The British Empire and the Discovery of Australia

The European “discovery” of Australia is a strange episode in the history of European expansion. The Dutch had known the western and northern coasts for nearly two centuries before Cook arrived. The French were working along the western coast in the 1770s. The British, in the end, did not so much discover Australia as inherit it from the Dutch, and they established the colony of New South Wales in 1788 not because they wanted to settle the continent but because they had just lost the American colonies and had nowhere else to send their convicts. The Australian story is, in this respect, a story of British imperial improvisation — of an empire that often did not know what it was doing and did it anyway.

Dutch Knowledge and Cook’s Contribution

The first documented European sighting of the Australian coast was by the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon, who in 1606 sailed into the Gulf of Carpentaria aboard the Duyfken. Other Dutch voyages followed. Abel Tasman (1603–1659), the greatest of the Dutch explorers, discovered Tasmania in 1642 and charted much of the northern and western coast in his second voyage of 1644. The Dutch called the continent “New Holland,” and the name remained in use until the early nineteenth century. The Dutch East India Company, however, had no interest in Australia as a destination for settlement: the continent was arid, harbourless along most of its coast, and produced none of the spices or other commodities the VOC traded in.

The decisive European exploration was James Cook’s first voyage of 1768–1771. Cook was no academic: he was a Yorkshire farmer’s son, self-taught in mathematics and astronomy, who had risen through the Royal Navy on the strength of his cartographic skill. The ostensible purpose of the voyage was to observe the 1769 transit of Venus from Tahiti. After completing the observation, Cook opened sealed Admiralty instructions and sailed south-west in search of the supposed southern continent. On 19 April 1770 his men sighted the south-east coast of Australia. Over the following months he charted the eastern coast in extraordinary detail, naming landmarks after his patrons and colleagues, and on 22 August 1770 claimed the territory for Britain at Possession Island. Cook’s second voyage of 1772–1775 was the first to circumnavigate the globe at high southern latitudes, and definitively established that no habitable southern continent existed in the accessible southern latitudes.

The Strategic and Convict Argument for Settlement

The British interest in eastern Australia grew after Cook’s voyages. Joseph Banks (1743–1820), the botanist who had accompanied Cook on his first voyage, was the most influential advocate of Australian settlement. Banks had returned from the voyage with an enormous collection of botanical specimens and a strong personal belief that the eastern coast — Botany Bay in particular — could sustain European settlement. He became a leading figure in British science — president of the Royal Society for more than 40 years, from 1778 to 1820 — and used his influence to push the Australian project.

The argument for settlement was sharpened by the loss of the American colonies in 1783. Britain had been transporting convicts to the American colonies since 1615, and the closing of the American ports created an urgent problem. Plans to send convicts to the Gold Coast, to the Bahamas, and to other African and Caribbean destinations were considered and rejected, in part because of the cost, in part because of the mortality of such settlements. Botany Bay, which was a long way away and was not being used for anything else, gradually became the obvious answer. Banks met with the Home Secretary, Lord Sydney, in 1785 to discuss the project. The Treasury approved the budget in 1786. Captain Arthur Phillip, a naval officer with experience in the Portuguese expedition to the South Atlantic, was given command.

The First Fleet and the Establishment of the Colony

The First Fleet, consisting of eleven ships, sailed from Portsmouth on 13 May 1787 under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip. The fleet carried around 1,420 people: 759 convicts (of whom 192 were women), 247 marines, and their families, together with officials and a small number of free settlers. The voyage took eight months, and the fleet arrived at Botany Bay on 18 January 1788.

Phillip found Botany Bay unsuitable for a settlement — the soil was poor, the water supply inadequate — and moved the fleet a short distance north to Port Jackson, the magnificent harbour that would become Sydney Harbour. The colony of New South Wales was formally established on 26 January 1788. The early years were extraordinarily difficult. Supplies from Britain were irregular; the local environment was unfamiliar; the food situation became critical by 1790. The arrival of the Second Fleet in 1790 — a voyage of notorious brutality, in which perhaps a quarter of the convicts died — relieved the immediate crisis. The Third Fleet of 1791 and the gradual growth of the colonial agriculture brought a more durable stability. By 1792 the colony was producing enough food to feed itself.

The Exploration of the Interior

The exploration of the Australian interior was one of the great heroic narratives of nineteenth-century British exploration. The first crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 by Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson, and William Charles Wentworth opened the rich pastoral lands of the western plains to settlement. The three great crossings of the continent in the 1860s and 1870s — Burke and Wills in 1860–1861, John Forrest in 1874, and Ernest Giles in 1875 — produced more comprehensive maps, but at a cost: Burke, Wills, and two of their companions died of starvation on the return from their south-to-north crossing, and only the survival of John King spared the expedition complete disaster.

The interior was mapped, in practice, by sheep and cattle. The pastoral industry was the principal driver of European expansion beyond the coastal strip, and the sheep runs of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia pushed steadily into the interior over the second half of the nineteenth century. The consequence for the Aboriginal inhabitants was catastrophic. The Aboriginal population of Australia, which at the time of European settlement was perhaps 750,000, declined by an estimated 90 percent over the following century, in large part through violence, dispossession, and disease. As the historian Henry Reynolds has documented, the European conquest of Australia was, in its consequences for the indigenous population, one of the most devastating in the history of European expansion.

The Convict System and Its Legacy

The convict system was the basis of the early Australian colonies. Some 165,000 convicts were transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868, of whom the great majority went to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). Western Australia received convicts between 1850 and 1868. The system was modelled on the American practice of convict transportation, which had operated from the early seventeenth century until the American Revolution, and it was intended both as a punishment and as a solution to the colony’s labour shortage.

The system left an enduring mark on Australian society. The convicts were assigned to settlers or to public works, and many of them were absorbed into the colonial population on the expiration of their sentences. The descendant populations of convicts, concentrated in Tasmania, New South Wales, and Western Australia, account for a substantial proportion of the modern Australian population. The “convict stain” — the sense that one’s ancestors were transported criminals — was a feature of nineteenth-century Australian social life that produced, paradoxically, both a working-class culture of grievance and a strong suspicion of authority.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of Australian settlement was for most of the twentieth century written from the perspective of the European settlers, with the Aboriginal experience treated as a marginal or tragic subplot. The work of Henry Reynolds, especially The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), began the systematic integration of Aboriginal history into the main narrative. The more recent scholarship, of which Bain Attwood’s The Making of the Aborigines (1989) and Ann McGrath’s Born in the Cattle (1987) are representative, has insisted that the European settlement of Australia cannot be understood without the Aboriginal response to it. The historiography of convict transportation — the work of A. G. L. Shaw, in particular — has also been substantially revised, away from a picture of unrelieved brutality and toward a more nuanced account in which the convicts were active agents in the making of Australian society. The frontier history of the Australian interior, as told by Reynolds and by the contributors to A Documentary History of the Australian Frontier (in the volumes edited by Bain Attwood and others), is now the most politically charged area of the field.

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