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 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. Completely isolated from the rest of the world, Aborigines developed a strong attachment to and intimate knowledge of the land. 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. 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, laid claim to the whole continent.

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). He was followed by the commercially organized 2nd and 3rd Fleets, which embarked a further 3,100 convicts. The transportation of convicts to New South Wales ceased in 1840, to Van Diemen's Land in 1853, 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. The Aborigines offered no effective resistance to the British.

The early days of New South Wales were under near famine conditions and the colony was not self‐sufficient in wheat until 1797. 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).

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 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.

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. 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. 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. 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).

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 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.

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 declined. Furthermore, since Australia no longer has preferential access to European markets, she 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.