following independence. This project was abandoned and instead the government decided to establish a penal settlement. The first fleet, under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip (who was to be the first governor of New South Wales, as the colony was called), arrived in 1788.

Many difficulties were encountered in the first few years. The land was not as fertile as Banks had anticipated, the convicts were poorly equipped and ill-suited to become settlers, and for some considerable time the colony remained far from self-supporting (often the whole settlement was placed on short rations). Maintaining discipline was aggravated by the poor quality of the recruits in the New South Wales Corps and by the tendency of officers to regard Australia as a purely financial speculation. They acquired land, virtually monopolized trade, exploited the colonists to the best of their ability, and finally mutinied against Governor William Bligh in the Rum Rebellion of 1808.

This mutiny brought matters to a head in Australia, and the British government adopted a new policy. It recalled the New South Wales Corps, and chose an army officer, not a naval captain, as the next governor. The arrival in 1809 of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, accompanied by his own regiment, inaugurated a period in which the colony ceased to be primarily a jail. Convicts might earn their release through good conduct, and Macquarie's policy of supporting emancipated convicts was sometimes resented by the free settlers. However, free settlers who took up land were assigned convicts to work for them, and the settlement grew rapidly. The growing proportion of free settlers made the granting of representative and then responsible government inevitable.

Exploring the interior During the period of Macquarie's governorship the Blue Mountains, which had been a barrier to the colony's westward expansion, were crossed by William Wentworth, Gregory Blaxland, and William Lawson in 1813. This opened the way for the pastoral industry to spread inland, led by the pioneering overlanders. Already John MacArthur with his experiments in breeding for fine wool had demonstrated that there was a great future for the wool industry.

The crossing of the Blue Mountains was the first of a number of important explorations that opened the way for further expansion of the colony. Within ten years John Oxley had explored the headwaters of the inland rivers of New South Wales. During their expedition of 1824–25 Hamilton Hume (1797–1873) and William Hovell (1786–1875) reached Port Phillip Bay and became the first Europeans to see the Murray River. Charles Sturt in the meantime had solved the problem of where the inland rivers flowed, and Allan Cunningham had pushed northwards to the Darling Downs. Thomas Mitchell (1792–1855), surveyor general for New South Wales 1828–55, opened up the fertile western area of Victoria in 1836.

From the 1840s explorers turned their attention to the centre of the continent. Notable expeditions include those of Edward Eyre in 1840 and 1841, Sturt's journey into the centre in 1844, Ludwig Leichhardt's explorations of Queensland and Arnhem Land in the 1840s, the ill-fated attempt by Robert Burke and William Wills in 1860–61 to cross Australia from south to north, and the more successful expedition undertaken by John Stuart in 1862. In the 1870s the last gaps were filled in by the crossings of Western Australia by John Forrest, Peter Warburton (1813–1889) in 1873, and Ernest Giles (1835–1897) in 1875–76. While these expeditions added greatly to the knowledge of the country, they did not have significant effects on settlement because of the barren nature of much of the territory crossed.

The growth of new colonies When the land was suitable the pastoralists followed close behind the explorers. Between 1820 and 1850 sheep and cattle farmers had occupied 310,000 sq km/120,000 sq mi – most of the good grazing land in eastern Australia. The gold rushes of the 1850s and 1880s also contributed to the exploration as well as to the economic and constitutional growth of Australia.

The expansion of settlement was outwards from Sydney and, after 1835, from Port Phillip (Melbourne). As early as 1803 two penal settlements had been made in Van Diemen's Land (as Tasmania was then known), and the colony there was formally established in 1825. Suspicions of French intentions had promoted the colonization of Van Diemen's Land and were to influence the establishment of the colony of Western Australia in 1829. South Australia was founded in 1836. From Tasmania squatters crossed to Port Phillip, and the colony of Victoria was established in 1851. A new settlement, Brisbane, was made at Moreton Bay in 1824, but for some years remained primarily a jail, and the colony of Queensland was not formally created until 1859.

The system of transportation of convicts from Britain was never introduced in South Australia and Victoria, and ended in New South Wales in 1840, Queensland in 1849, Tasmania in 1852, and Western Australia in 1868. The convicts' contribution to the economic foundation of the country was considerable, and many would not have been convicted under a less harsh and capricious penal system than the one operating in Britain at that time.

Land policy and labour supply Initially the British government had adopted the proposal that 40 acres (16.1 ha) of land should be granted to each settler for every £3 or £3-worth of goods he brought with him. Land was granted freely in the first few years, but the scheme was not notably successful. The land was not as fertile as anticipated and some years elapsed before the colony in New South Wales became self-supporting.

A different experiment had been tried in South Australia, where the colony had been founded in 1836 on the principles of Edward Wakefield, namely that land be sold at a reasonable price and the proceeds be spent on immigration. The new colony also had its difficulties, among which was a tendency to speculate in land rather than to develop it, though by the mid-1840s it was prospering and expanding.

Land policy and labour supply were important issues in New South Wales in this period. Originally convicts or ex-convicts had been the chief source of labour for the colonies, but in the 1830s an increasing number of people came to Australia as assisted immigrants. As the number of convicts grew proportionately smaller, the agitation for the cessation of transportation gained strength and by 1852 all transportation had stopped.

The achievement of self-government Two issues were involved in land policy. Firstly, there was the question of whether the land should be granted or sold; and secondly, arising from this, there was the colonists' demand that the British government should surrender its control over the allocation of land, a demand that implied self-government. Control over land policy was an important reason for the demand for self-government. It also involved a struggle between the squatters – illegal occupiers of otherwise unallocated crown grazing land, some of whom established vast estates and became very wealthy – and the more legally minded ‘democratic’ section of the community, composed mainly of the more recent assisted immigrants, who were anxious to acquire land themselves.

Since 1823 the governor of New South Wales had been assisted by an executive council and a legislative council. The latter was originally nominated but in 1842 became partly elected, although the electorate was restricted to the wealthy landed interests. The British government had thus in principle conceded responsible government, and between 1853 and 1859 most of the essential mechanism of parliamentary democracy had been established in all colonies, except Western Australia, Queensland being separated from New South Wales in that year. In the struggle between the two sections of the community the democratic element had succeeded in introducing legislation to force the squatters to bid for the land they occupied at auction, and in this way many of the large squatter estates were broken up.

The gold rushes The discovery of gold in the Blue Mountains by Edward Hargraves in 1851 sparked off the first gold rush. The gold rushes no doubt hastened the granting of self-government, and had far-reaching effects on the economic development of the country. Gold trebled the population in three years, increased trade, and brought enormous wealth to the colonies, but it also brought conflict.

The miners resented the high licence fees charged by the government for prospecting, and the heavy-handed police methods used to collect the fees. In addition, they agitated against their inability to vote and their lack of representation. Riots were frequent, the most serious developing into the Eureka Stockade incident. The rebellion was quickly suppressed, but it helped to bring about a number of reforms.

Development under the self-governing colonies Although the government of each colony acted on its own, a remarkably uniform approach to key issues emerged. In relation to education, religion, land policy, railways, and immigration the colonies pursued policies that were broadly similar.

Within a few years of receiving responsible government all the colonies had decided that there should be no state support for religion. Similarly the trend was to make education free, compulsory, and secular – though this was not achieved quickly, nor without bitter disputes. It was, however, a decision that has remained a determining factor in educational policy. In undertaking an ever-widening range of activities to assist in the development of the country, the colonies all progressed in the same direction: they built railways, roads, bridges, and telegraphs, and constructed irrigation works, hospitals, and schools.

The depression of the 1890s With the end of the gold rushes there was a halt in the rapid expansion that Australia had enjoyed. The depression that followed in the 1890s led to the formation of the Australian Labor Party and an increase in trade-union activity, which has characterized Australian politics ever since.

Another result of the depression was the introduction of laws by all the colonies to restrict Asian immigration. The gold fields had attracted a large number of Chinese, and as the competition from these immigrants began to be resented after the rushes were over, a movement emerged to exclude all those whom it was feared might lower the standard of living. The ‘White Australia’ policy had been determined before federation, and the Commonwealth legislation in the early years of the 20th century only made its application uniform.

The issue of free trade versus protectionism also came to a head during the depression, and was an issue where the colonies adopted divergent policies. The influx of new settlers during the gold rushes had stimulated the growth of local manufacturing, and some of the colonies, notably Victoria, sought to encourage their infant industries with protective tariffs. New South Wales, preoccupied with questions of land policy, benefiting from large coal resources, and influenced by the leading politician Henry Parkes, a confirmed free-trader, rejected protection. The creation of tariff barriers between the colonies became a cause of growing friction.

Towards federation The protection issue provided one of the motives for federation, for the disadvantages and inconveniences of border tariffs were only too obvious. But federation was mooted not only to overcome differences but to give expression and effectiveness to agreed policies. The need for a united voice in external affairs, in providing for the defence of the country, and in dealing with certain social and economic problems, and the desire for uniform immigration laws, all lent force to the argument for some form of unity.

The move towards federation was, perhaps above all, an expression of the nationalist spirit that had steadily gained strength in the last years of the century. Throughout the 1890s the issues were debated, and despite some reluctance on the part of state governments to surrender their powers, the federation came about, and on 1 January 1901 the Commonwealth of Australia was established.

For the history of Australia from 1901 to the present, see Australia.