Colonization of Australia
Colonization of Australia, establishment and expansion of British hegemony over the Australian continent and Torres Strait Islands, beginning with the arrival of the First Fleet at Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) in 1788. Initially a penal colony, British settlement in Australia grew and transformed the continent, rapidly changing Australia’s political, social, and economic structures through the creation of settler societies, the appropriation of land, and the development of colonial administrations across the continent. The growth of colonial Australian society came at the expense of the Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander peoples, who were often dispossessed of their land, exposed to foreign diseases, and either pushed into marginal areas or forcibly assimilated into European culture.
Early exploration
The question of the first non-Indigenous Australian to reach the continent is still a matter of debate. Muslim voyagers may have reached Australia during the period of their domination of Indian Ocean trade between 1200 and 1450 ce. Some historians posit that the Ming dynasty explorer Zheng He landed briefly in Australia during one of his voyages. Both Arabic (commonly used throughout the Islamic world) and Chinese documents tell of a southern land but with such inaccuracy that they scarcely clarify the argument. Some historians believe that Portuguese navigators at least spotted Australia in their 16th-century voyages and that it is the landmass depicted in the Dieppe maps—a set of 16th-century maps created in Dieppe, France, but based in part on information gathered by Portuguese explorers—as “Java la Grande.” Spanish explorers discovered an island group and the Torres Strait. Makassarese sailors from Celebes (Sulawesi) certainly fished off Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory, from the mid-18th century and may have done so as early as the 16th century.
Whatever the early history of exploration near Australia may be, European knowledge of the continent expanded greatly thanks to Dutch explorers in the 17th century. Late in 1605 Willem Jansz (Janszoon) of Amsterdam sailed aboard the Duyfken from Bantam in the Dutch East Indies in search of New Guinea. He reached the Torres Strait a few weeks before Torres and named what was later to prove part of the Australian coast—Cape Keer-Weer, on the western side of Cape York Peninsula. More significantly, from 1611 some Dutch ships sailing from the Cape of Good Hope to Java inevitably carried too far east and touched Australia: The first and most famous was Dirck Hartog’s Eendracht, from which some individuals landed and left a memorial at Shark Bay, Western Australia, October 25–27, 1616. Pieter Nuyts explored almost 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of the southern coast in 1626–27, and other Dutchmen added to knowledge of the north and west. In November–December 1642, having made a great circuit of the seas, Abel Tasman sighted the west coast and anchored off the southeast coast of what he called Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). He then explored the island of New Zealand before returning to Batavia, on Java. A second expedition of 1644 contributed to knowledge of Australia’s northern coast; the Dutch named the landmass New Holland but showed little interest in colonizing the region.
In 1688 the English buccaneer William Dampier explored New Holland’s northwestern coast. On returning to England, he published his Voyages and persuaded the Admiralty to back another venture. He traversed the western coast for 1,000 miles (1699–1700) and reported more fully than any previous explorer. In August 1768 Capt. James Cook left England in the HMS Endeavour on the first of his voyages to the South Pacific. A member of his crew sighted the southeastern part of the continent on April 20, 1770. Cook landed several times, most notably at Botany Bay and at Possession Island in the north, where on August 23 he claimed the land, naming it New South Wales. Cook’s later voyages (1772–75 and 1776–79) were to other areas in the Pacific, but they were both symptom and cause of strengthening British interest in the eastern seas.
Establishing the colonies
The colonization of Australia began in 1788 and continued for over a century. The following account examines the settling of each of Australia’s states, along with the Northern Territory, through the establishment of the colonial economy in each region. For a fuller treatment of Australian colonial history, see Australia: History, as well as the following articles:
New South Wales
Founding the colony
The British government determined on settling New South Wales in 1786. The motives for this move have become a matter of some controversy. The traditional view is that Britain thereby sought to relieve the pressure upon its prisons—a pressure intensified by the loss of its American colonies, which until that time had accepted transported felons. This view is supported by the fact that convicts went to the settlement from the outset and that official statements put this first among the colony’s intended purposes. But some historians have argued that this glossed a scheme to provide a bastion for British sea power in the eastern seas. Some have seen a purely strategic purpose in settlement, but others have postulated an intent to use the colony as a springboard for economic exploitation of the area. It is very likely that the government had some interest in all these factors. On January 26, 1788, Arthur Phillip sailed into what is now Sydney Cove with 11 vessels carrying about 750 convicts (570 men and 160 women) and more than 250 free persons (chiefly marines) and hoisted the British flag there, establishing the first European colony on the continent of Australia.
The plan was for Phillip, the commander of the expedition, to take possession of the whole territory from Cape York to Tasmania, westward as far as 135° and eastward to include adjacent islands. Phillip’s power was to be near absolute within his domain. The British government planned to develop the region’s economy by employing convict laborers on government farms, while former convicts would subsist on their own small plots.
While some Aboriginal Australians were accommodating of the newcomers, others were not. The Bidjigal warrior Pemulwuy led armed resistance against the settlers. In December 1790 he speared John MacIntyre, Phillip’s gamekeeper, who had committed atrocities against the Indigenous inhabitants of the area. In 1792 Pemulwuy began leading raids on settlements at Prospect, Toongabbie, Georges River, Parramatta, Brickfield Hill, and Hawkesbury River both for food and as retaliation for abuses by the colonists, including the abduction of Aboriginal children. By the late 1790s Gov. Philip Gidley King was offering a reward of 20 gallons of rum and two sets of clothing for any information that might lead to Pemulwuy’s death or capture. Pemulwuy’s resistance came to an end on or slightly before June 2, 1802, when he was shot dead. His head was removed from the rest of his body and sent to England (it has since been lost).
Growing the colony
For the first 52 years of the colony’s existence, New South Wales continued to receive regular consignments of felons, largely consisting of people who had been found guilty of property crimes. At first they arrived only in a trickle, but, once the Napoleonic Wars were over, larger numbers were dispatched. Those with convictions provided a labor force in the colony, used by the government but more commonly by private settlers to whom the government assigned convicts. After completing their sentences, most found work as laborers or in the trades, but the more-enterprising acquired land, established businesses, or, when suitably qualified, entered other professions.
Increasingly, the convict element was overshadowed by men and women who came to the colony as free people. The British government encouraged migrants who, it was hoped, could employ, discipline, and perhaps reform the convicts. Few arrived until after 1815, by which time the activities of John Macarthur and other pastoralists had shown that New South Wales was well suited to the production of meat and especially wool. During the 1820s the pastoral industry attracted men of capital in large numbers. They were joined in the 1830s and ’40s by some 120,000 men, women, and children who sought to escape the harsh conditions of industrial England. Their passages were in many cases paid from a fund resulting from the decision of the British government in 1831 to sell crown land in colonies instead of giving it away. Often they were carefully selected to remedy imbalances perceived in colonial society, such as the young women—“God’s police”—whom the philanthropist Caroline Chisholm worked to settle in pastoral districts. These migrants brought skills rather than capital and added greatly to the workforce.
The presence of growing numbers of ex-convicts and migrants helped convert New South Wales from a convict outpost to a free colony. Wool was sent to Britain in commercial quantities from 1821, although until 1834 the products of the fisheries, whale oil, and sealskins formed the principal exports. Thereafter wool leaped ahead at a remarkable rate. Wool exports increased from nearly 5 million pounds (2.3 million kg) by weight in 1834 to 14 million pounds (6.4 million kg) in 1850, linking the colony more closely to the English industrial system. New South Wales, replacing Spain and the German states as Britain’s source of wool, was drawn more closely into the British imperial network as an outlet for migrants and a market for investment capital and manufactured products.
All this gave a boost to development in New South Wales. The bounds of settlement spread outward as pastoralists took their sheep and cattle farther afield, “squatting” on land not yet surveyed, policed, or legally available to them. The local government, backed by the authorities in London, sought to impose limits on expansion but had no way of enforcing orders. Sydney grew into a thriving metropolis that was a center of government and the colony’s principal port. This expansion was at the expense of Aboriginal peoples. While governors maintained that Aboriginal people should be treated with humanity and as British subjects, the pressure of colonial expansion was accompanied by an increasingly systematic racism. Large numbers of Aboriginal people were killed in violent clashes with settlers. In 1838, following a notorious massacre at Myall Creek, seven white men were hanged at the insistence of the governor, Sir George Gipps. In general, however, the law itself, as well as the difficulties of enforcing it in outlying districts, favored the settlers, and massacres, incursions, poisonings, and forced dispersals usually went unpunished. During the 1830s attempts were made to safeguard Aboriginal peoples by placing them under supervision in protectorates, but these attempts failed and were abandoned after the coming of self-government in the 1850s.
Victoria
Founding Victoria
European Victoria was founded by groups of pastoral pioneers who crossed Bass Strait from Van Diemen’s Land (renamed Tasmania in 1856) in the 1830s in search of fertile grazing land. The occupation of the area was made in defiance of a British government edict forbidding settlement in the territory, which was then part of the colony of New South Wales. In November 1834 the Henty family landed stock and stores at Portland, on the south coast, and in 1835 John Batman landed at Port Phillip. Batman’s venture led the way to the pastoral occupation of Victoria. In that same year John Pascoe Fawkner established a colony on the banks of the Yarra River. From Batman’s colony grew Victoria’s capital city, Melbourne.
This expansion of European settlement came at the expense of the Indigenous population. Brutal frontier guerrilla war raged from 1830 to the mid-1840s, intensified in the later years by the use of paramilitary Native Police. Massacres of Aboriginal people—such as that by the Whyte brothers (William, George, Pringle, James, and John) at The Hummocks near Wando Vale in the Western District, where only one member of the Konongwootong Gundidj clan (which included men, women, and children) escaped slaughter—were common. By 1850 there were barely 3,500 Aboriginal people left in the colony. Beginning in 1837, mission stations were established, but they were largely unsuccessful, as was the Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate established under George Augustus Robinson in 1839. In 1862 some of the broken remnants of the Aboriginal population were forcibly moved to reserves such as Framlingham and Ramahyuck. Most of those lands were eventually usurped for European farming and their inhabitants dispersed. In 1886 the Aborigines Protection Act defined categories of Aboriginal Australians and forced those of mixed ancestry off the reserves. By 1917 all those classified as “full-blooded” Aboriginal peoples were concentrated on the two surviving mission stations largely against their will, and children were separated from their parents and placed in children’s homes or with white families.
After the 1840s, Victoria became a prosperous pastoral community, as squatters extended their grazing runs. The population rose rapidly, as British migrants arrived and more settlers crossed from Van Diemen’s Land or drove their flocks and herds south from New South Wales. By 1850 Victoria had 76,000 people and 6,000,000 sheep. Melbourne, Geelong, and Portland were its main urban centers.
Separation from New South Wales
Dissatisfied with their limited representation on the Legislative Council of New South Wales, the Port Phillip pastoralists agitated for separation. In 1851 Victoria became a separate colony with an Executive Council appointed by the British crown and a Legislative Council, partly elected and partly appointed, effectively dominated by conservative landed interests.
In 1851 the discovery of gold at Warrandyte, 16 miles (26 km) from Melbourne, led to a dramatic rush; other discoveries followed. By the end of 1851 half the men of the colony were working on the goldfields. In 10 years an extraordinary wealth of gold was won, the fields at Ballarat and Bendigo being the most important. More than 200,000 immigrants arrived from Britain and 25,000 from China. By 1860 the population of Victoria had exceeded 500,000 and constituted nearly half of the Australian total.
Gold transformed Victoria from a pastoral backwater into the most celebrated colony of the empire. The comparatively well-educated and skilled artisans lured by gold produced a society renowned for its attachment to 19th-century middle-class values and institutions. Although actual opportunities soon contracted and a Melbourne working class rapidly emerged, Victoria was noted for its economic individualism and opportunism and for its material progress and financial speculation, as well as for its imperial loyalty and political pragmatism.
Victoria attained self-government in 1855. The new constitution set up two houses of Parliament—a Legislative Council of 34 members, elected on a limited property franchise, and a Legislative Assembly, elected on a wider property and income franchise. The Legislative Council remained the stronghold of the wealthy conservative landowners and the main obstacle to land reform. But in the 1860s a series of land acts, designed to encourage small freeholders and to “unlock” the large grazing leases of the pastoralists, helped establish small wheat farmers in the Mallee and Wimmera regions. Victoria, previously an importer of flour, became Australia’s largest wheat producer by the end of the century. In other districts, however, the wealthy pastoralists managed by guile and financial manipulation to evade the land acts, and very many of them acquired freeholds to large estates at low prices, especially in the fertile Western District.
Queensland
The penal settlement
The Moreton Bay Penal Settlement arose in response to the government-commissioned reports of J.T. Bigge, which advocated severe punishment as central to the penal system. Within the Moreton Bay area, a penal settlement for colonial recidivists was founded at Brisbane, followed by other penal establishments at Ipswich and on Stradbroke Island. Accounts of life in the penal settlements describe harsh treatment of the convicts, particularly those confined to chain-gang duty. Colonization of the Moreton Bay region was strictly forbidden because the more dangerous convicts were housed in that area. The number of convicts varied from the initial 30 to more than 1,100 (including 30 women) in 1833. In 1840 the penal settlement was abolished, at which time the convict population numbered about 100.
Free settlement and separation from New South Wales
Allan Cunningham’s exploration of the Darling Downs pointed the way toward more flourishing settlement, which had already begun overland from the south from 1840 after the penal colony had been abolished. The early squatters were followed in 1842 by the first free settlers, and sales of land took place. The main hindrances then became the remoteness of the Moreton Bay district, the lack of understanding of the region in Sydney, and the consequent small number of settlers—no more than 2,000 in the mid-1840s. In 1840 pioneer rancher Patrick Leslie ventured on the downs at Warwick with sheep, and the first crop farmers, apart from some Moravian missionaries at Nundah in the penal days, were brought by John Dunmore Lang in the Fortitude in 1849. It was therefore mid-century before immigrant ships from Britain sailed directly to Brisbane. Nevertheless, political separation from New South Wales was achieved in 1859, and the colony of Queensland was proclaimed. At that time the European population numbered only 23,520, and no industry had yet been established, although gold had been discovered in 1858.
Coal was found at Ipswich as early as 1827, and the first mine opened in 1846, but it was a gold rush that really inaugurated the mining industry. From 1858 to 1873 the east and north of the colony were invaded and opened up by diggers at Canoona, Peak Downs, Gympie, Ravenswood, Charters Towers, and Palmer River. Within a few months, isolated spots in the bush became townships of 10,000 people. Some of the beginnings of the later anti-immigration White Australia policy may be seen in the discriminatory acts of the British Parliament at that time against Chinese and other Asian miners and speculators. By 1867 the European population of the state had grown to 100,000. Even where the gold failed, as at Canoona, a town such as Rockhampton could rise from the ruins. It was near Rockhampton that Mount Morgan, a mountain of gold and copper, was discovered in 1882.
In the 1860s westward migration was rapid wherever there was water, and the movement was encouraged in 1869 by an act of Parliament that granted 21-year leases to those who had 25 sheep or 5 cattle to the square mile. Many of the early pastoralists failed. Wool had to be transported in drays by long trains of bullocks, and markets were far away and uncertain.
By 1873, however, Victorian-era prosperity (in gold) began to be invested in Queensland. The first railways, from Ipswich to Dalby and Warwick, were operating by 1870. The European population of Queensland was more than 200,000 in 1880, with the largest cities being Brisbane, Townsville, Toowoomba, Mackay, and Rockhampton. Pastoral industry spread across the Darling Downs in the 1860s and ’70s. By 1880 the colony had some three million cattle and seven million sheep. Sugar and cotton production, established in the 1860s, increased.
Between 1863 and 1904 Queensland was involved in the dispute over the employment of South Sea islanders (Kanakas) as cheap labor. The recruiting of South Sea islanders, sometimes against their will, began with the introduction of cotton cultivation during the American Civil War (1861–65). When recruitment of Pacific Islanders as workers was banned in the early 1890s—an act that was rescinded in the face of an economic crisis later in the decade—the issue of cheap labor became a political struggle between the liberals and conservatives. Toward the end of the 19th century, the proliferation of small farms and a government-subsidized central mill system shifted sugar production away from the plantation model that relied on indentured laborers. This development strengthened the case against recruiting South Sea islanders as workers. In 1901 Australia’s new federal government officially ended the recruitment of laborers in the White Australia policy, and from 1904 to 1908 more than 7,000 islanders were forcibly deported.
Issues surrounding the recruitment of South Sea islanders as workers influenced the movement demanding the segregation of white from Aboriginal communities, particularly in central and northern Queensland (the region of sugarcane and goldfields). Whereas the sugar planters wanted separation, the miners did not, fearing that the planters would impose a policy of continued recruitment of cheap non-European labor. Queensland had a rapacious frontier in the 19th century, which led to the establishment of the Native Mounted Police in 1848. This force, along with private settlers, was responsible for killing thousands of Indigenous people. In 1897 provision was made to forcibly remove Aboriginal Australians to government reserves, thereby instituting a de facto segregation system. The reserves remained under strict government control until they were handed over to the Aboriginal councils in 1985.
Torres Strait Islands
European Australians discovered large quantities of pearl shells in the Torres Strait region in 1870, leading to the establishment of the pearling industry on the islands. The industry brought a large influx of foreigners but exhausted the natural marine resources. Bêche-de-mer (trepang, or sea cucumber) fishing also drew outsiders to the Torres Strait. With this increased activity, Torres Strait Islander peoples were subject to abuse from the pearlers and trepangers. To control the increasing lawlessness that was occurring in the Torres Strait region and regulate the two commercial marine industries, the colonial government of Queensland officially annexed many of the islands in the Torres Strait in 1872 and the remainder of them in 1879.
The arrival of the first Christian missionaries—from the London Missionary Society, in 1871 on the Torres Strait Island of Erub (Darnley Island)—had a profound impact on the Torres Strait Islander peoples’ customs and way of life. The adoption of Christianity in the late 19th century throughout the Torres Strait Islander communities is often considered the reason for the end of conflict between island groups and is thought to have provided protection against exploitation by foreign interests in pearling and bêche-de-mer fishing. However, conversion did not fully protect Torres Strait Islanders, as they lost their landowning rights upon the full annexation of the islands in 1879.
South Australia
Early European settlement
South Australia became the chosen location for an experimental form of colonization conceived out of the ideas and the entrepreneurial enthusiasm of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Wakefield had developed a theory of “systematic colonization” in 1829 that advocated a careful synchronization between the sale of land at a fixed price and the introduction of capital and labor. It was intended also to make emigration a more certain and respectable enterprise for ordinary British folk and to free Australian colonization from the stain of convictism, the policy of transporting convicts to colonial penal settlements. The proposals for the new colony emerged through a series of controversial negotiations with the British government. The government generally curbed, though it did not eradicate, the original plan’s aspirations toward civil and religious liberties. The projectors were wrongly suspected of republicanism. South Australia was to be no ordinary colony but rather a “province” of the mother country.
The Wakefieldian experiment began with the official settlement on December 28, 1836, soon after the arrival of the first colonists at Glenelg and Kangaroo Island. Col. William Light was responsible for the much-admired plan for the city of Adelaide, which was sited a short distance inland from the first landing on the shores of Gulf St. Vincent.
There were complicated arrangements governing the new colony, including regulations about the finance and control of immigration funds and the uses of revenues. The propaganda efforts of the first promoters—a mixture of commercial, theoretical, and utopian ideas that gave prominence to religious and political freedoms—attracted large numbers of immigrants and led to rapid expansion during the first five years of the colony’s foundation. But the administrative arrangements were ambiguous about the precise powers of the governors and the emigration commissioners and encouraged severe factional bickering. Instability and overexpansion produced a disastrous financial crisis in 1841–42 that threatened the very future of the experiment. The British government intervened, and the fledgling colony was placed under direct control of the Colonial Office. Gov. George Grey imposed severe economic austerity. There was a collapse of confidence, and immigration and investment ceased. Nevertheless, within three years the colony returned to a pattern of growth, which eventually led to solid expansion. Settlers moved outward from Adelaide, and their production of wheat and wool soon exceeded local requirements and provided the basis for export earnings.
Colonial development
The discovery of rich copper deposits at Burra in 1845 induced a remarkable mining boom and stimulated rapid expansion. The development of South Australia outpaced that of the rest of the continent until 1850. South Australian wheat fed the markets of the eastern colonies, and the development of steamboats on the Murray River after 1853 opened new possibilities for intercolonial trade. South Australia began the first railway construction on the continent in 1854. Good agricultural land existed relatively close to Adelaide and its outlying ports, and pastoralists were pushed farther out into the drier lands.
In the 1860s most of the land revenues were no longer being spent on immigration but instead on public works. This signaled a serious departure from the original Wakefield blueprint. Copper, wheat, and wool dominated the exports of South Australia, and this resource-based growth continued until the early 1880s. It was punctuated by short setbacks in the early 1840s, and in the ’50s the dislocations caused by the discovery of gold in Victoria diverted labor from South Australia, especially from the copper industry. Nevertheless, the colony was an extraordinarily successful experiment in economic development. Until the 1870s South Australia often led Australia in economic growth and depended more completely on primary production than the other colonies. Further important discoveries of copper at Moonta and Wallaroo extended the mineral base of the economy. Settlement for agricultural occupation took the agricultural frontier into very dry country to the north and west. Wool producers prospered on buoyant world prices.
In the late 1870s a building boom converted Adelaide into a substantial city. It increasingly dominated the entire polity and economy of the colony, more so than other Australian cities. South Australia became a city-state in which the urban and rural sectors were relatively well integrated by the close settlement within reach of Adelaide. The continuous improvement of transport and communications greatly aided the process.
Tasmania
Britain’s colonization of Tasmania was a ploy to ensure British dominance in international sea power. Both the government in London and its representative in New South Wales, Gov. Philip Gidley King, wanted to secure bases in the south. Accordingly, John Bowen established a camp at Risdon Cove on the River Derwent in September 1803. After the arrival in February 1804 of Lieut. Gov. David Collins (1804–10), following the failure of his colonization venture at Port Phillip (Victoria), the settlement was relocated to Hobart. In November 1804 William Paterson founded a settlement in northern Tasmania, which soon had Launceston as its hub. This subcolony was independent of Hobart until 1812, a harbinger of the intense regional feeling (sometimes becoming acrid jealousy) that has long characterized the Tasmanian experience.
The survival of the tiny settlements was precarious. Transported convicts always made up much of the European population at that time, and runaway convicts—many of whom became bandits of the rural regions (“bushrangers”)—challenged formal authority. Scarcity of supplies prompted them to hunt kangaroos, which worsened relations with the Aboriginal population. Collins was passive as lieutenant governor, and his successor, Thomas Davey (1812–17), was certainly no more effective.
Thereafter rudiments of order emerged, first under Lieut. Gov. William Sorell (1817–24) and then under George Arthur (1824–36). Van Diemen’s Land gained virtual independence from New South Wales in 1825, allowing fuller scope for Arthur’s profound efficiency and determination. Subsequent lieutenant governors were the Arctic explorer-hero John Franklin (1837–43), Sir John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot (1843–46), and Sir William Thomas Denison (1847–54). All found their task difficult.
Tasmania enjoyed much economic prosperity between 1820 and 1840. During that period the European population increased from about 4,350 to more than 57,000. The colony’s penal function brought in large sums from the British treasury. Free immigrants and some ex-convicts developed commerce and various resources. Raising sheep for wool advanced quickly from the mid-1820s, and suitable land in the island’s eastern sector was soon occupied. Tasmanian entrepreneurs and pastoralists played a dominant role in opening Port Phillip from the mid-1830s. Locals also exploited adjacent seal and whale fisheries, encouraging the growth of shipbuilding and services to support these endeavors. International whalers made use of Hobart’s superb harbor; it became a major port for whaling ships. Convict labor assisted in all this and in constructing public works and handsome buildings, in both urban and rural areas.
The Tasmanian Aboriginal people (Palawa) bore the cost of all this economic development. Murderous encounters dating to the Risdon Cove settlement eventually degenerated into the Black War (1804–30), a period of great physical conflict between the Aboriginal population and European settlers. The hostility became especially intense during the 1820s, as pastoralists extended their dominion. In Bass Strait sealeries, Aboriginal women—who were often quasi-enslaved—provided domestic and sexual services for the Europeans. Disease ravaged Indigenous communities everywhere. Some consciences stirred, and Arthur appointed George Augustus Robinson to “conciliate” the surviving Aboriginal population. Consequently, from 1831 virtually all Tasmanian Aboriginal people (about 200 by that time) were relocated to Flinders Island in Bass Strait in an effort to shield them from hostility on the Tasmanian mainland. Deaths continued, however, and in 1847 the survivors moved back to Tasmania. In 1876 the death of Truganini, a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman who had helped with the resettlement of Flinders Island, gave rise to the widely disseminated myth that the Aboriginal people of Tasmania had become extinct.
Western Australia
Despite early explorations of Western Australia, European powers had little interest in the region. Then in 1826 Gov. Ralph Darling of New South Wales, perturbed by reports of French interest and American whaling in the region, dispatched Maj. Edmund Lockyer with a small party of soldiers and convicts to stake a claim by garrisoning King George Sound (at what is now Albany) on the south coast. This prompted Capt. James Stirling and the botanist Charles Frazer to examine the reaches of the Swan River. A mild summer and tall jarrah timber led them to overestimate the fertility of the coastal sand plain, and Stirling went to England to lobby for the establishment of Australia’s first nonconvict colony with himself as governor. The resulting “Swan River mania” brought nearly 4,000 settlers to Western Australia in 1829–30. Stirling arrived with the first party on the Parmelia in June 1829 at the site of the future port of Fremantle and founded the town of Perth 12 miles (19 km) inland. As elsewhere in Australia, disregard of Indigenous land rights triggered unrest within Aboriginal communities. Indigenous resistance in the Perth region was quelled in 1834 only after an intense and bloody confrontation known as the Pinjarra Massacre.
Meanwhile, the European settlers, underprepared for actual conditions in the region, suffered great privations, and only 1,500 remained by 1832. Although the colony could feed itself by 1835 and began exporting wool in 1836, the main industry, whaling, remained in American hands. London investors in 1840–41 planned another settlement 100 miles (160 km) south of Perth, to be called Australind in hope of trade with India. Although they brought several hundred immigrants, by 1843 their venture had also failed. Western Australia was too isolated and had too small an infrastructure of investment and population for rapid growth. But during the 1840s a bank was established, a tiny export trade began in sandalwood and horses, Spanish Benedictines established a monastery at New Norcia, and a pastoral settlement opened up the Geraldton district, 300 miles (500 km) north of Perth.
Wealthy landowners called for inexpensive convict labor, which was falling out of favor in the eastern colonies at that time. The British authorities responded by sending nearly 10,000 male convicts to Western Australia between 1850 and 1868. Social problems resulted, but so did signs of economic progress such as road work and public buildings. In the 1860s pastoralists expanded north into the Pilbara district and the Gascoyne River region as the Aboriginal peoples fought unavailingly against invasion. From 1868 pastoralism was underpinned by a pearling industry that used Aboriginal women and, subsequently, Malay, Japanese, and other Asian sojourners as divers. No gold or minerals were found, and Western Australia consequently lagged behind its eastern neighbors as “the Cinderella colony.”
Northern Territory
The first foreigners to spend more than a brief time in the Northern Territory were Buginese and Makasarese sea cucumber fishers from the island of Celebes (Sulawesi). This practice was established by the 19th century and may have started as early as the 16th century. However, in the 1820s the British desire to claim all of Australia, combined with a belief that they could control trade in the eastern Malay Archipelago just as the Dutch had done in Java, led to the establishment of three military settlements on the territory’s coast. These were Fort Dundas on Melville Island (1824–29), Fort Wellington at Raffles Bay (1827–29), and Victoria at Port Essington (1838–49). All failed when the trade did not develop and when no challengers appeared to contest the British claim to Australia. However, Victoria’s presence did attract the Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, who made an epic overland journey from southeastern Queensland to Port Essington in 1844–45. In 1855–56 Augustus Charles Gregory, described by a contemporary as “a most competent leader…with great firmness of purpose,” led a well-organized expedition from the plains of the Victoria River eastward across the territory to the Queensland coast. In six expeditions between 1858 and 1862, John McDouall Stuart thrust northward through the central deserts and reached the coast east of Port Darwin, distinguishing himself as one of the great Australian explorers.
The journals of Gregory and Stuart held out the promise of good cattle country. South Australia moved to acquire the land, and in 1863 the British government granted it to them. South Australian governments, short-lived and controlled largely by business interests until the 1890s, could find no way to turn a profit in the territory. Their first settlement, set up in 1864 at Escape Cliffs, northeast of Port Darwin, failed two years later through poor site choice and mismanagement. South Australia’s surveyor general, George Goyder, successfully established Palmerston, on Port Darwin, in 1869. The Overland Telegraph line, spanning the continent from north to south in the early 1870s, joined Adelaide to the world and ensured the permanence of Palmerston. The town, renamed Darwin in 1911, has been the Northern Territory’s capital city ever since. The telegraph-poling parties found traces of gold in the stony hills around Pine Creek, south of Darwin, and in 1872 gold-prospecting parties began to arrive through Port Darwin. Speculation, obstructive mining laws, poor ore bodies, and bad living conditions on the goldfields meant that a mild boom was followed by a major bust. By 1896 gold production had gone into irreversible decline. Gold brought development, however, in the growth of Darwin and goldfields settlements, in the construction of the Darwin–Pine Creek railway (completed in 1889), and in the influx of Chinese immigrants. In 1888 the number of Chinese inhabitants peaked at slightly more than 7,000; Europeans at the time numbered 1,009. Thereafter restrictive immigration policies brought a steady decline, but the Chinese workers continued to dominate the goldfields and business in the northern part of the territory. In the south Alice Springs, founded as a telegraph station in 1870, grew into a small settlement. Its growth was stimulated by small gold strikes in the 1880s and, most importantly, by pastoralism.
Since the late 19th century the vast cattle runs of the north have formed the basis of the territory’s image, but sheepherding came first. In 1866 the westward movement of Queensland graziers brought sheep to the northern border area of the territory. Drought and recession forced them out within three years. In 1870 Ralph Millner led an epic drive of 7,000 sheep from South Australia to the Roper River, on the southern border of Arnhem Land. Cattlemen followed, traveling westward from Queensland into the northern section of the territory and northward from South Australia into the arid beauty of the MacDonnell Ranges country of central Australia. Most of the great cattle stations of the Northern Territory were founded between 1880 and 1885, during a prosperous period in Australia. Victoria River Downs, which covered 8,364 square miles (21,663 square km) in 1908, was said to be the world’s largest cattle run. Severe economic depression in the 1890s, accompanied by high transport costs, labor shortages, and an Aboriginal population that often showed its resistance to European encroachment on its territories by killing cattle, sent the industry into decline.
Aboriginal groups, little affected by the early settlements and transient explorers, were devastated by the wholesale confiscation of their lands for stock leases. The pattern of Aboriginal resistance and forceful white reprisal, established earlier in southern Australia, soon spread to the north, reaching a peak in the first decade of the 20th century, when the Eastern and African Cold Storage Supply Company employed gangs of armed men on their Arnhem Land station to shoot down “wild” Aboriginal individuals on sight. There were also notable examples of white settlers protecting Aboriginal communities from punitive expeditions, and Indigenous peoples gradually became the mainstay of the labor force on pastoral properties. Until the last days of its Northern Territory rule in 1910, however, South Australia passed no protective legislation for its Aboriginal population.