Some of you may remember that I wrote this posting for Australia Day, back in January. At the end of it, you may recall that I said I’d write about more Australian history sometime in the future.

Well, the future is now. So let’s get cracking.

Colonial Australia

For all of the 19th century, Australia was an island of colonies. They were given names such as “Van Diemen’s Land”, “Victoria”, “New South Wales”, and “Queensland”. Admittedly, the remaining colonies of South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory were hardly the most poetic of names to go along with the names of the other colonies, but I digress…

In the second half of the 19th century, Australia had finally broken out of the phase of being “Terra Australis Incognitia“, the great unknown southern land. It was now firmly established that an island south of Asia did exist, and that it was inhabitable, and that it now had a name. “Australia”.

Australia was seen as a great social experiment. Prior to this, no Western civilisation had colonised a landmass further south than this great, empty sandpit in the bottom left of the Pacific Ocean. The British Government was quick to realise that having Australia as a British colony would be very useful. It would be able to secure British dominance in the Southeast Asian region, along with their holdings in Singapore and Hong Kong. This would balance out the colonial scale, since nearby, the French, the Dutch and the Germans also had colonies. Colonies like French Indochina (Vietnam), the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and the German-held Papua New Guinea.

Colonial Australia was a hard and dangerous place to live. Summers are hot, scorching and dry. Cities were still mostly made up of wooden buildings, two storeys high, and streets were largely unpaved. Also, then, as now, Australia played host to the largest number of dangerous animals in the world – Spiders, sharks, snakes, and the vicious Spotted Quoll:

…D’awwwww…

The Victorian Gold Rush

Life in colonial Australia cheered up in the 1850s, though. Gold had been found sporadically for years, but in 1851, the great Victorian Gold Rush hit Australia. And it was a rush, alright. People from all over the world came to Australia, to go to Victoria, to find gold! The population of Victoria’s capital city, Melbourne, went from 10,000 people in 1840, to 123,000 people by the mid-1850s!

Towns like Bendigo and Ballarat popped up overnight and became booming centers of trade. Just like in almost every other gold-rush in history, in California, or Canada…a significant amount of the money made came, not from mining, but from merchants and shopkeepers who sold equipment to the miners at inflated prices. Shovels, buckets, pans, tents, billys (kettles, that is), bedrolls and countless other things were in high demand, and the scheming and unscrupulous shopkeepers could make a pretty penny or two from “mining the miners” for their hard-saved money.

The Victorian Gold Rush allowed Melbourne to grow at a fantastic rate, and it soon rivaled Sydney, the oldest city in Australia, in population, if not yet in size.

The Rush allowed Melbourne to build magnificent public buildings, like the state library, the town hall, the state parliament building, treasury, and several bridges across the Yarra River in the middle of town.

Australia slowly cast off the criminal element of its past and began to grow. Famous people came to Australia to look around. Prince Alfred, son of Queen Victoria, came for a look in 1868. Two hospitals (one in Sydney, one in Melbourne) were named after him. And it’s probably just as well that there were hospitals around, because the prince was the target of an assassination attempt while he was there! He was shot in the back, but the bullet was recovered and the prince made a full recovery.

Towards a Country

Australia was a ‘country’, but not yet a nation. It had separate colonial militias, but no national army. It had lots of railroads, but it was not possible to travel all around the continent without changing trains at each border, since each colony used a different gauge of rails. As the 19th century drew to a close, Australians wanted more and more to become their own country, their own nation and their own people.

Much like the United States, a hundred and thirty years before.

But unlike the United States, Australians didn’t start stockpiling rifles and muskets.

By the 1880s, there was increasing nationalism in Australia. A higher and higher percentage of people who lived in Australia were actually born there, instead of coming to Australia from overseas. Fewer people saw themselves as being “British” but as being “Australian”. Improved communications in the 1800s, such as finally, a nationwide telegraphic network in 1872, allowed them to communicate with each other faster and easier. This brought people closer together, and strengthened the ideas that Australia should become a nation.

To that end, in the 1880s, the Federal Council was formed, a body of men whose job it was to make Australia a nation. The Federal Council was the closest thing to a national government that existed before Federation itself.

Colonies were not all in favor of federation, however. They worried that having a big national government would mean that colonies with larger populations would bully those with smaller populations. They feared that individual colonial laws, taxes and tariffs would be stamped out by a more powerful national government. They were also scared that giving power over the country to one body, instead of splitting it up amongst lots of small ones, would cause problems, since any decision made by the national government would affect everyone. In the 1870s and 80s, the American Civil War was still very fresh, and Australians didn’t want to have their own civil war!

As the years ticked by, however, federation started looking more and more interesting, and in referendums held in each state, a higher and higher percentage of people were voting for the creation of the Australian nation.

1901 – Australian Federation

On the 1st of January, 1901, the 20th Century began. And so did Australia. It was now its own nation. Its colonies were now states, and it had its own national government. It was now the Commonwealth of Australia.

It still is.

Australia was the new kid on the block in the world stage. And it wanted to do things differently. Much differently. Australia was seen as the great big new social experiment that the world would gather around to watch. Things would be done differently here and the global community sat back to watch the results of this new experiment, this new country, this new nation called Australia. Laws were enacted in Australia which were never seen in England, or indeed, in any other country on earth at the time. Some laws were popular. Some were not. Some were incredibly controversial, even for the time! Australia in the 21st Century might pride itself on multiculturalism, but it wasn’t always like that…

Immigration Restriction Act (1901)

A similar law existed in America. It was called the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924. But Australia was the first country to implement a law such as this.

What was it?

The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was an act that regulated who could come into Australia. They didn’t want any undesirable people in this great social experiment that Australia was! They wanted Australia to be pure, clean, innocent and…

…white.

Incredibly white.

More bleach was air-dropped into Australia before 1965 than any other country on earth.

The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was designed to keep out undesirable people from the Australian nation. Asians. Jews. Africans. Americans. Anyone seen as undesirable. How did they do this?

Simple. They asked them if they could speak English!

There wasn’t going to be any other language in this new country other than English, so if you wanted to live here, you had to speak English. If you couldn’t, you couldn’t come in. Simple!

This was primarily designed to keep out Asians. I’m here, so it obviously didn’t work.

The problem was that a surprisingly large number of foreigners spoke English.

So much for that idea. To try and add a few more tripwires in this new immigration law, the government started changing the conditions of entry. How did they do this?

When you arrived in Australia, you had to take an English test to evaluate your language-skills. When it was found out that this wasn’t effective in keeping out the global rabble, the law was…altered.

Instead of giving a test in English, a test could now be given in ANY European language. And I do mean ANY language. German. French. Italian. Polish. Russian. Latish. Czech. Spanish!

…it still didn’t work. But it’s what they tried.

Pacific Island Labourers Act (1901)

Along with the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, there was also the Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1901. This was designed to kick out of Australia any persons living there who came from islands near to Australia. Again, this backfired. While several thousand Pacific-Islanders were indeed shipped out of Australia, a significant portion of them were able to apply to stay in Australia.

How?

Simple. Because they weren’t from the Pacific Islands. Their parents, or grandparents were. But they were born in Australia! It wasn’t legal to send them back to some place which they weren’t from in the first place, so the government had to let them stay put.

And there were a lot of them in Australia. They’d been brought over starting in the 1860s to work in Queensland, on the sugar-plantations. They were dark-skinned people, after all, and they were surely much better at working in the harsh, humid, hot and sunny Queensland climate than white folks. But then it was decided that they just had to leave.

The “White Australia Policy”

All these acts and laws and regulations were designed to create something unique in the history of the world. A completely white country. It wasn’t like America where blacks and whites were simply segregated…no. In Australia, they wanted to make sure that the whole country was white from the very start!…The Aborigines didn’t count, though…

There was a lot of support for a White Australia, but just was just as much dissent. And a significant amount of dissent came from Britain.

Why?

Australia was part of the British Empire. And the British expected Australia to trade with other countries within the Empire. Countries like Singapore, Hong Kong and India. The White Australia Policy irritated the British and they weren’t happy with the fact that it existed, because it meant that non-white subjects from British colonies couldn’t live and work in Australia, an act that was sometimes necessary for purposes of trade and business. This was why the British objected to the White Australia Policy. But then, Australia was by now its own country and nation…it could do what it liked without having to listen to England.

The White Australia Policy survived for decades, strengthening and weakening and gaining and losing support through the years. During the 1930s, fears of the Japanese and a second coming of the “Yellow Peril” increased support for a White Australia. However, after the Second World War, the need to repopulate Australia caused the Policy to be significantly relaxed, when the government realised that it could not afford to be picky about who it allowed into the country if they expected Australia to survive. It was during the postwar years that the White Australia Policy began to crumble in earnest.

The fact was that the policy had never really been any good. Non-whites had been trickling into Australia for years, and the policy never completely kept unwanted foreigners off of Australian soil. On top of that, Australia needed a larger population in the postwar era to fill up the gaps left by all the dead soldiers from the War. It was unreasonable and impossible to ask all red-blooded Australian males to do their patriotic duty and shag like rabbits on Viagra, and copulate for the good of the nation, so the Australian Government had to look…overseas! (horror of horrors!)…for more people!

The popular slogan became: “Populate, or Perish!”

This meant that Australia had to increase its population if it expected to survive in the dangerous and uncertain postwar world. Massive tourism and immigration campaigns started, encouraging people from everywhere (so long as it was white) to come to Australia!

A large percentage of the new arrivals in Australia were refugees from the Second World War. European Jews, British war-brides, displaced persons with nowhere else to go. But in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, more and more Asians started flooding into Australia. Trouble in Asia was encouraging people to leave and move south. The Chinese Civil War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War were driving people out of Asia towards Australia.

The White Australia Policy finally collapsed when international events made it impossible to implement – the numbers of Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese refugees pouring into Australia made the Policy a joke, and it was officially ended in 1966.

Universal Female Suffrage

Australia, the great social experiment, while it may not have been as forward thinking in issues of race and culture, was certainly more open to other ideas…such as the shocking notion of allowing women to…vote!

In 1902, Australian women were allowed to vote alongside men.

…Yeah. So what’s the big deal?

The deal is that Australia was the first country in the Western world to do this!

Britain? Nope. 1918.

America? Try again. 1920.

Germany? 1918.

France? Good luck. Not until 1944.

China? Surely, communists with all their equality and whatnot? Nope. 1947.

Canada? 1917.

Australia was the first! (Okay, second. New Zealand – 1893…damn Kiwis…).

Australia’s Place in the World

In 1901, Australia officially became a nation. It could go to war, it could run its own affairs, create its own laws, set its own taxes and was no-longer tied to Britain!…Except that it still (and still does) have the Queen as its head of state, and the Governor-General as the Queen’s representative in the Land Down Under.

Australia was a big exporter…and importer. It sent out shiploads of gold, iron, wool, wheat and leather, and in came things such as consumer-goods from England and America.

Australia was miles from England…it took two months to get there by ocean-liner…but a lot of Australians saw themselves still as being British. They supported Britain in wartime and peacetime. When Britain went to war with the Dutch South-Africans (the Boers) in 1899, Australia sent troops off to fight. When Britain went to war with Germany in 1914, Australia sent troops off to fight. When Britain went to war with Germany (again!) in 1939, Australia sent troops off to fight.

Why?

Australia is on the other side of the world, for God’s sake! Why on earth would it get involved in British wars?

Popular opinion in Australia listed reasons such as…

– Similar cultures.
– Helping “Mother England”.
– Failure to hep England in her time of need would result in England being too weak to help Australia in hers.

In the Edwardian-era, imperial pride and ties to “Mother England” still ran strong through the fabric of Australian culture and society. When soldiers fought and died in the First World War, they died in service of “The Empire”, not Australia. Indeed, such was Australia’s closeness to Britain that when the First World War came around in 1914, over sixty thousand Australians signed up to go to war.

The interesting bit?

Not a single one of them was a career-soldier.

Australia was the only country to participate in the First World War, which had a completely volunteer army. Shopkeepers, schoolteachers, engine-drivers, cable-car gripmen, farmers, shearers, bank-tellers and waiters rushed to sign up for the army. The most experience that Australia really had of fighting in big wars was in the Boer War of 1899 (during which, Australian soldier Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant was tried…and executed…for trumped-up charges of ‘Treason’, disobeying orders, and killing innocent noncombatant Boers).

After the Second World War, Australia stopped looking to Britain for aid, and turned increasingly towards the United States. Colonialism died a slow death as the European powers grudgingly (in the case of France, incredibly so!) gave up their colonial posessions. Australia joined the British Commonwealth, the collection of countries which shared historic, colonial ties with Britain.