Australia's history: a continent the law called empty

Who held the continent before the British came

The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians reached the continent between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago, during the last glacial period, over land bridges and short sea crossings from what is now South-East Asia. Wikipedia's history of Australia names the Madjedbebe rock shelter in Arnhem Land as perhaps the oldest site of human occupation. Devil's Lair in the far south-west was occupied around 47,000 years ago and Tasmania by 39,000 years ago, and human remains at Lake Mungo in New South Wales have been dated to around 41,000 years ago, with evidence of cremation.

The people spread across very different country and changed it. Fire was used to clear vegetation and open grassland from about 46,000 years ago. Rising seas cut Tasmania off from the mainland some 14,000 years ago, and between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago they formed the thousands of islands of the Torres Strait. Occupation of those islands began about 4,000 years ago, and by 2,500 years ago a distinct Torres Strait Islander maritime culture had emerged, with gardens on some islands and villages by about 700 years ago.

At the time of European contact there were about 600 groups, each tied to a language and a country, and some 250 distinct languages. Estimates of the population then range from 300,000 to one million. At Budj Bim in Victoria, the Gunditjmara built channels, weirs and dams from volcanic rock to trap, store and harvest short-finned eels, and UNESCO dates that work to a period of at least 6,600 years. The site was inscribed on the World Heritage List on 6 July 2019.

Contact with outsiders came first from the north. Britannica records that Makassarese seamen fished off Arnhem Land from the late eighteenth century and may have done so for generations; Wikipedia's history dates the Macassan trepang visits from around 1720.

How Europeans charted the coast first

The Dutch ship Duyfken, under Willem Janszoon, made the first documented European landing in 1606. Dirk Hartog's Eendracht touched Shark Bay in October 1616, and his men left a memorial there. Abel Tasman sighted the island he called Van Diemen's Land in 1642, and the Dutch named the western landmass New Holland. The English buccaneer William Dampier reached its north-west coast in 1688 and again in 1699, and wrote of the land and its people in terms so critical that another pause in exploration followed.

James Cook's Endeavour reached the east coast in April 1770. Cook landed at Botany Bay and, in August, at Possession Island off Cape York, claimed the eastern coast for Britain as New South Wales. The National Museum of Australia describes the claim as resting on terra nullius, the assumption that the people living there had no political organisation and no leaders with the authority to sign a treaty. Matthew Flinders sailed round the whole continent between 1801 and 1803, with the Aboriginal explorer Bungaree aboard, and urged that the name Australia replace New Holland. It had official backing from 1817.

How a penal colony spread across the continent

The British government decided on the settlement in 1786, and why it did so is still argued. The traditional account is that the prisons needed relief after the loss of the American colonies; other historians see a base for sea power or for trade in the eastern seas. Britannica judges it likely that all of these weighed.

The First Fleet of 11 ships sailed on 13 May 1787 and reached Botany Bay on 19 and 20 January 1788. The count of its convicts differs by source: Britannica gives about 730, of whom 570 were men and 160 women, while Wikipedia's history gives 778, of whom 586 were men and 192 women. Arthur Phillip moved the fleet north to Port Jackson, the flag went up at Sydney Cove on 26 January and the colony was proclaimed on 7 February. Its claim ran over everything east of 135 degrees east.

Colonies followed around the coast. Hobart was settled in 1804, Van Diemen's Land became a separate colony in 1825 and Britain claimed the whole continent once Edmund Lockyer settled Albany in 1827. The Swan River colony of 1829 and South Australia in 1836 were founded without convicts; Victoria separated from New South Wales in 1851 and Queensland in 1859. On 26 January 1808 the officers of the New South Wales Corps deposed Governor William Bligh, the only successful armed takeover of government in Australian history by Wikipedia's account.

How many convicts came is also counted two ways. Wikipedia's history puts the total at about 161,700 between 1788 and 1868; UNESCO, which inscribed eleven convict sites as a single World Heritage property in 2010, gives around 166,000 between 1787 and 1868. Transportation to New South Wales was suspended in 1840 and to Van Diemen's Land in 1853, and Western Australia took convicts from 1850 until transportation ended in 1868.

In 1835 John Batman used a treaty to buy about 40,000 hectares around Port Phillip from the Kulin. Governor Bourke's proclamation of 10 October that year annulled it and declared anyone occupying land without the government's authority a trespasser. The National Museum of Australia reads the proclamation as the moment terra nullius was written into colonial law: from then on, Aboriginal people could not sell land and nobody could acquire it except from the Crown.

What the frontier cost Aboriginal peoples

About 3,000 Aboriginal people lived in the Sydney region when the First Fleet arrived. An outbreak of smallpox in April 1789 killed about half of them, and its source is disputed. Further epidemics followed the frontier. Butlin, cited in Wikipedia's history, estimated the Aboriginal population of what became Victoria at around 50,000 in 1788 and about 12,500 by 1830.

Violence ran alongside disease. In Van Diemen's Land the Black War began in 1824, martial law was declared in November 1828, and in October 1830 about 2,200 troops and settlers formed a line across the island to drive Aboriginal people out of the settled districts. Around 200 settlers and between 600 and 900 Aboriginal Tasmanians were killed, and the survivors were moved to Flinders Island. The last recorded massacre by settlers took place at Coniston in the Northern Territory in 1928, where at least 31 Aboriginal people were killed.

No agreed total exists, and the estimates are best read together:

Protectors of Aborigines were appointed in South Australia and the Port Phillip District in 1839 and in Western Australia in 1840, and the offices had closed by 1857. Victoria's Board for the Protection of Aborigines, created in 1869, could decide where Aboriginal Victorians lived and worked, and in 1886 it gained the power to exclude people of mixed descent from its missions and stations.

How gold and the vote remade the colonies

Gold had been found in New South Wales before 1851, but the Governor, George Gipps, is reported to have told the geologist William Branwhite Clarke in 1844 to put his find away for fear of unrest in a colony of convicts. Edward Hargraves found gold near Bathurst in February 1851, and by 15 May some 300 diggers were at Ophir. Victoria offered its own reward and found gold at Clunes, Ballarat, Castlemaine and Bendigo within six months. The National Museum of Australia credits the Victorian fields with more than a third of the world's gold output in the 1850s.

The population rose from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871. By 1855 about 20,000 Chinese miners were on the Victorian diggings, and anti-Chinese riots broke out in Victoria in 1856 and in New South Wales in 1860. At Ballarat, miners angry at the licence fee built a stockade on the Eureka field, and on 3 December 1854 troops overran it, killing about 20 of them; five soldiers died.

Self-government came in the same decade. New South Wales, Victoria and Van Diemen's Land received constitutions in 1855, South Australia in 1856, Queensland on its separation in 1859 and Western Australia in 1890. Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia adopted the secret ballot in 1856, and South Australia gave women the vote in 1895. The long boom ended in the depression of the early 1890s, when the economy contracted by 20% between 1891 and 1895.

Why the colonies voted to federate

In the late nineteenth century each colony had its own laws, railway gauge, stamps and tariffs. Henry Parkes, premier of New South Wales, called for a federal government at Tenterfield in 1889, and the National Australasian Convention of 1891 in Sydney chose the name Commonwealth of Australia. A draft by the Tasmanian Andrew Inglis Clark, drawing on the United States constitution and British practice, lay behind the text. The depression stalled it until a conference at Corowa in 1893 proposed that the people vote on it directly.

Referendums in June 1898 produced majorities in four colonies, but New South Wales required at least 80,000 yes votes and did not reach the number. A second round in 1899 passed in New South Wales, Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria and Queensland, after the others agreed that the federal capital would lie in New South Wales. The British Parliament passed the constitution act on 5 July 1900 and Queen Victoria assented four days later. Western Australia voted on 31 July 1900, with the promise of a railway to the east. The Commonwealth was proclaimed in Centennial Park, Sydney, on 1 January 1901.

The constitution excluded Aboriginal people twice. Section 51 kept the Commonwealth from making special laws for them, and section 127 left them out of the count of the population. The Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902 gave women the federal vote and excluded most Aboriginal people from it. One of the first laws of the new parliament, the Immigration Restriction Act of 23 December 1901, set a 50-word dictation test in a language of the officer's choosing. It was given 1,359 times before 1909 and 52 people passed; after 1909 nobody did. Australians remained British subjects until the Nationality and Citizenship Act of 1948.

How the wars turned Australia towards America

Some 330,000 Australians served in the First World War by Britannica's count, and 324,000 served overseas by Wikipedia's; both give 60,000 dead. The landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 became Anzac Day. Voters rejected conscription for overseas service in referendums in October 1916 and December 1917, and the Labor Party split over it.

The second war moved the alliance. Singapore fell on 15 February 1942 with around 15,000 Australian soldiers taken prisoner, and Darwin was bombed four days later. On 27 December 1941 John Curtin had already announced that Australia looked to America. Almost one million of a population of seven million served, and more than 39,700 were killed or died as prisoners. The Statute of Westminster, which confirmed the dominions' equality with Britain in 1931, was ratified by Australia only in 1942, and the ANZUS treaty with the United States and New Zealand followed in 1951.

After 1945 the government set out to "populate or perish". About 4.2 million immigrants arrived between 1945 and 1985, some 40% of them from Britain and Ireland, and the Snowy Mountains Scheme, built between 1949 and 1974, employed 100,000 people from more than 30 countries. The dictation test was replaced by entry permits under the Migration Act 1958. The Holt government dismantled most of the White Australia policy in 1966, and it had legally ended by 1973.

What assimilation and child removal did

After federation Aboriginal affairs belonged to the states, which set up protectors and protection boards with power over Aboriginal people's property, residence, employment and the custody of their children. A conference of officials in 1937 endorsed the "absorption" of people of mixed descent into the white population, and one in 1951 adopted the assimilation of all Aboriginal Australians.

Children were taken from their families under these laws from about 1905 until the late 1960s, and in some places into the 1970s. In 1997 the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's report, Bringing Them Home, estimated that between one in ten and one in three Aboriginal children had been removed between 1910 and 1970, and described the policy as genocide. The historian Robert Manne put the national share closer to one in ten. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd moved an apology to the Stolen Generations in the federal parliament on 13 February 2008.

The 1960s turned the other way. The Commonwealth gave Aboriginal people the federal vote in 1962 and Queensland gave them the state vote in 1965. The Yolngu of Arnhem Land sent a bark petition on land rights to parliament in 1963, and the Gurindji walked off Wave Hill station in 1966. On 27 May 1967 nearly 91% of voters approved removing the two exclusions from the constitution, which was amended on 10 August 1967. The Aboriginal Land Rights Act followed in 1976.

How the courts answered terra nullius

In May 1982 Eddie Mabo and four other Meriam plaintiffs lodged a claim to Mer, or Murray Island, in the Torres Strait. Over ten years, 33 Meriam people produced 4,000 pages of evidence that the island's eight clans had held defined territories for hundreds of years. On 3 June 1992 six of the seven judges of the High Court found that the Meriam held traditional ownership and that native title could survive wherever it had not been lawfully extinguished. Three of the five plaintiffs, Mabo among them, had died by then. The Native Title Act 1993 followed, and where a Crown grant and native title conflict, the Crown's title prevails.

Two referendums since then have failed. In 1999 voters rejected a republic, with a majority for it only in the Australian Capital Territory. After the Uluru Statement from the Heart of 2017, a proposal to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through a Voice to Parliament went to the vote on 14 October 2023. It won 39.9% of formal votes and a majority in no state, and the Australian Capital Territory was again the only jurisdiction to vote yes.