The British Colonization of Australia

Australia is, in the judgment of the historian James Belich, “the most successful settler empire the British ever built.” By 1900, the British had built, in the continent Cook had charted in 1770, a society of 3.7 million people, mostly of British descent, organised into six self-governing colonies on the British parliamentary model, and producing, by the gold rushes, a prosperity that rivalled anything in the European Atlantic. The settlement that Arthur Phillip planted at Port Jackson in January 1788, with perhaps 750 convicts, was the foundation; the federation of the six colonies in 1901, the structure. The first Australians had been there for perhaps 60,000 years, and the British dispossession of them is the most consequential single fact about the colony.

The Discovery of Australia and the First Fleet

The European discovery of the eastern coast of Australia is generally credited to Captain James Cook, who sailed along the coast in 1770 and claimed the territory for Britain under the name of New South Wales. Earlier European visits to the western and northern coasts had been made by the Dutch in the seventeenth century, but Cook’s voyage was the first systematic exploration of the eastern coast. The decision to establish a penal colony at Botany Bay was taken in 1786 by the government of William Pitt the Younger, on the advice of Sir Joseph Banks, who had travelled with Cook; the loss of the American colonies in 1783 had removed the principal destination for British convicts. The First Fleet, consisting of eleven ships carrying some 750 convicts, marines, and officers, arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788 and was forced by the poor conditions to relocate to Port Jackson, the site of modern Sydney.

The Penal Colony and the Early Years

The early years of the colony at Port Jackson were extraordinarily difficult. The supplies brought from Britain were inadequate, the soil was poor, and the colonists faced starvation, disease, and conflict with the indigenous population. The first governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, governed the colony with restraint and avoided the worst excesses of conflict, but the arrival of the Second Fleet in 1791 and the Third Fleet in 1791–1792 brought the worst abuses of the convict system. The governorship of Lachlan Macquarie (1810–1821) represented a turning point: Macquarie instituted major public works, encouraged exploration of the interior, and pursued a more humane policy towards both convicts and Aboriginal people. The explorations of George Bass, Matthew Flinders, and others, beginning in the 1790s, opened up the continent to British knowledge.

The treatment of the Aboriginal Australians during the early colonial period was, in the judgment of the historian Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), “the foundation document of Australian history.” The smallpox epidemic of 1789 — almost certainly introduced by the First Fleet — killed perhaps half of the Aboriginal population of the Sydney region, and the subsequent expansion of the settlement, the taking of land, and the violent frontier conflicts produced a demographic catastrophe that took the Aboriginal population from perhaps 750,000 in 1788 to fewer than 100,000 by the 1930s.

The Transportation System and Free Settlement

The transportation of convicts to New South Wales was the principal source of population growth in the early years of the colony, but free settlers also began to arrive in significant numbers from the 1820s onward. The abolition of transportation to New South Wales in 1840, recommended by the Molesworth Committee of 1837–1838, was the beginning of the end of the penal system; the last convict ship arrived in Western Australia in 1868.

The discovery of gold in New South Wales and Victoria in 1851 produced a massive gold rush that transformed the colony’s economy and demographics. The population of the Australian colonies grew from about 400,000 in 1850 to more than 1.5 million in 1860, and the gold rushes brought a wave of free immigrants from Britain, continental Europe, the United States, and China. The Eureka Stockade of December 1854, in which gold miners at Ballarat revolted against the colonial authorities, was a major episode in the development of Australian democracy. As the historian Keir Reeves has shown, the Eureka uprising was, in part, the product of an unlikely alliance of Irish Catholics, Cornish miners, and Chartist veterans, and it produced, in its aftermath, the manhood suffrage of the 1850s.

Self-Government and the Six Colonies

The Australian colonies were granted self-government from the 1850s onward, following the Australian Colonies Government Act of 1850 and the constitutions drafted in each colony. New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania developed along similar but distinct paths, each with its own legislature, judiciary, and political culture. The campaign for federation gathered pace from the 1880s onward, led by Sir Henry Parkes of New South Wales. The Federal Convention of 1891 and the Federal Convention of 1897–1898 produced a draft constitution, modelled on the British and American systems, and the constitution was approved by popular referendum in each colony in 1898 and 1899.

Federation and the Commonwealth of Australia

The six Australian colonies federated on 1 January 1901 to form the Commonwealth of Australia. The new Commonwealth adopted a constitution modelled on the British and American systems, with a federal government, a bicameral parliament, a High Court, and a governor-general representing the British Crown. Edmund Barton became the first prime minister, and the new state adopted a programme of progressive legislation, including the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, which established the so-called “White Australia” policy. The White Australia policy, as the historian Gwenda Tavan has shown, was not the inevitable expression of an Australian racism but a political project of the new Commonwealth, designed to be dismantled as the country became more confident of its international identity.

Australia in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Australia has remained an active member of the Commonwealth of Nations and has retained the British monarch as head of state, although republicanism has been a recurring political movement, particularly since the 1999 republic referendum. The country has had a distinctive political history, marked by strong labour movement traditions, a long period of conservative rule in the mid-twentieth century, and the prime ministerships of Robert Menzies (1949–1966) and John Gorton (1968–1971).

The question of the relationship between the European-descended majority and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations has been a major political issue since the 1967 referendum, which amended the Australian constitution to give the Commonwealth power to legislate for Indigenous Australians. The Uluru Statement from the Heart (2017), in which Indigenous Australians called for a First Nations Voice to be enshrined in the constitution, was rejected in a referendum in 2023; the rejection, in the judgment of the historian Megan Davis, “closed a long chapter in Australian constitutional history without producing the reconciliation it claimed to make possible.”

Historiographical Note

The historiography of British Australia was, for a long time, dominated by the older imperial accounts — Manning Clark’s A Short History of Australia (1963) and the work of Russel Ward — which treated the colonial period as a foundation story. The revisionist work of the last forty years, led by Henry Reynolds, Ann McGrath, and the more recent writing of the contributors to the Oxford History of Australia, has produced a more critical picture, in which the colonial period is read as a contested terrain in which the British and the Aboriginal Australians were both active agents. The current debate, exemplified in the recent work of James Belich in Replenishing the Earth (2009) and the contributors to the Oxford Handbook of Australian History, is over how far Australian history can be told as a story of the British Empire and how far it should be read as a distinct Pacific narrative.

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