West B.A., Murphy F.T. A Brief History of Australia
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
80
than 30 years in Victoria, the Wurundjeri settled on unclaimed Crown
land, built houses, and began farming (Perkins 2008, episode 3).
With the settlement of Coranderrk a fait accompli, the Board of
Protection supported the establishment of the reserve, but with the
provisos that it was the board and not the Wurundjeri themselves
who would control the purse strings, and residents of the reserve had
to become Christian. These decisions were just two of many over the
course of the subsequent 60 years in which the board’s paternalistic
attitude toward Aboriginal people was more important to its members
than actual support for Coranderrk. Another example includes forcing
the Wurundjeri and other clans that moved onto the successful reserve
to grow hops instead of other crops in 1872 and then, instead of pay-
ing the Aboriginal farmers for their crop, merely providing rations to
the community. This economic structure served to keep community
members dependent on the board for their livelihood, and thus to
keep them poor. Perhaps the most damaging government decision,
however, was an act in 1886 that made it illegal for “half-caste” people
under the age of 34 to reside on state reserves (Perkins 2008, episode
3). The act resulted in the separation of parents from their children
and caused a rapid decrease in the community’s population so that by
The community leader William Barak stands in the middle of about 40 of his fellow residents
at Coranderrk.
(Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria)
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GOLD RUSH AND GOVERNMENTS
1924 Coranderrk was closed and its small remaining population moved
to another reserve, Lake Tyers, much farther away from Melbourne
(Coranderrk Mission History 2004).
New South Wales also had a Protector of Aborigines from 1881 for-
ward and an Aborigines Protection Board from 1883. Their jobs, as in
Victoria, were “to ‘educate,’ care [for] and ‘protect’ Aboriginal peoples”
(Thinee and Bradford 1998, 11) by overseeing the seven church mis-
sions and 134 government reserves that were established or continuing
operations in New South Wales after 1881 (Thinee and Bradford 1998,
340–341). The people who occupied these positions, however, saw it as
their primary duty “to control the lives of those [9,000 or so] Aboriginal
people” who lived in the colony (Thinee and Bradford 1998, 11, 20). In
South Australia there had been an early Protector of Aborigines from
1839 to 1856, but the protector himself, Matthew Moorhouse, had
failed so utterly—even participating in a massacre of Aboriginal people
in 1841—that the position was abolished until 1881 (Human Rights
and Equal Opportunity Commission [HREOC] 2007). At that time all
remaining government reserves were transferred to church missions,
but very little changed for Aboriginal people themselves, who contin-
ued to be treated, at best, as children and, at worst, as animals.
The Outback
While the southern and eastern Australian colonies were working
through the growing pains of relative independence in the latter half
of the 19th century, Western Australia and the Northern Territory were
still coming into their own. The former had officially become a penal
colony only in 1850, to bolster its tiny white population of fewer than
6,000 (Welsh 2004, 139); the last shipload arrived in 1868. This dif-
ference from the eastern colonies also meant that local governance
structures were slower to develop in the west, with the first elected rep-
resentative council sitting in 1870 and first self-governing parliament
in 1890 (Welsh 2004, 251, 253). A final difference from the eastern
colonies related to the Aboriginal population, which was both much
larger and more independent than elsewhere in this period. The British
government retained control over the reserves and missions until 1897,
and thus “some Aborigines [sic] enjoyed better conditions than those
elsewhere” (Welsh 2004, 271) since local farmers were less successful
in their pursuit of Aboriginal land.
The Northern Territory at that time was only marginally more con-
nected to the other Australian colonies than Western Australia, largely
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
82
because of geographic proximity. It was only in 1863 that the territory
came into being as an entity when South Australia formally took control
from New South Wales. Prior to this period this vast territory, 520,902
square miles (1,349,129 sq. km), which is almost twice as large as Texas,
was only nominally held by New South Wales and governed from far-
away Sydney. More important at that time than the Australians or British
were Macassan trepangers from the Indonesian archipelago who had
been arriving each year since the mid-18th century to catch and prepare
trepang, or sea slugs, for sale on the Chinese market. In the first half
of the 19th century, British attempts at controlling this lucrative trade
failed miserably. Three white settlements in the far north, Fort Dundas
on Melville Island (1824–28), Fort Wellington on Raffles Bay (1827–29),
and Fort Victoria at Port Essington (1838–49), all failed as a result of the
hot, humid climate and disease (Australian Heritage Database 2002).
Finally in 1863, when South Australia took control of the territory,
the colonial government began to make some headway in the region
by pouring millions of pounds into exploring and developing it. The
greatest success story of this period was the completion of the Overland
Telegraph in 1872. The electric telegraph had been invented in the
1830s and then perfected in the 1840s, when Samuel Morse sent his
first message. Australia built its first line about a decade later, in 1853,
when Melbourne and Williamstown were connected by an American
who had managed the New York and Buffalo Telegraph Company
(Taylor 1980, 17).
South Australians became interested in the new technology almost
immediately. The government appointed an Englishman, Charles Todd,
its first superintendent of telegraphs in 1854. He installed his first line,
from Adelaide to Port Adelaide, in February 1856 and then worked
with the Victorian superintendent to connect Adelaide and Melbourne
in July 1858. At the same time, Queensland was also developing its
telegraphic capacities with a view to connecting the continent to the
rest of the world.
For the next decade, Todd worked as an astronomer in South
Australia to fulfill the second part of his commitment to the govern-
ment, while others laid the groundwork that eventually led to his
overland success in 1872. Francis Gisborne arrived from England with
a proposal to connect Moreton Bay, Queensland, to Batavia (Jakarta) via
an undersea cable (Taylor 1980, 26–27). The first overland expeditions
also succeeded in this decade, with Burke and Wills and John McDouall
Stuart completing the journey in the early 1860s. Another event that set
the stage for Todd to begin was the completion of a telegraph line that
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GOLD RUSH AND GOVERNMENTS
crossed the United States from New York to San Francisco, a distance of
nearly 3,000 miles (about 4,800 km), proving that overland routes were
viable (Taylor 1980, 35). The last problem that had to be cleared up
was where to land an undersea cable in Australia. Gisborne’s company
favored Queensland, as did the English firm Telegraph Construction
and Maintenance Company. But a subsidiary of the latter company, the
British-Australian Telegraph Company, formed in January 1870, favored
Port Darwin, which gave Todd and the South Australian government
the chance to lobby for the ultimate connection to run overland to Port
Augusta and Adelaide rather than to Queensland. By offering to fund
the overland project with government funds and to have it completed
by January 1, 1872, South Australia won the contract in June 1870
(Taylor 1980, 37–40).
With no time to spare, Todd began the extraordinary task of complet-
ing a project many times larger than anything he had ever undertaken,
across territory that had been crossed by white men only twice, and
with a budget that had essentially been pulled from the air. The first
task was to send John Ross and a team of surveyors and explorers to
scout the route and determine the availability of water, timber for tele-
graph poles, and other resources (see Giles 1995); they left on July 8.
While they explored, Todd made plans from Adelaide and gathered ten-
ders for the northern and southern sections of the line; his government
team was to build the middle third. At this point, much of Adelaide’s
small business community was involved with the preparations, build-
ing wagons, carving 30,000 insulator pins for the line, and supplying
clothing, animals, and food; the all-important line itself was ordered
from England (Taylor 1980, 50).
For just under two years, teams of men, horses, and bullocks labored
in some of the world’s most difficult terrain to complete Todd’s dream
of connecting Australia and England via telegraph. They were thwarted
by searing heat and lack of water in one season and tremendous floods
in the next, but through it all the 36,000 poles kept going in and the
line kept extending. After the landing of the overseas cable from Java
to Darwin in October 1871, the southern section, from Port Augusta to
the Treuer River, was the first to be completed, in January 1872. Over
the next six months work continued overland, and by June 20 the citi-
zens of Adelaide were receiving their first transcontinental telegraphs,
although a short gap had to be bridged manually (Taylor 1980, 184).
This gap was finally closed and problems with both the undersea cable
and termite damage to the poles were solved so that on November 15,
1872, the governor of South Australia could declare a public holiday
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
84
to celebrate the achievement (Flinders Ranges Research 2008). Todd’s
dream had become a reality.
Despite this geographic and technological connection between
the Northern Territory and the rest of the Australian colonies, there
were significant differences between them. The most important was
the fact that the Northern Territory was not (and still is not) entirely
self- governing. Unlike in Queensland and Victoria, which became
Frequent repairs to the line were made by operators resident in the many telegraph stations
located all across central Australia. Bob Carew is working on this line in 1921.
(Image cour-
tesy of the State Library of South Australia, SLSA: PRG1365/1/133)
85
GOLD RUSH AND GOVERNMENTS
independent colonies upon breaking away from New South Wales,
governance of the Northern Territory was simply transferred from
Sydney to Adelaide. In 1911 South Australia transferred responsibility
for the territory to the new Commonwealth government, which held
it until a degree of self-government was permitted in 1978. Since that
time, the territory has had a legislative assembly and chief minister who
have similar powers to those of their counterparts in the six Australian
states. Nevertheless, important differences remain because the federal
government “retains the power to make laws for the Northern Territory,
and can override laws of the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly”
(Northern Land Council 2003).
Another important difference between the Northern Territory and
eastern and southern colonies was demographic. Even with the open-
ing of telegraph stations throughout the territory, the white population
did not begin to rival that of either the large Aboriginal population of
about 50,000 (Thompson 1994, 53) or the significant Chinese one. In
1888 the Northern Territory had a white population of just 1,000 and
a Chinese one seven times larger (Thompson 1994, 37). White fears
of Chinese supremacy in the territory, however, meant that after 1888
“vessels from China were quarantined and Chinese residents were
restricted to a radius of twenty miles around Darwin”; in addition, “the
South Australian government . . . placed a poll tax on Chinese entering
the Northern Territory” (Thompson 1994, 37). Just two years later, the
Chinese population was down to 4,000, while the white population had
remained about the same, at 1,000 (Thompson 1994, 37). While the
loss of 3,000 people must have had a great effect on the Chinese com-
munity, the decrease in number and proportion did not seriously affect
the strong economic position of the Chinese in the territory. By 1890
Palmerston (present-day Darwin) had 39 Chinese businesses including
laundries, cafes, shoemakers, tailors, and brothels (Thompson 1994,
52). The Chinese also provided the vast majority of fresh food in the
territory, from fish to vegetables; worked on the Palmerston railway
with Japanese and Indian colleagues; and maintained a thriving com-
munity that has survived into the present (Thompson 1994, 52–53).
Today the demographics of the Northern Territory are still very
different from those of the rest of the country, with extremely low
population density, relatively high numbers of Aboriginal people, and
relatively high ownership of the land by Aboriginal communities. The
Northern Territory houses about 1 percent of all Australians, with about
221,000 people on about one sixth of the country’s territory; this works
out to be about 2.36 people per square mile (one person per .79 km
2
).
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
86
About 29 percent of this population, or about 60,000 people, are of
Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent, while the national average
is less than 2.5 percent. This 29 percent of the population owns almost
half of all land in the territory, while the national average is about 14
percent (Northern Land Council 2003). Some of this land, such as that
around Uluru (Ayer’s Rock), Kata Tjuta (the Olgas), and Karlu Karlu
(Devil’s Marbles), has been leased back to the federal government for
tourism purposes, but much of it remains in at least nominal control of
Aboriginal cooperatives and corporations.
Conclusion
Most of the 19th century was very good for Australia’s few white resi-
dents. Wealth and population expanded exponentially with wool and
then gold feeding the colonial coffers and luring ever larger numbers
of settlers from Britain, Ireland, Europe, and even the Americas to take
advantage of the new frontier. This was largely an urban population that
settled in Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth to make
money as merchants for the expanding primary products industries
and in the service industries that they supported. This mainly urban
population, however, was not entirely separated from the land, and the
dream of exploring “the bush” or even owning a small plot of farmland
was still very strong. Henry Lawson and many others wrote about the
rural experience, while the entire population followed with interest the
activities of bushrangers like Ned Kelly. Thousands of families left the
cities and settled areas as “selectors” who struggled to survive on small,
dry plots of land with little possibility of long-term success.
These difficulties paled in comparison, however, to those experienced
by Australia’s Aboriginal population during this century. At the start of
the 19th century the territory that became Victoria still housed tens of
thousands of seminomadic Aboriginal people, who maintained their
strict marriage laws and social taboos. By midcentury their number had
been reduced to about 2,000 people, and by the end of the century the
few surviving communities were housed on government reserves and
Christian missions and lived in constant fear of intervention by the
Aboriginal Protection Board. The situation in the other colonies was very
similar, and even the large numbers of Aboriginal people in the Northern
Territory were beginning to fall under mission and government control.
This era of white prosperity in Australian history could not continue
forever, and by 1893 much of urban and rural life in Australia had been
transformed by debt, drought, and economic depression.
87
5
federation and
identity forMation
(1890–1919)
t
he 19th century began for the small non-Aboriginal population in
Australia as a period of tremendous growth and optimism. Trade
and primary production had begun to solve the food problems suffered
at the end of the 18th century, and increasing numbers of both convicts
and free settlers were expanding the population to a sustainable level.
As the century progressed, non-Aboriginal Australia’s fortunes grew
exponentially. The transportation of convicts ended, leaving a settle-
ment of free colonizers set on achieving prosperity and stability. By the
early 1880s gold mining and wool and wheat production had exploded,
leaving Australia’s colonizers among the richest people in the world,
with the exception of those unlucky families who had staked their
money and luck on rural selections in Victoria and New South Wales.
The 1890s
Starting in 1888, the dream of continual economic growth in Australia
was in peril. Worldwide prices in both wool and wheat had decreased
during the decade, affecting primary producers throughout the conti-
nent (Clarke 2003, 150). In Victoria land speculation led to a slump in
prices that affected not only the marginal selector population in rural
areas but also the inhabitants of what had previously been “Marvelous
Melbourne.” This regional problem became an issue for all the
Australian colonies in 1890 with a crash in markets worldwide, starting
in Argentina and spreading to Australia through the collapse of finan-
cial institutions in Britain (Clark 1995, 185). While bank failures in
Britain were not as common as they were during the 1930s depression,
the withdrawal of capital from Australian enterprises hit the colonies
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
88
hard. Multiple bank failures, reduced prices, high unemployment rates,
and land devaluation were some of the major causes and effects of the
deteriorating Australian economic climate of the time.
Making matters more difficult, Australia’s already dry conditions
worsened during the 1890s. A combination of drought and a plague
of rabbits threatened rural recovery for much longer than even in
Argentina, where the crisis had begun (McLean 2005). In Queensland
the introduction of the cattle tick, possibly from India, reduced the
cattle population by about 43 percent and further exacerbated the
problems caused by these other macroeconomic factors (Molony 2005,
181). Government policies dictated by laissez-faire ideologies during
these years also tended to exacerbate rather than diminish the problems
generated overseas. The number of public works projects was reduced
rather than increased, and, especially in Victoria, banks were left to
fail, taking consumer savings and confidence with them (Clarke 2003,
153–155).
Although 1890 through 1894 were very difficult years in eastern
Australia, the rest of the continent did not suffer to the same extent. In
1890 Western Australia had finally joined New South Wales, Victoria,
Tasmania, Queensland, and South Australia as a self-governing colony,
only to be blessed two years later with gold rushes in the outback towns
of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie. These events drained population from
the more established eastern colonies and helped to ease some of the
effects of depression and unemployment there; 50,000 people departed
Melbourne and another 50,000 left regional Victoria in the first half of
the 1890s (Molony 2005, 175). While Melbourne remains a large, cos-
mopolitan city today, it has never recovered the position it held from
the mid-1850s through the early 1890s as the world’s most prosperous
and expensive city. Today it is not even Australia’s largest city, trailing
behind Sydney by several hundred thousand people.
Another long-term ramification of the depression of the 1890s is
the development of Labor Party politics. Labor unions first emerged in
Australia in 1840 when Sydney’s Australian Society of Compositors was
organized (Clarke 2003, 157). This action was followed by a burgeon-
ing of other associations, including the first women’s union in the colo-
nies in 1882, formed by Victoria’s dress makers (Molony 2005, 172).
By 1860 Melbourne’s Trades Hall Council had emerged to assist all the
working people’s associations in that city, followed by Sydney’s in 1871
(Clarke 2003, 158).
During Australia’s boom years from the 1850s through the 1880s,
these unions seemed to represent their members’ interests with signifi-
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FEDERATION AND IDENTITY FORMATION
cant success; workers and owners worked together to manage the years
of prosperity to the benefit of both groups. Of course, many people
were left out of this pact, including Aboriginal people, Chinese and
other nonwhite workers, as well as many women (Thompson 1994,
40–41). In fact, the one major source of conflict between labor unions
and owners in this period was over the migration of Chinese and other
nonwhite laborers; owners wanted cheaper labor regardless of skin
color, while workers preferred to maintain de facto white Australia
policies. With the exception of Melanesian Kanakas in Queensland and
Asian laborers in the Northern Territory, workers’ associations largely
won these battles, underpinning the power they held in the colonies.
As later events were to illustrate, however, the workers’ power was
almost entirely an illusion. This fact was brought home to all in the
labor strikes that accompanied the economic downturn of the 1890s.
The most severe of these widespread strikes lasted for about four months
in late 1890 and included action by the Maritime Officers’ Association,
Queensland’s shearers, and the many others who walked out in support
of these two groups. Various other unions, such as coal miners in 1893
and 1896 and shearers in 1891 and 1894, also tried to use strikes to
improve workers’ conditions and rates of pay. Unfortunately for them,
all the colonial governments supported the owners against the unions
in these strikes and used the police and military to protect nonunion,
or “scab,” laborers as well as private company property (Clarke 2003,
158–159). In the end, the almost endless supply of workers thanks
to the high unemployment rates caused by the depression meant that
unions had nothing to use as a bargaining chip and the power they had
seemingly accumulated during the boom years evaporated.
Having had the illusion of power taken away from them, as well
as the knowledge that strikes could produce almost none of their
aims except under limited circumstances, Australia’s laborers began
to emphasize political organization. Prior to this turn of events, the
most important ideological difference that marked Australian politics
was between those who supported free trade and those who supported
protective tariffs; no organized party or body was looking after work-
ers’ interests at the governmental level. After 1893 many unions put
their efforts toward this end and very rapidly Labor Parties throughout
the colonies were participating in elections (Duckworth 1892, 440); by
1899 Queensland was home to the first Labor Party government in the
world (Clarke 2003, 162–163). Between 1894 and 1900 Labor Parties
throughout the colonies made impressive gains in the areas of work-
ers’ wages, conditions, safety, and hours, as well as land and income