Australia, Commonwealth of

Australia, Commonwealth of. A federation of six states, New South Wales (founded 1788), Western Australia (1829), Tasmania (formerly Van Diemen's Land, 1825), South Australia (1834), Victoria (1851), and Queensland (1859) and the self-governing Northern Territory (1863), together with Australian Capital Territory (1911), Norfolk (1856), Heard and McDonald (1947), Cocos (1955), Christmas (1958), and Coral Sea (1969) Islands, and the Australian Antarctic Territory (1933).

Australia is the smallest, most arid, and least populated of the world's continents. Its mainland, together with Tasmania, is nearly 3 million square miles—i.e. 35 times the size of Great Britain—and had a population of 19 million in 1998. Australia took its name from the mythical Southern Continent first postulated by classical geographers, Terra Australis Incognita. First sighted by Portuguese and Spanish navigators during the late 15th cent., it became known through 17th- and 18th-cent. Dutch, British, and later French voyages.

Australia's Aboriginal people entered the country more than 40,000 years ago across a land-bridge created during a low sea-level period. They greatly modified the Australian environment by the extensive use of fire and hunting to extinction of its mega-fauna, and developed a distinctive way of life centred around hunting and gathering, in which women and children played a key role. Aborigines gave animate and inanimate things quasi-religious properties and their cultures revolved round a seasonal cycle of life, whose origins were explained by a creation known (in translation) as the Dream Time. Completely isolated from the rest of the world, Aborigines developed a strong attachment to and intimate knowledge of the land (which they regarded as Mother). Although they appeared to have no socio-political system, they developed a complex web of social, lineal, and trade relations, which could extend over large areas. Estimates put their population at the time of the coming of the British at 500,000.

The modern era began with the arrival on 26 January 1788 of the 1st Fleet of eleven vessels under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip RN, who took formal possession of land already named New South Wales and claimed on Britain's behalf in 1770 by Captain James Cook. Extending westward as far as longitude east 135 degrees (extended to 129 degrees E. in 1834), New South Wales, with Sydney its capital, excluded New Holland, known to the Dutch East India Company from about 1610, but thought of little value. The British began to occupy New Holland in 1827, and with the formal possession and change of name to Western Australia and the founding of the Swan River Colony under Captain Stirling RN in 1829, Britain laid claim to the whole continent. New South Wales, the first colony, was subsequently divided into five separate colonies.

Britain's decision in 1786 to occupy New South Wales was partly to compensate for the loss of the American colonies to which unwanted convicts (some 50,000 before the Declaration of Independence in 1776) had been sent; and partly to protect Britain's control of the sea route to Asia via the Southern Ocean.

On arrival at Botany Bay on 18 January 1788, Captain Phillip, finding it less fertile than he had anticipated, sailed a few miles into Port Jackson (now Sydney Harbour), where, on 26 January, he commenced landing 736 convicts (including 188 women) along with a military guard of 210 officers and men. He was followed by the commercially organized 2nd and 3rd Fleets, which embarked a further 3,100 convicts, of whom nearly 300 died from maltreatment during the voyage. The transportation of convicts to New South Wales ceased in 1840, to Van Diemen's Land in 1853 (shortly afterwards renamed Tasmania), and to Norfolk Island in 1855. Between 1850 and 1868, 10,000 convicts were shipped as a subsidy to poverty-stricken Western Australia, making a grand total of 160,000 convicts transported before 1868. Convictism's real legacy is Australia's distinctively authoritarian executive-style government. The Aborigines offered no effective resistance to the British who, presuming them to be ‘savages’, applied the principle of vacuum domicilium (or terra nullius).

The early days of New South Wales were under near famine conditions and the colony was not self-sufficient in wheat until 1797. Free settlers were loathe to emigrate to such a distant land because it lacked a staple product and was tainted by convictism. However, the crossing of the Blue Mountains behind Sydney in 1813 revealed a belt of millions of acres of rich savannah grasslands. Here, flocks of fine wool-bearing merino sheep (first imported from the Cape Colony in 1797) spread out and by 1880 it supported over 60 million sheep. The export of wool provided the staple upon which to found a viable economy, helped end convict transportation, and created a new class of politically powerful and capitalist large-landholding squatters (graziers).

Exploration by sea from Sydney had already established that Tasmania was an island ( George Bass, 1796) and a later circumnavigation ( Matthew Flinders, 1803) established the true extent of the Australian continent. Inland exploration was initially directed toward the discovery of a supposed inland sea and new grasslands ( Charles Sturt, 1830 and 1845; Hamilton Hume and William Hovell, 1824; and Thomas Mitchell, 1836). Later explorations culminated in a series of trans-Australian expeditions, the most famous of which were E. J. Eyre (1851), L. Leichhardt (1844–5), Augustus Gregory (1855–6), John McDouall Stuart (1860–2), R. O'H. Burke and W. J. Wills (1861), and John Forrest (1874).

The discovery of gold in 1851 caused a dramatic leap in immigration and the combined population of New South Wales and Victoria rose from 267,000 in 1850 to 886,000 in 1860; 538,000 were located in the newly proclaimed colony of Victoria. Melbourne, its capital, rapidly became Australia's financial and industrial centre. A miners' revolt at Eureka Stockade near Ballarat in 1854 eventually forced the introduction of democratic reforms far in advance of those in England. These included the adoption of secret ballot (1856), adult male franchise (1857), paid parliamentarians (1870), and eventually votes for women (1908). The electoral power of the surplus population created by the gold rushes led to the breakup of the squatters' vast landholdings into family-operated cereal, hay, and dairy farms 1869–91.

After the repeal of the British Corn Laws in 1846, South Australians began to develop ‘dry-land’ wheat farming technologies in the 1850s. These were later adopted by new-land farmers in Victoria and New South Wales. Land clearing boomed, using rollers (Mullenizing, invented 1868), the stump plough (1876), harvesters (strippers, 1835), and with the introduction of refrigerated shipping (1882) came the export of dairy products and fresh meat to Britain.

The gold rushes and the rise of agriculture encouraged commerce, finance, trade, and industry in Sydney and Melbourne, the latter growing to more than half a million by 1900. The spread of wage labour in mines, factories, ports, and shearing sheds saw the rise of trade unionism during the 1870s. The defeat of the great strikes of 1888–95 led to the setting-up of union-backed Labour parties. The first, but short-lived, minority Labour governments took office in Queensland in 1899, and federally in 1904.

The 1880s was an era of reckless bank lending, and even more reckless borrowing by the land boomers. The inevitable bank crash of 1893 caused great distress and unemployment and also brought to an end ‘marvellous Melbourne’. The discovery of gold in Western Australia (Coolgardie, 1892, and Kalgoorlie, 1893) partly alleviated the recession.

The latter part of the 19th cent. was also a highly formative period for Australian culture: the founding of universities (Sydney, 1850; Melbourne, 1853; Adelaide, 1874; Tasmania, 1890); the writing of Australian novels and poetry, among them works by Henry Lawson (1867–1922); the beginnings of Australian science and technology (Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, Sydney, 1888); the development of Australian-rules football (first game 1858) and of Australian prowess in sport (the ‘Ashes’, 1882).

Following a series of meetings during the 1890s, six colonies agreed by referendum to become a federation. This was inaugurated on 1 January 1901 as the Commonwealth of Australia under a written constitution, based on that of the USA. One of the Commonwealth government's first acts was to introduce the so-called ‘White Australia policy’ to protect the Australian working man's standard of living. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 severely tested the new federation. An Australian Imperial Force (AIF) comprising 322,000 troops was sent overseas to fight alongside the allies, of whom 60,000 died or were killed in action. The period between the First and Second World Wars was at first prosperous with assisted British immigration until development was stopped by the Great Depression of the 1930s. At times, unemployment exceeded 25 per cent of the work-force. Australia's support for British empire preference helped maintain her exports to Britain. High gold prices, a devalued Australian currency, and the introduction of tariffs, subsidies, and marketing boards to protect local industry and primary producers may have staved off an even worse calamity, but Australia's dependence upon overseas capital and markets remained unchanged.

With the fall of Singapore in 1942, the withdrawal of the British to India, and the Japanese invasion of Papua New Guinea, the Second World War came to the shores of Australia with the bombing of Darwin. Wartime Labour Prime Minister John Curtin turned to America for military help. Australian forces played an important part in the Pacific War and were the first to defeat the Japanese on land in the battle for New Guinea (Kokoda).

After 1945, the wartime industrialization of Australia was continued behind tariff walls. The nationalization and welfare state ambitions of the governing Australian Labour Party were brought to a halt with the Australian High Court's rejection of the ALP's Bank Nationalization Act (1948) as unconstitutional, and the electoral success of Robert Menzies and his conservative coalition government in 1949. The coalition governed in times of increasing prosperity until defeated by the ALP in 1972 under the leadership of Gough Whitlam in a revolt against the conservatism and alleged uniformity of the Menzies era. The Menzies era (he served as prime minister until 1966) was one of the embourgeoisement of urban Australia involving the spread of the suburban family owner-occupied house (the ‘quarter acre block’) and car ownership.

Post-war mass European immigration, assisted by the Labour government, was made possible by an assured British market, a high Australian tariff wall, a 1960s boom in mining, especially for bauxite and iron ore, and the discovery of new reserves of petroleum, natural gas, and coal. 500,000 European immigrants, one-third from the British Isles, came to Australia 1945–9. Immigration peaked at 170,000 in 1952. The balance shifted toward Asian migration after the end of the war in Vietnam in 1972, whence Australia had accepted more than 100,000 refugees. Australia's population, which had passed the million mark by 1860 and the 5 million mark by 1920, was by 1970 more than 12.5 million.

Under the Whitlam Labour government (1972–5) tariffs were reduced and some economic reforms introduced. But the government ended in turmoil, was dismissed by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, in 1975 and replaced after a general election by a coalition (Liberal and Country Party) under the leadership of Malcolm Fraser (1975–83). The Whitlam government's initiatives in Aboriginal affairs (already made full citizens by referendum in 1966), heritage, environment, family law, and health care were continued by the new government.

Despite massive majorities, the Fraser government was thought indecisive and, because of Kerr's action, regarded by some as lacking legitimacy. Labour was returned to power in 1983 under the leadership of former labour union leader, Robert Hawke. Replaced by his rival and federal treasurer Paul Keating in 1992, Hawke's government sought accord with the labour unions, introduced a programme of financial and industrial deregulation, improved health and welfare, superintended the 200th anniversary of the British settlement of Australia, and failed in its attempt to change the constitution.

The rise of a new nationalism, epitomized by Whitlam's recognition of China and North Vietnam, and his tour of Asian countries, the Fraser government's multi-cultural initiatives, and Hawke's celebration of the winning of the America's Cup in 1983, sought to include the new Asia-Pacific and multi-cultural horizon. Keating took the new nationalism further by forging closer links with Asia and pushing his republican ideas. He was returned to office in 1993 when coalition leader John Hewson failed to convince the people of the need to introduce a goods and services tax. Keating, with his self-proclaimed republican ‘big picture vision’ for Australia, his polemical style, and what was believed to be his arrogance, was roundly defeated in the 1996 election by a John Howard-led coalition. The 1996 election represented the third occasion (the others in 1949 and 1975) on which a reformist Labour government, often using ideas taken from the conservatives (deregulation and market economics being most recent), had been rejected by an electorate saturated with change.

Australia looks west to Europe, east to the USA, and north to her burgeoning Asian neighbours. Although now officially multi-cultural, Australia has still not resolved her relation with her own indigenous people, the Aborigines. The granting of native title by federal law in 1993 will in the long run markedly change the position of Aborigines, but unlike Australia's European and Asian immigrants, a high proportion of the nearly 300,000 Aboriginal people are still both culturally and geographically ‘fringe dwellers’.

With the rise of the new industrializing countries of east Asia, Australia's relative industrial and economic strength has dramatically declined. Australia has yet to face the fact, for example, that personal incomes in Singapore are on a par with those of an Australian worker. Furthermore, since Australia no longer has preferential access to European markets, it is now in direct competition with other primary raw material producers. Though retaining all the political, organizational, and governmental structures inherited from Britain, Australia is no longer the Anglo-Celtic culture that she was before 1945.

Martyn Webb

Bibliography

Blainey, G. , The Rush that Never Ended: A History of Australian Mining (Melbourne, 1963);
—— The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History (Melbourne, 1966);
Elder, B. (ed.), Great Events in Australia's History (Frenchs Forest, 1988);
Molony, J. , The Penguin History of Australia (Ringwood, 1987).