Australian History For Dummies. Alex McDermott

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Opening up Australia’s economy and its borders

      

Seeing in the new millennium

      The first thing about Australian history that probably strikes you — aside from the very obvious exception of millennia of successful Indigenous adaptation — is that practically all of it is modern history. Getting your head around Australian history — what the big events were, and what the major forces shaping people’s actions, reactions and various ideas were — means you also get your head around the major shifts and changes of the modern era. Australian history provides an invaluable window onto the flow of the modern era, while also being a pretty interesting story of the emergence of a distinctive nation in its own right.

The contrast between Australia being home to one of the longest continuing societies and most people thinking of Australian history in terms of only recent events is one thing. But another striking thing about Australia is that it is a land and society of many more contrasts. The country was colonised as a place to punish people, yet being sent here often turned out to be the convicts’ greatest opportunity. Australia was a place where British convicts were sent to be deprived of their rights, yet was one of the first places to bestow on men an almost universal right to vote (and, a few decades later, to almost all women). And, after Federation, Australia was set up as something of a ‘new society,’ yet was one that refused entry to non-Brits for most of the 20th century. The playing out of these contrasts adds to the depth and colour of the Australian story.

When Oldest Meets Newest

      Australian modern history largely begins with the strange encounter between the oldest continuing culture in the world and the most rapidly changing one. The first Australians were Indigenous Aboriginals (see Chapter 2 for more on their way of life pre-European settlement). They were brought into contact with an invading group of settlers from an island on the other side of the world and off the west coast of Europe — Great Britain.

      

Explorer James Cook had been given a secret set of instructions to open only after he’d done his scientific work in Tahiti: Search for the elusive Terra Australis Incognita. If he found it, according to the instructions, he was then to ‘with the consent of the natives take possession of convenient situations in the name of the King … or if you find the land uninhabited, take possession for His Majesty’.

      Cook found the land inhabited — he even observed that, despite their apparent material lack, Aboriginals may be the happiest people on earth — but he then went ahead and claimed possession of the whole east coast of Australia anyway. As far as intercultural harmony went, this set an ominous tone for how Australia’s first inhabitants would be viewed by the colonisers. Britain established the convict colony of New South Wales (NSW) shortly after. (See Chapter 3 for more on Cook and the decision to settle NSW.)

      Getting ahead in the convict world

      If I say to you the words ‘convict colony’, certain mental images probably automatically flash up. Chances are, they’d be pretty grim ‘hellhole’-type images: A basic slave society with clanking chains and floggings.

      Setting up a penal colony on the other side of the known world, with minimal chance of convicts returning to Britain once they’d served their time, certainly sounds like a recipe for disaster. But this is where the story of Australia gets interesting.

According to English law, criminals usually lost most of their legal rights after being convicted for a crime — and they lost them permanently. They couldn’t own property. They couldn’t give evidence in court. If the original colony planners or early governors had really been set on making life in NSW as miserable as possible for transported convicts, the scope was there. But that’s not what happened at all. In the new settlement, convicts not only kept their rights — they could own property, and could sue and give evidence in court — but they also became major economic players.

      Convicts were allowed to retain legal rights and were given plenty of opportunities partly out of necessity: They were the vast majority of the population. How do you run a society where some 80 to 90 per cent of people can’t hold property or talk in court? Convicts were the labour force (and the police force!), and they were the tradesmen and a large chunk of the entrepreneurial class. If you wanted to get anything done in this strange new colony, you had to see a convict about it. Indeed, if you wanted a date, you needed a convict. Most of the soldiers and officials had come out without womenfolk. While the soldiers and convict women entered into common-law partnerships (or de facto marriages), plenty of officers had relationships where convict women were their lovers and mistresses, sometimes even setting them up in businesses, having families and children with them, and occasionally even marrying them.

      

Economically, the new colony offered plenty of opportunities to make money, especially in importing and exporting — and, most notably, trading in alcohol for a very thirsty populace. Military officers, convicts and ex-convicts were all quick to get in on the act. None of them was super-scrupulous about how they did it, either.

      By a weird quirk of fate, which neither transportation’s administrators nor its detractors wanted publicised too much, getting caught, convicted and transported for crimes committed in Britain in the late 18th or early 19th centuries was frequently the luckiest break a criminal ever scored. (See Chapters 4 and 5 for more on the opportunities and second chances offered to new arrivals in NSW.)

      Eventually, Britain got around to designing and building proper convict hellholes — at Port Arthur, Norfolk Island, Moreton Bay and Macquarie Harbour (see Chapter 6). But that took decades, and life in these places was never the reality for the majority of convicts.

      

The myth of NSW as a convict hellhole was at least in part a creation of free settlers. In the 1840s, plenty of now successful free settlers wanted to separate their new home from the stigma of convict association, so they dwelt on the horror of the exceptional places and practices — the chain-gangs, the isolated outposts designed for severe punishments — as if they were the usual thing. They weren’t. But they created a myth that still shapes our thoughts about convict life.

      Leaping into the big time with wool

      At first, NSW was a trading and maritime colony. In 1808, 20 years after first settlement (and about the same time Governor Bligh was arrested by an extremely irritated populace — see Chapter 4) the population of the main port town, Sydney, was about half that of the entire colony. In the 1820s and 1830s, a real foothold finally started to be put down on the broader continent because of one main factor — the take-off СКАЧАТЬ