History of Australia
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Bathurst Island Aborigines
Aborigines from Bathurst Island (1939), one of the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory. Australian Prehistory: Humans are thought to have arrived in Australia about 30,000 years ago. The original inhabitants, who have descendants to this day, are known as aborigines. In the eighteenth century, the aboriginal population was about 300,000. The aborigines, who have been described alternately as nomadic hunter-gatherers and fire-stick farmers (known for using fire to clear the brush and attract grass-eating animals instead of cultivating the land), settled primarily in the well-watered coastal areas. Some observers believe that poor treatment of the environment by aborigines over many centuries may have led to the barren nature of much of the Australian interior. Higher forms of mammals never reached Australia because the land bridge from Asia ceased to exist about 50 million years ago.
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Captain James Cook (1728 – 14 February 1779)
James Cook was a British explorer, navigator and cartographer, he reached the south-eastern coast of Australia on 19 April 1770, his expedition became the first recorded Europeans to have encountered Australia's eastern coastline. European Discovery and Settlement to 1850: The period of European discovery and settlement began on August 23, 1770, when Captain James Cook of the British Royal Navy took possession of the eastern coast of Australia in the name of George III. His party had spent four months in exploration along eastern Australia, from south to north. Unlike Dutch explorers, who deemed the land of doubtful value and preferred to focus on the rich Indies to the north, Cook and Joseph Banks of the Royal Society, who accompanied Cook for scientific observations, reported that the land was more fertile. Cook’s fame in Britain helped to fix the attention of the British government on the area, which had some strategic significance in the European wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
In 1779 Joseph Banks recommended Botany Bay, named after the profusion of new plants found there, as a site for a penal settlement. A new outlet was needed for convicts to be transported overseas in continuance of British penal policy after the loss of the 13 North American colonies. In 1786 the British government decided to adopt Bank’s recommendation. Considerations other than the pressing need to reduce the convict population may have influenced Lord Sydney, the home minister, in his action. There was, for example, some expression of interest in supplies for the Royal Navy and in the prospects for trade in the future. The first fleet in the series that transported convicts arrived in January 1788, bringing 1,500 people, nearly half of them convicts. On January 26, Captain Arthur Phillip of the Royal Navy raised the British flag at Sydney Cove, which he decided was preferable to Botany Bay, slightly to the south, as a settlement site. The colony of New South Wales was formally proclaimed on February 7, 1788.
Transportation of convicts eventually brought a total of about 160,000 prisoners to Australia. The initial character of a penal colony lasted for about 60 years in the areas of major original settlement. It ended in 1840 in New South Wales and in 1852 in Van Diemen’s Land (modern Tasmania), which became a colony in 1825. Western Australia, which was founded in 1830 by free immigrants, added convicts to its population by its own choice from 1850 to 1868. Convicts were not sent to South Australia, which became a colony in 1836.
The major continuing problems of the colonies arose from efforts to carry out British policy designed for a penitentiary when other interests—fishing, sealing, farming, and trade—were developing. The economic development begun in the convict phase of settlement included the expansion of agriculture where conditions were favorable, as in Van Diemen’s Land, which started in 1815 to export grain to New South Wales. Roads, bridges, and other transportation facilities necessary for commerce were built by convict labor, as were government buildings. In the early nineteenth century, enterprising colonists successfully introduced merino sheep as a source of the fine wool increasingly demanded by the expanding British textile industry.
Individual immigrants to Australia increased in number in the 1820s. They were mostly people of some means with which to acquire land, which was in general granted only to those of substance. This land policy, favoring the so-called exclusives, or individuals of established position, over the freed convicts, or emancipists, who sought to advance themselves, facilitated the pastoral expansion of the 1820s. The colonies already established—New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land—got most of the early immigrants, but some immigrants went to the newer colonies, Western Australia and South Australia. In the 1830s, the southern p