The ancestors of the peoples now called the
Aborigines began settling Australia at least 40,000 and possibly as early
as 100,000 years ago. Bêche de mer traders from the Indonesian islands
regularly visited Australia's northern coasts before the first European
settlement in 1788, but when they began doing so is unknown. European interest
in the continent dates from the 16th century, when geographers hypothesized
that a southern land mass must exist somewhere between Africa and South
America to help counterbalance the land masses of the northern hemisphere.
Its discovery by Europeans arose from the search for new routes to the
East Indies across both the Indian and Pacific oceans.
In 1567 Alvaro de Mendaña discovered the Solomon Islands; in 1606 Luis de Torres touched New Guinea and supposed he had seen the "great southern continent." Meanwhile the Dutch, rivals of the Spanish, were entrenching themselves in the trade of the East Indies. Explorer Dirk Hartog in 1606 landed on an island in Shark Bay, in present Western Australia. In 1642 Abel Tasman discovered the island that now bears his name, Tasmania. In 1644 he sailed into the seas lying between New Guinea and Australia but failed to find the Torres Strait passage into the Pacific Ocean.
In 1768 the British government promoted an expedition to Pacific waters for geographical and astronomical research. Led by Captain James Cook, the group reached the east coast of Australia in 1770. It followed the coast north for some 2,280 miles (3,670 km) from present eastern Victoria to Torres Strait. Naming the land New South Wales, Cook claimed it for Great Britain before proceeding through Torres Strait to the Cape of Good Hope and then home.
The British colonization of Australia resulted
largely from the cessation of the transportation of convicts to the British
colonies in North America. This practice had played a major part in the
English penal system until the American Revolution put a stop to it. After
a fruitless search for other destinations for the ever-growing number of
prisoners being kept in hulks moored in the Thames River, the government
adopted a plan for sending them to Botany Bay in New South Wales. The first
fleet, under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, left England in May
1787 and arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788. Phillip disliked the location
and soon discovered a harbor slightly to the north that appeared more satisfactory.
A landing was made at Sydney Cove, on Port Jackson, and the work of clearing
land and constructing necessary buildings was begun.
The principal problems of the colony of New South Wales were the provision of an adequate food supply, proper management of the convicts, and the policy to be adopted with regard to convicts when they became free.
Providing food to meet the colony's needs was a problem in the early period of settlement. The colonists were unable to learn anything from the indigenous Australians, whose hunter-gatherer life was well adapted to local conditions. As it turned out, although the soil near Port Jackson (Sydney) was not fertile, crops could be grown farther inland, and after a time the colony averted the threat of starvation. In the absence of all luxuries and shortages, and even of necessities, rum was highly prized; people commonly bartered essential articles to obtain it.
Transportation continued on a large scale to New South Wales until 1840, to Tasmania until 1852, and to Western Australia until 1868; convicts were sent at the greatest rate between 1825 and 1845. Almost all of the 160,000 convicts were common criminals, but about 1,000 English and 5,000 Irish may be better described as political prisoners. While under sentence, a few worked for the government, and those convicted of further offenses were sentenced to penal settlements or to work in chains on the roads, but most were assigned to work under free persons. Convicts who behaved well might be freed from servitude by the governor, who also had the right to give "tickets of leave," which permitted convicts to work for themselves without being assigned to a specific person. Convicts whose terms of transportation had expired rarely returned home. Until 1822 they often received small grants of land, but usually before and always afterward they went to work as ordinary laborers. To colonists who had never been convicted, emancipists and expirees represented a social and political threat that became more acute with the passage of time.
Arthur Phillip was the first colonial governor.
Bad health forced him to leave for England in 1792, and for the next three
years two temporary governors, John Hunter and Philip Gidley King, sought
in turn to administer the colony with the aid of a force known as the New
South Wales Corps, recruited in England. Their successor was William Bligh,
famous for his connection with the mutiny on the H.M.S. Bounty. Bligh attempted
to apply naval discipline to the colony and came into conflict with many
who were seeking to make private profits from the colony's struggles. Backed
by wealthy and powerful colonists, Major George Johnston, commander of
the New South Wales Corps, deposed and arrested Bligh. Johnston was tried
by court-martial for his part in this "Rum Rebellion," and in 1809 Colonel
Lachlan Macquarie became governor.
Macquarie brought his own military unit, the 73rd Highland Regiment, to Australia, and the New South Wales Corps was sent back to England. Macquarie considered many of the emancipists better citizens than some of the free settlers. He also undertook an energetic building program, greatly improving the appearance of Sydney, improving roads, and encouraging exploration.
Such development was costly. The British government, concerned about the expense and ready to believe Macquarie was treating convicts too leniently, sent Commissioner John T. Bigge to investigate. Bigge's reports led to the official encouragement of wool production, to the tightening of convict discipline, and to the first granting of civil rights to the free colonists.
It was impossible to proceed rapidly toward self-government in New South Wales as long as the differences between the emancipists and the free settlers remained unsettled. Emancipists insisted on their right to participate in the processes of government, while the free settlers feared the granting of political privileges to men who had once been convicts. A British parliamentary committee in 1837-1838 recommended that the transportation of convicts be stopped. In 1840 the British government put the recommendation into effect for New South Wales. The way was thus cleared for a further step toward colonial self-government. An act of 1842 granted to New South Wales a legislative council of 36 members. Emancipists were allowed to vote. The act was not democratic in the modern sense, in that a property qualification was set up for voters and for eligibility for membership on the legislative council.
Bills could be vetoed by the governor or sent to the British government for consideration, and the British government retained control over the sale of land. Continued British control aroused violent colonial opposition. Eventually, after seeing that a more liberal colonial constitution was working satisfactorily in Canada, the British Parliament passed the Australian Colonies Government Act in 1850, and the colonial legislatures were permitted, subject to the consent of the British government, to frame new constitutions for themselves.
By 1856, constitutions had been framed by Tasmania and South Australia as well as by New South Wales and Victoria. The new bicameral colonial legislatures had power over crown lands and were allowed to practice responsible government in the British and Canadian manner. Queensland, opened to free settlement after transportation of convicts to New South Wales ceased in 1840, was organized as a separate colony in 1859. Western Australia, founded in 1829 and sparsely populated, did not receive representative institutions until 1870 and responsible government until 1890.
All this time explorers had been discovering
the nature and extent of the Australian continent. In 1803 Matthew Flinders
circumnavigated the continent and prepared a map showing it in its entirety.
He urged that the term "Australia" should be used to denote the whole landmass.
Revelation of the general configuration of the continent, combined with
the fear of imminent French occupation of ports in the west and the north,
resulted in the annexation in 1824 of Bathurst and Melville islands, of
the area between east longitudes 135° and 129° in 1825, and of
the rest of the continent in 1829.
In 1844 there began a series of attempts to cross the interior. Captain Charles Sturt made an expedition to the drought-stricken center and Ludwig Leichhardt to Port Essington on the north coast. Robert Burke and William Wills, who set out from Melbourne in 1860 and reached the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1861, were the first to cross the continent from south to north. McDouall Stuart planted the flag in the center of Australia in 1860 and successfully crossed from Adelaide to Darwin in 1861-1862.
In 1851, the discovery of gold in New South
Wales changed the course of Australian history. A squatter brought gold
from a site near Bathurst to Sydney, and soon hundreds of miners were searching
for nuggets and gold dust. The diggings in Victoria were found to be the
most productive. The goldfields attracted large numbers of people from
the towns and countryside of Victoria and New South Wales, to the point
where other economic activities were often left shorthanded. And though
the population of the country as a whole remained largely British, immigrants
from abroad, pouring in to seek gold, boosted the population of Australia
from about 400,000 in 1850 to about 1,146,000 ten years later. The gold
rush greatly stimulated economic activity in the southeastern colonies.
It was necessary to construct buildings, manufacture equipment, and provide
cereals, meat, and dairy products for the new population. Prices rose,
and during these years the area under cultivation doubled.
Bushrangers -- that is, highwaymen roving the countryside singly or in gangs -- flourished along with the goldfields, preying on travelers, isolated farms, and stagecoaches. The lawlessness of some of the diggings paralleled that of the American Wild West. The most notorious of the bushrangers was the Kelly gang, whose leader, Ned Kelly, was finally captured in 1880 after a shoot-out in which the other three gang members died. Kelly, hanged in Melbourne in 1880 for murdering three police officers in 1878, has since become a popular hero of mythical proportions. Other violence in the goldfields included riots, sometimes targeted against Chinese diggers, and, in 1854, the Eureka Riots, when troops dispersed rebellious miners protesting police bullying and general poor administration of the digs. Six soldiers and 22 miners were killed in these clashes. (See also Eureka Riots)
The value of the gold produced in Victoria in the decade 1851-1861 varied greatly from year to year. The production of 1852, nearly £17 million (about U.S.$81.5 million) was never again reached, and the year 1861 saw a production of £7.8 million (about U.S.$38 million). At the same time, the number of diggers was increasing, and mechanical power and technology coming more and more into use. Individual miners who lacked funds for large-scale enterprise were forced to leave the goldfields for other activities. Gold rushes in Queensland in the 1880's and in Western Australia in the 1890's drew miners from the southeastern colonies, shifting the focus of goldmining to new mining cities such as Mount Morgan in the former and Kalgoorlie in the latter. In the same period, the mining industry diversified to other minerals, notably silver, lead, and zinc around Broken Hill in the far west of New South Wales, and copper on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula.
Eureka Riots, the rebellion in the Victoria, Australia, gold fields in 1854 of dissatisfied miners, who built an armed stockade. With the decline of income per digger, objections arose to the fee of thirty shillings per month levied by the government. On Dec. 3, 1854, government troops attacked the stockade and dispersed the rebels, who had gone so far as to raise the flag of the "Republic of Victoria." An inquiry followed, and in six months the government of Victoria had dropped the former fee and put in its place a "miner's right" which cost $5 a year and gave to the miner the right to vote. An export duty on gold was also levied to make up for the loss of revenue by the former system.
The history of Australia after adoption of the constitutions of the 1850's shows a strong desire to achieve democracy. The constitutions embodied the principle of universal manhood suffrage, although women's suffrage did not come until later (South Australia, 1894; Western Australia, 1899; New South Wales, 1902; Tasmania, 1903; Queensland, 1905; Victoria, 1908). The secret ballot was adopted in Victoria in 1856. In the powerful upper houses of the colonial parliaments, however, where real decisions were made, democracy was compromised by the fact that each member, wealthy and conservative, had more than one vote. There was also considerable difficulty in the relations between the upper and lower houses of the parliaments.
Colonial governments wished to build up an
independent farming class and, despite the opposition of graziers (ranchers),
passed a number of acts designed to help prospective buyers purchase as
agricultural freeholds lands then being used as sheep runs. However, ranchers,
helped by credit from financial institutions, bought the land for themselves
in a process known as "dummying" and gradually came into formal ownership
of much of the land they had been using. Although the land acts stimulated
some expansion of mixed farming, typically based on varying combinations
of grain growing, dairying, and meat production, sheepherding for wool
continued to be the leading rural activity. The dominance of sheepherding
can be seen by the fact that in 1883 more than 8 million acres (3.2 million
hectares) in New South Wales were held in only 96 estates.
The graziers met with economic hardship in the last quarter of the 19th century. World prices showed a downward trend, and overstocking and lack of adequate rainfall hastened the development of dust-bowl conditions. Millions of acres were abandoned; the number of sheep declined by 33 percent between 1891 and 1901, as the dingo and the spreading rabbit plague reduced the carrying capacity of the land. Improved breeding, the introduction of shearing machinery, and the building of paddocks fenced with barbed wire failed to solve the graziers' problems.
The farmers were better off. Although hit by falling prices after 1880, they were helped by new agricultural machinery, fertilizer, better strains of wheat, the provision of "rural credit," and the penetration of the railroad into agricultural areas. On the Queensland coast the sugarcane industry attracted settlers and capital.
Labor organizations of the modern type date
from the 1850's, when unions in the building trades began agitation for
the eight-hour day. Labor unions were not, however, politically powerful
until after 1890. By that time miners, seamen, dockworkers, and sheep shearers
had become organized. The failure of strikes between 1890 and 1892 strengthened
the arguments of those in the labor movement who stressed the need for
Some typical goals of Australian labor in the 1890's were the restriction of immigration and exclusion of Asians; abolition of sweatshops; adoption of systems of wage control and labor arbitration; and old-age pensions. Victoria passed a factory act in 1885, and during the 1890's, in all the colonies, acts for regulating factories, mines, and public health, for the early closing of shops, and for the control of conditions on ships followed in rapid succession. Compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes and the fixing of wages by the government were first introduced in South Australia in 1894 and in the other colonies by 1901.
Between 1860 and 1900 all of the Australian colonies except New South Wales made efforts to encourage industry by tariff protection. The decline in profits from placer gold mining had created unemployment, and Victoria had been forced to resort to the customhouse for revenue, lacking as it did the extensive receipts derived from the continuous sale of Crown lands in New South Wales. Victoria's tariff was slowly pushed up by pressure groups of manufacturers and workmen and by politicians wanting revenue yet opposed to direct taxation. The differing policies of Victoria and New South Wales caused many disputes on their border, but it seems impossible to prove that either protective tariffs or tariffs for revenue were primarily responsible for the prosperity enjoyed by the Australian colonies in the 35 years before founding of the commonwealth.
The British government suggested the formation
of a central federal governing authority in 1847, but withdrew its
proposal in the face of colonial opposition. Conditions did not favor such
a development until the last two decades of the 19th century, when railroad
construction made colonial union more feasible. The feeling of being safe
from foreign threats was shaken by the growing interest of European powers
in the islands of the western Pacific. Convicts escaping from the French
penal colony of New Caledonia entered Australia illegally, and many feared
that France would annex the New Hebrides. Rumors of German interest in
New Guinea caused the Queensland government to annex the southeastern part
of that island in 1883. The British government quickly repudiated the annexation,
but in 1884 Germany annexed northeastern New Guinea and adjacent archipelagoes,
and Great Britain then reannexed the area Queensland had claimed earlier.
In the early 1880's, a federal council representing the colonies was empowered
to enact minor legislation, but had no real executive power and no authority
to collect revenue.
Great Britain agreed to contribute toward an Australian naval squadron in 1888, and the inadequate condition of Australia's defenses was linked to the need for federation. The first federal convention took place in Sydney in 1891. It produced a first draft of a constitution modeled on that of the United States, with power divided between the federal and state governments. The lower house would have representation based on the population of each state, while the upper house would represent the states equally.
Because of severe economic depression in the eastern colonies, little more was done for five years. Propaganda in favor of federation continued, however, and in 1895 the colonial premiers agreed to call another convention, to submit any constitution it might draw up to the voters, and, should that be accepted, to ask the British parliament to enact it as law. In 1897, the second federal convention adopted a draft based on the one produced in 1891. Amendments suggested by the colonial parliaments were then considered at second and third sessions. Referendums held in the three southeastern colonies, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania, accepted the draft constitution by large majorities. In New South Wales, however, the majority in favor, only 5,367, fell far short of the prescribed minimum of 80,000 affirmative votes. New South Wales feared domination by the other, less populous colonies as well as the imposition of a protective tariff.
Amendments were adopted to appease New South Wales; they related to revenue sharing and the site of the federal capital. A second referendum, in 1899, resulted in all five eastern colonies accepting the amended constitution. Western Australia held back until 1900, but assented to it at about the same time the British parliament approved it. The desire for internal free trade, and for common action in defense, immigration, and industrial and financial matters, eventually persuaded all the colonies to join the union. The Commonwealth Constitution Bill passed through the British parliament in spring 1900, and Queen Victoria granted royal assent on July 9. The Commonwealth of Australia was instituted on Jan. 1, 1901.
In the political life of Australia between
1901 and 1914, there were both free trade groups and protectionist groups,
with labor holding the balance of power and eventually supporting the enactment
of tariffs. Other important measures that were passed during this period
provided for old-age pensions and for a system of conciliation and arbitration
in labor disputes.
The trend of the period was toward a strengthening of the central power at the expense of that of the states, principally because economic problems were increasingly national. Tariffs and immigration policy were handled by the federal government. The High Court of Australia gave considerable, but not unlimited, support to the increase of federal power. Customs duties brought large sums to the federal treasury; the federal government took over the existing debts of the states in 1909 and compensated the state governments for their loss of customs and excise receipts with a small annual payment per person.
At the peace conference in Paris at the close of the war, Prime Minister Hughes represented Australian interests with considerable asperity and demanded the maximum of reparations. Fearing the proximity to Australian territory of a potential enemy, he demanded that Australia be allowed to annex any lands that it had conquered during the war and opposed the proposal that the former German colonies become mandates. He had to be content to allow Japan to hold the former German Pacific possessions north of the equator; Australia accepted a Class C mandate for, and became responsible for administering, German New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the northern Solomon Islands.
Foreign Policy and Defense
The government of Australia, despite its lack of independence in foreign and diplomatic affairs, showed decided interest in certain problems, especially those involving the Pacific. Australian spokesmen defended Australia's interests at the Colonial Conference of 1902 and at the Imperial Conferences of 1907 and 1911. In 1909 the government established the post of high commissioner for Australia in London. Australia made no claim to autonomy in the control of its own foreign affairs but desired to be able to state its wishes to the British government and to be informed of British policies. Australia also showed considerable concern for military and naval defense. In 1905 a Council of Defense was created, and a federal act of 1909 adopted the principle of compulsory military training. A system was established whereby there was an exchange of officers between the British army and the Commonwealth staff. Similar interest was shown in naval matters, and the Royal Navy was created in 1909.
Between 1901 and 1914 the population of Australia increased from 3,750,000 to almost 5,000,000. Economic development was highly encouraged and optimism for the future was shown by government borrowing for public works, particularly railroads, of which some 5,000 miles (8,000 km) were constructed in these years. The number of factories and factory workers increased. By 1914 the labor unions contained a larger share of the total population than the unions of any other country.
During these years, the Commonwealth government took over the immigration policies previously controlled by the states. It strongly encouraged immigration from Great Britain, but enacted legislation to restrict the entry of Asians and Pacific Islanders. After federation, the commonwealth decreed that newcomers be tested for their ability to take dictation in a "prescribed" language. This became the principal means of enforcing the "White Australia policy," which largely restricted immigration to people of European descent until the 1960's. The commonwealth also repatriated the Kanaka sugarcane laborers who had worked in Queensland, and further protected the sugar industry against imports produced by cheap labor. This policy also had racial overtones, although it was largely economic.
When war broke out in 1914, Australia's Labor prime minister, Andrew Fisher, promised to help Great Britain "to the last man and the last shilling." The Australian Imperial Force (AIF) received its baptism of fire at Gallipoli on Apr. 25, 1915. April 25 (Anzac Day) has been a national day of commemoration ever since. After Gallipoli was evacuated in December 1915, most of the Australian force was transferred to France. Near the end of 1916 Labor Prime Minister W. M. Hughes decided that conscription had become necessary. He was forced by his political opponents to hold a referendum on the issue, and his proposal was defeated. In 1917 Hughes formed a new war cabinet formed of five Laborites who favored conscription and six non-Laborites. The Nationalist Party thus came into being, but another attempt to introduce conscription failed.
After the peace conference, the wartime coalition
fell apart. The refusal of rural interests to support a Nationalist government
led by Hughes forced his resignation in 1923 and led to the formation of
a Nationalist-Country Party coalition. In 1927 this government began the
moving of the federal capital to Canberra. It brought 300,000 immigrants
to Australia and began the transformation of the Commonwealth Bank into
a central bank by giving it the power to issue paper money and fix discount
rates and by making it the depository for commercial banks.
In the late 1920's the government adopted a policy thought by the opposition to be hostile to labor. It took strong action against strikes and proposed to abandon arbitration in most cases. Faced also with a growing industrial depression, it lost popularity. In 1929 the Labor Party took office, only to face worldwide economic depression.
As an important producer of primary commodities,
Australia quickly felt the effect of falling prices from 1929 to 1931.
To meet the serious situation, the federal government decided on a reduction
in government salaries, a cut in pensions, and a scaling down of interest
rates on bonds. The Arbitration Court ordered a 10 percent cut in real
wages. The currency was stabilized at a depreciated ratio. Finally, the
Commonwealth Bank agreed to make credit available for unemployment relief
works and rural relief to meet government deficits.
In December 1931 the United Australia Party elected an absolute majority of the 75 members of the House of Representatives and formed an anti-Labor government. By 1932 the Labor Party had lost control of all but one state government.
After the end of World War I, Australia joined the League of Nations. The Australian navy was reduced. During the depression compulsory military service was abandoned. In the early 1930's defense expenditures were extremely low. Although there was some increase after 1935, there was little real armament until after the Munich crisis of 1938. Through the first two years of World War II, the Australian government continued to maintain a policy of good relations with Japan, despite the fact that Japan objected to its unfavorable balance of trade with Australia.
Robert G. Menzies had been prime minister
for only five months when his government joined Great Britain in declaring
war on Germany on Sept. 3, 1939. Supporting the "Motherland" was regarded
as a duty of empire. The government immediately raised an expeditionary
force, the second AIF, which fought in the Middle Eastern and North African
campaigns of 1940-1942. Menzies' coalition government encountered increasing
opposition, however, and eventually the Labor Party leader, John Curtin,
was commissioned to form a new government on Oct. 7, 1941.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, came exactly two months later. Japan's simultaneous attack on Malaya, where the AIF's 8th division was supporting the British, caused Curtin's government to declare war on Japan the next day. The Japanese rout of the allied forces in southeast Asia over succeeding weeks shattered Australians' trust in the ability of the British navy to protect them from invasion. On December 26 Curtin signaled a fundamental shift of national allegiances by announcing, "Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links of kinship with the United Kingdom." Defying British prime minister Winston Churchill, Curtin withdrew the AIF's 6th and 7th divisions from the Middle East to defend Australia. The Japanese landing in New Guinea in January 1942, followed by air raids on Darwin, Broome, Townsville, and other northern Australian towns added urgency to this decision. In April 1942 U.S. General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia to become commander in chief of the southwest Pacific region, in charge of the Allied military counteroffensive. Both the Royal Australian Navy and the Royal Australian Air Force expanded and became more active, and by May the threat of a Japanese invasion had receded. Germany's surrender in May 1945 allowed the Americans and British to begin an all-out drive against the Japanese, which Australia had been urging for three years.
During World War II, the Labor government
had adopted the British Statute of Westminster of 1931, which gave some
dominions, including Australia, legislative autonomy. The government greatly
expanded independent Australian diplomacy, and the external affairs minister,
Herbert V. Evatt, played an active role as a spokesman for the smaller
nations in drawing up the United Nations charter and supporting the move
toward independence of Indonesia and other new nations of the region.
The war ended on a note of optimism and confidence in Australia. The Labor government under Prime Minister Joseph B. Chifley, who replaced Curtin after the latter's death in July 1945, put forward plans for economic development. Between 1946 and 1949 legislation was passed providing for a welfare state, with a comprehensive system of health, old-age, unemployment, and other disability benefits. Social services were transferred to federal control. The government fostered enterprises in aviation, shipping, and banking that steered Australia midway between a free-enterprise and a planned economy. It introduced a system of commonwealth scholarships for university education, designed both to raise the intellectual and professional life of the country and to ensure careers for those with talent. It created the Snowy Mountains Authority in 1949 to irrigate the dry interior of southeastern Australia and generate cheap electricity. It also assisted immigration to meet labor shortages in the postwar boom.
Massive postwar immigration helped transform Australia from a remote British outpost of empire to an independent nation. Increasingly, immigrants came from a variety of countries, so that Australia ceased to be an almost exclusively British nation. Between 1949 and 1968, about 1,018,000 immigrants came from Great Britain and about 808,000 from elsewhere in Europe. Many arrived with financial assistance from the Australian government under the subsidization plan it sponsored beginning in 1947. With the official ending of the White Australia policy in 1966, increasing numbers of immigrants came from the Middle East and Asia. After the Communist victories in southeast Asia in the mid-1970's, large numbers of refugees came from the countries of that region, many as boat people who risked storms, unseaworthy vessels, and pirates to reach the freedom and opportunity Australia represented. By 1991 Asian-born people made up 4.1 percent of the Australian population, compared with 0.3 percent in 1947. The largest number of Asian immigrants came from Vietnam (133,440 Vietnam-born residents in Australia in 1991), Malaysia (84,090), the Philippines (74,330), Hong Kong (73,210), China (68,510), and India (65,430). The Vietnamese, Malaysians, Filipinos, and natives of Hong Kong were among Australia's 11 largest immigrant populations. Other groups in the top 11 were people born in the United Kingdom and Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, the nations formerly comprising Yugoslavia, Greece, Germany, and the United States. Australia's population passed 17 million in 1991, an increase of more than ten million in 50 years. Despite the long-term movement toward ethnic and cultural diversity, people from the British Isles (1,222,000 or 7 percent of the total population) remained the largest group of those born overseas.
Following the war, great political change swept Australia. By 1949 it was clear that the Labor government had lost touch with the drift of political events and sentiments. Despite Communist gains in Europe and the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war, the government's defense plans were based on fear of military resurgence in Japan. Dissatisfaction with Labor's domestic policies mounted. Gasoline rationing continued, although, beginning in 1948, the highly popular General Motors "Holden," Australia's first locally manufactured, mass-produced automobile, was placing private automobile transportation within the reach of the average family. Wartime economic controls seemed out of place as the nation entered a long, consumer-driven postwar boom. In pursuit of Labor's socialist ideals, Chifley endeavored, ultimately unsuccessfully, to nationalize the privately owned banks. The same year, 1949, labor struggles in the coal industry, initiated by the Communist-dominated unions, disrupted industry, business, and private lives, a problem Chifley tried to solve by sending troops to run the mines. Such events raised doubts about Labor's ability to govern, and fanned popular fears of creeping socialism and the "Red menace." In December 1949 R. G. Menzies again became prime minister, swept back to power at the head of a Liberal-Country Party coalition on an electoral platform of free enterprise and anti-Communism.
Under Menzies, who remained prime minister for 16 years and instituted an unbroken 23-year period of Liberal-Country Party rule, Australia became the "lucky country," its citizens enjoying the affluence of industrial prosperity. As private home ownership became an achievable reality for people of all classes, the suburbs of the capital cities expanded rapidly while the new skyscrapers of corporate capitalism transformed the central business districts into traffic-filled canyons of glass and concrete. Canberra, once derided as the "bush capital," a well-lit sheep paddock of widely interspersed monuments, became a neat and leafy city of noble public buildings displaying the confidence of the new wealth. Secondary and university education facilities multiplied rapidly with government support, for the first time opening educational opportunity to the wider population. The use of the international jet airplane; the exportation of coking coal, iron ore, copper, alumina, gold, silver, lead, and zinc; the opening up of new Asian and American markets for wool, wheat, and meat; and the discovery of oil and natural gas finally destroyed the remnants of the old bush culture and dependence on Great Britain. Australia emerged as a highly industrialized and urbanized middle-sized world power.
Menzies, an avowed royalist and Anglophile who boasted he was "British to the bootstraps," nevertheless strove to cement Australia's alliance with the United States as the latter sought to "contain" Communism. Under his government's foreign policy, Australia's realignment of allegiances away from Great Britain and toward the United States became more pronounced. At the onset of the Korean War he sent Australian naval forces to assist the United States and soon assigned a contingent of volunteers from the regular army. In 1951 Australia formed the ANZUS pact with the United States and New Zealand, a treaty that was to remain the crux of Australian defense policy for almost four decades. In 1954 Australia joined SEATO, and in 1955 Australian military forces were stationed in Malaya to help the British suppress Communism there. The Liberal-Country Party coalition committed troops to Vietnam 1965-1972; later a Labor government gave support to the U.S.-led action in Iraq in 1991 and to that in Somalia in 1992.
The conflict in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos proved to be a turning point for Australia. Menzies responded to the Vietnamese civil war by introducing a selective plan for compulsory military service and sending 800 troops to South Vietnam in 1965. In April 1966 Harold Holt, who had succeeded to the prime ministership on Menzies' retirement that January, increased the Australian force in Vietnam to 4,500. The death in action of the first of the Australian conscripts sparked a bitter, long-running debate on the wisdom of the government's defense policy and its allegiance to the United States. Government supporters believed it was necessary to back U.S. policy on Vietnam because Australian security depended on the promise of U.S. assistance under the ANZUS treaty. They also maintained that military intervention on the Asian mainland was justified in order to prevent Australia from becoming the "last domino" in Communism's southward advance. The Labor Party, some church leaders, intellectuals, university students and academics, and the more liberal newspapers emerged as the vocal and demonstrative opponents of the government's unwavering acceptance of U.S. policy in southeast Asia epitomized in Holt's promise to go "all the way with L.B.J." The mounting unpopularity of the war did not persuade the government to change its policy. John Gorton, who succeeded to the prime ministership in January 1968 (after Holt's disappearance while surf swimming), pursued the same foreign policy. Gorton and the Liberal-Country Party coalition retained power after the 1969 elections, but with reduced support. Faced with dissension within the party, Gorton resigned in 1971 and was succeeded by William McMahon.
McMahon's government finally withdrew Australian troops from Vietnam in February 1972, but foreign policy remained an issue in the December 1972 elections, when the voters returned Labor to federal office for the first time since 1949. Popular fears about Labor's susceptibility to Communist influence, an issue over which the party split disastrously in 1955, had kept Labor in an electoral wilderness for a generation. Rejuvenated after 1967 under the leadership of E. Gough Whitlam, who now became prime minister, Labor launched an ambitious program of reform. The new government immediately ended military conscription, freed the draft resisters from jail, and established diplomatic relations with China. It went on to introduce bills to promote education at all levels, expand welfare, institute universal health insurance, and provide tax relief for the poor. Other key elements of the program included the establishment of a federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs to bring to Australia's generally disadvantaged indigenous peoples, the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, the benefits other citizens enjoyed. The Labor government also created regional urban growth centers to relieve the continual outward sprawl of the capital cities; formed the Australia Council, a federal agency for promoting and subsidizing the arts; and, in 1975, granted independence to Papua New Guinea. Labor was unable to implement other reforms because doing so depended on the good will of the Senate, which it did not control. In 1974, Whitlam dissolved parliament when the Senate rejected an appropriations bill. Labor retained its majority in the House of Representatives in the subsequent elections, but again failed to win control of the Senate.
By this time worldwide recession and inflation were having profound influence on the Australian economy. Labor's generous wage concessions, big-spending policies, and slashing of tariffs worsened inflation and unemployment. After a series of ministerial firings, some attended by allegations of financial or personal impropriety, the public perception that Labor had lost direction grew throughout 1975. In October the opposition leader, J. Malcolm Fraser, refused to pass budget bills in the Senate until the government called an election. In an unprecedented action, the governor-general ended the deadlock by dismissing Whitlam and appointing Fraser interim prime minister pending elections. Bitter controversy over the governor-general's action divided the nation. In the elections that followed, the voters delivered their verdict by giving the Liberal and National (formerly Country) party coalition a record majority in the House and a majority in the Senate.
Despite the continuing political controversy over the coalition's accession to power, the new government's main problems were economic -- a sluggish economy and rising inflation and unemployment. Fraser gave top priority to fighting inflation, and at first enjoyed success by reducing the rate from the double-digit figures of the Whitlam years. His government was returned in two further elections, in December 1977 and October 1980. During the late 1970's and early 1980's rising inflation and worsening unemployment eroded the coalition's support. Meanwhile, Fraser's confrontational manner toward the union movement was a factor in the mounting rate of industrial disputes.
In February 1983 Fraser called an early election,
hoping to catch the Labor Party, diverted by a leadership struggle, unprepared.
This strategy failed, for the newly installed Labor leader, R. J. L. (Bob)
Hawke, not only enjoyed great public popularity but was able to offer voters
a clear-cut choice between policies as well as between leadership styles.
In elections in March Labor defeated the coalition decisively and Hawke
became prime minister. His consensual approach to labor-management issues,
resulting in a wage accord, gave the nation a period of industrial peace
unusually long in Australian experience. A striving for consensus became
the hallmark of Hawke's prime ministership, extending into areas as diverse
as taxation reform, job creation, restructuring of the education system,
and improving relations between the indigenous peoples and other citizens.
Under Hawke and his treasurer, Paul J. Keating, Labor turned its back on its mildly socialist tradition. For decades this had been built on a pro-worker philosophy that emphasized the need to extend social services and maintain a mixed economy embracing both public and private enterprise. Labor now adopted pro-business policies and courted the private business sector. It kept wage increases to a minimum, deregulated financial markets, and allowed foreign banks to begin operating in Australia. It then began opening publicly owned enterprises to private ownership and allowing privately owned firms to compete in industries once monopolized by government agencies. The finance industry boomed for a time, until the international stock market crash of October 1987. Mounting public and private debt, a succession of spectacular corporate failures, crises within the rural and manufacturing sectors (the products of which were increasingly uncompetitive in both overseas and domestic markets), a large balance of payments deficit, and high inflation characterized the economy as it slid into recession in 1991. The government's response was to depreciate the currency, cut public spending, maintain high interest rates, and avoid making tax concessions. Unemployment rose despite such measures: 6 percent in 1989, it passed 10 percent in 1991 and in 1992 reached 11 percent -- the highest rate since the Great Depression 60 years earlier.
Hawke's government had been reelected in 1984, 1987, and 1990, becoming the first federal Labor government to be reelected for more than two consecutive terms. Despite his successes here, his parliamentary colleagues deposed him in December 1991, opting for Keating instead. Although Keating seemed unpopular with the electorate, being the politician the public regarded as most responsible for the recession, his colleagues believed Labor had better chances of reelection with him as leader rather than Hawke.
After 16 months as prime minister, Keating, in March 1993, led Labor into an election in which the party was widely expected to lose office after a decade in power. Following a campaign fought largely over the Liberal-National opposition's proposal for introducing a general consumption tax, Labor won a surprising victory and increased its majority slightly. Electorally confirmed as prime minister, Keating faced urgent problems, chief among which was to lead the nation out of recession. Another was to respond to the High Court's 1992 finding in the "Mabo" case, which had far-reaching implications for Australia's system of land tenure. (In ruling that certain indigenous citizens still held "native title" to the land, the court had upset two centuries of accepted legal assumptions about the validity of Great Britain's occupation of Australia.) At the same time Keating took the nation in new directions -- for example, initiating debate on whether Australia should abandon the monarchy to become a republic and instituting a ten-year process of "national reconciliation" between the nation's indigenous and non-indigenous peoples.