A short history of Australia

Archaeological evidence from the Madjedbebe rock shelter in Arnhem Land puts human occupation of the continent at at least 65,000 years, and possibly longer. That is not one culture but hundreds: at the time of colonisation there were somewhere in the order of 250 language groups and many more clan and family groups, each with defined territory, law and relationships to neighbours.

Societies varied enormously across the continent, from the fish-trap and eel-farming systems at Budj Bim in western Victoria — now World Heritage listed, and among the oldest aquaculture systems known anywhere — to the desert societies of the centre with their vast trade and ceremonial networks, to the maritime cultures of the Torres Strait.

Sustained contact with outsiders predates the British. Makassan trepang fishers from Sulawesi visited northern Australia annually for at least a couple of centuries before 1788, leaving traces in language, art and material culture. Dutch navigators charted much of the western and northern coast in the seventeenth century and named it New Holland.

The First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788 and moved to Sydney Cove, where Governor Arthur Phillip raised the flag on 26 January — the date now marked as Australia Day, and the reason that date is contested.

The colony was established primarily as a penal settlement. Around 162,000 convicts were transported to Australian colonies between 1788 and 1868, when transportation to Western Australia finally ended. South Australia, founded in 1836, was the only colony that never received convicts.

British occupation proceeded on the legal doctrine of terra nullius — land belonging to no one — which treated the continent as unowned despite its occupation. Dispossession followed pastoral expansion, with frontier violence, introduced disease and the destruction of food and water systems causing catastrophic population decline. This history was largely absent from Australian public accounts until the late twentieth century and remains politically contested in its framing, though not in its broad facts.

Separate colonies were carved out over time: Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in 1825, Western Australia in 1829, South Australia in 1836, Victoria in 1851 and Queensland in 1859.

The gold rushes from 1851 transformed the colonies. Population tripled within a decade, Melbourne became briefly one of the richest cities in the world, and large numbers of Chinese miners arrived — provoking the first restrictive immigration laws, which foreshadowed the White Australia policy.

The 1854 Eureka Stockade at Ballarat, a short armed clash between miners and colonial authorities over licence fees, became a founding myth of Australian democratic sentiment. Responsible self-government was granted to most colonies through the 1850s.

Federation was argued over for a decade through conventions in the 1890s and approved by referendums in each colony. The Commonwealth of Australia came into being on 1 January 1901, with a Constitution enacted by the British Parliament. Among the first Acts of the new Parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 — the legal basis of the White Australia policy, which was not fully dismantled until the 1970s.

The First World War killed around 60,000 Australians from a population of fewer than five million — proportionally among the heaviest losses of any combatant. The Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915 became the central national commemoration, marked as Anzac Day.

The Great Depression hit Australia unusually hard because of its dependence on commodity exports and British capital. The Second World War brought the war to Australian territory: Darwin was bombed in February 1942, and the fall of Singapore ended any assumption that British naval power would defend the country. The strategic reorientation towards the United States dates from this moment and was formalised in the ANZUS Treaty in 1951.

Post-war reconstruction brought large-scale European migration — initially British, then Italian, Greek, Dutch, Yugoslav and others — under a programme whose slogan was 'populate or perish'. The Snowy Mountains Scheme, built between 1949 and 1974 largely by migrant labour, is its physical monument.

The 1970s brought rapid change: the end of White Australia, the introduction of universal health insurance, no-fault divorce, the abolition of university fees, and the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government in the sharpest constitutional crisis in Australian history.

The 1967 referendum, carried with 90.77 per cent support, allowed the Commonwealth to make laws for Aboriginal people and included them in the census. It did not, as is often said, grant citizenship or the vote, both of which had already been achieved by other means.

The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 created a mechanism for claiming inalienable freehold title in the Territory, and roughly half the Northern Territory is now Aboriginal freehold land.

In 1992, in Mabo v Queensland (No 2), the High Court rejected terra nullius and recognised native title at common law. The Native Title Act 1993 created the framework for claims, and determinations now cover a substantial share of the continent, though the evidentiary requirements are demanding and many claims fail.

The Bringing Them Home report in 1997 documented the forced removal of Aboriginal children — the Stolen Generations — leading to the National Apology delivered by the Prime Minister in February 2008. In October 2023 a referendum to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament was defeated, with about 60 per cent voting no and no state in favour.

The Australia Acts of 1986 removed the last legislative and judicial links to Britain, completing formal independence 85 years after federation. A 1999 referendum on becoming a republic was defeated with 45.13 per cent in favour, a result generally attributed to disagreement over the model rather than settled monarchism.

Economically, the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s — floating the dollar, dismantling tariffs, deregulating banking, introducing compulsory superannuation and national competition policy — reshaped the country and set up an uninterrupted growth run broken only in 2020.

The twenty-first century has been dominated by the resources boom and its aftermath, an unusually large migration programme, a long-running argument about climate and energy policy, and the effects of the 2020–2022 pandemic response, which included the longest and among the strictest border closures in the developed world.