Overview
Smallest continent and sixth largest country (in area) on
Earth, lying between the Pacific and Indian oceans.
Area: 2,969,978 sq mi (7,692,208 sq km). Population (2005
est.): 20,345,000. Capital: Canberra. Most Australians are
descendants of Europeans. The largest nonwhite minority is the
Australian Aborigine population. The Asian portion of the
population has grown as a result of relaxed immigration policy.
Language: English (official). Religions: Christianity (mostly
Protestant; also Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, other
Christians), Buddhism, Islam. Currency: Australian dollar.
Australia has three major physiographic regions. More than half
of its land area is on the Western Australian plateau, which
includes the outcrops of Arnhem Land and the Kimberleys in the
northwest and the Macdonnell Ranges in the east. A second
region, the Interior Lowlands, lies east of the plateau. The
Eastern Uplands, which include the Great Dividing Range, are a
series of high ridges, plateaus, and basins. The country’s
highest point is Mount Kosciusko in the Australian Alps, and the
lowest is Lake Eyre. Major rivers include the Murray-Darling
system, the Flinders and Swan rivers, and Cooper Creek. There
are many islands and reefs along the coast, including the Great
Barrier Reef, Melville Island, Kangaroo Island, and Tasmania.
Australia is rich in mineral resources, including coal,
petroleum, and uranium. A vast diamond deposit was found in
Western Australia in 1979. The country’s economy is basically
free enterprise; its largest components include finance,
manufacturing, and trade. Formally a constitutional monarchy,
its chief of state is the British monarch, represented by the
governor-general. In reality it is a parliamentary state with
two legislative houses; its head of government is the prime
minister. Australia has long been inhabited by Aborigines, who
began arriving at least 50,000 years ago. Estimates of the
population at the time of European settlement in 1788 range from
300,000 to 1,000,000. Widespread European knowledge of Australia
began with 17th-century explorations. The Dutch landed in 1616
and the British in 1688, but the first large-scale expedition
was that of James Cook in 1770, which established Britain’s
claim to Australia. The first British settlement, at Port
Jackson (1788), consisted mainly of convicts and seamen;
convicts were to make up a large proportion of the incoming
settlers. By 1859 the colonial nuclei of all Australia’s states
had been formed, but with devastating effects on the indigenous
peoples, whose populations declined sharply with the
introduction of European diseases. Britain granted its colonies
limited self-government in the mid-19th century, and an act
federating the colonies into a commonwealth went into effect in
1901. Australia fought alongside the British in World War I,
notably at Gallipoli, and again in World War II, preventing
Australia’s occupation by the Japanese. It joined the U.S. in
the Korean and Vietnam wars. Since the 1960s the government has
sought to deal more fairly with the Aborigines, and a loosening
of immigration restrictions has led to a more heterogeneous
population. Constitutional links allowing British interference
in government were formally abolished in 1968, and Australia has
assumed a major role in Asian and Pacific affairs. During the
1990s there were several debates about giving up its British
ties and becoming a republic.
Profile
Official name Commonwealth of Australia
Form of government federal parliamentary state (formally a
constitutional monarchy) with two legislative houses (Senate
[76]; House of Representatives [150])
Chief of state British Monarch represented by Governor-General
Head of government Prime Minister
Capital Canberra
Official language English
Official religion none
Monetary unit Australian dollar ($A)
Population estimate (2008) 21,338,000
Total area (sq mi) 2,969,978
Total area (sq km) 7,692,208
Main
the smallest continent and one of the largest countries on
Earth, lying between the Pacific and Indian oceans in the
Southern Hemisphere. Australia’s capital is Canberra, located in
the southeast between the larger and more important economic and
cultural centres of Sydney and Melbourne.
The Australian mainland extends from west to east for nearly
2,500 miles (4,000 km) and from Cape York Peninsula in the
northeast to Wilsons Promontory in the southeast for nearly
2,000 miles (3,200 km). To the south, Australian jurisdiction
extends a further 310 miles (500 km) to the southern extremity
of the island of Tasmania, and in the north it extends to the
southern shores of Papua New Guinea. Australia is separated from
Indonesia to the northwest by the Timor and Arafura seas, from
Papua New Guinea to the northeast by the Coral Sea and the
Torres Strait, from the Coral Sea Islands Territory by the Great
Barrier Reef, from New Zealand to the southeast by the Tasman
Sea, and from Antarctica in the far south by the Indian Ocean.
Australia has been called “the Oldest Continent,” “the Last
of Lands,” and “the Last Frontier.” These descriptions typify
the world’s fascination with Australia, but they are somewhat
unsatisfactory. In simple physical terms the age of much of the
continent is certainly impressive—most of the rocks providing
the foundation of Australian landforms were formed during
Precambrian and Paleozoic time (some 3.8 billion to 250 million
years ago)—but the ages of the cores of all the continents are
approximately the same. On the other hand, whereas the landscape
history of extensive areas in Europe and North America has been
profoundly influenced by events and processes that occurred
since late in the last Ice Age—roughly the past 25,000 years—in
Australia scientists use a more extensive timescale that takes
into account the great antiquity of the continent’s landscape.
Australia is the last of lands only in the sense that it was
the last continent, apart from Antarctica, to be explored by
Europeans. At least 60,000 years before European explorers
sailed into the South Pacific, the first Aboriginal explorers
had arrived from Asia, and by 20,000 years ago they had spread
throughout the mainland and its chief island outlier, Tasmania.
When Captain Arthur Phillip of the British Royal Navy landed
with the First Fleet at Botany Bay in 1788, there may have been
between 250,000 and 500,000 Aboriginals, though some estimates
are much higher. Largely nomadic hunters and gatherers, the
Aboriginals had already transformed the primeval landscape,
principally by the use of fire, and, contrary to common European
perceptions, they had established robust, semipermanent
settlements in well-favoured localities.
The American-style concept of a national “frontier” moving
outward along a line of settlement is also inappropriate. There
was, rather, a series of comparatively independent expansions
from the margins of the various colonies, which were not joined
in an independent federated union until 1901. Frontier metaphors
were long employed to suggest the existence of yet another
extension of Europe and especially of an outpost of Anglo-Celtic
culture in the distant “antipodes.”
The most striking characteristics of the vast country are its
global isolation, its low relief, and the aridity of much of its
surface. If, like the English novelist D.H. Lawrence, visitors
from the Northern Hemisphere are at first overwhelmed by “the
vast, uninhabited land and by the grey charred bush…so
phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall, pale trees and many
dead trees, like corpses,” they should remember that to
Australians the bush—that sparsely populated Inland or Outback
beyond the Great Dividing Range of mountains running along the
Pacific coast and separating it from the cities in the east—is
familiar and evokes nostalgia. It still retains some of the
mystical quality it had for the first explorers searching for
inland seas and great rivers, and it remains a symbol of
Australia’s strength and independence; the Outback poem by A.B.
(“Banjo”) Paterson, Waltzing Matilda, is the unofficial national
anthem of Australia known the world over.
Australia’s isolation from other continents explains much of
the singularity of its plant and animal life. Its unique flora
and fauna include hundreds of kinds of eucalyptus trees and the
only egg-laying mammals on Earth, the platypus and echidna.
Other plants and animals associated with Australia are various
acacias (Acacia pycnantha [golden wattle] is the national
flower) and dingoes, kangaroos, koalas, and kookaburras. The
Great Barrier Reef, off the east coast of Queensland, is the
greatest mass of coral in the world and one of the world’s
foremost tourist attractions. The country’s low relief results
from the long and extensive erosive action of the forces of
wind, rain, and the heat of the sun during the great periods of
geologic time when the continental mass was elevated well above
sea level.
Isolation is also a pronounced characteristic of much of the
social landscape beyond the large coastal cities. But an equally
significant feature of modern Australian society is the
representation of a broad spectrum of cultures drawn from many
lands, a development stemming from immigration that is
transforming the strong Anglo-Celtic orientation of Australian
culture. Assimilation, of course, is seldom a quick and easy
process, and minority rights, multiculturalism, and race-related
issues have played a large part in contemporary Australian
politics. In the late 1990s these issues sparked a conservative
backlash.
Unlike Britain, Australia has a federal form of government,
with a central government and six constituent states (New South
Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia,
and Tasmania). Each state has its own government, which
exercises a limited degree of sovereignty. There are also two
internal territories: Northern Territory, established as a
self-governing territory in 1978, and the Australian Capital
Territory (including the city of Canberra), which attained
self-governing status in 1988. Major issues in resource
development and environmental management have ignited
controversies over the protection of states’ rights and the
federal government’s gradual accumulation of power. The federal
authorities also govern the external territories of Norfolk
Island, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Christmas Island, Ashmore
and Cartier islands, the Coral Sea Islands, and Heard and
McDonald islands and claim the Australian Antarctic Territory,
an area larger than Australia itself. Papua New Guinea, formerly
an Australian external territory, gained its independence in
1975.
Historically part of the British Empire and now a member of
the Commonwealth, Australia is a relatively prosperous
independent country. Australians are in many respects fortunate
in that they do not share their continent—which is only a little
smaller than the United States—with any other country. Extremely
remote from their traditional allies and trading partners—it is
some 12,000 miles (19,000 km) from Australia to Great Britain
via the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal and about 7,000 miles
(11,000 km) across the Pacific Ocean to the west coast of the
United States—Australians have become more interested in the
proximity of huge potential markets in Asia and in the highly
competitive industrialized economies of Japan, South Korea, and
Taiwan. Australia, the continent and the country, may have been
quite isolated at the beginning of the 20th century, but it
entered the 21st century a culturally diverse land brimming with
confidence, an attitude encouraged by the worldwide fascination
with the land “Down Under” and demonstrated when Sydney hosted
the 2000 Summer Olympic Games.
Geologic history
The earliest known manifestations of the geologic record
of the Australian continent are 4.4-billion-year-old detrital
grains of zircon in metasedimentary rocks that were deposited
from 3.7 to 3.3 billion years ago. Based on this and other
findings, the Precambrian rocks in Australia have been
determined to range in age from about 3.7 billion to 540 million
years (i.e., to the end of Precambrian time). They are succeeded
by rocks of the Paleozoic Era, which extended to about 250
million years ago; of the Mesozoic Era, which lasted until about
65 million years ago; and of the Cenozoic Era, the past 65
million years.
For millions of years Australia was part of the
supercontinent of Pangaea and subsequently its southern segment,
Gondwanaland (or Gondwana). Its separate existence was finally
assured by the severing of the last connection between Tasmania
and Antarctica, but it has been drifting toward the Southeast
Asian landmass. As a continent, Australia thus encompasses two
extremes: on the one hand, it contains the oldest known earth
material while, on the other, it has stood as a free continent
only since about 35 million years ago and is in the process—in
terms of geologic time—of merging with Asia, so that its life
span as a continent will be of relatively short duration. (See
also geochronology: Geologic history of the Earth.)
General considerations
Tectonic framework
The map of the structural features of Australia and the
surrounding region shows the distribution of the main tectonic
units. The primary distinction is between the plates of oceanic
lithosphere, generated within the past 160 million years by
seafloor spreading at the oceanic ridges, and the continental
lithosphere, accumulated over the past 4 billion years. (The
lithosphere is the outer rock shell of the Earth that consists
of the crust and the uppermost portion of the underlying mantle;
see plate tectonics.) The largest area of oldest rocks is the
Western Shield, comprising the western half of the continent,
which has been eroded to a low relief. The youngest rocks are
found in the growing fold belt of the Banda arcs and in New
Guinea at the boundary between the Indian-Australian plate and
the Eurasian and Pacific plates. The modern fold belts are
separated from Australia by a “moat” (the Timor Trough) and a
wide shelf (the Timor and Arafura seas). The northern half of
the Australian margin is completed by the North West Shelf and
the Exmouth Plateau on the west and by the Great Barrier Reef
and the Queensland Plateau on the east.
Precambrian rocks occupy three tectonic environments. The
first is in shields, such as the Yilgarn and Pilbara blocks of
the Western Shield, enclosed by later orogenic (mountain) belts.
The second is as the basement to a younger cover of Phanerozoic
sediment (deposited during the past 540 million years); for
example, all the sedimentary basins west of the Tasman Line are
underlain by Precambrian basement. The third is as relicts in
younger orogenic belts, as in the Georgetown Inlier of northern
Queensland and in the western half of Tasmania. Rocks of
Paleozoic age occur either in flat-lying sedimentary basins,
such as the Canning Basin, or within belts, such as the
east–west-trending Amadeus Transverse Zone and north-trending
Tasman Fold Belt.
Mesozoic and Cenozoic rocks occur in widely distributed
(though poorly exposed) basins onshore (the Great Artesian Basin
in the eastern centre). Offshore they occur on the western,
southern, and eastern margins, including beneath Bass Strait,
which separates Australia from Tasmania, and to the north in the
submerged ground between the Banda arcs/New Guinea and the
mainland.
Chronological summary
The geologic development may be summarized as follows.
Archean rocks (those more than 2.5 billion years old) crop out
within the two-thirds of Australia that lies west of the Tasman
Line. Individual blocks of Archean rocks became embedded in
Proterozoic fold belts (those from about 2.5 billion to 540
million years old) to form a mosaic. The lines of weakness
within the mosaic later guided stresses that pulled the blocks
apart or pushed them together. The Proterozoic fold belts that
bounded the western and southern sides of the Archean Yilgarn
block, for example, became the sites of the continental margin
during seafloor spreading in the Mesozoic, and the fold belts of
the Amadeus Transverse Zone in central Australia guided the
overthrusting of blocks in the north over those in the south
during the late Paleozoic.
Proterozoic Australia was part of the supercontinent of
Gondwanaland, comprising India and the other southern
continents, from about 750 million years ago. At the beginning
of the Paleozoic, some 540 million years ago, pieces began to
flake off the Australian portion of Gondwanaland when ocean
basins opened around its periphery. Off the northwest, an
ancient forebear of the Indian Ocean, called the Tethys,
transferred continental terranes (fault-bounded fragments of the
crust) from Gondwanaland to Asia; later generations of this
ocean rifted material northward, including the biggest and
latest terrane of India. Off the east, an ancient Pacific Ocean
opened and closed in the first of a series of back-arc basins or
marginal seas that persists to the present.
The structure of Australia was determined by the following:
the processes that welded the Archean blocks and Proterozoic
fold belts into a mosaic; the lithospheric plate processes that
acted on this mosaic along lines of weakness to form ocean
basins by spreading along the western and southern margins; and
the processes that accompanied the convergence of the Pacific
Plate, including alternating back-arc spreading and subduction
that accreted the eastern third of Australia during the
Phanerozoic. Australia ultimately became isolated from its
Gondwanaland neighbours India and Antarctica by seafloor
spreading. It was isolated from Lord Howe Rise/New Zealand by
back-arc spreading that began in the Mesozoic. Today, Australia
is drifting northward from Antarctica as a result of seafloor
spreading in the southeast Indian Ocean and, consequently, is
colliding with the westward-moving Pacific Plate to form the
strike-slip ranges of New Guinea and the S-shaped fold of the
Banda arcs.
Stratigraphy and structure
The Precambrian
This major period of geologic time can be subdivided into
the older Archean and the younger Proterozoic eons, the time
boundary between them being some 2.5 billion years ago. In
Australia the main outcrop of the Archean and older Proterozoic
rocks is in the Yilgarn and Pilbara blocks of the southwest and
northwest, respectively.
In the Yilgarn block the oldest known rocks are sialic crust
(i.e., composed of rocks rich in silica and alumina) that
developed in the Narryer Gneiss Complex between 4.3 and 3.7
billion years ago. The older end of this time span is provided
by detrital zircon grains found in younger metasedimentary rock
(metamorphosed sedimentary rock) some 3.3 to 3.7 billion years
old: as determined by ion microprobe analysis, these grains are
4.2 to 4.3 billion years old. A zircon grain imbedded in
3.75-billion-year-old metamorphosed sediment from Jack Hills in
Western Australia was found to be even older, 4.4 billion years,
and it is thus the oldest dated material on Earth. The younger
end of 3.7 billion years ago is provided by samarium-neodymium
(Sm-Nd) isotopic analyses of anorthosite and gabbro and more
extensive granitic rocks. Subsequent to such igneous rocks being
formed, siliceous sedimentary rocks were deposited during an
interval of subdued relief and extensive sheets of vein quartz
pebbles were concentrated on the surface.
The oldest rocks in the Pilbara block to the north make up a
granite-greenstone terrane and so differ distinctly from those
of the Yilgarn block. They are mostly 3.3 to 3.5 billion years
old and comprise basic (alkaline) volcanics associated with
horizontal tabular igneous bodies known as sills and layered
intrusions, as well as acid volcanics associated with granitic
plutons (bodies of deep-seated intrusive igneous rock) and
sheets. The association of basic and acid rocks suggests the
possibility that older sialic crust melted. Chert within basalt
3.5 billion years old at the North Pole mining centre contains
stromatolites (layered deposits formed by the growth of
cyanobacteria) and filamentous colonial microfossils that are
among the oldest known sets of fossils on Earth. Between 3.05
and 2.9 billion years ago, thick acid and basic volcanics and
sedimentary rocks were intruded by large granite plutons and
deformed and metamorphosed to establish the internal form of the
Pilbara block. Between 2.8 and 2.7 billion years ago, the
beveled surface of the Pilbara block was blanketed by basaltic
lava. Finally, between 2.55 to 2.4 billion years ago,
banded-iron formation, dolomite, shale, and minor acid-volcanic
rocks were intruded by sills of porphyry. Iron ores of hematite
and goethite have been formed by supergene enrichment of
banded-iron formation.
The Yilgarn block became an internally coherent mass only
after greenstone and associated granitic terrane had developed
from 3.0 to 2.5 billion years ago, and it was then intruded by a
swarm of vertical tabular bodies called dikes composed of
dolerite. Mafic and ultramafic rocks (those composed primarily
of ferromagnesian—dark-coloured—minerals) 2.7 billion years old
within the granite-greenstone terrane are the chief host of the
epigenetic gold deposits of Western Australia. Slightly older
(2.8 billion years) volcanic ultramafic rocks contain deposits
of nickel sulfide.
The Pilbara and Yilgarn blocks were joined between 2.0 to 1.8
billion years ago along a belt of deformed continental-margin
deposits. Later in the Proterozoic, between 1.6 billion and 650
million years ago, mountain belts resulting from the collision
of continental terranes were repeatedly worn down and overlain
by sedimentary rocks. This view contrasts with another
interpretation that regards most of the western part of
Australia as intact since Archean times and considers that most
later orogenic activity was ensialic.
The development of the late Proterozoic Adelaidean province,
the other Precambrian succession to be described here, was
within a sialic basement. The Adelaidean succession crops out in
the region of South Australia between Adelaide and the Flinders
Ranges and contains an almost complete sedimentary record of the
late Proterozoic. The early Adelaidean Callanna and Burra groups
are confined to troughs faulted down into basement. A sheet of
sedimentary deposits at the base of the Callanna group was cut
by faults into rift valleys that filled with basic volcanic
rocks and evaporitic sediment and carbonate rock. The succeeding
Burra group comprises fluvial sediment followed by shallow
marine carbonate.
The late Adelaidean Umberatana and Wilpena groups
unconformably succeed older rocks. The Umberatana group contains
a rich record of two glaciations: the older Sturtian glaciation
is indicated by glaciomarine diamictites deposited on a shallow
shelf and at the bottom of newly rifted troughs; the younger
Marinoan glaciation is represented by diamictites deposited on
the basin floor and sandstone on the shelf. The Wilpena group
comprises extensive sheets of interbedded sandstone, siltstone,
and shale deposited during two marine transgressions, during the
second of which deep canyons were cut and filled. The uppermost
part of the Wilpena group, in the latest Proterozoic, contains
the celebrated Ediacara assemblage of the oldest well-known
animal fossils.
The Precambrian rocks of Australia provide a rich source of
economically important minerals, such as the above-mentioned
major iron ore deposits of the Pilbara block and the gold and
nickel deposits of the Yilgarn block. Other minerals include
diamonds from the Argyle diatreme (vertical volcanic conduit
filled with breccia) in northern Western Australia. Lead and
zinc are found at Broken Hill in western New South Wales, and
lead, zinc, and copper occur at Mount Isa in northwestern
Queensland and at Olympic Dam in South Australia.
The Paleozoic Era
Phanerozoic Australia is divided at the Tasman Line into two
parts. These are a western terrane of exposed Precambrian blocks
and fold belts overlain by thin Phanerozoic basins and an
eastern terrane of exposed Phanerozoic fold belts and basins.
Principal regimes
During Phanerozoic times, Australia has been marked by three
regimes: Uluru (540 to 320 million years ago), Innamincka (320
to 97 million years ago), and Potoroo (the past 97 million
years). Each regime, a complex of uniform plate-tectonic and
paleoclimatic events at a similar or slowly changing latitude,
generated a depositional sequence of distinct facies separated
by gaps in deposition.
The Paleozoic Era (about 540 to 250 million years ago) opened
in Australia with the breakup of the Precambrian continent along
the Tasman Line and the initial generation of the floor of the
Paleo Pacific Ocean by seafloor spreading. In the Adelaide area,
wedges of deepwater quartzose sediment advanced over the newly
formed seafloor. On the northwestern side of Australia,
widespread basalt erupted over the Precambrian platform,
possibly during the initial generation of the Paleo Tethyan Sea,
and was succeeded by deposition of shallow marine limestone with
abundant fossil trilobites and archeocyathids. The initial Paleo
Pacific marginal seafloor was subducted—i.e., forced under the
edge of a converging plate into the hot mantle—at the end of the
Cambrian (490 million years ago); concomitant deformation and
granitic intrusion of the overlying deepwater sediments and
those of the adjacent Adelaidean region formed the Delamerian
fold belt. A similar cycle of marginal sea generation and
subsequent Mariana-type subduction (within oceanic lithosphere)
accreted a second fold belt to eastern Australia during the
Ordovician Period (488 to 444 million years ago). This was
followed by an interval of block faulting and widespread
granitic intrusion in eastern Australia that produced a
landscape similar to the present Basin and Range Province of the
western United States; by the late Devonian Period (370 million
years ago) the first of a series of magmatic orogenic arcs had
become established by Chilean-type subduction (of oceanic
lithosphere beneath continental lithosphere) on the eastern
margin, and a thick succession of mainly sandstone and shale
accumulated in the moatlike foreland basin between the mountain
belt and the craton—the flat and relatively stable interior
portion of the continent. At the same time, local uplifts in
central Australia shed gravels into the Amadeus Basin. By the
mid-Carboniferous Period (320 million years ago), central
Australia was deformed by folding and thrusting along east-west
axes, and eastern Australia was deformed by folding along
north-south axes and a subsequent granitoid intrusion that
consolidated the Lachlan and Thomson fold belts in an epoch of
deformation that concluded the Uluru regime.
Australia had moved to higher latitudes so that the alpine
uplands that followed the deformation were covered by the
nucleus of a continental ice sheet. Only the highest peaks stood
prominently above the surface of the ice in the form of
nunataks, and the little sediment available was carried off the
continent in ice streams. The melting of the ice sheet early in
the Permian Period (i.e., about 290 million years ago) released
the sediment into the newly subsiding basins of the Innamincka
regime. Much of interior Australia was covered by broad basins.
The eastern margin between the New England Fold Belt and the
craton became a second foreland basin in which the rich seams of
black coal in the Bowen Basin of Queensland and the Sydney Basin
of New South Wales were deposited during the final 10 million
years of the Paleozoic Era. Other economic resources in
Paleozoic rocks are the reef gold in Victoria that triggered the
first mining boom, lead and zinc at Cobar and Woodlawn in New
South Wales, and natural gas in Permian sandstone in the Cooper
Basin of South Australia.
Terranes of the Tasman Fold Belt
The various parts of the Tasman Fold Belt are separated from
each other by faults or have boundaries covered by sediment.
Geologists have reviewed the Paleozoic development of the Tasman
Fold Belt in light of the observation that the component
terranes of many other circum-Pacific fold belts are displaced
to a greater or lesser extent from their place of origin. In the
Tasman Fold Belt, uncertainty remains about the exact
paleotectonic and paleogeographic settings and relationships of
the identified terranes and the craton and between the terranes
themselves during most of Paleozoic time. Much effort is being
applied to paleomagnetic determinations of elevation levels at
the time and to studies of the provenance and facies of
sedimentary successions within the terranes in an attempt to
ascertain their original locations.
The Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras
The coal measures of the Permian gave way to barren red beds
in the early part of the Triassic Period (about 250 to 200
million years ago). By 230 million years ago the foreland basin
of eastern Australia had been overthrusted by the mountain belt,
and a second epoch of black-coal formation opened in eastern
Australia (southeastern Queensland and Tasmania) and in South
Australia (Leigh Creek). Another foreland basin became
established behind the magmatic arc along the eastern margin,
and a set of basins, including the Great Artesian Basin,
subsided over the east-central part of Australia. Thick sand was
deposited over the area of rifting that became the western and
northwestern margins of Australia as Gondwanaland was breaking
up and seafloor spreading was beginning in the northwest during
the Late Jurassic (about 160 to 145 million years ago) and in
the west during the Early Cretaceous (about 145 to 100 million
years ago). Subsequent burial of the sand by sediment of late
Mesozoic and Cenozoic age (65 million years old or younger)
generated the giant natural gas field at Rankin on the North
West Shelf. Rifting between Australia and Antarctica started in
the Late Jurassic and culminated with the separation of the
continents and the beginning of (very slow) seafloor spreading
in the Late Cretaceous (about 100 to 65 million years ago). The
other momentous event at this time took place in eastern
Australia. The shallow sea that had covered nearly half of
Australia during the Early Cretaceous retreated when the
long-enduring Chilean-type subduction off eastern Australia was
replaced by Mariana-type subduction and back-arc spreading in
the Southwest Pacific Ocean that carried New Zealand and the
submarine Lord Howe Rise away from Australia.
All these events marked the change from the Innamincka Regime
to the Potoroo Regime and the inception of modern Australia,
with its oceanic margins on all sides and uplands on the eastern
margin dividing the continental drainage into short coastal
rivers to the east and the long ancestral Murray and Darling
rivers to the southwest. Gold-bearing sand in rivers within the
highlands was covered from time to time during the Cenozoic by
flows of basalt lava. Other river sands deposited in the
Paleocene and Eocene epochs (65 to 34 million years ago) at the
foot of the ancestral Eastern Highlands of Victoria were later
shaped into broad folds to become the reservoirs of the giant
oil and gas fields in the offshore Gippsland Basin. Australia
continued moving away from Antarctica owing to seafloor
spreading of the southeast Indian Ocean. By the beginning of the
Oligocene Epoch (about 34 million years ago) the ocean was wide
enough to allow the unimpeded flow of the Circum-Antarctic
Current, which led to the glaciation of Antarctica by insulating
it from the rest of the world ocean.
Australia meanwhile had drifted to lower latitudes, and the
northern half of the Australian margin, including the southern
part of New Guinea, became covered in warm-water carbonate
sediment, though it was not until sometime in the Quaternary
Period (the past 2.6 million years) that the Great Barrier Reef
off the Queensland coast began to grow. In its northern progress
over the Pacific Plate since about 25 million years ago, the
leading edge of Australia picked up slivers of the continental
and oceanic terranes that now form the northern half of New
Guinea. Within the past few million years, Australia has
collided in Timor with the Banda arcs. As Australia continues to
move northward, it will ultimately join Eurasia by colliding
with continental Southeast Asia, as did India, its former
neighbour in Gondwanaland, some 50 million years ago.
The Quaternary Period
The Pleistocene Epoch occupies most of the Quaternary
Period, with the exception of the past 11,700 years (i.e., the
Holocene Epoch). The northern leading edges of the continental
plate in New Guinea and Timor rise to peaks of two miles (three
kilometres) or more and are separated from mainland Australia by
the flooded continental area of the Arafura and Timor seas. On
the mainland, the Central-Eastern Lowlands extend from the Gulf
of Carpentaria through Lake Eyre, some 40 to 50 feet (12 to 15
metres) below sea level, to the Spencer and St. Vincent gulfs
near Adelaide. The Lowlands are bounded on the west by the Great
Western Plateau—great in extent but not height: the highest
point (in the Pilbara) is 4,105 feet (1,251 metres)—and on the
east by the Eastern Highlands, whose highest point (at Mount
Kosciuszko) is 7,310 feet (2,228 metres). Inside a coastal
region in the north, east, and southwest that is about 620 miles
(1,000 km) wide, the arid interior lacks coherent drainage, and
much of it consists of dune fields and sand plains covered by
sparse vegetation in what is now the hottest and (after
Antarctica) the driest continent. In the southeast, Tasmania
represents the southernmost part of the Eastern Highlands beyond
the flooded Bass Strait.
The Holocene is the latest of several interglacial phases
within the Quaternary ice age. During the peak of the latest
glacial phase, 18,000 years ago, the global sea level was some
300 feet (90 metres) lower than it is today, and New Guinea and
Tasmania were joined by dry land to the mainland. The arid zone
was even wider than it is at present: summers were dry, hot, and
windy; sand was moved about in dunes and sheets; and dust was
blown out to sea. Ice built up in Tasmania and the Mount
Kosciuszko region. Giant forebears of the Holocene marsupial
animals became extinct, but humans survived as they had for the
previous 20,000 years.
Economic resources
Major economic resources generated during the Mesozoic and
Cenozoic include the oil and natural gas of the North West Shelf
and offshore Gippsland; the brown coal of onshore Gippsland; the
oil shale of Queensland; the black coal of Queensland, Tasmania,
and South Australia; the bauxite of northern Australia; and,
particularly valuable in arid Australia, extensive groundwater
reservoirs, notably those of the Great Artesian Basin.
The modern geologic framework
The surface of Australia reflects the longevity of its
landforms. The Eastern Highlands, strictly speaking a low
plateau, rose 90 million years ago, probably as a result of the
breakup of Lord Howe Rise/New Zealand. Parts of the Great
Western Plateau rose even earlier in the Paleozoic. Individual
monoliths on the plateau, such as those found in the Olgas and
Uluru/Ayers Rock (Aboriginal name: Uluru), date from at least 60
million years ago. As a result of low exposure and slow erosion,
the bedrock of the interior is deeply weathered with crusts of
ironstone and silica that originated earlier in the Cenozoic
when conditions differed from those of today. In areas with
sufficient groundwater, the hard conditions imposed by soil and
climate have been turned to advantage in the production of fine
wool. The riverine plains of southeastern Australia, inherited
from former sea and lake basins, have been made fertile by
carefully managed irrigation. The only young landscapes are in
the Holocene volcanic areas of Victoria and northern Queensland.
Pangaean supercycle
The Phanerozoic development of Australia (and the rest of
the Earth) was overshadowed by the changing configuration of the
continents. The enormous continental blocks amalgamated into a
supercontinent—the so-called Proto-Pangaea—by the end of the
Precambrian and then split apart in the early Paleozoic. The
landmasses reassembled to form Pangaea between the late
Carboniferous (about 315 million years ago) and the Late
Jurassic (150 million years ago), after which they began (and
have continued) to disperse again. Attending the clustering of
the continents in Pangaea were the tectonic effect of reduced
turnover of mantle material and the environmental effects of low
global sea level, a low concentration of atmospheric carbon
dioxide, and, through the correspondingly weak greenhouse
effect, low retention of heat from the Sun. As a result, Pangaea
was prone to glaciation, exemplified by the global glaciations
near the end of the Proterozoic (in Australia, the Marinoan
glaciation) and Permian (the deposits at the onset of the
Innamincka Regime).
The reverse effects are known to occur during the alternate
configuration of dispersed continents: the plate-tectonic
“motor” turns faster, new rift oceans drive the continental
fragments apart, sea level is high and the continents flooded,
and a high concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide vented
from the mantle retains radiant heat from the Sun. The result is
that the continents are prone to be covered by the sea
(Australia was flooded during the Cambrian and Ordovician
between Proto-Pangaea and Pangaea, and after Pangaea in the
Cretaceous) and tend to be warm (even though Australia was
located at high latitudes in the Mesozoic, there is no evidence
of permanent ice having existed on the continent at that time).
It is the Pangaea factor that explains the association of
tectonic and environmental effects that characterize the
tectonic-climatic regimes of Phanerozoic Australia. Accordingly,
the Uluru sequence in the interior is dominated by warm marine
carbonate deposits, the Innamincka sequence by nonmarine
(including glacial) deposits, and the Potoroo sequence by marine
deposits confined almost wholly to the margins.
John J. Veevers
Land
Australia is both the flattest continent and, except for
Antarctica, the driest. Seen from the air, its vast plains,
sometimes the colour of dried blood, more often tawny like a
lion’s skin, may seem to be one huge desert. One can fly the
roughly 2,000 miles (3,200 km) to Sydney from Darwin in the
north or to Sydney from Perth in the west without seeing a town
or anything but the most scattered and minute signs of human
habitation for vast stretches. A good deal of the central
depression and western plateau is indeed desert. Yet appearances
can be deceptive. The red and black soil plains of Queensland
and New South Wales have long supported the world’s greatest
wool industry, and some of the most arid and forbidding areas of
Australia conceal great mineral wealth.
Moreover, the coastal rim is, almost everywhere, exempted
from the prevailing flatness and aridity. In particular the east
coast, where European settlement began and where the majority of
Australians now live, is topographically quite diverse and is
comparatively well watered and fertile.
Inland from the coast runs a chain of highlands, known as the
Great Dividing Range, from Cape York in northern Queensland to
the southern seaboard of Tasmania. From the coast this range,
which may be anything from 20 miles to 200 miles (30 to 300 km)
distant, often appears as a bold range of mountains, though few
of its peaks exceed 5,000 feet (1,500 metres). In fact, it is
more like the escarpment of a giant plateau, formed of gently
rolling hills, which slopes imperceptibly down to the western
plains. There are similar, though smaller, stretches of hilly,
well-watered land all around the rim of the continent except on
the south coast where the Nullarbor Plain stretches to the sea,
but everywhere precipitation diminishes rapidly as one
penetrates farther from the coast.
In this huge continent there are wide variations in landforms
and climate. The thickly wooded ranges of the Great Divide have
little in common with the treeless, sun-baked plains of the
Inland. There is a vast difference between the red rocks and
monumental hills of central Australia and the tropical
rainforests and sugar plantations of northern Queensland. To
many visitors, Australia may not seem a pretty country, but it
has a unique and haunting beauty that exerts a powerful
fascination on those who get to know it.
The Australian Heritage Commission Act of 1975 established a
federal agency to develop interest in a National Estate of
listed places. Such places would be selected mainly on the basis
of aesthetic, historical, scientific, or social significance.
The process was not intended to guarantee any area or site
against development, but the growing register was, nevertheless,
made to serve that purpose on occasion. The UNESCO list of World
Heritage sites carries more political and legal weight, and
areas so classified have been protected by the federal
governments in the face of furious opposition from their state
partners. More than a dozen Australian landmarks, representing
every state and territory, have been added to the list,
including the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu National Park, Shark
Bay, Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park (which contains the great
red mass of Uluru/Ayers Rock, a sacred site of the Aboriginals),
rainforest reserves in central-eastern Australia, the Tasmanian
Wilderness, and fossil mammal sites at Riversleigh and
Naracoorte. Territorial disputes have arisen over proposals for
the Great Barrier Reef and natural rainforest enclaves in
Queensland and Tasmania.
Relief and drainage
Overall characteristics
Australia is a land of vast plains. Only 6 percent of the
island continent is above 2,000 feet (600 metres) in elevation.
Its highest peak, Mount Kosciuszko, rises to only 7,310 feet
(2,228 metres). This situation stems in part from the long
periods of geologic time during which Australia has been subject
to weathering and erosion and in part from Australia’s position
at the edge of a zone of significant and geologically recent
earth movement.
Patterns of faulting and folding in large measure control the
distribution and attitude of rocks and thus play a significant
part in determining the shape of the land surface. But the
nature and intensity of the processes at work at and near the
land surface also give rise to characteristic assemblages of
forms. Australia is an arid continent; fully one-third of its
area is occupied by desert, another third is steppe or
semidesert, and only in the north, east, southeast, and
southwest is precipitation adequate to support vegetation that
significantly protects the land surface from weathering.
Permanently flowing rivers are found only in the eastern and
southwestern regions and in Tasmania. The major exception is the
Murray River, a stream that rises in the Mount Kosciuszko area
in the Eastern Uplands and is fed by melting snows. As a result,
it acquires a volume sufficient to survive the passage across
the arid and semiarid plains that bear its name and to reach the
Southern Ocean southeast of Adelaide. (In Australia, the
southern portions of the Pacific and Indian oceans surrounding
Antarctica are called the Southern Ocean; this body of water is
also known as the Antarctic Ocean.) All other rivers in
Australia are seasonal or intermittent in their flow, and those
of the arid interior are episodic.
Many areas—notably the Nullarbor Plain, which is underlain by
limestone, and the sand ridge deserts—are without surface
drainage, but there are underground streams. A map of Australia
can be misleading; though many “lakes” are depicted in the
interior, the fact is that many of them are now salt lakes that
contain no water for years on end.
The Western Plateau
The Precambrian western core area, known geologically as a
shield or craton, is subdivided by long, straight (or only
slightly bowed) fractures called lineaments. These fractures,
most obvious in the north and west, delineate prominent
rectangular or rhomboidal blocks, some of which have been raised
to form uplands; others have been depressed to form lowlands or
topographic basins. The lineaments display strong
northwest-southeast and northeast-southwest trends in the
northern, northwestern, and southeastern parts of the shield,
but east-west alignments are prominent in the centre, and major
structural lines are more nearly longitudinal in the west and
southwest. In all areas, however, trends other than those that
are locally dominant can be discerned.
Within such structurally defined areas as the Kimberleys, the
Mount Isa Highlands, and the Pilbara, the nature of the land
surface varies according to the type and disposition of the rock
outcrops. In the Kimberleys and the Mueller Range there are
extensive outcrops of flat-lying massive sandstone that have
been dissected to give rise to striking isolated rock features
known variously as plateaus, mesas, and buttes. Under these
circumstances, local joints and bedding planes in the rocks,
combined with the permeable nature of the bedrock, control the
local landforms. Similar plateau forms dominate the Pilbara and
Arnhem Land, though in the former region horizontally bedded or
only gently warped massive ironstone formations, together with
massive sandstones, give rise to prominent bluffs bordering the
plateau assemblages; and in the latter karst landforms (greatly
eroded) are developed where limestone occurs at the surface. At
the margins of the Kimberleys (in the Fitzroy region and in the
Durack Range) and in the southern part of the Pilbara, in the
Ophthalmia Range, dipping rock strata have been differentially
eroded to form ridges and valleys. Such features are also
extensively and well developed in the uplands of central
Australia (the MacDonnell, James, and Krichauff ranges), in the
Isa Highlands, and in the Stirling Range of the southwest. In
all of these areas it is the sandstones and quartzites that
underlie the upstanding ridges, the intervening valleys being
eroded in siltstones or shales; and in all these areas the
pattern in plan of ridge and valley reflects the pattern of
folding in the underlying rocks.
In the far southwest, the Darling Range forms an upfaulted
block underlain mainly by granite but capped by laterite, a
reddish, iron-rich product of weathering rock. The Gawler block,
in the southeast, is complex. There are crystalline and
sandstone uplands in the east, sandstone plateaus in the
northeast, and, in the centre and north, the rounded Gawler
Ranges built of Precambrian volcanic rocks (those older than 540
million years). Much of Eyre Peninsula is occupied by a rolling
plain traversed by fixed sand dunes, but in the northwest
numerous low isolated granite rocks of spectacular appearance,
called inselbergs, stand above the plain. These epitomize the
isolated ranges and hills widely developed in the northwest of
South Australia, in the Musgrave, Everard, Birksgate, Mann, and
Tomkinson ranges.
The lowlands between these raised blocks also display varied
topography. The so-called Barkly Tableland is in reality a high
plain of remarkable flatness, partly eroded in Cambrian
sedimentary rocks (those about 490 to 540 million years old) and
partly underlain by swamp deposits of Neogene and Paleogene age
(i.e., about 2.6 to 65 million years old). The Nullarbor Plain,
a karst area, is approximately coincident with the Eucla Basin.
Its surface is so flat that in one section the Trans-Australian
Railway runs absolutely straight for some 300 miles (500 km) as
it passes over the region. A vast area of the southwest of
Western Australia is occupied by an extensive high plain
traversed by elongate ribbons encrusted with salt, the
desiccated and disrupted remnants of former river courses. The
Gibson Desert consists in large part of a laterite-capped plain,
but huge areas of the plains of central and northern Australia
are occupied by active sand dunes, and large areas of southern
South Australia and Western Australia are covered by fields of
fixed dunes.
Actively developing and moving sand ridges occupy the Canning
Basin, the Great Victoria Desert, the Amadeus depression, and
large areas of the Arunta-Sturt Complex. The dune fields extend
to the east into the Great Artesian Basin, where the dunes
constitute the well-known Simpson Desert. These dune deserts
reflect the prevailing aridity of most of Australia, and the
dune trend displays a huge swirl around the centre of the
continent. Yet, even in these most arid areas, rain falls from
time to time, and the rivers run occasionally. Because of the
scarcity of vegetation and the common development of impermeable
rock layers of various types, runoff in the arid lands tends to
be rapid and achieves dramatic and significant results.
Hillslopes are scoured and washed bare of weathered debris;
streams erode gullies and transport large volumes of sediment
from the uplands to the plains; broad, braided river channels
are developed; and extensive alluvial plains are formed. It is
the alluvium, carried to the lowlands by rivers and deposited on
the plains, that is, in large measure, the source of the sand
out of which the desert dunes are molded by the wind.
In the far southwest of the shield, and especially in the
northern areas, precipitation is sufficient to support a
considerable vegetation and is regular enough for streams to
flow seasonally. Here the work of rivers in shaping the land
surface is more obvious and widespread; the landscape consists
essentially of valleys and intervening divides, the precise form
of each depending on local structure. But in such areas the rate
of landscape change is more rapid than in the arid zones.
Many of the landforms of the shield are inherited from the
past, when different climatic conditions obtained. Remnants of
laterite are widespread in many parts of Australia: the Darling
Range, the far southwest, the Isa Highlands, and Mueller Range,
near Darwin, and the southern Eyre Peninsula. The evidence
indicates that during the Paleogene and Neogene periods these
areas had been reduced to low relief, and humid tropical
climates prevailed, for laterite is at present forming only
under such conditions in such areas as Southeast Asia and the
Congo River basin. The disrupted former drainage system of
southwest Western Australia has already been referred to, and
remnants of similar old stream networks occur in the Amadeus
depression, on the Nullarbor Plain, and in the Great Victoria
Desert. A large swamp formerly occupied the south of the Barkly
Tableland; and Lake Woods, near Newcastle Waters, is now dry,
with a bed of some 70 square miles (180 square km) in extent,
but shorelines indicate that the lake formerly occupied some
1,100 square miles (2,850 square km). Fossil remains also
suggest wetter climates in the past in many parts of Australia
and subsequent deterioration toward aridity. But in the south
the occurrence of dunes now fixed by vegetation shows that the
climate there has recently become moister.
Finally, in several parts of the shield remnants of eroded
surfaces, planed off and covered with hard, silicified crusts of
weathered rock, cut across local bedrock and are either
preserved high in the relief or buried beneath later sedimentary
deposits. They attest to changes in the disposition of the land
surface (either base-level changes or regional warping or
faulting) and also indicate that, in the past, surfaces of low
relief similar to present ones were widely developed. Reference
has already been made to the distribution of the laterite
surface. At the eastern margin of the shield there are remnants
of a still older surface, of middle or late Mesozoic age (i.e.,
formed about 175 to 65 million years ago), which has been warped
by subsequent earth movements and now disappears beneath the
sediments of the Great Artesian and similar basins. Other
evidence of the existence of this surface has been found in
northwestern Queensland, central Australia, and South Australia.
On the southeastern extremity of the shield, the
Flinders–Mount Lofty ranges occupy the site of the Adelaide
downwarp in the Earth’s surface. These sediments were folded and
faulted, principally in the early Paleozoic (about 540 million
years ago), though recurrently since. The Flinders Ranges are a
much-eroded fold mountain belt characterized by ridge and valley
forms in which sandstone ridges and bluffs are dominant. The
Willochra Plain occupies an elongate intermontane basin
excavated from a major upwarped structure and achieved through
the erosion of some 20,000 feet (6,000 metres) of sediments.
There are remnants of old land surfaces of low relief, and, in
the north, extremely rugged relief developed on a much-shattered
granite outcrop.
To the south, the Mount Lofty Range is a faulted and much
dissected and complex horst, or ancient uplifted structural
block. Bounded on both east and west by meridional or gently
arcuate fault scarps, which developed initially in the Early
Paleozoic but which have suffered recurrent movements since (and
which indeed are still active), the ranges are surmounted in
many areas by the remnants of a lateritic plain. In many other
areas, such a hard capping of rock, if ever present, has been
eliminated by stream erosion. Sandstones again form prominent
ridges and residuals (isolated relief features), such as Mount
Lofty itself; small granite outcrops give rise to boulder-strewn
surfaces; and exposures of gneiss form slablike blocks known as
tombstones, monk stones, or penitent rocks.
Between the Mount Lofty and the Flinders ranges is a region
of broad simple folds in which the sandstone ridges run for the
most part north-south and in which the broad open valleys were
in some instances occupied by lakes during the Paleogene and
Neogene periods. To the northeast, similar upland areas of low
relief, but with domes of crystalline rock standing above the
general level, dominate the Olary Spur.
The Interior Lowlands
The Interior Lowlands are dominated by three major basins,
the Carpentaria Basin, the Eyre Basin, and the Murray Basin. The
Carpentaria and Eyre basins are separated by such minute
residual relief elements as Mount Brown and Mount Fort Bowen in
northwestern Queensland. The Wilcannia threshold divides the
Eyre and Murray basins, and the latter is separated from the
Otway Basin and the Southern Ocean by the Padthaway Ridge. The
Eyre and Murray basins are entirely terrestrial, but the
Carpentaria is partly inundated by the sea.
The Carpentaria plains, occupying the basin of the same name,
form a narrow lowland corridor between the Isa Highlands and the
Einasleigh uplands (part of the Eastern Uplands). They are
drained by the Leichhardt, Flinders, and Gilbert rivers and in
the south take the form of broadly rolling plains underlain by
heavy gray lime-enriched (pedocalic) soils. In the north,
however, there are extensive flat depositional plains, some of
them related to swamps from the Pleistocene Epoch (i.e., about
2,600,000 to 11,700 years ago), some associated with the present
floodplains of the braided river systems. Standing above the
plains, for example around Normanton, are considerable plateau
and mesa remnants of the Paleogene and Neogene laterite surface.
Similar rolling plains with laterite residuals standing above
them occur in the Eyre Basin, particularly around the headwaters
of the Diamantina, near Kynuna. But to the south, toward the
more arid interior, the plains become flatter and are protected
by a veneer of stones—the well-known stony desert with its
mantle of gibber (hammada, serir, and desert armour). In many
parts of southwestern Queensland, northeastern South Australia,
and northwestern New South Wales, there are plateau and related
relief remnants similar to those found in other parts of the
lowlands, although these are capped and protected not by
laterite but by silcrete, another hard rock residue. This region
is folded in places, and the subsequent dissection by erosive
forces has brought about disintegration of the silcrete, which
is about 20 million years old and which formerly extended over
vast areas of central Australia. This process provided much
stony debris for the gibber plains so characteristic of much of
central Australia and particularly of the Lake Eyre depression.
The catchment of Lake Eyre extends over some 500,000 square
miles (1,295,000 square km) of central and northern Australia.
It occupies the lowest point of the Australian continent (51
feet [15.5 metres] below sea level), and many large river
systems drain into it. These rivers drain the driest part of the
continent. But no desert is rainless, and floodwaters entirely
cover the bed of Lake Eyre about twice each century, the waters
deriving not only from central Australia but also from the
higher-rainfall areas drained by the headwaters of the Georgina,
Diamantina, Thomson, Barcoo, and similar rivers. It is now clear
that, during the late Pleistocene, the precipitation of central
Australia was heavier than it is now. The interior drainage
basin has received vast quantities of sediment and salt by these
rivers, past and present. This has provided ample source
material for the Simpson Desert dunes, and many of the normally
dry lake beds, including all the large ones, are encrusted with
salt. Most of the largest salinas, or salt pans (Eyre, Frome,
Torrens, Gregory, and Blanche), are, at least in part, of
structural origin, having been formed by downfaulted blocks.
Torrens and Gregory are surfaced mainly by gypsum, but the
remainder carry a crust of sodium chloride, common salt. Around
the major salinas there are extensive alluvial plains.
Under the prevailing arid conditions, fine dust is winnowed
from the surface sediments and can be carried high into the air
in dust storms. Some is carried long distances, even reaching
New Zealand from time to time. The sand of the alluvium is
molded into dune ridges.
Sand dunes also occupy large areas of the Murray River basin.
They are, by contrast, fixed (or “fossil”) dunes, which
developed at some time in the recent past and have since been
stabilized by higher precipitation conditions. The eastern part
of the basin, near the foothills of the Eastern Uplands, shows
evidence of these former higher precipitation amounts in the
numerous abandoned river channels of the Riverina. But the
western Murray plains are a stony as well as a climatic desert.
The plains are underlain by limestones of Miocene age (those
about 23 to 5.3 million years old) and, in many areas, by
calcrete, a calcareous soil accumulation. Instances of
water-dissolved sinkholes and enclosed depressions can be found,
and there is a lack of surface drainage characteristic of this
type of topography. Only the Murray River, which originates
outside the area in a different environment, crosses the basin,
flowing in a narrow trench in its lower reaches.
In the east of this region there are extensive alluvial
plains associated with major tributaries of the Murray. One
feature of interest is the diversion of the Murray, near Echuca,
by a rising structural block bounded by fault zones and known as
the Cadell Fault Block.
The Eastern Uplands
The Eastern Uplands are a complex series of high ridges,
high plains, plateaus, and basins that extend from Cape York
Peninsula in the north to Bass Strait in the south, with a
southerly extension into Tasmania and one extending westward
into western Victoria. The uplands are the eroded remnants of an
ancient mountain range recently rejuvenated by block faulting.
They occupy the site of the Tasman downwarp belt, the sediments
of which were folded and faulted in late Paleozoic times.
Granite batholiths were intruded into this region, and during
the Cenozoic Era (the past 65 million years) lavas appeared
extensively in areas as far apart as northern Queensland and
Tasmania. Characteristic features associated with this process
were lava fields, with stony rises, soil-filled depressions, and
lava caves. Extinct cones and craters survive in southeastern
Queensland, in the Monaro district of New South Wales, and in
western Victoria.
In considerable measure the landforms reflect these various
geologic events. Uplifted structural blocks, many of them
trending north to south, are common in some areas, while
straight river courses reflect the control exercised by fault
zones. Ridge and valley forms, as found in the Grampians of
Victoria, reflect the differential erosion of broken and folded
rock strata. Massive domes or clusters of boulders are common on
the exposed granitic batholiths. The lava plains and plateaus
display stony rises, shallow alluvial depressions, and volcanic
vents and plugs of various types and ages.
Other features reflect the erosional history of the region.
Wide areas of the upland had been reduced to a uniform low
relief by the time of the later Mesozoic Era (about 100 million
years ago) and many remnants of this ancient surface, exhumed by
erosive action from beneath a later Cretaceous cover (about 65
to 145 million years old), survive in the landscape, notably in
northern Queensland. The Cenozoic leaching of rocks by
weathering in humid climates—which forms iron-rich residuals
(laterization)—also affected the uplands, from northern
Queensland to Tasmania.
Lastly, during the Pleistocene, small glaciers developed in
the Mount Kosciuszko area of New South Wales and the central
plateau of Tasmania. Small, ice-scoured hollows and small
moraines (ridges of glacial debris) attest to these events,
while over rather wider areas frost-shattered rocks that
subsequently caused soils to flow down-slope (solifluction) have
helped shape the surface. No snow normally survives through
summer in either of these areas now, but in winter the
snowfields of the Mount Kosciuszko area alone are more extensive
than those of all Switzerland, if far less heavily supplied.
The Great Barrier Reef is related in important respects to
the Eastern Uplands. Lying off the Queensland coast, this great
system of coral reefs and atolls owes its origin to a
combination of continental drift (into warmer waters), rifting,
sea-level change, and subsidence.
The human impact
In the context of such extraordinary environmental time
frames, neither the Aboriginals nor the European settlers can be
described as long-term residents, yet in their brief time they
have already modified the landscape considerably and in most
ways deleteriously. The Europeans in particular have been
responsible for initially minor, but later significant and
widespread, changes, notably considerable soil erosion. Clearing
vegetation for agricultural purposes, overgrazing, introducing
exotic plants and animals, making tracks and roads, even
clearing stones from paddocks—all have rendered the land surface
more susceptible to soil erosion. Humans have set in train their
own great cycle of erosion, similar to that which beset many
parts of western Europe in the 18th century and which has
assailed many parts of the American West since the late 19th
century.
Soils
In general, the continental pattern of soils is closely
related to climatic factors. Mineral or skeletal soils exist
over much of arid Australia that contain virtually no organic
content and have developed little depth; they may consist merely
of a rough mantle of weathered rock. Gypsum is present in many
of the desert loams and arid red earths. The soils of the
semiarid regions (where annual precipitation is from 8 to 15
inches [203 to 380 mm]) are also alkaline, with gypsum or lime a
common feature. The organic content of the soils is again low in
the solonized (salt-enriched) brown soils and the gray and brown
soils of heavy texture that are common in these areas.
In both the arid and semiarid regions gilgai—patterns of
swells and depressions caused by the alternate swelling and
contraction following wetting and drying of clay soils—have
developed. They are especially well represented in areas of
seasonal rainfall. In areas with 15 to 25 inches (380 to 635 mm)
of annual precipitation, black earths, brown soils, and
red-brown earths are the most common soils. In the wetter areas
the leaching out of minerals is a prominent feature of the
soils. Podzols—sandy, with much humus at the surface and acid
throughout—are the characteristic soil types. In the alpine
regions humus soils—surface peats over a mineral—are noteworthy.
Superimposed on these broad, climatically determined, soil
patterns are local variations caused by topography, groundwater
conditions, and parent materials. For example, red soils of one
kind (krasnozems) are developed on the basalt outcrops so common
in eastern Australia, and those of different composition (terra
rossas and rendzinas) on calcareous bedrock. In addition,
laterite and silcrete originated in remote geologic times, when
conditions were markedly different from those of today. Laterite
is represented in every state, including Tasmania, though it is
forming nowhere in Australia at the present time, while
silicified material is restricted to arid Australia and parts of
subhumid Western Australia, South Australia, and Queensland. The
term is usually applied to surface or near-surface deposits
cemented by silica and is often associated with the formation of
mesas and other prominent landforms. Most Australian silcretes
are thought to have originated in the Neogene Period.
Climate
Australia is the arid continent. Over two-thirds of its
landmass, precipitation (largely as rainfall) per annum averages
less than 20 inches (500 mm), and over one-third of it is less
than 10 inches (250 mm). Little more than one-tenth of the
continent receives more than 40 inches (1,000 mm) per year. As
has been noted, in winter the snowfields of Tasmania and the
Mount Kosciuszko area can be extensive, but on the whole
Australia is an extremely hot country, in consequence of which
evaporation losses are high and the effectiveness of the
rainfall received is reduced. In addition, the severity of
climate, the predominance of the outdoors in the minds and lives
of many, and the national importance of agricultural and
pastoral pursuits all make Australians perhaps more
climate-conscious than most. In no country of comparable
development do climate and weather loom so large in the lives
and conversation of the people.
The principal features of Australia’s climate stem from its
position, shape, and size. Australia is mainly a compact
tropical and near-tropical continent. No major arms or
embayments of the sea penetrate far into the landmass. The only
extensive uplands occur near the east coast, and even they are
not, by world standards, very high.
In summer (December–February), when the sun is directly
overhead in northern Australia, temperatures are extremely high.
The sea exerts little moderating influence, and the uplands are
not sufficiently extensive or high to have more than local
effects. Temperatures commonly soar above the 100 °F (38 °C)
mark in the interior, but because there rarely is any cloud
cover, radiation loss is considerable at night, and daily
temperature ranges are wide. High temperatures dominate the
Australian summers in all but Tasmania. Heat waves are common,
and, though the highest amounts of solar radiation are received
in northern South Australia, the highest temperatures and
longest heat waves are recorded in the northwest of Western
Australia. For example, Marble Bar has recorded a maximum
temperature of 100 °F or more on 162 consecutive days.
Temperatures in winter remain moderate except in the uplands of
Tasmania and southeastern Australia, where snow is common. Night
frosts are common in winter throughout southern Australia and in
the interior.
Because of its relatively low latitudinal position, Australia
comes under the influence of the southeast trade winds in the
north and the westerlies in the south. Northern Australia is
affected by a northerly monsoon, partly because of the latitude
and the seasonal migration of planetary wind zones and partly
because of the summer heating of the continental interior that
draws in surface winds. The monsoon brings summer
(December–February) rains to the northern coastal area that
penetrate inland for variable distances. These summer rains are
all the more important because most of northern Australia is in
the sheltered rain shadow of the Eastern Uplands, which block
the rain-bearing southeast trades in winter. The trades, forced
to rise by the uplands, bring heavy rains to the Pacific coasts
of Queensland and northern New South Wales. These areas are also
affected by tropical cyclones and receive the heaviest rains of
any part of Australia. Within this coastal fringe, the northern
Queensland area around Tully, south of Cairns, is the wettest,
with an annual average of nearly 160 inches (4,050 mm).
Southern Australia receives winter rains from depressions
associated with the west-wind zone. Again, there are local
topographic controls, with uplands receiving higher amounts than
the adjacent plains. Parts of the southern Mount Lofty Range, in
South Australia, average more than 40 inches (1,000 mm) of
rainfall per year, but Adelaide, to the west, averages only
about 20 inches (500 mm), while the Murray plains, in the rain
shadows of the range, receive 15 inches (380 mm) or less
rainfall annually.
In the great mass of the interior of Australia, annual
rainfall averages less than 20 inches (500 mm), and over vast
areas the total is less than 10 inches (250 mm); the Lake Eyre
region averages less than half that amount. Rainfall in these
areas is unreliable and capricious, with long droughts broken by
damaging rains and floods. Over Australia as a whole, rainfall
is indeed extremely variable. Only in the far north, around
Darwin, in the southwest of Western Australia, in southern South
Australia and Victoria, in Tasmania, and in eastern New South
Wales is the recorded annual precipitation fairly consistent, in
any given year totaling no more than 10 percent above or below
the long-term average in specific years.
Much of Australia’s marked climatic variability has been
ascribed to the changeability in differential air pressures over
the central Pacific and the Indonesian archipelago, primarily
caused by contrasts in sea and ocean temperatures. The resulting
large-scale swing in air pressure is known as the Southern
Oscillation. Monitoring the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) is
now considered essential to seasonal weather forecasting. The
SOI is strongly negative when weak Pacific winds bring less
moisture than usual to Australia. Prolonged negative phases are
related to El Niño episodes in the South Pacific, and most of
Australia’s major droughts have been related to these episodes.
Prolonged positive SOI phases (during La Niña) normally bring
above-average rainfall and floods to eastern and northern
Australia. In each case, however, the correlations are not
exact.
Charles Rowland Twidale
Ed.
Plant and animal life
Overall characteristics
Some two centuries ago Australia was in a nearly primal
condition, unmodified by the practices of large-scale
conventional agriculture. The continent’s prehistory is so
recent that a scattering of old eucalypts can be found still
standing, bearing the great scars of canoes or shields cut from
the bark by the Aboriginal peoples.
As nomadic hunters and gatherers without herds or crops,
Aboriginals burned much of Australia’s native vegetation, both
deliberately and haphazardly. Fire, more particularly its
frequency, had a profound influence on much of Australia’s
native vegetation, the surviving remnants of which have become
difficult to manage; some have changed in composition because
the fire frequency has decreased, others because the frequency
has increased. The Australian botanist Helene Martin has
presented palynological evidence (from the study of pollen and
spores) showing how the trends of change in certain types of
arid and coastal vegetation, over several thousand years of
prehistory, were apparently deflected by the fires of
Aboriginals.
Since Europeans arrived on the continent, cataclysmic changes
have been wrought in its biota. Settlers have stripped the
native vegetation from most potentially arable and some
nonarable regions, substituting mainly exotic (nonnative)
herbaceous crops and pastures. In the process they have effected
the extinction of many native species and, through sheer
decimation and reduction of habitat, have pushed many more to
the brink of extinction. The vast central and northern regions
too arid for the cultivation of crops were stocked with millions
of sheep and cattle, converting them to rangelands. Many exotic
animals (such as camels) and plants were introduced
incidentally, some running wild as pests, without effective
control measures. As a result, much of the inland has been
overgrazed, and its original fauna has become impoverished.
Public pressure began increasing dramatically in the late
20th century for improved wildlife and natural landscape
conservation in Australia; this in turn provoked strong opposing
reactions from long-standing business interests that have
exploited the country’s resources. The result has been an
increasing acrimonious debate. Existing reserves have protected
some native biota and landscape—though scarcely enough to check
the ongoing loss of diversity.
Legislation requiring preparatory environmental impact
statements became standard for most types of development during
the early 1970s. Conservationist organizations interested in
protecting fauna and flora are well developed in Australia, and
environmental protection is also served by related National
Trust bodies whose main concern has been with the “built”
environment of towns, cities, and historic rural landscapes. The
strongest national conservation body is the Australian
Conservation Foundation, which acts as a lobbyist and
coordinates the work of smaller groups.
Plant life
Australian federal and state government agencies and some
universities maintain facilities for the scientific collection,
storage, and study of Australian plants. Updated knowledge about
these plants comes mainly from such institutions and reaches the
public through published handbooks, called floras, listing and
illustrating the species. The number of general popular books
dealing with the ornamental, horticultural, medicinal, culinary,
and other uses of plants increased sharply following the
publication of a major new flora, the multivolume series Flora
of Australia (1981).
Australia’s phanerogamian (seed plant) flora of approximately
20,000 species is thought to have arisen in ancient times from
two distinct intakes of stock. Both stocks had previously been
involved in a wider theatre, and each intake was followed by a
period when the species adapted and diversified within the
continent. The great advances in geophysics toward understanding
continental drift have made it possible to take the
paleontological and related botanical evidence and reconstruct
the physical environment and time-sequence.
Australia’s initial intake of flora originated—as was the
case with present-day South America, Africa, India, Madagascar,
New Caledonia, New Zealand, and Antarctica—during the period
when it was part of Gondwana. Hence, much Gondwanan flora is
still shared among these now-separated lands, both at present
and in the fossil record, including, for example, the southern
beech (also called the Antarctic, or myrtle, beech), the conifer
families Podocarpaceae and Araucariaceae, and many angiosperm
families (e.g., Myrtaceae, Proteaceae, and Stylidiaceae).
Australia also shares many groups of plants with the Malesian
region (the Malay Archipelago) to the north. This is considered
to be the result of a second, two-way exchange much later in
geologic history, in the Miocene Epoch, when continental drift
eventually brought Australia into close proximity with the
Malesian region. Thus, typically Australian taxa such as the
genus Leptospermum (of the family Myrtaceae) extend northward;
Baeckea extends to China, Melaleuca to India, and Eucalyptus to
the Philippines. Of the family Epacridaceae, Leucopogon extends
to Malaysia and Thailand, and Trochocarpa to Borneo and Celebes
(Sulawesi). Conversely, more than 200 genera of plants best
known from the Malesian region or northward are represented in
Australia (mainly northern Australia), each by a single species
not confined to Australia. These are comparatively recent
arrivals from the north.
The characteristic part of Australia’s plant life that is
little shared with other lands, together with those specialized
characteristics that apparently originated on the continent long
ago, form what has been designated as an Australian (or
autochthonous) element. It includes many of the plants that are
distinctive to typical Australian vegetation scenery and shows a
marked tendency to sclerophylly (formation of hard leaves).
Speculation has linked sclerophylly with low soil nutrient
levels. Australia ranks lowest among the continents for soil
fertility. Many genera include various species, each adapted to
different environments across the entire range of the
continent’s habitats.
The Australian element includes derivatives of Gondwanan
stock channeled specially to Australia, at the family level (for
example, Epacridaceae, Myoporaceae, Goodeniaceae, and
Stackhousiaceae), together with typically Australian
developments within nonendemic families—for example, subfamily
Leptospermoideae of Myrtaceae, the genera Banksia and Hakea of
Proteaceae, the grass trees and blackboys (family
Xanthorrhoeaceae, separated from Liliaceae), and the kangaroo
paws (family Haemodoraceae).
Most obvious to the visitor is Eucalyptus, which is
represented by more than 400 species, ranging in size from
diminutive mallees, smaller than a person, to forest giants
matching in bulk and height the world’s largest plants. Their
habitat is similarly varied, ranging from rainforest to
snowfield to hot desert fringe. Members of the genus Acacia have
undergone similar adaptive diversification; the 700 species
range from mulga and myall—the dominant trees of vast arid
areas—to small leafless blades at ground level, the grass
wattles.
Vegetation
The word vegetation, as opposed to plant life, implies the
structure and communal relations of the landscape’s plant cover,
whether it be forest, grassland, or marsh. There is no standard,
or worldwide, classification system (such as exists for
describing flora) for this aspect of the environment. Initial
attempts to apply European and American classification concepts
to Australia were not particularly satisfactory because of the
peculiarities of the continent’s vegetation and environment. For
example, climatic control of local vegetation zones was often
found insufficient to explain vegetation changes; on the
contrary, soil patterns and geologic history quite override
climatic control in many localities. Similarly, structural
descriptive schemes useful for Northern Hemisphere coniferous
and deciduous vegetation proved inappropriate when confronted by
the great variety of evergreen vegetation—notably mallees and
shrubs—found in Australia. The mapping of Australian vegetation
is based largely on factual descriptive features, and by this
means comprehensive and detailed accounts and maps have been
produced.
Australian plant life is distributed in three main zones—the
Tropical, Temperate, and Eremian—a pattern that reflects overall
climatic conditions. The Tropical Zone, which arcs east and west
across the northern margin of the continent and extends halfway
down the eastern seaboard, has a mainly dry monsoonal climate,
with some wet regions. The Temperate Zone, with a cool-to-warm
(temperate-to-subtropical) climate and precipitation mostly in
winter, is arced across the southern margin, embracing Tasmania
and extending up the eastern seaboard to overlap slightly with
the Tropical Zone. The Eremian Zone covers the whole of central
Australia through to the west-central coast; its climate is
arid.
The major structural units constituting this geographic
distribution are rainforest, sclerophyll forest (dominated by
hard-leaved plants such as eucalypts), and woodland, scrub,
savanna, and grassland forms, each with a range of subforms. The
bulk of the Tropical Zone comprises mixed deciduous woodland and
sclerophyllous low-tree savanna, with areas of tussock
grassland, coastal mangrove complexes, and tropical rainforest
containing much exotic vegetation—particularly in the
northeastern parts of Cape York Peninsula and in Queensland. A
strong Malesian influence occurs throughout the entire zone. The
rainforests—characterized by large trees with stem buttresses
and by multiple vegetation layers with interlaced canopies of
lianas and epiphytes growing in the trees—fit the popular
concept of “jungle.”
The Temperate Zone is characterized by dry and wet
sclerophyllous forests, temperate mixed woodlands, savanna
woodlands, mallees, and scrubs, with areas of alpine
vegetational complexes, temperate rainforest, and sclerophyllous
heath. A much higher proportion of the vegetation cover is
typically and recognizably “Australian.” Within this zone the
southwestern corner of Western Australia is outstanding, both
for the high proportion of Australian plants and for the
richness of the plant life, while the vegetation of Tasmania is
notable for its forests of southern beech and for its botanical
links with New Zealand and South America. In marked contrast to
the tropical rainforests, the predominant trees throughout most
of the Temperate Zone communities are either Eucalyptus or
Acacia. Much of the Temperate Zone vegetation has been cleared
for agricultural purposes, leaving only the vegetation
communities of infertile or inaccessible localities.
The vegetation of the Eremian Zone ranges from barely
vegetated desert and hills through a variety of semiarid shrub
savannas, shrub steppes, semiarid tussock grasslands, and
sclerophyllous hummock grasslands. Many shrubs have adapted
themselves similarly to the arid conditions, so that in their
vegetative state many representatives of different families look
alike. Acacia, Eremophila, and Casuarina are examples of genera
that tend to displace Eucalyptus as the dominant tree or shrub.
Much of this vegetation is badly degraded.
Robert Terence Lange
Animal life
The distribution of climates, topography, and soils that
has produced the zones and ecological variation of Australian
vegetation has also been reflected in the distribution of animal
life. Australia probably has between 200,000 and 300,000
species, about 100,000 of which have been described. There are
some 250 species of native mammals, 550 species of land and
aquatic birds, 680 species of reptiles, 190 species of frogs,
and more than 2,000 species of marine and freshwater fish. The
remainder are invertebrates, including insects.
In the varied environments of the Tropical Zone, species
confined to the rainforests of the mountainous northeast include
the tree kangaroos (genus Dendrolagus) and the gorgeous
bird-wing butterflies (Ornithoptera). Others favour more open
habitats such as savannas and grasslands. Among this group are
the agile wallaby (Macropus agilis) and Amitermes meridionalis,
a termite that orients its mounds in a north-south direction by
sensing the Earth’s magnetic field.
The animals of the Eremian Zone are characterized by their
ability to survive under extremely arid conditions and irregular
rainfall. Examples include the marsupial mole (Notoryctes
typhlops), a burrower in sand, and the water-holding frog of the
genus Cyclorana. After rainy spells Cyclorana burrows deep in
the soil, forming a chamber in which it lies in a cocoonlike sac
filled with water formed from a special outer layer of its skin.
The budgerigar (Melopsittacus) is adapted to irregular rainfall
by being nomadic.
The fauna of the eucalyptus forests and other habitats of the
Temperate Zone contains animals whose life cycles rely on
regular winter rainfall. Many are highly adapted to the
eucalyptus forests. The koala depends on the foliage of just a
few species of forest eucalyptus. Lyrebirds and gray kangaroos
are forest dwellers. Gray kangaroos also range into semiarid
shrublands and heaths. The only Australian alpine animals occur
in the high mountains of the Temperate Zone. They include the
mountain pygmy possum (genus Burramys) and the alpine
grasshopper (Kosciuscola).
Some species occur in all zones. These include the galah
(Cacatua roseicapilla; a species of cockatoo) and the Australian
magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen).
Extinction of native species is a matter of much concern.
Some 20 mammal, 20 bird, and 70 flowering plant species are
presumed to have become extinct during the period of European
settlement. Some 50 terrestrial mammals and more than 1,000
flowering plants are officially listed as both endangered or
vulnerable; that description is also applied to about 30
amphibians, 50 reptiles, and 50 birds. Estimates of the numbers
of introduced species include 1,500 to 2,000 flowering plants,
30 freshwater and marine fish, and about 70 land animals and
birds. There has also been a great reduction of range of most
species inhabiting temperate or semiarid lands, except for those
that have benefited from the extension of pastures and watering
points. The latter species include the large kangaroos and the
Australian magpie.
The high degree to which many species depend on a relatively
narrow range of vegetation types means that animals of some
zones have suffered more from human activity than others. Small
and medium-size terrestrial mammals and ground-nesting birds of
temperate and semiarid grasslands and shrublands have been most
affected by clearing for pastures and cereal crops. In addition,
they have suffered most from competition with and habitat
destruction by introduced animals such as rabbits, sheep, goats,
and cattle and from predation by the foxes and feral cats. Few
parts of Australia are free from the effects of introduced
animal species. In the tropical north the cane toad (Bufo
marinus) is believed to be a major predator of small native
vertebrates. Even the introduced honeybee, which is widely
established in the feral state, is suspected of affecting native
nectar-feeding insects, mammals, and birds.
The role of the Aboriginal people in causing the extinction
of fauna before European settlement has been much debated. It is
clear that at the time of European settlement Aboriginal hunting
and burning had major effects on animal numbers, but a balance
seems to have been maintained, possibly assisted by a system of
social prohibitions that protected important species under
certain conditions. But the effect of the initial Aboriginal
entry on the continent is not yet clear. At that time, at least
60,000 years ago, the fauna contained many species of large
animals (the Australian megafauna) and was considerably
different from the fauna present at the time of European
settlement. Such megafaunal animals as the rhinoceros-sized
Diprotodon, giant wombats, the giant short-faced kangaroos
(Sthenurus and Procoptodon), the so-called marsupial lion
Thylacoleo, and giant flightless birds called mihirungs or
Genyornis probably became extinct over a period between 27,000
and 12,000 years ago, possibly as late as 6,000 years ago.
It has been argued that Aboriginal overhunting, together with
environmental changes caused by associated Aboriginal burning of
the country, caused the extinction of these species. Others have
suggested that climatic fluctuations at the end of the
Pleistocene (some 11,700 years ago) were a more likely cause.
Certainly, although there were no extensive ice sheets in
Australia, the last glacial maximum (between 22,000 and 18,000
years ago) was a time of highly arid, as well as cold and windy,
conditions. Deserts reached their greatest extent at that time,
and there is no doubt that under such conditions the fauna (as
well as humans) would have been under considerable physiological
stress. No clear consensus has emerged, and, in view of the
facts that there is no evidence of a sudden mass extinction and
that Aboriginals seem to have occupied most of Australia for at
least 20,000 years before the last megafauna disappeared, it is
likely that a combination of all these factors played a part. By
about 20,000 years ago, few mammals had survived that weighed
more than their human predators.
Commercial hunting of only a few species of native fauna is
allowed. It is confined to several species of the kangaroo
family, muttonbirds (Puffinus tenuirostris), and some of the
most common cockatoos and parrots; however, federal law does not
permit live birds to be exported. Permits can be obtained to
destroy pest species (such as kangaroos in certain
circumstances). Sport shooting of game birds (ducks, quail, and
snipes) and a few mammals is permitted in some states. Before
controls were established, the numbers of several attractive
varieties of parrots and cockatoos—as well as of crocodiles and
such mammals as koalas, brushtail possums, ringtail possums,
many wallaby species, and seals—reduced dramatically. Most have
recovered, however. Quotas are set for the commercial taking of
kangaroos each year for hides and for human and pet food.
Numbers of kangaroos are constantly monitored, and there is no
evidence of any reduction in the wild populations. Hundreds of
thousands of muttonbirds are taken yearly for human consumption.
Fauna authorities and scientists responsible for conserving
kangaroos support such commercial exploitation on scientific
grounds. Many also believe that it would be in the interest of
both conservation and agricultural practice to encourage
husbandry of kangaroos. However, many others, both in Australia
and elsewhere, are vehemently opposed to killing kangaroos for
any reason. The issue has become highly political.
Australia has its share of potentially dangerous, as well as
commercially useful, animals. The large saltwater crocodile
(Crocodilus porosus) is known to eat humans. Of the many
poisonous elapid snakes, the most dangerous to humans include
taipans (Oxyuranus), smooth snakes (Parademansia), tiger snakes
(Notechis), brown snakes (Pseudonaja), and death adders
(Acanthophis); the latter, although smaller than the others,
have large fangs, a lightning-fast strike, and highly toxic
venom. About one-seventh of Australia’s snake species pose a
deadly threat to humans. There are many poisonous spiders, the
best-known being the funnel-web spider (Atrax) and the red-back
(Latrodectus). Both of these have caused human deaths, but only
a minute proportion of Australia’s spiders are dangerous.
Antivenins are available for the venoms of both spiders and
snakes.
Ticks and internal parasitic worms are mainly harmful to
stock and domestic pets, and some blood-sucking insects are
disease carriers. The larvae of the sheep blowfly Lucilia attack
sheep and cause losses worth millions of dollars to the wool
industry. Locusts, weevils, and insect larvae of various sorts
do great damage in agriculture.
The Australian fauna (and that of New Guinea, which is part
of the Australian lithospheric plate) is markedly different from
that of the other adjacent land areas (Indonesia and other
nearby islands). It is now known that this difference stems from
Australia’s long isolation and northward drift into its present
geographic position. Thus, the Australian fauna has been derived
to a large degree from the lands with which Australia was in
contact when it was part of Gondwana. That part of the fauna
derived from Asia, which includes the only extant native
placental mammals (rats, mice, bats, and the dingo—the latter
probably introduced by Aboriginals), entered Australia by
island-hopping or accidental drifting. As might be expected,
flying animals of Asian origin (e.g., bats and birds) reached
Australia before the others, and they may have done so soon
after Australia separated from Antarctica. Horseshoe bats
(family Hipposideridae), which are related to typical Old World
forms, appear in the Australian fossil record about 20 million
years before the present.
The Gondwanan component gives the Australian fauna its
distinctive character. As is the case in South America,
Australia has many species of marsupials, but they radiated more
widely in Australia than in South America, coming to occupy
virtually all mammalian adaptive niches. Thus, there are
marsupial equivalents of moles, anteaters, wolves, flying
possums, and antelopes. The only egg-laying mammals in the
world—the platypus (genus Ornithorhynchus) and the echidna
(Tachyglossus); also the New Guinea long-beaked echidna
(Zaglossus)—are Gondwanan as well, but the oldest related fossil
is from the Early Cretaceous of central Australia and predates
the separation of India from Australia. Until recently it was
assumed that placental mammals had not occurred in Australia
until they emigrated southward from Asia. Nor was there evidence
of distinctively Australian mammal fossils in South America. In
1991, however, the Australian paleontologists Michael Archer,
Henk Godthelp, and Suzanne Hand reported finding bats of early
Eocene origin (about 55 million years old) and a condylarth-like
placental mammal in southeastern Queensland. In the same year,
the Argentinian paleontologist Rosendo Pascual announced
evidence of a 63-million-year old monotreme from Patagonia in
southern Argentina. Pascual and Archer reported it to be
strikingly similar to the Australian platypus (genus Obdurodon)
of the Middle Miocene (15 million years ago).
Emus and cassowaries, mound builders (megapodes), and parrots
are almost certainly of Gondwanan origin, as are the side-necked
turtles (family Chelidae). Other examples of animals of
Gondwanan origin may be found among reptiles, amphibians, and
invertebrate groups. Some, such as earthworms belonging to the
nonpheretimoid Megascolescini, occur in Australia and India but
not in the other continents derived from Gondwana, implying that
these animals occurred in a sector of Gondwana from which both
Australia and India were derived.
The most ancient part of the Australian fauna predates even
the formation of Gondwana. For example, the Queensland lungfish
(Neoceratodus) has its closest relatives among the ancient
fossil fauna of Europe, North America, and Asia. These elements
are thought to have evolved between the Cambrian and the
Devonian periods. Queensland lungfish are less closely related
to the lungfish of Africa and South America (Lepidosirenidae)
than to the extinct forms from Asia, Europe, and North America.
Some insects, arachnids, onycophorans, land mollusks, and
earthworms also are thought to have Pangaean origins. There are
rich Australian fossil faunas from these ages, including the
oldest known vertebrates, Arandaspis, a jawless fish from the
Late Ordovician and superbly preserved armoured fishes and
lungfishes from the Devonian.
W.D.L. Ride
Ed.
People
Ethnic groups
Australian society is regarded in the wider world as
essentially British (or at any rate Anglo-Celtic), and until the
mid-20th century that portrayal was fairly accurate. The ties to
Britain and Ireland were scarcely affected by immigration from
other sources until then, although local concentrations of
Germans, Chinese, and other ethnic groups had been established
in the 19th century. But the complex demographic textures in
Australia at the beginning of the 21st century contrasted quite
sharply with the bland homogeneity of the country for much of
the 20th century. Although some nine-tenths of Australia’s
population is European in ancestry, more than one-fifth is
foreign-born, and there is a small but important (and growing)
Aboriginal population. Of those born overseas, about half were
born in Europe; though by far the largest proportion of those
are from the United Kingdom, there are also more than 200,000
Italians. Among the larger non-European groups are New
Zealanders and Vietnamese. The growth in immigration,
particularly Asian immigration (from China, Vietnam, Hong Kong,
and the Philippines) beginning in the last decades of the 20th
century, combined with a subsequent flow of refugees from the
Balkans, has altered the cultural landscape, imbuing Australia
with a cosmopolitanism that it lacked in the mid-20th century.
The persecution of and political indifference shown toward
Aboriginal people failed to extinguish their culture; inevitably
“land rights” became the rallying cry of a political movement
accompanying a highly publicized revival of the Aboriginal
community. A national referendum on Aboriginal rights held in
1967 agreed to the transfer of legislative power over Aboriginal
affairs from the states to the federal government, and this
accelerated the revival. The number of Australian Aboriginals
and Torres Strait Islanders, though still only a tiny fraction
of the total population, increased dramatically in the last
decades of the 20th century and into the 21st century, jumping
from 115,000 in 1971 to some 517,200 in the 2006 census.
In numerical terms the most important Aboriginal
concentrations are located in Queensland, New South Wales,
Western Australia, and Northern Territory. Until the later 1960s
the Aboriginal population was not inaccurately described as
being as rural as white Australia was urban. In the Outback,
small numbers still lived in tribal societies and tried to
maintain the traditional ways. Some were employed as highly
skilled stockmen on the big stations (ranches), and welfare
payments and charitable organizations supported others on
mission stations and government reserves. From the 1970s and
’80s the drift of Aboriginals to the towns and cities
transformed the old patterns except in Northern Territory, where
the rural distribution has remained predominant. Their
migrations to the country towns have often left Aboriginal
families as stranded “fringe dwellers,” a term with social as
well as geographic connotations. In the larger centres,
Aboriginal communities from widely differing backgrounds face
innumerable hazards as they attempt to adjust to volatile urban
politics. Perceptions of common grievances have encouraged a
unity of purpose and a sense of solidarity between urban and
rural groups.
The growth in the Aboriginal population has been exceeded by
Australians born in Vietnam, China, Hong Kong, and the
Philippines. By the early 21st century, about one-third of all
new settler arrivals had been born in Asia. Huge expenditures
have been made on Aboriginal affairs, to the chagrin of much
larger minority groups who have received less international
visibility. Official federal policy has been to encourage
self-help and local autonomy while improving the provision of
essential services and the climate of opportunity. Obstacles to
progress have included residual prejudice and neglect in the
white (i.e., European) community and the lingering consequences
of the vicious circle of poverty, ignorance, and disease in
which native peoples became entrapped after their earliest
encounters with whites.
Languages
English, Australia’s official language, is almost
universally spoken. Nevertheless, there are hundreds of
Aboriginal languages, though many have become extinct since
1950, and most of the surviving languages have very few
speakers. Mabuiag, spoken in the western Torres Strait Islands,
and the Western Desert language have about 8,000 and 4,000
speakers, respectively, and about 50,000 Aboriginals may still
have some knowledge of an Australian language. (For full
discussion, see Australian Aboriginal languages.) The languages
of immigrant groups to Australia are also spoken, most notably
Chinese, Italian, and Greek.
Religion
Recorded religious adherence has generally mirrored the
immigrants’ backgrounds. In every census since the early
colonial era, most Australians have professed to be Christian,
principally Anglican and Roman Catholic, but simple materialism
has become more influential than Christianity. The number of
Roman Catholics exceeded the number of Anglicans for the first
time in the late 1980s. More than two-thirds of Australians
identify themselves as Christian; about one-fourth are Roman
Catholic, one-fifth Anglican, and one-fifth other Protestant
(notably of the Uniting Church, Methodist, and Presbyterian
denominations). The proportions registering as Orthodox
Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists increased sharply in the last
decades of the 20th century; there are also small groups of Jews
and Hindus. By the beginning of the 21st century, more than
one-sixth of Australians professed no religion, and about
one-tenth of citizens refused to disclose their religious
affiliation on the national census form. In contrast to the
European settlers, traditional Aboriginal communities are
intensely spiritual. There religion gives meaning to life, and
the coordinating theme is the sustaining connection between land
and people.
Demographic trends
The population debate—which is laden with considerable
controversy—is a long-running affair that has drawn contributors
from every walk of life since the beginning of the colonial era.
After the mid-19th century, population growth was frequently
adopted as an index of economic success and environmental
adaptation, and the proximity of Asia’s crowded millions
deepened national insecurities. One of the first objectives of
the new federal government, established in 1901, was to design a
“White Australia” policy, which aimed to prevent diluting
Australia’s Anglo-Celtic heritage. Although the policy was both
unproductive and discriminatory, it was made more attractive by
blending imperial and nationalistic sentiments that proclaimed
“population capacities” of 100 to 500 million in Australia’s
“vast empty spaces.” In the interwar period the Australian
geographer Griffith Taylor argued that there were stringent
environmental limits that would restrict Australia’s population
to approximately 20 million people by the end of the 20th
century. Taylor was vilified and finally hounded out of
Australia, but his “environmental determinism,” like his
remarkable prediction, was well-remembered, particularly since
Australia’s population only approached that benchmark at the
beginning of the 21st century.
The battles in the Pacific theatre during World War II
revived the “populate or perish” catchcry, and after the war a
vigorous campaign was launched to encourage immigration from all
parts of Europe. The government initially continued to emphasize
the exclusivist White Australia policy, and the country’s ethnic
composition was only slightly affected. Over the succeeding
decades, however, ethnic diversification gradually intensified,
eventually setting off heated debates over the relative merits
of publicly funded programs for assimilation and for
multiculturalism.
The big cities received the bulk of the postwar immigration.
Melbourne’s early lead in industrialization was closely
associated with the immigration boom, but Sydney eventually
proved more attractive. The impact of immigration was not
confined to these two centres; whereas the overseas-born
population accounted for about one-third of the total for Sydney
and Melbourne at the start of the 21st century, the national
proportion was more than one-fifth and rising. Each of the other
state capitals and the industrializing provincial centres also
received their share of the influx. The impact was much smaller
in the rural districts, except for the areas under irrigation.
At the outset, the federal government preferred to maintain
British and Irish immigration at a high rate, but those sources
were soon deemed insufficient to meet rising expectations, and
further “assisted migration” and “private sponsorship”
agreements were negotiated with other European and Middle
Eastern governments. In addition, most major world crises have
introduced fresh waves of immigrants: refugees from Hungary and
Czechoslovakia after the uprisings in the 1950s and ’60s; from
Lebanon and from Chile and other Latin American countries in the
1970s; from Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam) and
China in the late 1970s and ’80s; and from the Balkans in the
1990s. Since the end of World War II, some 600,000 refugees and
displaced persons have arrived in Australia—more than one-tenth
of the total number of new settlers. Consequently, about half of
the population has been born overseas or has at least one
overseas-born parent.
The White Australia policy was relaxed in 1966 and officially
abandoned in 1973. Thereafter the share of non-European
immigrants, particularly from Asia, began to increase. Most of
the debates on immigration have focused on cultural and economic
issues and only peripherally on ethnicity, and (with the
exception of the complex Aboriginal issues) Australians largely
have been spared the kinds of interracial conflict that have
scarred other immigrant societies. Nevertheless, opposition to
immigration and multiculturalism policies sparked the formation
of the anti-immigrant One Nation Party in the late 1990s;
although the party’s success was limited, its position resonated
with some Australian voters.
As discussed above, there was a dramatic increase in the
indigenous population after World War II. This growth is usually
attributed to greater pride in Aboriginality, the evolution of
positive discrimination (affirmative action) policies in
education, health, and welfare, and the official adoption of a
generous definition of “Aboriginals” and “Torres Strait
Islanders.” (For a further discussion of the labels, see
Researcher’s Note: “Aborigines” and self-designation.) The
relatively youthful age-structures and high fertility rates of
those enumerated as indigenous largely account for the
continuing upward trend. Nevertheless, infant mortality is
unusually high, and average life expectancy at birth is about 30
percent lower than that of the rest of Australia.
Australia’s overall rate of natural population increase is
less than half the world average, and its death and birth rates
are also less than the world average. Life expectancy is high—in
excess of 75 years for men and 80 years for women. Australia’s
population age 65 or over is substantial and growing, and about
one-fifth of the population (many from the immigrant and
Aboriginal communities) is under 15.
Settlement patterns
Australia has not yielded readily to development by
Europeans. Even on the relatively favoured eastern periphery,
the first European settlers were perplexed by the environment.
Later, when they penetrated the mountains of the Great Dividing
Range, they had to fight even harder against searing droughts,
sudden floods, and voracious bushfires; they also continued to
clash, often ruthlessly, with Aboriginal communities. Pioneer
settlers took pride in conquering the continent’s prodigious
distances, and that became a national trait. The spread of
railway networks in the latter part of the 19th century and the
subsequent introduction of the automobile, the airplane, radio,
television, and the Internet gradually reduced the friction of
distance, but the conquest was far from complete even by the
beginning of the 21st century.
Rural settlement
The most densely populated 1 percent of the country contains
nearly seven-eighths of Australia’s total population. Since the
early 19th century, the terms Outback, Interior, and Coastal
(also Fringe, or Fertile Crescent) have been popular titles for
the three broad regions of settlement. The term bush is applied
indiscriminately to most rural or isolated districts regardless
of their stage or type of development.
Extensive arid and semiarid areas in Western Australia,
Northern Territory, and South Australia are routinely labeled as
actually or virtually uninhabited. This description also applies
to remote sections of west-central Queensland and to scattered
patches of dry or mountainous wilderness in Victoria, New South
Wales, and Tasmania. On the northern and central mainland some
large Aboriginal reserves punctuate the open territory.
In the more useful but still arid and semiarid country,
enormous cattle and sheep stations are held under complex
leasehold arrangements, and property sizes generally range
between 30 and 5,800 square miles (80 and 15,000 square km).
Many of the larger holdings are now controlled by Australian
banks and investment firms or by large domestic and foreign
companies, though original pioneering families are still
represented. The fulcrum of the typical big station is a compact
base comprising the homestead headquarters and separate
buildings for the manager, overseer, general and specialized
workers, garage and machine shops, butchery, shearing shed, and
small airstrip. These pastoral hamlets typically accommodate
between 15 and 50 individuals; a few widely scattered huts or
cottages might be available for outlying workers. Thus, the
private enterprise development of areas much larger than some
U.S. states or groups of English counties is essentially in the
keeping of small groups of tightly focused communities—albeit
under leasehold, not freehold, tenures.
The gradual improvement in the quantity and reliability of
rainfall from this difficult interior to the coast is not
uniform, but it is a noticeable tendency and is accompanied by
progressively denser settlement. A standard sequence begins with
wheat and sheep farming on the drier margins and moves on to
more specialized wheat production and intensive livestock
enterprises, dairy farming, and market gardening. Roughly
equivalent gradations may be traced in the spacing of
properties—for example, from large wheat-sheep enterprises that
may exceed 2,500 acres (about 1,000 hectares) held in a mixture
of freehold and leasehold tenures, down to freehold dairy farms
and market gardens using about 100 acres (40 hectares) apiece
and often much less than that. Irrigation developments interrupt
the sequence in all states.
A combination of government enterprise and the initiatives of
pioneer families had established the main outlines of this
framework by World War I in the older states and a little later
in Queensland and Western Australia. The existence of
characteristic Australian farming and grazing belts from state
to state can be exaggerated, but, to the extent that these
exist, they are the product of common objectives in settlement
policy and represent a gradual clarification, by people and
governments, of the importance of regional environmental
quality.
Prominent mining centres such as Mount Isa in Queensland and
Broken Hill in New South Wales are exceptions to the rule that
sizable towns cannot be supported in the Outback. But over the
country as a whole, remarkably few Australians live in the rural
districts, despite their national economic importance and their
stereotyped images overseas. Small service centres are
distributed through every region in proportion to the intensity
of rural production. Insulated yet also restricted by
remoteness, the economies of most of the larger towns
incorporate food and fibre processing and assorted light
industries. Several towns have been assisted by state and
federal decentralization policies aimed largely at reducing the
extraordinary concentration in the state and territorial
capitals.
Aboriginal land rights campaigners in Northern Territory and
in Western Australia and South Australia have achieved
significant successes, contributing to the Australianization of
the wider national Aboriginal community. Perhaps it is only a
slight exaggeration to state that, taken in conjunction with
decisions made at state and federal levels to begin
rehabilitating soils and vegetation ravaged by two centuries of
aggressive European settlement, the process signified the
dawning recognition of a binding moral imperative. The
Aboriginal communities that have been awarded freehold or
near-freehold rights over extensive areas have been made well
aware that their management skills are under close observation.
On the other hand, a stirring nationwide “reconciliation” has
held out the promise of improved relationships.
Urban settlement
Despite the continuing significance of farming, grazing, and
mining activities that have shaped most of Australia’s
landscapes and contributed so much to its distinctive history,
Australia is statistically among the most urbanized countries in
the world. Whereas more than two-fifths of Australia’s
population lived in rural areas in 1911, by the 1970s that
proportion had declined to about one-seventh. At the beginning
of the 21st century, urbanization had slowed, but nearly
seven-eighths of the population is officially described as
urban. Statistics, however, mask part of the story, not taking
into account the peculiar role of “the bush” in the Australian
psyche. In any event, “suburban” is a better description of the
lifestyles of the bulk of the Australian population.
The metropolitan centres and provincial towns are almost
entirely the products of growth since the 19th century, and, in
their low-density living and dependence on the automobile, they
resemble North American rather than European creations. Yet
close inspection of the legacies of colonial town planning and
of some assertive architectural preferences suggests a certain
hybridization of international influences. Canberra, the federal
capital, differs from each of the other rapidly growing centres
in its heavy emphasis on planning. The American architect Walter
Burley Griffin produced the original design, and construction
began in 1913. Canberra’s planners harnessed rather than changed
the national preference for suburban sprawl, but the city’s
broad avenues, artificial lake, and prestigious public buildings
and monuments—including a striking Parliament House, completed
in 1988—have maintained its conspicuous individuality.
Economy
Australia’s established world reputation has long been that
of a wealthy, underpopulated country prone to natural disasters,
its economy depending heavily on agriculture (“riding on the
sheep’s back”) and foreign investment. This description was
reasonably fair during the first century of European settlement,
when wool exports reigned supreme. Wheat, beef, lamb, dairy
produce, and a range of irrigated crops also became important,
but the key significance of farming and grazing was not
challenged. However, this image was shattered by the growth of
manufacturing and services and especially by the spectacular
developments in mineral exploitation after World War II.
In another sense, there was no break in continuity. Reliance
on foreign investment and a vulnerability to world markets made
it difficult for Australians to divest themselves of their
traditional roles as minor or peripheral players in an
interconnected global system. As manufacturing began declining
in the last decades of the 20th century, other aspects of this
entrenched dependency status were exposed. Australia’s
governments have usually shown a pronounced readiness to
intervene in the economy, but in general the economy has been
dominated by foreign interests—first by those of the United
Kingdom, then by the United States and Japan, and more recently
by giant multinational corporations.
Nonetheless, there are two distinct and comparatively new
features of Australia’s economy. The first has been a grudging
acceptance of the vital economic and strategic significance of
the Asia-Pacific region and a rising awareness of the
opportunities to be grasped there. Second, despite a measure of
discomfiture in some quarters, Australia’s corporate, financial,
political, and bureaucratic cultures have steadfastly embraced a
more rationalist economic philosophy that seemed to accept as
inevitable a comprehensive globalization and deregulation of the
country’s economy.
Agriculture, forestry, and fishing
Most of Australia’s soils are mediocre or poor by world
standards. There are no extensive areas of rich, adaptable soils
that compare to those of the great intensive farming regions of
other sizable countries (e.g., the Cotton and Corn belts of the
United States). Chemical deficiencies are particularly common,
and it is often necessary to apply generous amounts of phosphate
and traces of numerous other nutrients.
With good reason, Australia is regularly described as the
driest of the inhabited continents, and vast areas of the
country are unsuitable for agricultural production. The average
annual rainfall is approximately 18 inches (460 mm), and more
than one-third of the mainland, principally the interior,
receives less than 10 inches (250 mm). Aridity or semiaridity
prevails over most of Australia, and evaporation rates are
extremely high, so that less than 2 inches (50 mm) of the
national total contributes surface runoff for natural and
modified systems. The combined discharge from all Australian
rivers including the Murray-Darling, the country’s principal
river system, is the equivalent of only about half that of
China’s Yangtze River, and records for both the Mississippi and
the Ganges rivers indicate discharges greater than one and
one-half times Australia’s aggregate total.
In addition, there are wide regional disparities. In the
sparsely populated northern sector, runoff draining into the
Timor Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria accounts for half the
national total, and the tropical north as a whole contributes
about two-thirds. Subsurface resources are extensive. Good
groundwater assets have been located in three-fifths of the
country, including much of the dry interior. The Great Artesian
Basin is the largest of its type in the world and gives a
measure of security to one-fifth of the mainland.
Native flora and fauna have been dramatically undervalued.
When Europeans began colonizing Australia in 1788, nearly
one-tenth of the continent may have been covered by forest, and
two-fifths by woodlands, including savanna woodlands. It seems
likely that less than half of the forested area had commercial
potential. Yet, until the late 20th century, clearing was done
at a frenzied rate and often indiscriminately. In the late 1980s
it was roughly estimated that, with the exception of Northern
Territory, the proportions of forest and scrub cover cleared
during two centuries of European occupation was between
one-third and two-thirds in each state. Even if this is somewhat
overstated, it suggests a thoroughly savage onslaught, given the
relatively short period of European occupation and the European
population’s originally restricted distribution.
Overgrazing has caused some deterioration of the saltbush,
stunted trees, and native grasslands of the interior, but in the
tropics the productivity of the original pastures has been
increased by introducing improved strains of grasses and heat-
and tick-resistant cattle. Far too little has been done to farm
the kangaroo and wallaby populations on a commercial basis; this
might be preferable, on economic and environmental grounds, to
the regular culling operations that mainly serve the pet-food
trade.
Accelerated soil erosion, including rampaging gulleys and
disfiguring landslips, were noted by the first generations of
European settlers in the southeastern colonies. The threat of
soil salinization was reported later, especially in the
irrigation districts where it was associated with overwatering
and poor drainage.
Land degradation became a major issue from the 1980s, when
media coverage became intense and well-directed education
programs proliferated. A “land care” decade was proclaimed for
the 1990s, and a nationally coordinated schedule was drawn up to
promote new cultivation methods, extensive tree planting, modest
and adventurous engineering solutions, and wholesale changes in
production systems. Even so, land was still being cleared
nationally at a high rate, chiefly in Queensland.
Agriculture
Australia’s total sheep population peaked in 1970, dropping
by about one-third at the beginning of the 21st century.
Nonetheless, Australia remains the world’s leading producer of
wool, regularly supplying nearly one-third of the global
total—this despite a collapse in world prices that caused
production to fall steeply during the 1990s. Concurrently, there
was a precipitous drop in sheep farming’s proportion of total
agricultural revenues. By contrast, Australia’s grain and
combined grain and livestock production held stable at about
two-fifths of agricultural turnover. During the early 1950s,
agricultural production accounted for between one-sixth and
one-fifth of the gross domestic product (GDP), but by the
beginning of the 21st century that proportion had declined to
less than 5 percent. Much of the decline was attributed to
reorganized economic priorities; some of it, however, was the
result of increasing competition from European and North
American producers who took advantage of subsidies and
enhancement programs.
The number and importance of small operations has also
steadily declined. Roughly half of the country’s farm
establishments combined now contribute less than one-fifth of
Australia’s total agricultural output, but about one-tenth of
the farm businesses account for roughly half of production.
Australia is an important source of export cereals, meat,
sugar, dairy produce, and fruit. Landholdings are
characteristically large, specialized, owner-operated,
capital-intensive, export-oriented, and intricately interlinked
through the activities of producers’ associations and government
organizations. Less than one-tenth of the country is used for
intensive production; one-fourth is virtually unused, and
three-fifths is employed for sparse grazing on natural or
near-natural pastures. Only a minute fraction is irrigated.
Wheat is the country’s leading grain crop and is grown in every
state, with production concentrated in the wheat belts of the
southeast and southwest. Up to four-fifths of the grain is
exported, chiefly to eastern Asia, the Middle East, and the
Pacific region. In contrast to its Northern Hemisphere
competitors, Australia does not have the standard winter or
spring wheats and does not produce red-grained wheat; rather,
all Australian wheats are white-grained, principally intended
for breads and noodles, and are planted in the winter months of
May, June, and July. The main harvest begins in Queensland in
September or October and ends in Victoria and southern Western
Australia in January; production is highly mechanized. The crop
has become closely integrated with sheep grazing and the
cultivation of barley, oats, and other grains and with the
production of green fodder and hay for livestock.
Intensive sugarcane farming is significant in Queensland’s
coastal districts, on the northern coastal plains of New South
Wales, and in the Ord Irrigated District in northwestern Western
Australia. Production operations are highly sophisticated, from
planting and harvesting to milling; the most arduous manual
labour traditionally associated with this cultivation was
replaced long ago by efficient mechanization. Sugar represents
Australia’s second-biggest crop export.
Other important crops include cotton (the second most
valuable crop, after wheat), rice, tobacco, temperate and
tropical fruits, corn (maize), sorghum, oilseeds, and a host of
other items reflecting the expansive latitudinal range of
farming operations. Wine making for domestic and export markets
is pursued in every state but is most significant in the
southern parts of the country. The sector experienced
spectacular growth in the 1990s, with production of wine grapes
increasing by three-fifths during the decade to supply some
1,200 wineries. Nearly half of wine exports are directed to the
United Kingdom. Other major markets include the United States,
New Zealand, Canada, and Germany.
Sheep are raised in most of the agricultural regions and
under widely varying environmental conditions, but one-third of
the total graze wholly on the natural fodders of the dry
“pastoral zone,” much of which is the undisputed domain of the
Merino. In belts with higher precipitation levels (15–25 inches
[380–635 mm] annually) sheep are farmed in conjunction with
wheat and other cereals, and the flocks include breeds other
than the Merino. Approximately two-fifths of the national flock
is located in these “wheat-and-sheep” belts. Areas with
moderately reliable rainfall produce most of Australia’s
superfine wool. Mutton and lamb production is particularly
important in mixed-farming areas of Victoria, commonly in
association with wheat.
Australia’s total cattle population peaked in the mid-1970s
and has subsequently shrunk by about one-fourth. Most of
Australia’s beef cattle are raised in Queensland, Northern
Territory, and New South Wales, but the industry is important in
all productive regions. The favoured breeds are British in
origin, predominantly Herefords and Shorthorns, but in the
tropical areas resistance to heat, ticks, and insects is
required, and zebu types such as Africander, Brahman, and Santa
Gertrudis are used in crossbreeding programs. Management styles
range from high-tech sophistication on numerous southern
properties to a more rough-and-ready approach on giant northern
cattle stations, where the annual musters (roundups) resemble
hunting expeditions and the stockmen’s horses have been replaced
by helicopters, motorbikes, and four-wheel-drive vehicles.
Another characteristic of the Outback beef industry is that
stock is transported long distances to meat-processing centres
or pasture. The old dependence on a government-monitored system
of wide “stock routes” plied by expert drovers has been replaced
by modern trucking, including the distinctive “road trains”
(large trucks, each pulling several trailers) of the north, and
by reasonably maintained roads capable of supporting these
behemoths.
Australia’s governments are intimately involved in most
aspects of rural production. Their purview extends from
initiating pioneer settlement to conducting intensive scientific
research and providing advisory and educational services. It
also takes in organizing national and international marketing,
price control, complex schemes for drought and flood relief,
controlling and eradicating pests and diseases, and tailoring
subsidies to facilitate economic, environmental, and social
programs.
All state governments maintain large staffs to serve the
major rural industries. The federal government coordinates much
of the state-based research and is responsible for matters
connected with national and international perspectives. Its main
research arm is the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial
Research Organisation (CSIRO), which has a formidable reputation
worldwide. Producers’ organizations work independently and
alongside government bodies, and they constitute effective
lobbying groups in the federal and state parliaments.
Forestry and fishing
At the beginning of the 21st century, official (and
controversial) estimates suggested that a total of one-fifth of
Australia’s land area was native forest, nearly a third of which
was in private hands. Most of the private native forest is not
actively managed for wood production, and much of the publicly
owned area is set aside in national parks and other reserves.
Roughly one-fifth of the overall total is managed for wood.
The chief commercial forests are in high-rainfall areas on
the coast or in the coastal highlands of Tasmania, the
southeastern and eastern mainland, and along the southwestern
coast of Western Australia. The main types of tree are the
evergreen members of genus Eucalyptus, providing timber of great
strength and durability, and a great variety of rainforest
trees. Since World War II several regions have been intensively
exploited for wood pulp, partly for export to Japan. These
activities have been opposed by the well-organized environmental
movement, which consolidated its influence in political affairs
during the 1970s and ’80s.
Except for the temperate seas in the southeast and around
Tasmania, Australia’s extensive marine ecosystems are found in
comparatively warm waters over a narrow continental shelf; by
world standards their productivity is low, but they support a
small domestic industry and are significant for tourism and
recreation. Administered by the Australian Fisheries Management
Authority, the 200-nautical-mile (370-km) Australian fishing
zone—the third largest of its type—was proclaimed in 1979 as a
safeguard against foreign incursions. It covers an area
considerably larger than the Australian landmass and is
difficult to police. Although the influx of Asian and southern
European immigrants has enlarged the local market and
diversified the catch, less than one-fifth of the marine and
freshwater species are commercially exploited. The most valuable
exports (primarily to Japan and other eastern Asian countries)
are prawns, rock lobsters (marine crayfish), abalone, tuna and
other fin fish, scallops, and edible and pearl oysters. Other
important species caught include bream, cod, flathead, mackerel,
perch, whiting, and Australian salmon. Fresh, frozen, and canned
seafood is sold locally and to Asian, European, and North
American markets.
Power and resources
Energy
Hydroelectric generation is limited by highly variable river
volumes and a predominantly level topography. The exception is
Tasmania, where the economy has been built around hydropower by
exploiting the island-state’s rugged terrain and abundant water
reserves. On the mainland, several major multiple-purpose dams
have been constructed, including the world-renowned Snowy
Mountains Scheme, a hydroelectric and irrigation complex serving
New South Wales and Victoria, and Queensland’s Burdekin Falls
dam. However, the great bulk of electric power is generated by
thermal stations that draw on Australia’s vast coal reserves—a
situation unlikely to change in the near future, despite strong
opposition from the environmental movement to burning fossil
fuels.
Inexpensive wind power, ubiquitous in pioneering times,
offers great opportunities. Solar and tidal energy are other
obvious options for alternative power sources in Australia. In
each case, popular demand and political will are in shorter
supply than technical know-how and natural advantages, and
renewable energy resources contribute only a tiny fraction of
total energy production.
Minerals and mining
The mining industry accounts for a small but vital
contribution to the Australian economy. However, there are
several issues of concern in this sector, including high rates
of foreign ownership and control, unwelcome effects on the
environment, rapid rates of extraction that may exhaust the
reserves, and the widespread but not universal neglect of simple
preshipment processing in Australia. In particular, concern
about burning fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases such as
carbon dioxide has strengthened opposition to the coal industry.
Bulk loading and specialized shipping facilities are usual in
the mining industry, and extraction methods are considered
advanced by international standards. Highly mechanized open-cut
techniques prevail in Queensland’s massive coal-mining
operations, whereas underground mining predominates in the
long-established New South Wales coal industry. Western
Australia’s iron ore mines and Victoria’s lignite (brown-coal)
deposits are also worked on the open-cut principle, by
gargantuan machines.
The most economically important mineral reserves are located
in Western Australia (iron ore, nickel, bauxite, diamonds, gold,
mineral sands, and offshore natural gas), Queensland (bauxite,
bituminous [black] coal, lead, mineral sands, zinc, and silver),
New South Wales (bituminous coal, lead, zinc, silver, and
mineral sands), and Victoria (lignite and offshore oil and
natural gas).
Australia has about one-fourth of the world’s low-cost
uranium reserves, the largest known of which are found in
northern and northwestern Queensland, Northern Territory,
Western Australia, and South Australia. Yet, production has been
small and discontinuous and has been limited by the minuscule
domestic demand and by strenuous objections from
environmentalists. Australia is not self-sufficient in crude oil
production, but it does supply the bulk of its domestic needs.
There are abundant reserves of coal and natural gas capable of
meeting domestic and export demands over the medium term. Coal
production is thought to be sustainable for more than three
centuries, but natural gas deposits are expected to be depleted
in the mid-21st century.
Iron ore
Australia is one of the world’s top producers of iron ore,
which is used partly in the domestic iron and steel industry but
is largely exported to Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.
Remoteness has disguised the staggering scale of the iron ore
deposits. Western Australia’s Hamersley iron province contains
billions of tons of ore in iron formations. The most extensive
of the high-grade deposits are those of Mount Tom Price, Mount
Whaleback, Mount Newman, and the Robe River area. Tasmania’s
Savage River deposits were also developed in the late 20th
century.
Ferroalloys and nonferrous base metals
Tungsten, mined since colonial times, is a major export. It
has been produced in Queensland and from wolframite and
scheelite deposits located on King Island in the Bass Strait.
Manganese is obtained from numerous small deposits and
especially from the Groote Eylandt area on the Gulf of
Carpentaria. Australia has some of the world’s largest
recoverable nickel reserves. The rich Kambalda deposits, located
35 miles (56 km) southeast of Kalgoorlie, were discovered in
1964, and similar discoveries followed in that old goldfields
belt. Other nickel deposits are at Greenvale (Queensland) and in
the Musgrave region on the borders of Western Australia, South
Australia, and Northern Territory.
Australia has the world’s largest recoverable deposits of
zinc and lead. The Broken Hill lode in western New South Wales
has been an important producer since the 1880s. Lead, zinc, and
copper ores were discovered at Mount Isa in western Queensland
in 1923, and in the late 20th century new lead-zinc deposits
were developed in Tasmania and on the McArthur River in Northern
Territory. More than two-thirds of Australia’s copper comes from
Mount Isa. Enormous reserves of bauxite have been located at
Weipa on the Cape York Peninsula, at Gove in Northern Territory,
and in the Darling Range in Western Australia. Their
exploitation enabled Australia to become the world’s leading
producer of bauxite and alumina. Australia is also the world’s
largest producer and exporter of natural rutile, ilmenite,
zircon, and monazite, obtained from both east- and west-coast
beach sands.
Precious metals
From a peak production of nearly four million fine ounces in
1904, Australia’s annual output of gold declined through most of
the 20th century. Production increased in the 1980s in response
to world prices and economic conditions, and approximately
four-fifths of the national output came from Western Australian
mines. Australia is among the world’s top gold producers, and
gold is one of Australia’s most valuable minerals in terms of
annual production. Silver occurs in good quantities in the rich
lead-zinc ores, mainly in the Broken Hill and Mount Isa
districts. Small amounts of platinum and palladium have been
located by nickel miners.
Nonmetallic deposits
Australia has abundant reserves of such industrial minerals
as clays, mica, salt, dolomite (limestone), building materials
of all kinds, refractories, abrasives, talc, and asbestos. An
intensive search for phosphates to offset the declining
production of Nauru and Banaba (Ocean) Island yielded important
discoveries in the Cloncurry–Mount Isa area, but it has not been
economical to develop these deposits. Gemstones occur in many
localities, and mechanized industrial prospecting and mining is
common. Australian white opals, mainly from Andamooka and Coober
Pedy in South Australia and White Cliffs in New South Wales, and
the unique black opals, from Lightning Ridge in New South Wales
and Mintabie in South Australia, are internationally famous.
Sapphires and topaz from Queensland and the New England district
of New South Wales are also well known. In 1979 a vast deposit
of diamonds was discovered in the Kimberley region of Western
Australia. Australia soon became the world’s leading supplier of
gem, near-gem, and industrial diamonds; most of the output comes
from the Argyle open pit in the Kimberley, which accounts for
more than one-third of the world’s production by volume.
Manufacturing
Although manufacturing has been overshadowed by both
academic and popular histories of mining and rural frontiering,
it has been significant since the inception of European
settlement. As in so many remote colonial outposts, Australia’s
earliest manufacturing industries were developed to supply the
domestic market with food, shelter, and clothing. By the end of
World War II, manufacturing contributed more than one-fourth of
GDP, peaking at about one-third in 1959–60. Factory employment
also rose over the same period and continued to do so into the
1960s. Declining sharply from this high point, manufacturing now
employs about one-eighth of the labour force and contributes
about one-eighth to Australia’s GDP.
The greatest differences between manufacturing in the
colonial period and in the years since 1900 were the degree of
direct government intervention and the importance of foreign
investment in the post-1900 era. Manufacturing became an
instrument of development policy, and government assistance was
provided in several forms, including by imposing protective
tariffs designed to increase employment through import
substitution and by the deliberate seeding of selected
population centres with government-aided industries. Foreign
investment increased steadily after 1950; overseas interests now
control about one-third of the manufacturing sector.
Japanese and American corporations are prominent in the motor
vehicle industry, which includes assembly and full-production
plants. Motor vehicle manufacture is a principal source of
employment in each of the mainland state capitals and has become
closely associated with immigrant labour. The industry’s complex
interconnections with many smaller manufacturing concerns also
underline its national importance. Motor vehicle ownership rates
are high; more than four-fifths of households own an automobile.
Iron and steel is a virtual monopoly held by the
Australian-based multinational BHP Billiton (formerly Broken
Hill Proprietary Ltd.). Other major manufacturing industries
include food, beverage, and tobacco manufacture; printing and
publishing; oil refining; and the manufacture of textiles,
domestic appliances, and wood and paper products. About
two-thirds of the employment in manufacturing is concentrated in
New South Wales and Victoria.
Since the 1960s manufacturing has declined steadily. The
change is attributable to the independent decisions of
multinational corporations to move production offshore to Asian
countries with lower wages, to reductions in protective tariffs
and other controls on imports, and to increasing domestic labour
costs. Early offshore moves bit deeply into a long list of old,
established industries with assured domestic markets, including
clothing, electrical goods, footwear, household appliances,
leather goods, and printing and transport equipment. The
continuing need for goods in these categories left Australia
with punishing import bills.
Finance
The Reserve Bank of Australia, Australia’s central bank, is
responsible for issuing the country’s currency, the Australian
dollar (coins are issued by the Royal Australian Mint). Its
statutory functions stipulate that it is to apply monetary
policy to regulate the economy through the banking system in
such a way as to contribute to the stability of the country’s
currency and maintain full employment and the economic
prosperity and welfare of the people of Australia. Thus, the
general banking system is usually expected to bear the brunt of
monetary and credit restraints when decisions are made to dampen
inflationary pressures in the economy.
Federal and state governments have gradually relinquished
their traditionally close involvement in all aspects of the
banking system. Although some 50 banks were operating at the
beginning of the 21st century, more than half of the total
banking assets were controlled by the four leading
institutions—Australian and New Zealand Banking Group, the
Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the National Australia Bank, and
the Westpac Banking Corporation. There were also numerous credit
unions, credit cooperatives, and building societies operating
partly as banks, a variety of finance companies and money-market
corporations, and some foreign banks. In the late 19th century,
stock exchanges developed in each state capital. Stocks,
options, and securities are now traded by the Australian Stock
Exchange Limited (ASX), formed in 1987 to amalgamate the six
state stock exchanges, via an all-electronic system.
Both federal and state governments have actively sought
foreign investment, but, as Australians have become more focused
on national identity, there has been growing concern about
non-Australians steering critical sectors of the economy. The
federal government has responded by monitoring and directing
foreign investment, with mixed success. Foreign influence
remains particularly strong in the minerals industry, real
estate and property development, retailing, communications, and
manufacturing.
Services
While manufacturing entered a slump, the traditional
services such as transport and retailing showed a little more
resilience until an economic recession deepened at the end of
the 1980s. Over the longer term, however, the main growth has
been in education, finance, government, and insurance; the
communications sector; health and welfare; property and business
services, including legal services; and tourism and recreation.
The housing and construction industry is a major employer in
boom times, and its fortunes tend to ebb and flow with the state
of the economy. Overall, the services sector (including finance,
transport, and trade) contributes about four-fifths to
Australia’s GDP and employs more than three-fourths of the
labour force.
Tourism makes a small but still important contribution to the
economy, providing jobs to about 5 percent of the labour force
and accounting for about 5 percent of GDP. The growth in the
number of foreign visitors has been especially strong, sparked
by such events as the Australian bicentennial in 1988 and the
2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney. Some 5 million overseas
visitors arrive annually, the largest share of which come from
New Zealand, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and
Singapore.
Labour and taxation
The most prominent labour organization is the Australian
Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), formed in 1927, which has some
50 affiliated trade unions. Similar to trends in most countries,
union membership has been declining since the last decades of
the 20th century, dropping from about half the labour force in
the mid-1970s to about one-fourth by the early 21st century.
Among the largest unions are the Shop, Distributive and Allied
Employees Association, the Community and Public Sector Union,
the Communications, Electrical, Electronic, Energy, Information,
Postal, Plumbing and Allied Services Union of Australia, and the
Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union.
To ameliorate labour conflict, Australia employs an
arbitration system that has aroused much interest in other
countries. The system, unique to Australia and New Zealand,
attempts to fix wages and working conditions by law. The
national constitution gives the federal government the right to
undertake conciliation and arbitration in industrial disputes.
The arbitration system was first established in 1904 by the
Conciliation and Arbitration Act, which created the Commonwealth
Court of Reconciliation and Arbitration. Under the terms of the
act, if a dispute cannot be solved by collective bargaining or
conciliation, then either the employer or the trade union
concerned can take the dispute to the relevant court for a
judicial decision that has the force of law. Strikes are not
forbidden, but a union striking in defiance of a judicial award
may be held to be in contempt of court and fined accordingly.
The system has been modified several times, though its broad
outlines remain intact. In 1956 the court, which was vested with
both judicial and arbitral powers (found to be in violation of
the constitution), was replaced by the Commonwealth Conciliation
and Arbitration Commission, which in turn was supplanted in 1973
by the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. Under
the system in place from 1956 to 1988, the judges on the
commission, after hearing argument from both sides, could set
minimum wages and conditions for a large section of Australian
industry. In 1988 the government repealed the 1904 act,
replacing the commission with the Australian Industrial
Relations Commission (which also took over the responsibilities
of arbitration commissions covering airline pilots, public
sector employees, and the maritime industry); though the
arbitral procedures were revised, the overall system remained
unchanged.
Taxes are levied by federal, state, and local governments.
The federal government collects income taxes, customs and excise
dues, sales taxes, and minor taxes for specific purposes. In
2000 the tax system was reformed, and a goods-and-services
(value-added) tax was introduced that replaced various indirect
taxes. The states impose taxes covering motor vehicles,
payrolls, land, water and sewerage, and stamp and probate
duties. Each householder and property owner is expected to pay
local government taxes, termed “rates,” which are based on
property values.
Trade
Overseas trade has been vital to the development of
Australia since the early 19th century, and the export-import
balance has exercised a direct influence on regional economies
and national living standards. Domestic trade patterns have been
less significant: for the most part they reflect the domination
of Australian manufacturing by New South Wales and Victoria;
seasonal movements of produce between tropical, subtropical, and
temperate regions; and the alert responses of multinational
corporations to interstate rivalries over encouragements to
industry.
The value of Australian exports is the equivalent of
approximately one-sixth of GDP. Minerals contribute nearly
one-third of export income, with coal being the most important;
also significant are gold and iron ore. The combined share of
the mining and manufacturing sectors is more than double that
for agricultural products—which accounts for roughly one-fifth
of total exports—and provides another contrast between the
colonial and modern economies. The leading imports are machinery
and transport equipment (including motor vehicles), electronic
and telecommunications equipment, miscellaneous manufactured
items, chemicals and petroleum products, and foods and
beverages.
Historical trends in trading patterns emphasize the
colonial-to-modern transition. During the second half of the
20th century, Britain’s share of Australia’s exports shrank from
roughly two-fifths to only 5 percent, and the rise in Japan’s
share from less than 5 percent to one-fifth during the same
period hinted at a direct supplanting. Import trends were less
clear-cut. Britain’s share declined from nearly half to 5
percent, Japan’s increased from less than 5 percent to
one-eighth, and that of the United States more than doubled to
about one-fifth. Other major trading partners now include China,
South Korea, Germany, and New Zealand.
Some analysts have interpreted these changes as evidence of a
substitution of one form of colonial status for another.
Proponents of this view often refer to the close intertwining of
Japanese industrial expansion and the direct influence exerted
by Japanese investment in Australia, notably in the mining of
coal and iron ore. The argument is complicated, however, by the
continuing strength of Australian-U.S. connections and
especially by expanding trade ties with several industrializing
neighbours in the Asia-Pacific region. These trends, taken in
the context of the preponderance of foreign interests in vital
parts of the manufacturing sector, may suggest a chronic
condition of economic dependence rather than colonialism in its
narrowest sense.
Transportation and telecommunications
Because of Australia’s great size and its relatively small
population, transport has always been costly and has absorbed an
unusually high proportion of the workforce. Moreover, the main
lines of road and rail transport were laid down in the second
half of the 19th century, when Australia was a collection of
separate colonies, each of which looked to Britain for most of
its trade. The transport system was designed to maintain this
trade, with roads and railways radiating from the main ports.
Little thought was given to internal transport between the
colonies. An unfortunate relic of this situation was that three
different railway gauges were maintained. It was not until 1970
that it became possible to go by train from Sydney on the east
coast to Perth in the west without changing trains. Air, rail,
and water transport services were owned by the government until
the 1980s, when a process of deregulation and privatization
began.
Australia is almost entirely devoid of internal waterways.
The Murray-Darling system supplied important arteries in the
19th century, when it was used to transport wool and other
produce from the country districts of New South Wales and
Victoria to the coast. Variable volumes in the rivers made such
shipping hazardous and unreliable, and it soon succumbed to
competition from the railways. In contrast, the great distances,
low topography, and predominance of suitable weather conditions
have made flying a comparatively safe and economical option.
Modern road networks perpetuate the historical pattern,
radiating from the ports and especially from the state capitals.
In the 1980s the federal government initiated a bicentennial
program that improved many of the main roads, but the heavily
used highways between the capitals required further attention to
bring them up to the necessary quality. Modern expressways and
throughways are becoming standard features in the larger
capitals.
Rail transport has played a crucial role in the Australian
economy, but most systems have suffered in competition with road
and air services. During the late 20th century, there were
widespread closures of rural and suburban rail lines. Freight
and passenger services alike were progressively reformed and
privatized through the 1990s, but a residual measure of
government ownership remained. In 1991 the National Rail
Corporation was established to take over all interstate traffic.
Port facilities were also privatized in the 1990s. The main
ports are located on the east coast, the most important being
Sydney (with nearby Botany Bay) for mixed freight. It is
followed by Port Hedland (specializing in bulk iron ore),
Melbourne, Fremantle, Newcastle, Brisbane, Hay Point, Port
Walcott, Gladstone, Port Kembla, and Port Adelaide. Australian
companies retain a virtual monopoly on coastal interstate trade,
but international shipping is nearly all foreign-controlled.
Australia is well connected to the global air network, with
several dozen international airlines operating regular services
to and from the country. Qantas (founded in 1920 in Queensland),
the national carrier, was privatized in the 1990s, as were the
major airports. The main national and international airport is
Sydney (Kingsford Smith), opened in 1920; Melbourne’s
Tullamarine airport, opened in 1970, is the second busiest.
There are many smaller airports serving other state capitals,
Canberra, provincial centres, resorts, and mining developments.
Both freight and passenger services have grown steadily.
Australia’s telecommunications sector was highly centralized
until the late 20th century. The national government took
control of services in 1901, overseen by the Postmaster
General’s Department. An Overseas Telecommunications Commission,
established in 1946, was given a monopoly in international
telecommunications. In 1975 telecommunications functions were
vested in Telecom Australia, which was given a monopoly for all
domestic services. In the early 1980s satellite services were
made the responsibility of AUSSAT, which was publicly owned and
which started commercial services in 1985. In 1989 the
government began implementing reforms, though the monopolies
were maintained; by 1991, however, limited competition was
introduced. Telestra (formed from Telecom Australia and the
Overseas Telecommunications Commission) was partially privatized
in 1996, and full competition in the sector ensued beginning in
1997. The industry is overseen by the minister for
communications, information technology, and the arts, who wields
significant regulatory authority, with the ability to impose
conditions on telecommunications providers, and the Australian
Communications Authority (ACA), established in 1999, which
licenses carriers and reports to the minister for
communications. With the opening of competition, by the early
21st century there were some 70 ACA-licensed providers.
Internet use climbed dramatically during the late 1990s in
Australia. Whereas less than one-tenth of the population had
Internet access in 1997, by the early 21st century more than
half of all people used the Internet regularly.
Government and society
Constitutional framework
Australia’s constitution, which can be considered crudely as
an amalgam of the constitutional forms of the United Kingdom and
the United States, was adopted in 1900 and entered into force in
1901. It established a constitutional monarchy, with the British
monarch, represented locally by a governor-general, the reigning
sovereign of Australia. Likewise, Australia adopted the British
parliamentary model, with the governments of the Commonwealth of
Australia and of the Australian states chosen by the members of
the parliaments. Similar to the United States, Australia is a
federation, and the duties of the federal government and the
division of powers between the Commonwealth and the states are
established in a written constitution. Under the constitution,
the federal government has responsibility for defense, foreign
policy, immigration, customs and excise, and the post office.
Those powers not given to the federal government in the
constitution (the “residual powers”) are left to the states,
which are responsible for justice, education, health, and
internal transport. In keeping with federalism, the constitution
can be altered only by majorities in both federal houses of the
legislature followed by a referendum that gains the consent of a
majority of all the electors and a majority in at least four of
the six states. Constitutional disputes are resolved by the High
Court of Australia.
Although the British monarch is Australia’s formal head of
state, the country is essentially independent. The sovereign’s
functions are almost entirely formal and decorative and, except
when the monarch is in Australia, are exercised by a
governor-general who resides in Canberra and by the state
governors. Although formally the governor-general and the
governors are appointed by the monarch, they are invariably
recommended by the Australian governments. By convention, the
prime minister (the leader of the party or coalition of parties
victorious in the general election) is the country’s head of
government.
Australia’s legislature is bicameral. The House of
Representatives (the lower house) comprises 150 members,
including two each from the Australian Capital Territory and
Northern Territory. Members are elected for three-year terms and
are responsible for choosing the government. The Senate consists
of 76 members; each state has 12 senators, and there are two
senators each from the Australian Capital Territory and Northern
Territory. Senators representing the states serve six-year
terms, while territorial senators serve three-year terms.
Government ministers are drawn from both the House and the
Senate.
Local government
There are hundreds of local government authorities in
Australia. The powers of local authorities are derived from
legislation adopted in each state and territory, and their
functions vary considerably. Typically, these functions include
waste and sanitary services, water, roads, land use, inspection
and licensing, maintaining public libraries and recreational
facilities, town planning, and the promotion of district
attractions and amenities. In some areas, particularly the
densely settled suburbs, its role includes the operation of
transport and energy systems. Local governments receive funding
from their respective states and collect taxes.
Justice
The Australian legal system is based on the common law of
England, and many laws are identical with those laid down in
acts of the British Parliament. The administration of the law is
largely in the hands of the states, each of which has a series
of courts culminating in a supreme court. Between them these
courts have comprehensive responsibilities extending to all
matters of state (and to most matters of federal) jurisdiction.
The High Court of Australia, the federal supreme court,
consists of a chief justice and six other justices, each of whom
is formally appointed by the governor-general. It exercises
general appellate jurisdiction over all other federal and state
courts and is given the special duty to decide disputes
involving the interpretation of the federal constitution and
acts of the federal parliament. The High Court also has original
jurisdiction on matters such as Australia’s obligations under
international treaties, issues affecting foreign
representatives, and disputes between states. The court is well
respected by legal authorities both inside and outside
Australia. The Federal Court of Australia combines the
jurisdictions formerly exercised by the Federal Court of
Bankruptcy and the Australian Industrial Court.
Political process
Elections
Australia has been a pioneer in election law. The secret
ballot, generally called the Australian ballot, was first
introduced in Victoria in 1855, and South Australia granted
women the right to vote in 1892. Women have also made dramatic
gains in representation, particularly since 1990. In modern
elections, all citizens at least 18 years of age are eligible to
vote. Voting itself is compulsory (with the exception of
elections to South Australia’s Legislative Council), and nearly
all citizens cast ballots in elections. A small fine can be
imposed for not voting. Aboriginals received the franchise in
1962, though voting did not become compulsory for them until
1984.
Electoral laws are quite unique. Australia utilizes both
preferential and proportional systems. At the federal (House of
Representatives) and state levels, members are elected in
single-member districts utilizing the alternative-vote
preference system, in which the voter numbers the candidates in
order of preference on the ballot paper. This enables minor
parties—even those unable to win any seats—an indirect influence
on policy formation, since the votes of losing candidates may be
reallocated in close contests. In elections to the federal
Senate and in Tasmania, the single-transferable-vote
proportional representation system is used. This method enables
voters to rank order their preferences and ensures that a party
is allocated seats in a manner somewhat proportional to its
share of the vote. The proportional method generally provides
minor parties with better representation in the federal Senate,
where Senators for each state are elected in 12-seat districts,
than in the House of Representatives.
Political parties
Since the Australian federation was formed, politics has
generally been a contest between the Australian Labor Party
(ALP), established in 1901, and a number of anti-Labor parties.
Notable among these are the Liberal Party of Australia (founded
in 1944 by Sir Robert Menzies), a generally conservative party
that favours the interests of private enterprise, and the
National Party (formerly the Country Party), which has received
support from farmers, ranchers, and other groups in the rural
constituencies. These two, in coalition, have formed the federal
government for most of the years since 1949. The
social-democratic ALP, linked closely with the country’s trade
unions, normally has retained the support of the working class;
though it has always had a left wing that espouses various
brands of socialism, it has generally favoured practical reforms
to socialist theories. The Australian Democrats, formed in 1977,
have drawn support away from the main parties, though in federal
elections it has only won representation in the Senate. The
environmentalist Australian Greens have also enjoyed some
success in federal Senate elections.
Constitutional issues
In 1975 the elected ALP government was dismissed by the
governor-general, calling into question the conventional
assumptions about the relationship between the elected
government and the British crown’s representative. The
complicity of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and of the
British secret service in this event was widely alleged—and in
some circles is still bitterly resented. Subsequently, there
have been intense debates and proposals regarding both the
country’s relationship with the United States and the scope of
powers and duties of the governor-general. An influential
minority supports the severing of all remaining formal ties with
the United Kingdom and favours Australia declaring itself a
republic, in which case the post of governor-general would be
abolished. In a 1999 referendum, however, voters favoured
retaining the constitutional monarchy.
Security
Australian defense policy emphasizes self-reliance within
the limits of national resources and in the context of a
supporting framework of international alliances and agreements.
Australia’s relationships with the countries of Southeast Asia
and the southwestern Pacific are of fundamental strategic
importance. Trilateral security arrangements with the United
States and New Zealand are also considered crucial.
Australia has a strong military tradition, extending from the
involvement of colonial troops in British engagements in Africa,
China, and New Zealand and especially from the mythologized
landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) on
the Gallipoli Peninsula during the Dardanelles campaign of World
War I. Since that time, Australian forces have served with
distinction in both World Wars I and II and in Malaysia, Korea,
Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and East Timor. The Australian
Defence Force has played a pivotal role in international
peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts in such places as
Zimbabwe, the Sinai, Afghanistan, Rwanda, and Somalia. Military
service is not compulsory.
The states manage police services, although there is a
federal Commonwealth police force that performs general security
duties in the Australian Capital Territory and is the principal
agency for the enforcement of federal laws.
Health and welfare
Australians enjoy the advantages of a modified welfare state
and compare favourably with the rest of the world in terms of
nutrition, living and working conditions, and general rates of
life expectancy. Cardiovascular disease and cancers account for
most deaths, but accidents, particularly road accidents,
represent the largest single category of health hazards during
the first half of life. Improvements in health care led to a
rise of more than 50 percent in average life expectancy during
the 20th century.
Health care provision is managed by the states and
territories, though broad national policies are framed by the
federal government through the Department of Health and Aging.
The national government also influences health service standards
through its financial arrangements with the states and
territories, through grants and benefits to individuals and
organizations, and by regulating health insurance. Health care
is also delivered by local governments, semivoluntary agencies,
and private enterprises. Public and private hospitals provide
good-quality care and support medical research that has
established an excellent international reputation. Private
health insurance covers about one-third of Australians.
A compulsory health insurance system was introduced in 1974
by an ALP government. As amended by subsequent conservative
administrations, the plan depends on a combination of direct
patient charges, voluntary insurance, and a national Medicare
program. The latter covers basic surgery visits and care in
public hospitals and is funded by a compulsory levy on taxable
incomes. Costs of drugs and other prescribed therapeutic
substances are government-subsidized, but most patients are
still required to pay for each prescription. Pensioners and the
chronically ill receive major concessions.
There is the familiar spectrum of disability and
rehabilitation pensions and family allowance supports, but
particular provision is made for the needs of remote
communities, especially for Aboriginal health and welfare. The
Royal Flying Doctor Service, established in 1928, provides
emergency medical care to people living and working in
Australia’s remote areas; the service operates, in part, through
subsidies by the federal, state, and territorial governments.
Some Outback Aboriginal communities continue to endure poor
living conditions that are reflected in a disease profile
including trachoma, leprosy, tuberculosis, and a range of
intestinal complaints, as well as diabetes. Successive
governments have attempted to repair the mistakes of earlier
generations that left the obdurate problems underlying this
situation—inferior nutrition and hygiene, unemployment, and
alcohol abuse—but there is much still left to be done.
Australia’s welfare services system sprang from a deep
concern for the general public. Traditionally egalitarian,
Australians have been quick to resent any claims to privilege
either by a class or by an individual. Australians place great
pride in the fact that, by and large, they have avoided the
worst extremes of capitalism. Some of this is delusive, but
certainly they have had good reason for not seeing themselves as
wage slaves. Innovative Labor governments and idealistic trade
unionists are proud of their accomplishments, and Australians
have historically maintained a comparatively small gap between
rich and poor, though this gap widened appreciably in the late
20th century.
Housing
Australia has a relatively new housing stock, particularly
as the construction industry enjoyed a boom during the 1990s.
About one-fifth of the stock has been built since 1990, and some
three-fifths since 1970. Although many properties need
significant repairs, the overall quality of the housing stock is
quite good. About seven-tenths of houses are owner-occupied, and
some four-fifths of Australians live in separate detached
houses. The size of the average home is fairly large, with some
three-fourths of residences having at least three bedrooms.
Housing costs are highest in Sydney and Canberra.
Education
Except for universities, the governments of the states and
territories manage all aspects of education. The federal
government is responsible for funding higher education and
provides supplementary funding to the states. The national
government also develops national education policies and
guidelines.
Basic literacy rates are high, and school attendance is
compulsory throughout Australia between the ages of 6 and 15
years (16 years in Tasmania). Most children begin primary school
at about 5 years of age. The final two years of schooling are
noncompulsory. About seven-eighths of students complete 11
years, and some three-fourths complete 12; the number of
students in the final year varies considerably by region, from
less than half in Northern Territory to nine-tenths in the
Australian Capital Territory.
Of students attending primary and secondary schools, most are
enrolled in government schools; nearly one-third attend private
institutions, mainly Roman Catholic schools. Secondary-school
curricula tend to focus on compulsory cores in traditional
subjects coupled with a generous list of options or electives.
Specialist services include educational, psychological, and
vocational counseling, assistance for Aboriginal children and
adults, programs offering English as a second language, courses
for gifted and disabled children, and programs to assist
children in remote areas.
Despite an emphasis on multiculturalism, foreign languages
traditionally have not been well represented, and several ethnic
groups have felt obliged to organize independent programs. Since
the late 1980s, the government has promoted the teaching of
Asian languages, especially Indonesian, Japanese, and Chinese;
it has also favoured applied science and technology and computer
literacy.
Higher education is provided in self-governing universities
and colleges and in institutions operating as part of the
state-controlled TAFE (Technical and Further Education) systems.
In 1988 the federal government launched an assertive
restructuring program to produce fewer, larger institutions,
with each institution offering a broader educational profile. To
facilitate the process, student fees were reimposed, and central
funding mechanisms were amended. However, progress was hampered
by an economic downturn in the early 1990s and by opposition
from academics. Most higher education institutions are funded by
the Commonwealth government through charges on Australian
students under a Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) and
from international and other fee-paying students. About
one-third of operating revenue comes from the HECS income and
other fees.
The original state-sponsored system guaranteed an even spread
of universities, and it is still somewhat unusual for
undergraduates to attend universities outside their home states.
Most of the older public universities were founded in the
colonial era, and all were established before World War I. In
chronological order of establishment, they are the Universities
of Sydney (1850), Melbourne (1853), Adelaide (1874), Tasmania
(in Hobart, 1890), Queensland (Brisbane, 1909), and Western
Australia (Perth, 1911). The Australian National University in
Canberra, a research-oriented institution, was established by
the federal government in 1946.
There are some 40 higher educational institutions with
operating grants from the Commonwealth Department of Education,
Training and Youth Affairs. There is also an Australian Film,
Television and Radio School, a National Institute of Dramatic
Art, and an Australian Defence Force Academy. Two private
universities, Bond University in Queensland and Notre Dame
University in Western Australia, also provide higher education
instruction. Except for the Australian National University and
the Australian Maritime College, universities operate under
their respective state and territory legislation and are
regarded as autonomous institutions.
Joseph Michael Powell
Ed.
Cultural life
Australia’s isolation as an island continent has done
much to shape—and inhibit—its culture. The Aboriginal peoples
developed their accommodation with the environment over a period
of at least 40,000 years, during which time they had little
contact with the outside world. When Britain settled New South
Wales as a penal colony in 1788, it did so partly because of the
continent’s remoteness. Australia’s convict heritage ensured
that European perceptions of the environment were often
influenced by the sense of exile and alienation. Yet, the
distance from Britain—and the isolation it imposed—strengthened
rather than weakened ties with it. The ambivalence of the
continuing colonial relationship, which only began to be
dismantled in the second half of the 20th century, has been a
central cultural preoccupation in Australia.
Until World War II, Australian culture was almost exclusively
Anglo-Celtic. The Aboriginal population was small and
persecuted, and the Commonwealth government’s exclusivist White
Australia policy helped to maintain the continent’s striking
cultural homogeneity. However, in the second half of the 20th
century, immigration rules were relaxed, and large influxes of
both immigrants and refugees from eastern Asia, the Middle East,
and various continental European countries made their way to
Australia, each leaving an indelible imprint on the continent’s
culture. Likewise, a revival of Aboriginal identity and positive
measures from the government to redress past wrongs, along with
a dramatic increase in the Aboriginal population, unleashed a
renaissance in the Aboriginal arts.
Daily life and social customs
Australians are proud of their heritage and progress—proud
of the fact that a nation of convicts and working-class folks
could build a modern egalitarian society in a rough and
inhospitable land. They typically disdain the pompous and
ostentatious, and they are often characterized as informal and
“laid back,” an impression fostered by the typical and now
internationally recognized greeting among “mates” and “sheilas”:
G’day (Good day). Their tastes in popular fashions and
entertainment differ little from those in Europe and North
America, and their humour is often characterized as sarcastic,
ironic, and self-deprecating.
Drinking and gambling have long been important aspects of
Australian popular culture, despite persistent government
attempts to regulate and limit them. Beer has traditionally been
the drink of choice, but the explosion of Australian wine
production has somewhat altered patterns. Since World War II,
laws generally have been liberalized in favour of more
“civilized” drinking and greater access to gambling, often
through government-owned agencies. However, whereas an older
generation turned to the pub for socializing, many of the young
are likely to seek out the disco or trendy bar or restaurant.
Australian cuisine is a product of international trends and
the contributions of its Aboriginal and immigrant communities.
Nevertheless, it has been heavily influenced by the country’s
Anglo-Celtic heritage, with the traditional British supper still
common. Barbecues (“the barbie”) are a quintessential Australian
pastime, and meat is ubiquitous. Traditional Aboriginal Outback
cuisine consists of such unique foods as kangaroo, wombat,
turtle, eel, emu, snake, and witchetty grubs (larvae of the
ghost moth). Vegemite, a salty, dark-brown yeast extract, has
long been a staple of the Australian diet.
The calendar is well endowed with public holidays, making the
long weekend an institution. ANZAC Day (April 25), marking the
Australian and New Zealand landing at Gallipoli in 1915, is
observed throughout Australia. Australia Day (January 26)
celebrates the 1788 arrival of the British First Fleet at Sydney
Cove and the proclaiming of Australia as a British possession.
The British monarch’s birthday is also celebrated in June
(October in Western Australia). In addition, the states have
several regional holidays.
Australia hosts many festivals, which often attract a wide
international audience. Particularly noteworthy arts events are
the Sydney Festival (January), which features concerts and
theatre and is accompanied by fireworks displays; the biennial
Adelaide Festival of Arts (March); and the Melbourne Festival
(October). Aboriginal arts festivals include the Barunga and
Cultural Sports Festival (June) and Stompin Ground (October),
held in Broome. Sydney’s vibrant Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras,
held annually in February, attracts hundreds of thousands of
revelers from around the world and is considered the world’s
largest celebration of its kind.
The arts
Literature
The original inhabitants of Australia used the oral
tradition, including song and dance with gestural storytelling,
to entertain, instruct, guide, and reveal spiritual truths, as
well as physical geography and the location of life-sustaining
resources. (See Australian literature.) This tradition,
disrupted and more or less destroyed by the arrival of the
British, was replaced by a literature that imitated European
models. In the mid-19th century, the Australian landscape,
flora, and fauna became the setting for many novels, and, soon
after, the colonial experience became a popular subject.
Although the bush, or Outback, loomed large in the national
consciousness, Australia has been a characteristically urban
society, even from its days as a penal colony. Writers as
diverse as Robin Boyd, Donald Horne, and Hugh Stretton, as well
as the satirist Barry Humphries (Dame Edna Everage), drew
attention to the significance of the suburban ethos in
Australian culture. Patrick White, Australia’s greatest novelist
and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, explored
the negative potentialities of a country in the process of
defining itself. Contemporary Australian writers such as Thomas
Keneally, Thea Astley, David Malouf, Peter Carey, Hal Porter,
Janette Turner Hospital, Elizabeth Jolley, and Tim Winton
continue to draw an international following.
Performing arts
Dance
Perhaps best-known among Australia’s dance troupes is the
world-renowned national company, the Australian Ballet (founded
1962). Like the state-sponsored Queensland Ballet (1960) and
West Australian Ballet (1953), it presents both classical and
contemporary programs, though unlike them it tours
internationally as well as regionally. Also noteworthy are
Australian Dance Theatre (1965; contemporary dance), Dance North
(1970), One Extra Dance Company (1976), Sydney Dance Company
(1979), TasDance (1981), Legs on the Wall (1984), and Buzz Dance
Theatre (1985). Bangarra Dance Theatre (1989), which blends the
ancient traditions and spirit of the first Australians with the
contemporary concerns of indigenous peoples, reached a large
international audience when it performed in the opening
ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Olympic Games.
Music
Like the other arts in Australia, music there has two
distinct traditions: those of the European colonists and those
of the indigenous peoples, whose singing and ritual playing of
the didjeridu (a drone instrument) reenact the ancient
traditions related to a mythological time called the Dreaming,
the Aboriginal conception of creation. Contemporary Aboriginal
bands (such as Warumpi Band and Yothu Yindi in the early 21st
century) incorporate elements of ancestral rituals. The
European-based musical tradition also maintains its vitality in
the contemporary scene. Australian opera fans can point to
talent ranging from the popular coloratura soprano Dame Nellie
Melba to the Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann’s 21st-century
production of Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème. Traditional symphony
orchestras abound, and Australian musicians and bands such as
Olivia Newton-John (born in England), the Bee Gees (who
emigrated with their family to Australia), AC/DC, and INXS have
wide international followings.
Theatre
For indigenous Australians, the corroboree comes closest to
a modern concept of theatre, but this participatory public
performance of songs and dances represents much more than
entertainment; it is a celebration of Aboriginal mythology and
spirituality. Groups such as Bangarra Dance Theatre bring a
modern sensibility to bear on the storytelling and ritual
essential to Aboriginal culture. European-based contemporary
Australian theatre is characterized by its emphasis on smaller,
regional theatre groups. Australia’s larger cities offer fringe
theatre as well as mainstream and alternative performances. Most
of these troupes are committed to presenting the work of
Australian playwrights, including Alexander Buzo, Jack Davis,
Tim Robertson, and David Williamson.
Visual arts
At the time that Europeans arrived, Australia’s Aboriginal
people had long-standing traditions in the visual arts,
including rock art (painted or carved rocks), bark painting,
sand sculpture, wood sculpture, and body decoration (usually
painting and scarification). Some Aboriginal artists
subsequently continued these traditions without alteration.
Beginning in the late 20th century, others, such as landscape
painter Albert Namatjira, successfully pursued Western styles.
The art market, art critics, and museums now fully acknowledge
the importance and lasting value of Aboriginal artistic
traditions. Many Aboriginal communities generate income by
selling handcrafted art to tourists and an increasingly eager
art market, an economic necessity that has sometimes been
troubling given the spiritual and ancestral importance the
artists attached to the work. Perhaps the most famous Aboriginal
handicraft is the boomerang, on which artists often paint or
carve designs that relate to indigenous legends or traditions; a
common theme is the Dreaming. They are sometimes used in
religious ceremonies and other times clapped together, or
pounded on the ground, as accompaniment to songs and chants.
Carved and painted emu eggs are also popular.
Throughout most of the 19th century, Australian artists
utilized European, particularly British, styles and themes. In
the 1880s and ’90s, however, Australian art began to forge its
own identity when Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Frederick
McCubbin, and others in the so-called Heidelberg school (named
for the town outside Melbourne where they often painted) began
to depict uniquely Australian subject matter, usually the
landscape, in their plein-air canvases. This focus on the
Australian landscape continued into the early 20th century; for
the most part, Australia was slow to embrace avant-garde
European movements such as Cubism or Surrealism. After World War
II, painters such as Sir Russell Drysdale and Sir Sidney Nolan
were drawn to the dramatic isolation of the Outback. Nolan
became known especially for his series of iconic works depicting
the notorious 19th-century bushranger (bandit) Ned Kelly.
Beginning in the 1960s, painter Fred Williams gained notice for
his dense, nearly abstract depictions of the Australian
landscape. While artists focused on Australian themes achieved
the most renown within Australia, other artists subsequently
followed international avant-garde trends—from Pop art to
conceptual art to postmodernism.
For the original inhabitants of Australia, architecture
traditionally was thought of more as sacred spaces and natural
places than as built structures. Aboriginal history and identity
was intimately connected to the land and to the ancestral beings
that formed the natural world (e.g., rocks and waterholes). For
them, mythology, landscape, geography, and ecology were
inextricably intertwined to form an organic, self-sustaining
whole.
Australian architecture similarly followed European, mostly
British, trends in the period after occupation. Throughout the
19th and early 20th centuries, the Georgian style became
popular, as did an opulent Classical style used for major public
buildings; these styles were interpreted literally, although
with adjustments such as verandahs that accounted for the
Australian climate. After some experimentation with Modernist
forms, a heightened interest in regional architecture developed
in the period following World War II. In particular, the Sydney
school of architects, including Peter Muller, Bruce Rickard, and
Richard Norman Johnson, created organic domestic architecture,
somewhat reminiscent of the work of American Frank Lloyd Wright,
that was in tune with the needs and natural features of
particular sites. In 1957 Danish architect Jørn Utzon won an
international competition to build the Sydney Opera House
(completed 1973). The result, an ingenious combination of
lightness and monumentality, is the most famous building in
Australia. Architects subsequently experimented with a variety
of late 20th-century styles such as postmodernism and
deconstruction, but no single style has become dominant.
Film
The exhibition and production of motion pictures arrived in
Australia at the beginning of the 20th century. The early
decades of Australian film were dominated by the development of
two genres: the bushranging film, as exemplified by The Story of
the Kelly Gang (1906), which depicted the life of Ned Kelly; and
the “backblocks” farce, a genre that satirized farming families
of the era. The most significant film of the silent era was The
Sentimental Bloke (1919), a tale of a working-class fellow in
search of romance that embraced the slang and culture of Sydney.
Film production from 1930 to 1950 was limited mostly to
documentaries developed under the guidance of the Commonwealth
Film Unit. After World War II feature film production
increasingly involved collaborations with British, American, and
other foreign companies, and films thought of as “Australian,”
such as On the Beach (1959) and The Sundowners (1960), were
simply shot in Australia.
Formed in 1970, the Australian Film Development Corporation
(AFDC) was a government-funded agency charged with helping the
film industry create commercial films for audiences at home and
abroad. The success of Stork (1971) gave birth to a rash of
“ocker” comedies, a genre that centred on boorish male
characters and their antisocial behaviours. The AFDC was
replaced by the Australian Film Commission (AFC) in 1975, and a
more culturally refined Australian film style emerged. Period
films such as Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975),
Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1980), and Bruce
Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980) were well received by critics
and audiences and brought international acclaim. The success of
George Miller’s Mad Max (1979) and The Road Warrior (1981), both
violent road movies set in the near future, made an
international star of Mel Gibson and forced the AFC to abandon
the more staid historical films it seemed to prefer. In 1986 the
light comedy Crocodile Dundee, starring popular comedian Paul
Hogan as a bushranger displaced in New York City, also became a
major worldwide hit. Australian cinema continued to mature and
produced such notable films as Proof (1991), Muriel’s Wedding
(1994), Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Shine (1996), and
Moulin Rouge (2001). A second wave of actors and directors from
the Australian filmmaking industry were making Hollywood
pictures at the turn of the 21st century, most notably Nicole
Kidman (born in Hawaii, U.S.), Russell Crowe (born in New
Zealand), Cate Blanchett, and Baz Luhrmann.
Cultural institutions
Australian culture, particularly in urban areas, has
benefited from state subsidies for the arts, enabling
sophisticated cultural facilities to be developed. Most capital
cities have acquired new art galleries and museums—or have
expanded existing ones—and built performing arts centres, of
which the Sydney Opera House is the best-known. The Australia
Council, which presides over the funding of the arts, has played
a vital role in cultivating Australian talent in literature and
the visual and performing arts. It and equivalent agencies of
the state governments help support opera and dance companies,
some of which have enjoyed success abroad. The government-funded
Australian Broadcasting Corporation is also an important patron
of the arts, particularly of music. It supports the principal
symphony orchestra in each state and gives strong encouragement
to composers. In Sydney many new facilities were also built (and
established ones refurbished) during the 1990s to prepare for
the 2000 Summer Olympics.
Australia enjoys a wealth of excellent libraries and museums.
The Australia Museum (founded 1827), the country’s first, is
renowned for its exhibits of natural history and cultural
artifacts. Sydney is home to the Museum of Contemporary Art and
the Australian National Maritime Museum (opened 1991). The
Melbourne Museum, which opened in 2000, is the largest in the
Southern Hemisphere and houses a diverse range of cultural and
scientific exhibits. The National Museum of Australia in
Canberra (opened 2001) maintains an extensive collection of
exhibits exploring the history of the land and peoples of the
country. The National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery,
the National Library, and the National Archives are also based
in Canberra. The Outback is celebrated at the Australian
Stockman’s Hall of Fame, located in western Queensland.
Sports and recreation
Sports play an integral role in the lives of many
Australians, and the temperate climate of the most populated
areas has always encouraged outdoor activities. Organized
sports, including tennis, swimming, golf, basketball, and horse
racing, flourish throughout the country. The major summer sport,
however, is cricket. Introduced by a British ship’s crew,
cricket arrived in Australia in 1803, and play among cricket
clubs began in the mid-1820s. The country has produced a wealth
of great cricketers, including the brilliant Don Bradman. The
national team captured World Cup titles in 1987 and 1999.
Head and shoulders above all other sports in popularity is
football, played in various forms. Australian rules football is
approached with near-religious fervour. Originating in Melbourne
in 1858 and somewhat resembling Gaelic football, Australian
rules football was confined largely to the southern states of
Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania until
1990, when it became a truly national game with the formation of
the Australian Football League. The sport has produced some of
Australia’s most legendary athletes, including Roy Cazaly, Jack
Dyer, and Leigh Matthews. Rugby, both union and league
varieties, also enjoys wide popularity in Australia. The
national team, known as the Wallabies, won the Rugby Union World
Cup in 1991 and 1999 and has featured such greats as David
Campese and John Eales.
Australia boasts a particularly rich tennis tradition.
Melbourne hosts the annual Australian Open, one of professional
tennis’s major world championships. Australian players in the
1960s and ’70s dominated the international tennis scene, many
winning grand slam titles; among them are Rod Laver, Ken
Rosewall, John Newcombe, Margaret Court, and Evonne Goolagong
Cawley, whose Aboriginal descent made her accomplishments still
more noteworthy. In professional golf Australian Greg Norman was
one of the world’s top players in the 1980s and ’90s, winning
two British Open titles (1986, 1993). Another major sport is
horse racing; the most prestigious event of the year is the
Melbourne Cup, held on the first Tuesday of each November and
televised worldwide.
Australia has competed in every modern Summer Olympics,
winning its first two medals in 1896, five years before it even
existed as a country; it first participated in the Winter Games
in 1936. The 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne were the first
games held in the Southern Hemisphere and featured Australian
sprinter Betty Cuthbert and an Australian swimming team led by
Murray Rose and Dawn Fraser. The 2000 Games, held in Sydney,
featured memorable performances by Aboriginal runner Cathy
Freeman and by swimmer Ian Thorpe.
Media and publishing
Newspaper readership in Australia is high, with daily and
weekly newspapers enjoying wide circulation. Particularly
influential are the daily newspapers The Australian, The Daily
Telegraph, and The Sydney Morning Herald (all published in New
South Wales); the Herald Sun and The Age (Victoria); The
Advertiser (South Australia); and The West Australian (West
Australia). Newspaper ownership is highly concentrated, with
only a handful of media groups controlling the vast majority of
the country’s newspapers. Australia also has a lively publishing
scene, though most publishing houses, apart from the university
presses, are foreign owned.
The Australian Broadcasting Authority is responsible for
regulating television and radio. There are two primary public
broadcasters, both of which are funded by but independent from
the national government: the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, which operates an extensive television and radio
network; and the Special Broadcasting Service, which provides
radio and television broadcasts to Australia’s various ethnic
communities and offers sophisticated international coverage.
There are also dozens of commercial radio and television
broadcasters. Australia’s media is served by the Australian
Associated Press news agency. The Australian press is free from
most forms of government censorship.
John David Rickard
Ed.
History
This article discusses the history of Australia from the
arrival of European explorers in the 16th century to the
present. For a more detailed discussion of native Aboriginal
culture, see Australian Aboriginal.
Australia to 1900
Early exploration and colonization
Early contacts and approaches
Prior to documented history, travelers from Asia may have
reached Australia. China’s control of South Asian waters could
have extended to a landing in Australia in the early 15th
century. Likewise, Muslim voyagers who visited and settled in
Southeast Asia came within 300 miles (480 km) of Australia, and
adventure, wind, or current might have carried some individuals
the extra distance. Both Arab and Chinese documents tell of a
southern land, but with such inaccuracy that they scarcely
clarify the argument. Makassarese seamen certainly fished off
Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory, from the late 18th
century and may have done so for generations.
The Portuguese
The quest for wealth and knowledge might logically have
pulled the Portuguese to Australian shores; the assumption has
some evidential support, including a reference indicating that
Melville Island, off the northern coast, supplied slaves.
Certainly the Portuguese debated the issue of a terra australis
incognita (Latin: “unknown southern land”)—an issue in European
thought in ancient times and revived from the 12th century
onward. The so-called Dieppe maps present a landmass, “Java la
Grande,” that some scholarship (gaining strength in the early
21st century) has long seen as evidence of a Portuguese
discovery of the Australian landmass, 1528 being one likely
year.
The Spanish
Viceroys of Spain’s American empire regularly sought new
lands. One such expedition, from Peru in 1567, commanded by
Álvaro de Mendaña, discovered the Solomon Islands. Excited by
finding gold, Mendaña hoped that he had found the great southern
land and that Spain would colonize there. In 1595 Mendaña sailed
again but failed to rediscover the Solomons. One of his officers
was Pedro Fernández de Quirós, a man of the Counter-Reformation
who wanted Roman Catholicism to prevail in the southland, the
existence of which he was certain. Quirós won the backing of
King Philip III for an expedition under his own command. It left
Callao, Peru, in December 1605 and reached the New Hebrides.
Quirós named the island group Australia del Espirítu Santo, and
he celebrated with elaborate ritual. He (and some later Roman
Catholic historians) saw this as the discovery of the southern
land. But Quirós’s exultation was brief; troubles forced his
return to Latin America. The other ship of the expedition, under
Luis de Torres, went on to sail through the Torres Strait but
almost certainly failed to sight Australia; and all Quirós’s
fervour failed to persuade Spanish officialdom to mount another
expedition.
Oceanic exploration
The Dutch
Late in 1605 Willem Jansz of Amsterdam sailed from Bantam in
the Dutch East Indies in search of New Guinea. He reached the
Torres Strait a few weeks before Torres and named what was later
to prove part of the Australian coast—Cape Keer-Weer, on the
western side of Cape York Peninsula. More significantly, from
1611 some Dutch ships sailing from the Cape of Good Hope to Java
inevitably carried too far east and touched Australia: the first
and most famous was Dirck Hartog’s Eendracht, from which men
landed and left a memorial at Shark Bay, Western Australia,
October 25–27, 1616. Pieter Nuyts explored almost 1,000 miles of
the southern coast in 1626–27, and other Dutchmen added to
knowledge of the north and west.
Most important of all was the work of Abel Tasman, who won
such respect as a seaman in the Dutch East Indies that in 1642
Governor-General Anthony van Diemen of the Indies commissioned
him to explore southward. In November–December, having made a
great circuit of the seas, Tasman sighted the west coast and
anchored off the southeast coast of what he called Van Diemen’s
Land (Tasmania). He then explored the island of New Zealand
before returning to Batavia, on Java. A second expedition of
1644 contributed to knowledge of Australia’s northern coast; the
Dutch named the new landmass New Holland.
The British
The Netherlands spent little more effort in exploration, and
the other great Protestant power in Europe, England, took over
the role. In 1688 the English buccaneer William Dampier relaxed
on New Holland’s northwestern coast. On returning to England, he
published his Voyages and persuaded the Admiralty to back
another venture. He traversed the western coast for 1,000 miles
(1699–1700) and reported more fully than any previous explorer,
but he did so in terms so critical of the land and its people
that another hiatus resulted.
The middle decades of the 18th century saw much writing about
the curiosities and possible commercial value of the southern
seas and terra australis incognita. This was not restricted to
Great Britain, but it had especial vigour there. The British
government showed its interest by backing several voyages. Hopes
flourished for a mighty empire of commerce in the eastern seas.
This was the background for the three voyages of Captain
James Cook on behalf of the British Admiralty. The first, that
of the HMS Endeavour, left England in August 1768 and had its
climax on April 20, 1770, when a crewman sighted southeastern
Australia. Cook landed several times, most notably at Botany Bay
and at Possession Island in the north, where on August 23 he
claimed the land, naming it New South Wales. Cook’s later
voyages (1772–75, 1776–79) were to other areas in the Pacific,
but they were both symptom and cause of strengthening British
interest in the eastern seas.
Later explorations
Cook’s voyages led to settlement but did not complete the
exploration of the Australian coasts. Marion Dufresne of France
skirted Tasmania in 1772, seeing more than had Tasman. The count
de La Pérouse, another French explorer, made no actual
discoveries in Australia but visited Botany Bay early in 1788.
In 1791 the British navigator George Vancouver traversed and
described the southern shores discovered by Pieter Nuyts years
before. The French explorer Joseph-Antoine Raymond de Bruni,
chevalier d’Entrecasteaux, also did significant work, especially
in southern Tasmania.
Two Britons—George Bass, a naval surgeon, and Matthew
Flinders, a naval officer—were the most famous postsettlement
explorers. Together they entered some harbours on the coast near
Botany Bay in 1795 and 1796. Bass ventured farther south in
1797–98, pushing around Cape Everard to Western Port. Flinders
was in that region early in 1798, charting the Furneaux Islands.
Late that year Flinders and Bass circumnavigated Tasmania in the
Norfolk, establishing that it was an island and making further
discoveries. Several other navigators, including merchantmen,
filled out knowledge of the Bass Strait area; most notable was
the discovery of Port Phillip in 1802.
Meanwhile Flinders had returned home and in 1801 was
appointed to command an expedition that would circumnavigate
Australia and virtually complete the charting of the continent.
Over the next three years Flinders proved equal to this task.
Above all, he left no doubt that the Australian continent was a
single landmass. Appropriately, Flinders urged that the name
Australia replace New Holland, and this change received official
backing from 1817.
France sponsored an expedition, similar in intent to
Flinders’s, at the same time. Under Nicolas Baudin, it gave
French names to many features (including “Terre Napoléon” for
the southern coast) and gathered much information but did little
new exploration. It was on the northern coast, from Arnhem Land
to Cape York Peninsula, that more exploration was needed. Two
Admiralty expeditions—under Phillip Parker King (1817–22) and
John Clements Wickham (1838–39)—filled this gap.
European settlement
The British government determined on settling New South
Wales in 1786, and colonization began early in 1788. The motives
for this move have become a matter of some controversy. The
traditional view is that Britain thereby sought to relieve the
pressure upon its prisons—a pressure intensified by the loss of
its American colonies, which until that time had accepted
transported felons. This view is supported by the fact that
convicts went to the settlement from the outset and that
official statements put this first among the colony’s intended
purposes. But some historians have argued that this glossed a
scheme to provide a bastion for British sea power in the eastern
seas. Some have seen a purely strategic purpose in settlement,
but others have postulated an intent to use the colony as a
springboard for economic exploitation of the area. It is very
likely that the government had some interest in all these
factors.
Whatever the deeper motivation, plans went ahead, with Lord
Sydney (Thomas Townshend), secretary of state for home affairs,
as the guiding authority. Arthur Phillip was commander of the
expedition; he was to take possession of the whole territory
from Cape York to Tasmania, westward as far as 135° and eastward
to include adjacent islands. Phillip’s power was to be near
absolute within his domain. The British government planned to
develop the region’s economy by employing convict labour on
government farms, while former convicts would subsist on their
own small plots.
The First Fleet sailed on May 13, 1787, with 11 vessels,
including 6 transports, aboard which were about 730 convicts
(570 men and 160 women). More than 250 free persons accompanied
the convicts, chiefly marines of various rank. The fleet reached
Botany Bay on January 19–20, 1788. Crisis threatened at once.
The Botany Bay area had poor soil and little water, and the
harbour itself was inferior. Phillip therefore sailed northward
on January 21 and entered a superb harbour, Port Jackson, which
Cook had marked but not explored. He moved the fleet there; the
flag was hoisted on January 26 and the formalities of government
begun on February 7. Sydney Cove, the focus of settlement, was
deep within Port Jackson, on the southern side; around it was to
grow the city of Sydney.
Phillip at once established an outstation at Norfolk Island.
Its history was to be checkered; settlement was abandoned in
1813 and revived in 1825 to provide a jail for convicts who
misbehaved in Australia. (It served a new purpose from 1856 as a
home for the descendants of the mutineers of the HMS Bounty, by
then too numerous for Pitcairn Island.)
Phillip remained as governor until December 1792, seeing New
South Wales through its darkest days. The land was indifferent,
disease and pests abounded, few convicts proved able labourers,
and the Aboriginals were often hostile. The nadir came in autumn
1790 as supplies shrank; the arrival of a second fleet brought
hundreds of sickly convicts but also the means of survival.
An authoritarian society
While much change proceeded throughout this period,
authoritarian and hierarchical elements remained strong. The
reception of convicts continued and was a major fact in social
and economic life. Entrepreneurs strove hard but did not yet
develop a staple industry. Farmers and graziers began to fill
out an arc 150–200 miles around Sydney; this area was designated
as the Nineteen Counties in 1829, and settlement beyond that
limit was discouraged.
Following the discovery of Bass Strait, and in order to
secure southern waterways, new settlements were established in
the south. From Britain, David Collins sailed in 1803 to settle
Port Phillip. His sojourn there was unhappy, and in mid 1804 he
moved to the Derwent River in southern Tasmania, already settled
(September 1803) by a group from Sydney under John Bowen.
Collins resettled the amalgamated parties at Hobart. In November
1804 William Paterson founded a settlement in northern Tasmania,
the precursor of Launceston. These settlements united in 1812;
they were still under supervision from Sydney, although only
nominally from 1825. Among penal outstations settled from Sydney
were those at Newcastle (1804) and Moreton Bay (1824), the
forerunner of Brisbane. Britain extended its possession over the
whole of the continent in the 1820s, again fearing French (or
even American) intervention. The western boundary of the
governor’s commission shifted to 129° in 1825 to include
Bathurst and Melville islands in the far north, and there was a
small settlement in this region (1824–29). At Western Port, east
of Port Phillip, another settlement was made (1826–27), while in
January 1827 Edmund Lockyer began permanent settlement at
Albany, Western Australia. His instructions stated that Britain
now claimed all Australia.
As remarked above, the constitutional structure was
authoritarian. The governors were all service officers. There
were no representative institutions, but Acts introduced in 1823
and 1828 provided for executive and legislative councils, with
the major officers of government serving in both and an equal
number of private individuals, chosen by nomination, in the
latter. More significant at this stage was the articulation of a
judicial system, especially the establishment of supreme courts
(New South Wales, 1814; Tasmania, 1824); normal trial by jury
did not obtain.
Within this rigid structure, sociopolitical factions
developed. Most important in the early years was the assertion
of the New South Wales Corps, stationed at Sydney from 1791.
Some officers of the corps sought power and profit with an
avidity that led to clash after clash with the early governors.
This culminated in the events of January 26, 1808, when John
Macarthur, a former officer of the corps, led an uprising known
as the Rum Rebellion that deposed Governor William Bligh (served
1806–08), earlier famous for the Bounty mutiny. In due course
the imperial government reacted and recalled the corps; but
Governor Lachlan Macquarie (served 1810–21) also clashed with
the colony’s Exclusives—former officers and a handful of wealthy
free immigrants. Macquarie associated himself with the
Emancipist faction, a group that argued in favour of former
convicts having a particular claim upon government and the
colony’s resources.
Macquarie’s attitude disturbed the imperial government. After
an official inquiry (1819–21) by John Thomas Bigge, the
government encouraged the migration of men of some standing and
wealth to both New South Wales and Tasmania. Such men received
substantial grants of land and appeared to be the natural
leaders of social and economic development. The Emancipists
continued to be strong, however, especially through the
leadership of William Charles Wentworth (himself the son of a
convict woman), whose newspaper, the Australian (founded 1824),
was the spearhead of opposition, especially to Governor Ralph
Darling (served 1825–31). In Tasmania factions never formed so
clearly, but there, also, the press led criticism of the
government.
By 1830 about 58,000 convicts, including almost 50,000 men,
had come to Australia (the rate increasing rapidly after 1815).
Many were urban thieves. There were a few political prisoners,
while a substantial proportion of the Irish convicts (at least a
third of the total) had become offenders through sociopolitical
unrest. In Australia the convicts were either employed by the
government or “assigned” to private employers. In general,
conditions were not especially harsh or repressive, and “tickets
of leave” and pardons provided relatively quick routes to
freedom. Assignment to the new settlers of the 1820s, however,
often had an element of slavery, and many convicts must have
suffered grief and despair in their exile. Most convicts
committed some further misdeeds, although only about one-tenth
were charged with serious offenses. Those found guilty went to
secondary penal stations, the (sometimes exaggerated) horror
spots of Australian history—Macquarie Harbour, Newcastle, and
Moreton Bay in this period and, later, Norfolk Island and Port
Arthur. The convicts gave Australia a Lumpenproletariat; but
success stories were common enough, and many convicts led decent
lives. There were only a few large-scale protests; the most
remarkable was the Castle Hill Rising among Irish convicts
outside Sydney in March 1804. Altogether, the impact of such a
large convict population was less grim and ugly than might be
expected.
The maintenance of convicts was essentially the economic
resource of the colony for many years; this function entailed
very considerable expenditure by the British government. Wealth
was won by supplying government stores with food and grain or by
controlling internal trade—or both. The officers of the New
South Wales Corps were skilled in filling these roles, although
civil officers, private settlers, former convicts, and even
serving convicts all had their own means of doing business, and
the amount of petty commercial activity was large. Farming was
pursued on a widely ranging scale. John Macarthur was the most
notable of those who early believed that wool growing would be a
major economic resource; he himself received a substantial land
grant in 1805 to pursue this hope, and he persuaded Bigge of its
validity. By 1830 these hopes were still some distance from
fulfillment: sheep long returned more value from their meat than
from their wool, and the breeding of wooled sheep suitable to
the environment took time. The 1820s saw that process
quickening, with relatively greater strength in Tasmania.
Sealing and whaling also proved profitable, although the richest
seal fields (especially in Bass Strait) were soon thinned; and
not until the 1820s did colonists have the wealth to engage
seriously in whaling, although British and Americans early used
Australian ports for this purpose. Maritime adventure led early
colonists to make contact with Pacific islands, most importantly
Tahiti.
The period saw some notable exploration by land. From early
days in Sydney settlers sought a way over the mountains, some
50–100 miles west. The task was accomplished in 1813; the young
Wentworth led the party. A surveyor, George William Evans,
followed their route to Bathurst (founded 1815) and reported
rich pastoral country. John Oxley further mapped the inland
plains and rivers, especially the Lachlan and Macquarie, and
also explored the southern coasts of the future Queensland
(1823), while Allan Cunningham was the great pioneer of that
state’s hinterland (1827). Meanwhile, in 1824–25, Hamilton Hume
and William Hovell went overland southward to the western shore
of Port Phillip. Charles Sturt in 1828–30 won still greater fame
by tracing the Murray-Murrumbidgee-Darling river system down to
the Murray’s mouth.
The writings of explorers and pioneers were Australia’s first
contributions to literary culture. While catering to the
European appetite for natural history, they sometimes achieved
literary grace. Pictorial illustrations of the new land, some by
convicts, also dated from the earliest years. David Collins’s An
Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (1798) and
Wentworth’s Description of New South Wales (1817) were literate,
informed, and impressive. Wentworth showed skill as a versifier,
too, especially in his Australasia (1823). Newspapers were
founded as early as 1803, and they contributed to cultural as
well as political history. Outstanding was the architecture of
Francis Greenway, a former convict, who, under Macquarie’s
patronage, designed churches and public buildings that remain
among the most beautiful in Australia.
A major shift: 1830–60
The three decades between 1830 and 1860 saw rapid change.
The impact was most evident in politics and the economy, but
culture was no less affected. Not until 1825 did the European
population pass 50,000; in 1851 it was about 450,000, and by
1861 it had reached 1,150,000.
Settlement
Four of Australia’s six states were formed between 1829 and
1859. A British naval captain, James Stirling, examined the Swan
River in 1827 and interested English capitalist-adventurers in
colonization. Two years later he returned to the Swan as
governor of the new colony of Western Australia. The Colonial
Office discouraged schemes for massive proprietorial grants;
still the idea persisted, with Thomas Peel—kinsman of the future
prime minister Sir Robert Peel—investing heavily. But
colonization was grim work in a hot, dry land, with the
government reluctant to expend resources. Western Australia’s
story for decades was survival, not success.
Yet enthusiasm quickly generated around proposals to
establish a colony in South Australia, inspired by the British
social reformer Edward Gibbon Wakefield. He argued that, if land
were sold at a “sufficient” price, its owners would be forced to
maximize its value by cultivation, while labourers would have to
lend their energies to that task before being able to become
landowners themselves. Wakefield’s ideas appealed to the liberal
intelligentsia and to dissenting groups in England. Both of
these elements backed nascent South Australia. The first
colonists arrived in 1836, and Adelaide was settled the
following year. The colony experienced many hardships, but
lasting significance resulted from its founders’ emphasis on
family migration, equality of creeds, and free market forces in
land and labour.
The northern and southern portions of New South Wales formed
separate colonies. Settlement into the Port Phillip district in
the south proceeded very quickly, starting from the mid 1830s,
with colonists coming both from north of the Murray and from
Tasmania. The settlement of Melbourne began in 1835, and the
place boomed immediately. Throughout the 1840s there were calls
for constitutional independence; this was granted in 1851, at
which time the Port Phillip District took the name Victoria. The
Moreton Bay District in the north was never quite so buoyant,
and the creation of Queensland had to wait until 1859.
Short-lived settlements included Port Essington (1838–49) and
Gladstone (1847).
Politics
All the colonies except Western Australia gained responsible
self-government. New South Wales led the way when an imperial
act of 1842 created a two-thirds elective legislature. The
Australian Colonies Government Act (1850) extended this
situation to Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania. The act
made allowance for further revision of the colonial
constitutions, and in 1855–56 this took effect in the four
colonies, Tasmania then abandoning the name Van Diemen’s Land.
Queensland followed after its separation from New South Wales.
All had bicameral legislatures, with ministers responsible to
the lower houses, which by 1860, except in Tasmania, were
elected on a near-democratic basis (all adult non-Aboriginal men
were eligible to vote). In Victoria and South Australia the
secret ballot was introduced in 1856 (see Australian ballot).
While the imperial power thus responded to colonial cries for
self-rule, on the way there were some tense moments. Virtually
all colonists abhorred paying taxes for imperial purposes,
including the costs of maintaining convicts locally; a good many
disliked convictism altogether; most disputed the imperial right
to dictate land policy; and many, especially in South Australia,
disapproved of the imperial government’s directing that aid be
given to religious denominations.
From the outset of the period, the imperial government
fostered a freer market in land and labour throughout the
colonies, not merely in South Australia. Thus, grants of land
ceased in 1831, replaced by sale. Attempts to create a
pastoral-lease system caused much friction, with colonists
generally hostile to any demand for payment. In New South Wales
in 1844, new regulations even prompted talk of rebellion.
With regard to labour, colonists agreed with imperial
encouragement of free migration, but friction arose over the
convicts. British opinion in the 1830s became increasingly
critical of the assignment of convicts to private employers as
smacking of slavery; it was abolished in 1840, and with it
transportation of convicts to the mainland virtually ceased,
although increased numbers were sent to Tasmania. The end of
assignment removed the chief virtue of transportation, from the
colonists’ viewpoint, and so contributed to a vigorous movement
against its continuation. The British government ended
transportation to eastern Australia in 1852. In Western
Australia transportation began in 1850, at the colonists’
behest, and continued until 1868. Altogether some 151,000
convicts were sent to eastern Australia and nearly 10,000 to
Western Australia.
In the early 1850s the most dramatic political problem arose
from the gold rushes. Diggers (miners) resented tax imposition
and the absence of fully representative institutions. Discontent
reached a peak at Ballarat, Victoria, and in December 1854, at
the Eureka Stockade, troops and diggers clashed, and some were
killed. The episode is the most famous of the few occasions in
Australia’s history involving violence among Europeans.
Common suspicion of the imperial authority modified, but did
not obliterate, internal tension among the colonists. Divisions
of ideology and interest were quite strong, especially in
Sydney, where a populist radicalism criticized men of wealth,
notably the big landholders. The coming of self-government
marked a leftward (although far from revolutionary) shift in the
internal power balance.
The economy
The three decades leading to 1860 saw booms of the two
bonanzas of Australian economic growth—wool and minerals.
Only then did men, money, markets, and land availability
interact to confirm that Australia was remarkably suited for
growing fine wool. Occupation of Port Phillip was the most vital
part of a surge that carried sheep raising 200 miles and farther
in an arc from beyond Adelaide in the south, north, and east to
beyond Brisbane. The “squatter” pastoralist became an archetype
of Australian history. Although it suffered some depression in
the early 1840s, the industry kept growing, and the whole
eastern mainland benefited as a result.
The first significant mineral discovery was that of copper in
South Australia (1842 and 1845). The discovery had the effect,
to be repeated time and again, of suddenly redeeming an
Australian region from stagnation. Much more remarkable,
however, were a publicized series of gold discoveries made from
1851 onward, first in east-central New South Wales and then
throughout Victoria. As a result Australia became a land of
golden attraction. The Victorian economy benefited from the
flood of men and money, although the smaller colonies suffered.
The Eureka Stockade incident not withstanding, the diggers
proved more rowdy than revolutionary.
Culture
Both governments and citizens paid considerable heed to
improvement of soul and mind. From the mid 1830s, generous aid
helped all Christian churches to expand. The Church of England
had the highest nominal allegiance, but in the eastern mainland
colonies Roman Catholicism was notably strong; Methodism had
vigorous advocates throughout; Congregationalism and other forms
of dissent dominated in South Australia; and Presbyterianism had
its chief strength in Victoria. Most churches attended to
education, especially the provision of superior schools, while
the state struggled to provide a primary system. The
Universities of Sydney and Melbourne were founded in 1850 and
1853, respectively. Mechanics’ institutes, museums, and
botanical gardens also were built.
Architects created much beauty in early Australia. Artists
were active; drama and music developed in all towns. At the same
time, a distinctive Australian literature began to develop. The
first Australian novel, Quintus Servinton (1830–31), was written
by a convict, Henry Savery; Henry Kingsley’s Geoffrey Hamlyn
(1859) is often judged the first major Australian novel. John
West’s History of Tasmania (1852) was a work of remarkable scope
and insight.
Various forms of science had their investigators, but land
exploration remained the richest field of discovery. Sir Thomas
Livingstone Mitchell confirmed Sturt’s work on the river systems
and first opened the way from New South Wales to the rich lands
of western Victoria (1836). The Western Australian coastal
regions were mapped by George Grey (1837–40) and by Edward John
Eyre, who went overland from Adelaide to Albany (1840). Eyre and
Sturt both vainly attempted to reach mid continent from
Adelaide; this was at last achieved in April 1860 by John
McDouall Stuart, who in 1862 went still farther, to Darwin.
Meanwhile, the central north and the northeast had been
penetrated from Sydney; the most famous explorer was Ludwig
Leichhardt, who led two successful expeditions (1844, 1846–47)
before disappearing in an attempt to traverse from the Darling
Downs to Perth. An equal and more celebrated tragedy ended the
expedition of Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills, who
crossed from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1860–61 but
starved to death on the return. Later explorations of Western
Australia in the 1870s added the names of John Forrest and
Ernest Giles to the pantheon of explorer-heroes.
The Aboriginals
Economic development by Europeans had as its necessary
complement the ravaging of Aboriginal life. Especially if it is
accepted that the pre-1788 native population exceeded one
million and that living standards were high, the subsequent
history must all the less appear as one of colonial “growth” and
all the more as one of forced transfer (or theft) of wealth from
Aboriginal to European.
Some tension always threatened as the two groups met, but
often the Aboriginals were accommodating and responsive. A kind
of coexistence might have evolved had not European pastoralism
generated an inexorable demand for land. Aboriginals responded
with guerrilla war, often fiercely and tenaciously: ultimately
more than 20,000 Aboriginals and almost 2,000 Europeans are
estimated to have died as a consequence. Disease and alienation,
often allied with massive physical displacement, wreaked further
havoc.
Some European consciences were troubled—most notably those of
British Evangelicals in the 1830s. There had always been a
stream of humanitarian and Christian concern for the Aboriginals
in European Australia. In Tasmania only a very few persons of
full Tasmanian Aboriginal descent survived by 1860, and they
were the last. The “protectorates” (reserved areas) that
imperial policy had established in several mainland colonies
served little purpose.
Several small democracies: 1860–1900
Between 1860 and 1900 the colonies had little formal
relation with each other; instead they concentrated their
attention inward on their capitals. The separate histories of
each state therefore have particular importance for this period.
Withal, patterns were similar, and federation at length came
about in 1901.
Politics
Democracy was largely established, save that the upper
houses remained elitist in franchise and membership. Governments
often had short and inchoate lives, but the constitutions
survived. Political groupings were extremely intricate, often
personal or power-seeking in origin, but allowing some
expression for liberal or conservative ideology.
The liberals made the colonies quite advanced in matters of
social reform, if not the average man’s paradise that some glib
publicists depicted. Breaking up the large “squatter” estates
and replacing them with yeoman farming was a constant concern,
meeting many difficulties yet achieving some effect where market
and environment allowed. Reformers put much faith in education
and strove toward providing adequate primary schooling for all.
“Free, secular, and compulsory” was a slogan and roughly the
final result; this entailed hot controversy with the Roman
Catholic church, which scorned the “godless” schools and made
enormous efforts to provide its own. Other forms of state aid to
religion tapered away. Factory legislation and rudimentary
social services developed; however, restriction of nonwhite,
especially Chinese, immigration was enforced, for Europeans
feared these labourers would reduce living standards, but the
restriction was also a matter of sheer racism.
The economy
Overall the economy prospered, with the European population
rising to 3,370,000 in 1901. Wool and metals continued as the
great export income earners. Pastoralism flourished, especially
up to the mid 1870s; despite land legislation, this was the
heyday of the squatter “aristocracy.” Expansion of sheep and
cattle growing into the more distant hinterland continued the
heroic-pioneer theme of earlier years. Railway construction
aided rural industry and proceeded remarkably quickly, notably
in the 1880s: between 1875 and 1891 the mileage rose from 1,600
miles to above 10,000 and reached as far as 500 miles inland.
Most of the required capital was raised overseas on behalf of
governments, contributing to the extremely important role played
by the public sector in economic growth. The 1890s were less
prosperous. This resulted in part from a worldwide decline in
wool prices and investor confidence. Local circumstances also
contributed, however, as capital, often borrowed from overseas,
increasingly went into speculative and unprofitable ventures.
Victoria’s gold and South Australia’s copper maintained their
significance as new techniques allowed more sophisticated
exploitation. Gold was found in southern Queensland in the later
1860s and then in the Northern Territory and in tropical
Queensland: the Palmer River goldfield pulled men to the far
north in the mid 1870s. By then Cobar, in central New South
Wales, had proved the most important of many new copper fields.
Tin also became significant, Mount Bischoff in Tasmania being
the world’s largest lode at its discovery in 1871. The 1880s
were predominantly the decade of silver; western New South Wales
proved richest, and in 1883 Charles Rasp, a German migrant,
first glimpsed the varied riches of Broken Hill. The silver,
lead, and zinc ores found there were to make that city almost
fabulous and to prompt the establishment of Broken Hill
Proprietary Company Ltd.—in time, Australia’s largest private
enterprise. Also from 1883 dated another big and ramifying
discovery, the gold of Mount Morgan, Queensland. Gold also
became Western Australia’s great bonanza in the early 1890s, the
Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie fields winning international
attention; the copper of Mount Lyell, Tasmania, was another
highlight of that decade. These discoveries were both product
and instigator of much wider activity, creating speculation,
mobility, boom, and slump of extraordinary impact.
Urban expansion and the growth of secondary industry, while
less distinctive to Australia and contributing little to export
income, were remarkable. By the criteria of investment,
employment, and relative acceleration, the growth of secondary
industry outstripped that of primary industry. Secondary
industry multiplied its growth some 10 times over during the
period, so that manufacturing and construction accounted for
one-fourth of the national product in the 1880s. The population
ratio shifted decisively from country to town, establishing an
extreme capital-city concentration and eventually placing
Melbourne and Sydney among the world’s large cities. Urban
building and services attracted much capital, and most
manufacturing was directed to providing food, furniture, and
clothing for the relatively affluent townspeople. City
speculation contributed more than its share to
overcapitalization, and the main impact of the depression of the
1890s was in the urban industrial sector.
The colonies
The history of the respective colonies sharpens some points
in this general background. In the later 19th century regional
characteristics consolidated, and they changed little at least
until the 1960s.
Victoria
Victoria retained the impetus of the 1850s for a full
generation. This was most evident in its capital, Melbourne,
which had a vigorous cultural and social life. Ardent and
ideological liberalism was evident in the colony’s education
controversy and, with greater novelty, in its adoption of tariff
protection as a means of developing its industries and living
standards. Disputes between the upper (conservative) and lower
(liberal) houses of the parliament were frequent and sharpened
political feeling. Liberals gained some notable victories, but
even in Victoria bourgeois values were altogether dominant.
New South Wales
With its longer background, New South Wales changed less
during this period. Its master politician, Henry Parkes, first
came into prominence in the 1840s. Parkes was involved in
sectarian disputes, which were especially vigorous in the
colony. Another major theme of political debate was protection
versus free trade—the latter retaining greater favour, in
contrast to Victoria. Sydney had its share of scandals and
scalawags, especially late in the period, contributing to its
rambunctious image.
Queensland
Expansion westward and northward dominated the history of
Queensland. Cattle and sugar became industries of substantial
importance. A class of small farmers aspired to settle the
tropics, which had been considered unsuitable for small-scale
farming by Europeans. Conversely, the established “kings” of the
tropical region relied on Kanakas (labourers from the Pacific
islands). The continued immigration of Kanakas provoked hot
debate, which was not resolved until after federation, when the
young commonwealth imposed an absolute prohibition.
South Australia
South Australia enjoyed less prosperity than its eastern
neighbours. Agriculture remained significant in its economy but
was not without setbacks; in the decade around 1870 farmers
pushed out into semiarid country, hoping that rain would follow
the plow, only to learn with cruel certainty that it did not.
Landholding did prompt South Australia’s most famous
contribution to reform: that land transfer proceed simply by
registration, rather than through cumbrous title deeds. Another
notable contribution was the institution of woman suffrage
(1894), which helped bring nationwide application of the
principle at federation. Appropriately, South Australia was the
home of Catherine Helen Spence, the most remarkable Australian
woman in public life, who published a significant novel, Clara
Morison (1854), and became active in many social and political
movements.
In 1863 the colony took over the administration of the area
thereafter known as the Northern Territory, which earlier had
been technically part of New South Wales; the change entailed
adjustment of boundaries. (The territory became the concern of
the federal government in 1911.)
Tasmania
The 1860s imprinted a sleepy image on Tasmania, which
persisted. The mineral discoveries at Mount Bischoff and
elsewhere were important in reviving the economy. Nevertheless,
living standards generally remained lower than elsewhere, and
there were still property qualifications for voting in 1900. The
colony contributed to democratic practice, however, by
experimenting with proportional representation.
Western Australia
Western Australia ceased to receive convicts in 1868; it
gained a partly elected legislature in 1870 and responsible
government in 1890. The premier throughout the 1890s was Sir
John Forrest, who was as adept at politics as he had been at
exploration. Until the gold rushes, economic growth was slow and
primitive; in the 1890s the colony was fastest in relative
growth and little short of that in absolute terms. Farming (in
the southwest), town and railway building, and social
legislation all followed.
Social movements
Working-class and radical movements stretched back to the
1830s, although substantial trade union organization came only
after the mid century.
Labour
The unions won some job benefits, including widespread
adoption of the eight-hour workday. The 1870s and ’80s saw
extensive mass unionism, notably among miners and sheepshearers.
Trades halls arose in the cities, and organizations extending
beyond colonial boundaries began to knit together. The unions
early considered using political pressure and gaining political
representation. This inclination strengthened in the early
1890s, helped by tougher times and by employers’ stiffening
resistance to union demands. Thus arose the labour parties,
which gained quick success, especially in New South Wales and
Queensland. At first the labourites’ aim was simply to influence
ministries, but for a few days in December 1899 Anderson Dawson
was Labor premier in Queensland.
Other radicals reacted differently to the pressures of the
1890s. A few hundred of them set off for Paraguay in 1893 to
establish there a utopian “New Australia”; they failed.
Republicanism was fairly strong in the 1880s and ’90s, sometimes
accompanied by a nearly Marxist militancy.
Movement toward federation
Federation was another ideal of the times. Most important
politicians supported the cause, with more or less altruism.
They could invoke more positive factors than common background
and apparent common sense. Especially since the Crimean War
(1853–56), Australians had feared incursion from the north by
Europeans or Asians or both; the most emphatic result came early
in 1883, when the government of Queensland, fearful of Germany,
took possession of Papua, forcing Britain’s reluctant
connivance. Better defense was one motive for association, and
so was the prospect of more effective Asian immigration
restriction; intercolonial free trade was another desideratum.
The Australian Natives Association (the Australian-born
comprised nearly two-thirds of the population in 1901) rallied
to the cause.
Yet the events progressed slowly. A federal council was
established in 1885 but was only a standing conference without
executive power. New South Wales never joined the council; the
senior colony was jealous of a movement that would reduce its
autonomy, the strength of which was in Victoria. Conventions met
in 1891 and 1897–98 to prepare drafts for a national
constitution. The final draft was confirmed by referendum, and
the Commonwealth of Australia came into existence on January 1,
1901.
The constitution was federal, with the states (as the
colonies now became) forsaking only limited and specified powers
to the commonwealth government; these included defense,
immigration, customs, marriage, and external affairs. While the
lower house, the House of Representatives, consisted of
single-member constituencies of roughly equal size, each state
had an equal number of representatives in the upper house, the
Senate. Ministers were to be members of parliament. A high court
would interpret the constitution. Woman suffrage was enacted in
1902. Aboriginals, however, were denied citizenship rights under
the constitution.
The culture
Men of learning had contributed to the nationalist surge.
Especially in the 1890s and through the Sydney Bulletin, verse
and prose portrayed the Outback as the home of the true
Australian—the bush worker: tough, laconic, and self-reliant but
ever ready to help his “mate.” The Bulletin was nationalist,
even republican, and much more radical than the federalist
politicians. Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy were the supreme
writers of the nationalist school. Painters and poets also
extolled the nationalist ideal.
Not all cultural achievement belonged to the nationalist
context, however. Henry Kendall was a lyricist of nature, and
Adam Lindsay Gordon wrote of horses and countryside with a skill
that won him a memorial in Westminster Abbey. “Rolf Boldrewood”
(Thomas Alexander Browne) wrote tales of Outback adventure,
while the great 19th-century Australian novel was Marcus
Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1874), based upon
convict records and legends. The older universities remained
small but had some outstanding men on their faculties; the
Universities of Adelaide (1874) and Tasmania (1890) were new
foundations. Ferdinand von Mueller was an outstanding botanist
who worked primarily at the Botanic Gardens, Melbourne. That
city was the home of the great coloratura soprano Nellie Melba.
Popular culture followed the British model, with music halls,
novelettes, and especially sport to the fore. Australian rules
football developed first in Melbourne and became strong
throughout southern Australia. In cricket, a victory over the
mother country in 1882 established one area of colonial
equality. Admiration combined with fear to create a sporadic
cult of the bushranger (highwayman); its most famous expression
came with the capture of Ned Kelly’s gang and Kelly’s execution
in 1880. Urban youths joined in gangs, or “pushes,” and won the
epithet “larrikin,” or rowdy.
The Aboriginals
The Aboriginal experience continued to be grim. The
estimated number of persons of predominantly Aboriginal descent
declined from about 180,000 in 1861 to less than 95,000 in 1901.
In accordance with contemporary ideas of racial superiority,
many Europeans believed that the Aboriginals must die out, and
they acted in such a way as to ensure that outcome. Frontier
violence continued, or even intensified, in northern Australia.
In the more settled south, people of mixed race became common. A
feeling of despair prevailed among the nonwhite population, for,
although the newly self-governing colonies made some sympathetic
protestations, they rarely took appropriate or effective action.
Even the shelter of mission and government “stations” diminished
from the 1880s as policy makers decided to disperse Aboriginals,
especially those of predominantly European descent. As a result,
a growing number of people suffered the miseries of ghetto life
on the margins of capital cities and country towns. Aboriginals
served as workers and servants in the Outback, where they were
often crucial to the pastoral economy, but they rarely received
due respect or reward.
Australia since 1900
Nationhood and war: 1901–45
Growth of the Commonwealth
The world’s passions and conflict of the early 20th century
were to shape the new nation’s history, despite its physical
distance from their epicentres. In some respects this was the
least positive of the major periods of Australian history.
Nationalism grew in strength, but it killed and sterilized as
much as it inspired; egalitarianism tended to foster mediocrity;
dependence on external power and models prevailed. Yet
creativity and progress survived, and Australia’s troubles were
small compared with those of many contemporary societies.
Drabness was most evident in economic affairs. At the
broadest level of generality, the period did little more than
continue the themes of the 1860–90 generation. The most
important such themes were the increasing industrialization and
improvement of communications; railways reached their peak of
27,000 miles in 1941, and meanwhile came the motor boom. In the
agricultural sector there was significant expansion of exports,
with wheat, fruits, meat, and sugar becoming much more important
than theretofore. But just as manufactures received increasingly
high tariff protection, so the marketing of these goods often
depended on subsidy. Hence, the sheep’s back continued to be the
nation’s great support in world finance. Metals, gold
especially, were important in the early years, but thereafter
this resource conspicuously failed to provide the vitality of
earlier and later times. The worldwide economic depression of
the 1930s affected Australia, especially its primary industries;
otherwise, the overall rate of growth, and probably of living
standards, too, scrambled upward—more quickly than average in
the years around 1910 and again in the early 1940s.
In national politics, candidates fought for office with
increasing vigour and resource, while their administrative
performances generally began well but then ebbed. A constant
theme was the strengthening of the central government against
the states. This complemented the high degree of homogeneity,
especially in personal and social matters, that extended through
Australia’s great physical spread; it was expressed primarily
through the Commonwealth’s financial powers—at first especially
relating to customs and excise duties but later by direct
taxation. From World War I (1914–18) both levels of government
imposed income taxes, but in 1942 the federal government
virtually annexed the field, with the high court’s approval. The
establishment of a national capital at Canberra, where
parliament first sat in 1927 after having met in Melbourne since
federation, symbolized this situation. The strengthening of the
Commonwealth was scarcely a product of popular enthusiasm.
Several constitutional referenda upheld the rights of the
states, each of which had its own distinct political, cultural,
and social characteristics.
The first two prime ministers were Edmund Barton (1901–03)
and Alfred Deakin (1903–04), who had headed the federation
movement in New South Wales and Victoria, respectively. They
were liberal protectionists. Their ministries established a
tariff, an administrative structure, and the White Australia
immigration policy that excluded Asians. They also established
the High Court and initiated legislation for a court of
conciliation and arbitration. This carried to the highest point
in the world the principles of industrial arbitration and
judicial imposition of welfare and justice through wage and
working-condition awards.
In 1904 John Christian Watson led the first, brief Labor
cabinet, followed by George Houston Reid’s conservative
free-trade ministry. Deakin led again (1905–08), and Andrew
Fisher was Labor’s second prime minister (1908–09); his ministry
was defeated when liberals and conservatives “fused” in Deakin’s
third term (1909–10). Labor then won its first clear majority at
election, which it barely lost in 1913 and regained, still under
Fisher, in 1914. These changing ideologies did not
hinder—perhaps even prompted—ambitious governmental policies.
Social services were extended with old-age pensions (1908) and
maternity grants (1912); protection rose markedly in a 1908
tariff; the Commonwealth Bank was established; and an army and
navy developed.
The new nation was psychologically as well as physically
prepared for war. Fear of attack became increasingly directed
against Japan, prompting pressure on Great Britain for a firmer
policy in the New Hebrides (since 1886 supervised jointly by
Britain and France); this was achieved in 1906–07. Although many
Australians criticized Britain when the latter appeared
negligent of local interests, the dominant note was profound
loyalty to the empire. Colonial troops had fought in both the
Sudan and South African (Boer) wars. In 1914, when World War I
began, politicians of all hues rallied to the imperial cause.
World War I
Some 330,000 Australians served in World War I; 60,000
died, and 165,000 suffered wounds—few nations made such
relatively heavy sacrifice. The most famous engagement of the
Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) was in the
Dardanelles Campaign (1915); the day of the landing at
Gallipoli—April 25—became the preeminent day of national
reverence. Even before Gallipoli, Australian troops had occupied
German New Guinea, and the Australian warship Sydney sank the
German cruiser Emden near the Cocos Islands (November 9, 1914).
After the Dardanelles Australians fought primarily in France;
Ypres, Amiens, and Villers Bretonneux were among the battles,
all marked by slaughter. In Palestine the Australian light horse
and cavalry corps contributed to the defeat of the Ottoman
Empire.
The war profoundly affected domestic affairs. Economically,
it acted as a super-tariff, benefiting especially textiles,
glassmaking, vehicles, and the iron and steel industry. Such
products as wool, wheat, beef, and mutton found a readier market
in Britain, at inflated prices. But the shock of war affected
politics much more, especially by giving full scope to the
furious energy of William Morris Hughes, who supplanted Fisher
as Labor prime minister in October 1915. Soon afterward he
visited Britain. There his ferocity as a war leader won acclaim,
and he became convinced that Australia must contribute still
more. He advocated military conscription for overseas service,
but a referendum in October 1916 repudiated this proposal, and
immediately afterward the Labor parliamentary caucus moved no
confidence in Hughes’s leadership. He continued as prime
minister of a “national” government, however, even after losing
a second conscription referendum in December 1917. The referenda
in particular and war stress in general made these years
uniquely turbulent in Australian history. The Labor Party lost
other men of great ability along with Hughes. The split
solidified a long-standing trend for Roman Catholics to support
the party. Hughes’s enemies also included the small but growing
number of extremists—most notably the Sydney section of the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—who opposed the war on
doctrinaire grounds.
The postwar years
The aftermath of war continued, but finally resolved, this
turbulence. Some radicals hoped that returning servicemen would
force social change, but instead the Returned Sailors’ and
Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (later called the
Returned Services League of Australia) became a bastion of
conservative order, some of its supporters ready to use physical
force against local people they considered “bolsheviks.” The
Labor Party faltered, its members adopting a more radical
socialist type of platform in 1921, but with far from uniform
conviction. (In 1918 the name Australian Labor Party [ALP] was
adopted throughout Australia.) When the challenge came to
Hughes’s leadership early in 1923, it arose partly from the
conservative-business wing of Hughes’s own Nationalist Party
(its representative, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, becoming prime
minister) and partly from the Country Party, which from late
1922 held a crucial number of parliamentary seats. Although led
by wealthy landowners, the Country Party won support from many
small farmers; it benefited too from its former-soldier image
and from widespread country-versus-city feeling. Its leader,
Earle C.G. Page, had considerable, if erratic, force.
Bruce continued as prime minister until 1929, with Page his
deputy in Nationalist-Country coalitions. Bruce strove to buoy
the economy by attracting British investment and fostering
corporative capitalism. Tariffs, bounties, prices, and public
indebtedness all rose. There was considerable administrative
innovation—e.g., the Loan Council regulated all government
borrowing—and the successful Council for Scientific and
Industrial Research (later called the Commonwealth Scientific
and Industrial Research Organisation [CSIRO]) was established in
1926 to apply scientific expertise to developmental problems.
The worldwide development of consumer industry had its impact:
the revolution in transportation provided by the automobile is
the best example, although full-scale car production was still
in the future.
With much economic activity subsidized—the exception being
one primary product, wool—Australia was particularly vulnerable
to the Great Depression of the 1930s. It struck hard:
unemployment exceeded one-fourth of the work force and imposed a
degree of social misery rarely known in Australian history. The
rate of recovery was uneven, manufactures doing better than
primary industry. Population growth slowed; at the nadir,
emigration exceeded immigration.
Politics reflected the impact. James Henry Scullin succeeded
Bruce as prime minister in October 1929, but his Labor ministry
suffered the real squeeze of events; within the ALP there was
considerable division as to how government should react to the
Depression. Some favoured a generally inflationist policy, with
banks facilitating credit issue and governments extending public
works. Right-wing Labor distrusted such a policy; radicals would
have gone further by renouncing interest payment on overseas
loans. Conservative opinion argued for deflationary
policies—curtailed government expenditure, lower wages,
balancing the budget, and the honouring of interest commitments.
In June 1931 the Commonwealth and the state governments agreed
on a plan, called the Premiers’ Plan. Although the plan had some
inflationary features, it foreshadowed a one-fifth reduction in
government spending, including wages and pensions—a considerable
affront to Labor’s traditional attitudes.
Against this background the government disintegrated. Before
the Premiers’ Plan, some Labor right-wingers, led by Joseph
Aloysius Lyons, had crossed to the opposition. In November some
leftist dissidents voted against Scullin, forcing his
resignation. In the elections that followed, Labor suffered a
heavy defeat. The new prime minister was Lyons, whose followers
had coalesced with the erstwhile Nationalists to form the United
Australia Party (UAP). Lyons led a wholly UAP government until
1934 and UAP-Country coalitions until his death in 1939.
The Lyons governments provided stability and not much more.
Recovery was uneven and sporadic, quicker in manufacturing than
in primary industry, aided more by market forces than by
governmental planning. Two policies failed to fulfill
expectations—the Imperial Economic Conference, held at Ottawa,
Ontario, Canada, in 1932, improved trade slightly, but the
integrated economic community for which some had hoped never
developed. Australia’s trade diversion policy of 1936, which
tried to redress the imbalance of imports from Japan and the
United States, offended those countries and actually reduced
exports further. A plan for national insurance, the Lyons
governments’ most ambitious social legislation, also aborted.
These mishaps did not much bother the electorate; improvement,
even if meagre, was enough to retain favour.
Internal division was the greater threat to the government.
This became manifest after Lyons’s death. The UAP elected Robert
Gordon Menzies its new leader (and therefore prime minister);
but the decision was hard fought, and it was criticized publicly
and vehemently by Page, still leader of the Country Party.
Nevertheless, Menzies retained office; but internal division
persisted, the coalition’s parliamentary majority was tiny, and
Menzies resigned in August 1941. Arthur William Fadden, the new
leader of the Country Party, then took office, but in October he
gave way to John Curtin and a Labor ministry.
While the electorate generally voted conservative, Australia
shared the common Western experience of the interwar years in
the rise of a small, vigorous communist movement. Founded in
1922, the Australian Communist Party made most headway in the
big industrial unions and in Sydney; it also had some influence
and supporters among the intelligentsia, especially in the
1930s. The party suffered a share of internal factionalism but
for the most part was able to present a united face to the
public.
Fascism achieved no formal political recognition in
Australia, but there were hints of sympathy toward fascist
attitudes—D.H. Lawrence wrote of such in his novel Kangaroo,
based on a brief visit in 1922; and an “Australia First”
movement began in literary nationalism but drifted into race
mystique and perhaps even treason. An intellectual movement of
more lasting force developed among a group of young Roman
Catholic intellectuals in Melbourne in the mid 1930s. They
developed a commitment to social justice and against communism,
somewhat in the manner of G.K. Chesterton. This was known as the
Catholic Social Movement, and it had considerable influence.
Whereas Australia had been virtually spoiling for war before
1914, passivity became the international keynote after 1920. At
the Paris Peace Conference that formally concluded World War I,
Hughes was his fire-eating self, especially in defense of
Australia’s interests in the Pacific. Thus he won a mandate for
erstwhile German New Guinea and Nauru (an atoll in the central
Pacific) and effectually opposed a Japanese motion proclaiming
racial equality, which he thought might presage an attack on
Australia’s immigration laws. In the League of Nations,
Australia was an independent member from the outset. Yet in
following years “the empire” became the object of even more
rhetoric and more desperate hope than earlier. Australia did not
ratify the Statute of Westminster (1931, embodying the 1926
Balfour Report as to the constitutional equality of the
dominions) until 1942. The UAP governments followed Britain
closely in its attitude toward the totalitarian expansion of the
1930s; if Australian influence counted for anything, it was to
strengthen appeasement of Germany and Japan. Although fear of
Japan continued, that country’s accession to the fascist camp
did not provoke a tougher governmental line. The government
suspected that Britain could not control the Eastern Hemisphere
but found no answer to that dire problem. The Labor Party
meanwhile was even more incoherent and variable in matters of
foreign policy than were its social democratic counterparts
elsewhere in the Western world: isolationism and antifascism
were equal and opposing forces.
World War II
When war came again, however, the nation’s response was
firm—some 30,000 Australians died in World War II (1938–45), and
65,000 were injured. From early in the war, the Royal Australian
Air Force was active in the defense of Britain. The Australian
Navy operated in the Mediterranean Sea (1940–41), helping to win
the Battle of Cape Matapan (March 1941). Australian troops
fought in the seesaw battles of North Africa. In mid 1941
Australians suffered heavy losses both in the Allied defeats in
Greece and Crete and in the victories in the Levant. Meanwhile,
the German general Erwin Rommel was scoring his greatest
triumphs in North Africa. Out of these emerged the successful
Allied defense of Tobruk, carried out substantially by
Australians (April–December 1941), and the decisive victory at
the battles of El-Alamein, in which an Australian division
played a key role.
After the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl
Harbor, Hawaii (December 7, 1941), however, the focus shifted
homeward. The Japanese victories of the following months more
than fulfilled the fantasies that fear and hate had long
prompted in Australia. On February 15, 1942, 15,000 Australians
became prisoners of war when Singapore fell to Japanese forces,
and four days later war came to the nation’s shores when Darwin
was bombed. Then came a Japanese swing southward that by August
threatened to overrun Port Moresby, New Guinea.
The United States became Australia’s major ally. In a famous
statement (December 1941), Prime Minister Curtin declared: “I
make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free from
any pangs about our traditional links of friendship to Britain.”
A sharper note of independence from Britain came when Curtin
insisted (February 1942) that Australian troops recalled from
the Middle East should return to Australia itself and not help
in the defense of Burma (Myanmar), as British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill wished. Conversely, American needs prompted
total response to Curtin’s call. U.S. General Douglas MacArthur
established his headquarters first in Melbourne and then in
Brisbane. In May the Australian navy assisted in the American
victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea, which was a turning
point in the war, and the two countries’ troops thereafter
fought in many joint land battles. The American soldier became a
common figure in the Australian state capitals, forging the
biggest single link in the social relations between the two
countries.
On land the fortunes of war turned against the Japanese in
August–September 1942, beginning with an Allied (primarily
Australian) victory at Milne Bay, New Guinea. More prolonged—and
of more heroic dimension in Australian eyes—was the forcing back
of the Japanese from southern New Guinea over the Kokoda Trail.
Then followed a long attrition of Japanese forces elsewhere in
New Guinea and the islands, with Australia initially playing a
major role and subsequently playing a role secondary to American
forces. Australian volunteers and conscripts fought in these
campaigns, the government and people having accepted the
legitimacy of sending conscripts as far north as the Equator and
as far west and east as the 110th and 159th meridians.
The war brought some passion into domestic affairs, albeit
less than in World War I. Curtin’s government exercised
considerable control over the civilian population, “industrial
conscription” being scarcely an exaggerated description. Overall
this was accepted—partly because of the crisis, partly because
the government showed purposefulness and capacity. Curtin easily
won the 1943 elections; thereafter his ministry and the
bureaucracy gave considerable thought to postwar reconstruction,
hoping to use war-developed techniques to achieve greater social
justice in peace.
The war carried industrialization to a new level. The
production of ammunition and other matériel (including
airplanes), machine tools, and chemicals all boomed. Meanwhile,
primary production lost prestige, aid, and skills, so that the
1944 output was but two-thirds that of 1939–40. Urban employment
was bountiful, and concentration in the state capitals became
more marked than ever; many families had two or more income
earners. Thus, affluence quickened; federal child endowment from
1940 and rationing of scarce products helped distribute this
wealth. The gross national product increased by more than
one-half between 1938–39 and 1942–43 and by the end of that time
was nearly triple what it had been at the end of World War I.
The culture
The period produced not only Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life
(1903) but also the work of Henry Handel Richardson (pseudonym
of Ethel F.L. Richardson, later Robertson), another contender as
“the great Australian novelist.” In The Fortunes of Richard
Mahony (three volumes, 1917, 1925, 1929), Richardson told the
anguish of the central character, modeled on her father, as he
sought to come to terms with Australian life. The tension of
dual loyalties to Britain and Australia was a major concern also
of Martin Boyd, whose long career as a novelist began in the
1920s. A more exclusively nationalist tone pervaded many tales
of Outback life and historical novel sagas. An early notable
novel of urban life was Louis Stone’s Jonah (1911); a later
contributor to this genre was Vance Palmer (especially The
Swayne Family, 1934), who, with his wife Nettie, won fame as a
literary critic and selfless patron of the aspiring young.
The most significant contribution in poetry came from a group
in Sydney influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche and the late 19th-century French innovators.
Outstanding was Christopher John Brennan, a major theorist of
Symbolism. While calling on their Australian background, these
men gave a sophistication to their poetic world that lifted it
far from Outback balladry. Associated with this group was Norman
Lindsay, an artist, novelist, and sculptor. The novelist
Christina Stead was another product of this milieu.
In art the rural landscape dominated. Revolutionary changes
in European art were relatively slow in affecting Australia, but
a few artists did produce some notable work of imaginative
technique. In Percy Grainger Australia produced (but did not
retain) a musician of remarkable originality and ability.
Architecture promised an interesting chapter with the selection
of the American Walter Burley Griffin’s design for the city of
Canberra. In practice his design was much mutilated, but Griffin
did do some important work in both Melbourne and Sydney.
One outstanding new area to which the universities
contributed was anthropology; a chief protagonist was A.R.
Radcliffe-Brown (professor of anthropology at the University of
Sydney, 1925–31). Australians increasingly filled faculty posts,
although most who did so were graduates of either Oxford or
Cambridge universities, while some of the most able native
intellects worked overseas. The University of Western Australia,
founded in 1911, drew on one of the most substantial
philanthropic bequests in Australian history (from the newspaper
editor Sir John Winthrop Hackett) and initially charged no fees.
Other university foundations were Queensland (1909) and colleges
at Canberra and Armidale. State-owned secondary schools
developed throughout the period, although the achievement was
scarcely comparable to the development of primary education in
the early period.
Australia was in the forefront of filmmaking early in the
century, but this early promise soon faded. A.B. Paterson’s
Waltzing Matilda became Australia’s best-known song—part folk
hymn and part national anthem. Radio had an impact in Australia
equal to that elsewhere; radio stations became a mark of urban
status, and the Australian Broadcasting Commission became a
major force in culture and journalism. Radio helped make the
1930s probably the most sports-conscious decade in Australia’s
history. Cricket, tennis, swimming, boxing, and horse racing
were areas of athletic excellence. Aviation moved from sport to
enterprise to business; Charles Kingsford-Smith, who established
several long-distance records, was the most famous hero, and
Qantas the most successful airline.
The Aboriginals
Early in the century governments tended to be still more
authoritarian and intrusive in their policies on Aboriginals.
This was notably so in Western Australia, where the most brutal
of direct clashes continued. Reports of such events in the later
1920s stirred those Christian and humanitarian forces that had
always recognized the violence and injustice of Australia’s
racial experience; the new anthropology abetted such concern.
Commonwealth governments gave these voices some heed, especially
after 1937, although only in the Northern Territory did the
government control policy. In 1932 the formation, under William
Cooper, of the Australian Aboriginals League spurred black
political action—which had some history back to the 1840s.
Cooper and William Ferguson organized protest against
Australia’s sesquicentennial celebrations in January 1938:
“There are enough of us remaining to expose the humbug of your
claims, as White Australians, to be a civilised, progressive,
kindly and humane nation.”
Michael Roe
Australia from 1945 to c. 1983
Postwar expansion
World War II generated economic vigour that continued into
the 1970s. While some groups suffered disadvantages, that
period, the 1960s especially, ranked as something of a golden
age. The population nearly doubled by 1976, with expenditure per
head increasing by roughly the same proportion. This prosperity
reflected the general Western experience and depended much upon
the export of basic commodities—notably wool in the 1950s and
minerals thereafter. Domestic manufacturing also expanded
remarkably and with considerable sophistication: manufactured
goods included iron and steel wares, electric and electronic
goods, and automobiles (production of “Australia’s own car,” the
Holden, began in 1948). Output per worker increased, and working
hours were lessened.
The number of private automobiles increased eight-fold by
1970, and the car joined the personally owned home as a
lodestone of most Australian lives. Tourism and travel enriched
traditional leisure patterns, which continued to be strong. The
holding of the Olympic Games in Melbourne in 1956 symbolized the
nation’s enthusiasm for sport and its production of world
champions, notably swimmers. Television in Australia effectively
began with the broadcast of the 1956 Olympics and soon came to
exercise its characteristic influence.
Domestic politics to 1975
On John Curtin’s death in July 1945, he was succeeded as prime
minister by another ALP stalwart, Joseph Benedict (Ben) Chifley.
Influenced by Keynesian theory, their governments maintained
close control of the economy and even contemplated
nationalization of the private banks. Welfare policies expanded,
as did the dominance of the commonwealth government over the
states, although the latter remained important. At all these
levels, and elsewhere, it was evident how much larger and more
expert the federal public service had become.
As the Cold War intensified Chifley’s policies seemed
dangerously radical to conservative eyes. Such apprehension fed
on the disruptive tactics pursued by Communist Party supporters,
especially in trade unions. Robert Menzies, who in 1944 had
founded the Liberal Party as a successor to the United Australia
Party, addressed these issues. In December 1949 he was elected
prime minister. His and all future non-Labor governments were
coalitions of the Liberal and Country parties, with the former
dominant.
Menzies stayed in office until 1966. A man of great political
competence, he also benefited much from the period’s prosperity.
His governments continued to monitor the economy to useful
effect. Menzies personally did much to increase spending on
education and on the development of Canberra. He continued to
present himself as a crusader against communism and to allege
that Labor’s leaders failed to check its evil. (The 1954
defection of Vladimir Petrov, a Soviet diplomat-agent in
Canberra, strengthened Menzies’ hand.) The ALP floundered under
the erratic leadership (1951–60) of Herbert Vere Evatt; an
anticommunist element, somewhat influenced by the Catholic
Social Movement (see above), split away to form the Democratic
Labor Party. This party won only a few seats but drastically
weakened the ALP.
Menzies was succeeded by his longtime lieutenant, Harold
Holt, who had little time to make any distinctive impact before
his sudden death in December 1967. His successor, John Grey
Gorton, proved more assertive, especially of a sharper national
interest in economic and diplomatic affairs. Gorton lost ground
with both the electorate and parliamentary colleagues, and in
early 1971 he gave way to another Liberal, William McMahon.
Meanwhile Labor had found new force under Edward Gough
Whitlam. He personified the importance within the party of an
intelligentsia, radicalized in modest degree by liberationist
and countercultural forces of the day as well as by more
traditional left-wing sympathies. The failure of McMahon to
become a convincing leader gave Labor its long-denied chance,
and in December 1972 Whitlam became prime minister.
Whitlam’s governments were extremely active, if not always
effectual. Many initiatives vitalized intellectual and cultural
pursuits. A stronger sense of Australian identity prevailed, and
some imperial symbols were abandoned. The government encouraged
wage increases (including equal pay for women) and spent much on
social services, notably health and urban amenities. To many, it
appeared as if Whitlam were shaping a new and better Australia.
Others saw the government as reckless and dangerous. Some of
its members did lean toward irresponsibility. Critics fought
hard and bitterly, especially after the accession to opposition
leadership in March 1975 of the Liberal John Malcolm Fraser. The
government lacked a majority in the Senate, which accordingly
deferred approval of revenue supply, the intent being to force
Whitlam to call an election. The complex constitutional issue
that thus arose required the adjudication of the
governor-general, Sir John Kerr, the formal head of state under
the crown. Kerr had been nominated (for the Queen’s approval) by
Whitlam, but on November 11, 1975, he dismissed Whitlam and
appointed Fraser interim prime minister. Kerr’s actions sparked
excitement, and among Whitlam’s admirers, outrage. An election
in December gave a handsome victory to Fraser.
International affairs
Both world wars encouraged, even forced, Australian
governments to assert themselves internationally. The ALP had
generally tended toward a forthright international policy.
Appropriately, therefore, the Curtin and Chifley governments,
especially in the person of Evatt, took a significant part in
founding the United Nations. Evatt helped secure recognition of
the rights of smaller nations in the United Nations and served
as president of the United Nations General Assembly in 1948–49.
The Labor governments also had some sympathy for Asian
nationalist movements, most importantly in Indonesia.
With the accession of Menzies and the deepening of the Cold
War, attitudes became more conservative. Sentimental ties of
empire remained strong enough for the visit of Queen Elizabeth
II in 1954 to provoke mass emotion. Menzies, an ardent royalist,
upheld the British position in the Suez Crisis of 1956. Yet
overall the stronger theme was Australian acceptance of U.S.
dominance—all the more inexorable as the United Kingdom
abandoned much of the modest interest it had cherished for
Australia. The U.S. alliance crystallized in the 1951
Australia–New Zealand–United States (ANZUS) Pact, reinforced
(1955–77) by the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).
Only the Whitlam government chafed at the alliance, and then but
in part. Australia followed the United States’ lead in such
crises as the Korean (1950–53) and Vietnam (1955–75) wars and, a
generation later, the Persian Gulf War (1990–91). Australia did
not recognize the People’s Republic of China until 1972–73. U.S.
satellite-tracking stations and other facilities functioned on
Australian soil.
Relations with Japan were particularly important. Antagonism
ran strong in the postwar years and lingered for decades.
Nevertheless, trade recommenced in 1949 and grew rapidly; by
1966–67 Japan had surpassed the United Kingdom as the nation
receiving the largest share of Australia’s exports, and it was
second only to the United States as the largest supplier of
imports.
While the influence of Asian communism was feared and Japan
was regarded with suspicion, more genial relationships developed
in the Hemisphere. The Colombo Plan, which went into effect in
1951, provided for Australia to give aid to its friends within
the region and began an inflow of Asian students into Australia
that became a permanent and considerable phenomenon. The
minister for external affairs between 1951 and 1960 was Richard
Gardiner Casey. He was unique among Australians in his
experience of traditional diplomacy, yet he was ready and able
to come to terms with the new Asia. As Indonesia became an ever
more populous, and sometimes assertive, nation, there was
wariness in Australia, but the fall of Sukarno in 1966 helped
stabilize relations for many years. The grant of self-government
to Papua New Guinea by the Whitlam government came early enough
to provide some basis for goodwill into the future.
Immigration
Meanwhile vast population changes had begun. Traditionally
Labor had been suspicious of mass immigration, seeing it as a
threat to established wages and standards. Yet in 1946 the ALP
government initiated a policy that assisted the entry not only
of people from the United Kingdom but also of many others from
war-distressed Europe. The peak year of net immigration (about
150,000) was 1950, while the greatest numbers of assisted
migrants (about 100,000 per annum) came in the later 1960s.
While it has been modified many times, this overall policy has
remained in place. Closer ties with Australia’s Asian
neighbours, however, moved toward abandoning the policy of
virtual exclusion of “coloured” immigrants. From the late 1960s
such restrictions were eased. The acceptance of refugees from
Indochina was the most palpable evidence of the new policy. The
diversification of ethnicity and culture provoked both critics
and enthusiasts.
In general the new migration proved an economic boost. Many
newcomers suffered alienation and discrimination; tensions
existed between the new migrant groups as well as between “old”
Australians and new—but on the whole this was one of the happier
chapters in the Australian experience. Continuing debate
pondered the relative merits of “assimilation” as against
“multiculturalism”—i.e., minimizing or encouraging the migrants’
retention of their native customs. Especially after 1970 the
latter policy had official favour, but migration had
surprisingly only marginal impact on established sociopolitical
structures. Many tongues were heard and many cuisines eaten, but
suburban living near the big cities was as compelling a goal for
most migrants as for their Anglo-Celtic forerunners, and their
values were shaped accordingly. It made Australia a more
interesting place, if one of less social ease.
Strains of modern radicalism
It was suggested above that “New Left” ideas had some part
in the victory and policies of Whitlamite Labor. While this
radicalism, like its precursors, never went to extremes in
Australia and soon passed its peak, its influence lingered. It
found formal expression in a new political party, the Australian
Democrats, which was founded in 1977 and succeeded to the
Democratic Labor Party’s role as a minority party of significant
effect. The new radicalism also helped shape thought and action
in other, more diffuse, ways.
Aboriginal activism became more assertive than it had been
since the days of physical attack on European settlers. The
estimated number of persons of Aboriginal descent had risen from
a nadir of 73,828 in 1933 to more than 170,000 in the early
1980s; in 1962 Aboriginals received the franchise and, for the
first time, were to be counted in the national census.
Aboriginal claims moved from wage equality with Europeans to
land rights over territory with Aboriginal associations. The
South Australian government acted in this direction from 1966,
and the federal Aboriginal Land Rights Act (1976), applying to
the Northern Territory, was particularly important. In 1967 the
general electorate overwhelmingly supported a constitutional
amendment to increase Commonwealth powers in Aboriginal matters.
Equality in formal civic rights, wage payments, and social
welfare benefits became the norm. Some groups received
considerable royalties from mining activities on their land.
The Whitlam government in particular encouraged a variety of
ethnic organizations, most importantly the National Aboriginal
Consultative Committee (founded in 1973, from 1977 renamed the
National Aboriginal Conference). These organizations contributed
to a growing strength and pride in Aboriginality. Early in the
period Aboriginals became known for their contributions to sport
(boxer Lionel Rose, tennis player Evonne Goolagong Cawley).
Later Aboriginals became celebrated in the fields of public
administration (Charles Perkins, Patricia O’Shane), art
(Yirawala, Michael Jagamara Nelson, Emily Kngwarreye),
literature (Kath Walker, Colin Johnson, Sally Morgan), and
politics (Neville Thomas Bonner, senator, 1971–83, and Aden
Ridgeway, senator from 1999).
While various researchers had been expanding knowledge of the
antiquity and richness of Aboriginal life, not all Aboriginals
accepted the right and capacity of white scholars to comprehend
the tribal past, but this attitude itself affirmed their
independence. School curricula began to provide sympathetic
teaching of Aboriginal culture to all Australians. Such policies
reinforced a shift away from assimilationist ideas. This shift
applied nationwide but had particular relevance in sustaining
the surviving remnants of tribal life. In the late 20th century
the number of Aboriginals with some experience of traditional
Aboriginal life was estimated to be about 10,000.
Increased awareness of past depredations against the
Aboriginals helped shape a wider-ranging critique of the
Australian experience. Dissidents influenced by the New Marxism
of the later 1960s (notably Humphrey McQueen in his A New
Britannia, first published in 1970) saw the nation as ever
dominated by petty bourgeois standards—mean, acquisitive,
racist, and authoritarian. Many earlier commentators had
perceived such traits, but now they were attacked with more
fundamental repugnance. The dismissal of Whitlam in 1975
encouraged the belief that essentially Australia was not a
democracy and that it suffered much from a heritage of
subservience to British imperial standards. While this radical
critique lost some acerbity after 1980, it left an impression,
especially on the liberal intelligentsia. One result was greater
emphasis on the dignity and autonomy of Australian-centred
cultural studies. Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore: The Epic of
Australia’s Founding (1987), a vivid account of the experiences
of both transported convicts and colonists that became an
international best-seller, explored Australia’s origins as a
colony and its search for a national identity.
Environmental activism developed, often spurred by repugnance
to the exploitative development that radicals saw, with much
truth, as central to Australian history since 1788. Some aspects
of environmentalism gained support across a wide spectrum. Most
state governments introduced controls about 1970. There was a
particularly emotional campaign to save beautiful Lake Pedder in
Tasmania from conversion into a hydroelectric dam. The campaign
failed in 1973, but in that year the federal government
established an inquiry into the national estate, from which
resulted the Australian Heritage Commission Act in 1975. In 1982
the High Court agreed that the Commonwealth had power to
override states on environmental matters should the issue in
question come within the purview of an international covenant to
which Australia was a party. Environmentalists have exercised
considerable influence as pressure groups and have made some
essays into parliamentary politics: in 1989 a “Green” group
acquired the balance of power in Tasmania, aided by the system
of proportional representation prevailing there. While Australia
contributed only a little to the mainstream of environmental
theory, Peter Singer of Monash University won international
renown for his exposition of animal rights.
Miriam Dixson in The Real Matilda (1976) argued that
Australian women had suffered an inferior status, markedly below
that of women in Western society at large. Her case was
arguable, but the increasing volume of feminist studies more
often stressed the achievements of women, though often against
great odds, in many sectors of society and culture. Feminists
played an important part in the expansion of Australian studies;
women increased their share in Australian literary work, often
writing on feminist themes. Germaine Greer, born in Melbourne,
achieved eminence for her writings.
The number of women physicians and lawyers in Australia rose
significantly, but more sizable still was the impact of women in
the public service. Some succeeded in federal politics, and a
greater number at the state level: in 1990 Carmen Lawrence (in
Western Australia) and Joan Kirner (in Victoria) were the first
women to become leaders of governments.
Gay and lesbian activism followed much the same path in
Australia as elsewhere; Sydney was said to have become one of
the major “gay” cities of the world. Seemingly in inverse
relation to sexual activity, or at least to discussion of it,
there was a decline in marriage and fertility rates. One in
three marriages contracted after 1970 seemed likely to end in
divorce. Into the 1990s there remained doubt as to how
fundamental the changes in attitude and social structure
associated with such developments might prove.
Cultural achievements
Patrick White’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature
(1973) most obviously indicated a new level of cultural
attainment. Among Australia’s renowned writers are the poets Les
Murray and Judith Wright; novelists Peter Carey, David Malouf,
Thomas Keneally, and Thea Astley; and playwright David
Williamson. The painter Sir Sidney Nolan produced a vast body of
compelling work, often inspired by Australian themes. Fred
Williams worked within a narrower range but produced intense,
novel, and entrancing representations of the Australian
landscape. Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira created
world-renowned watercolour landscapes depicting the terrain of
central Australia.
The work of Australian composers such as Peter Sculthorpe,
Ross Edwards, and Richard Meale approached world standing. The
soprano Joan Sutherland emulated Melba with her superb
coloratura voice. Many of Sutherland’s triumphs took place at
the Sydney Opera House, the supreme shrine of culture in
Australia, completed (after many problems) in 1973. Art
exhibitions and cultural festivals much enriched Australian
life, most substantially in the smaller capitals. The Australian
Broadcasting Commission (called the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation after 1983) remained very important as a sustainer
of orchestral music and sponsored most of the somewhat meagre
amount of quality television. Governments were much more
generous than their precursors in Australia (although scarcely
more so than many counterparts elsewhere) in funding opera and
ballet. The film industry had a notable florescence in the
1970s, and continued fairly active thereafter.
The 1960s was the golden age for tertiary education.
Universities expanded enormously. The Institute of Advanced
Studies at the Australian National University (one of the
visionary achievements of the 1940s Labor governments) was
unique in being research-oriented, but its activity was matched
elsewhere. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organization also grew rapidly in the 1960s and ’70s. In
addition to Patrick White, Australia’s Nobel laureates were Sir
John Cornforth (1975), for chemistry, and Sir Macfarlane Burnet
(1960), Sir John Eccles (1963), and Peter C. Doherty (1996), for
work in the medical sciences.
Michael Roe
Ed.
Australia since 1983
Domestic issues
Fraser served as prime minister until March 1983; then the
Labor Party returned to office, and Robert (Bob) Hawke’s term
lasted still longer. Under pressure from colleagues, Hawke
resigned in December 1991, and Paul Keating succeeded him as
party leader and prime minister. The electorate switched in
March 1996, and John Howard led a coalition of Liberal and
National (formerly, until 1983, Country) parties that remained
in power for 11 years. Every government won at least two
successive elections, and most more than that, testifying to
mainstream contentment. The Labor Party came to have virtually
as many middle-class professionals among its leaders as did the
Liberals, and—at least when in office—gave scarcely less
priority to running the economy according to the dictates of
economic rationalism. By those standards the economy fared well,
albeit suffering occasional setbacks (notably about 1990).
Manufacturing declined considerably, but that had some balance
in greater diversification and efficiency. Export of basic
commodities remained vital, and international price fluctuations
had less immediate impact than in the past. Unemployment figures
were higher than in the previous generation, but more women were
in the workforce. Many Australians enjoyed comfort, even
affluence. A UN survey in 2000 placed Australia fourth in terms
of quality of life worldwide.
There always remained some poverty and desolation. While
dominant discourses stressed human rights, equality, freedom,
and potential, older notions of social homogeneity seemed, if
anything, yet further from realization. One division to widen
was that between the big cities and rural Australia. This
tension helped create the most remarkable phenomenon of the
1990s, the One Nation movement. Led by Pauline Hanson, One
Nation invoked an older and not altogether mythical Australia of
Anglo-Celtic ethnicity and sturdy independence. Hanson herself
won election to the federal parliament in 1996, and in the
Queensland state election of mid 1998 several of her followers
also succeeded. Hanson lost her seat in 1998, and her movement
subsequently fell apart, but its very existence told something
of the national mood.
A much-publicized decision in 1992 (the Mabo case) seemed to
promise a radical legitimation of indigenous land-rights claims.
It confirmed that Australia was already occupied in a manner
recognizable under British law when the first white settlers
arrived. The court also ruled that, while native title had been
exterminated over vast areas, it might still exist over
leaseholds and unoccupied crown land. The resulting Native Title
Act (1993) was unsuccessfully challenged, and subsequently,
under its judgment in 1996 (the Wik case), the High Court
decided that native title and pastoral leasehold could coexist.
Aboriginal descent became a matter of pride, and by the early
21st century the number affirming themselves to be Aboriginal
was some half million.
Meanwhile, despite such advances, the bleakness of much
Aboriginal experience remained stark and disturbing—illness,
alcoholism, and violence all having their part. The many deaths
of Aboriginal men while in official custody added to such
feeling, and still more so invocation of the long history of
Aboriginal families being forcibly separated. While all
governments upheld the desirability of racial reconciliation,
they remained reluctant to make a formal apology for past
wrongs.
Debate as to constitutional change quickened in the late
1990s, many seeing the time as opportune for a shift to
republican status. However, when the matter came to referendum
vote in 1999, republicans divided over how radical their
intended change should be. With many other Australians still
attached to traditional and even monarchical sentiment, the
referendum failed decisively.
Following four consecutive electoral wins, John Howard and
the Liberal-National coalition were swept from power with the
November 2007 election victory of Kevin Rudd and the Labor
Party. Under Rudd, Labor advocated proactive domestic policies
to preserve the environment, to improve education, public
hospitals, and the country’s infrastructure, and to establish a
fair and flexible work environment for all Australians. Rudd
also favoured a plan to extricate Australian soldiers from Iraq,
where they had been assisting in the U.S.-led war effort. In a
historic address on Feb. 13, 2008, Rudd issued a formal apology
to Aboriginal peoples for abuses they suffered under early
Australian administrations.
Foreign policy and immigration
Australia gave enthusiastic welcome to 2000. The Summer
Olympic Games were held in Sydney, and the country made use of
the centenary of the creation of the federal Commonwealth of
Australia as an occasion of both celebration and soul-searching.
Before 1940 Australia had had only a tiny diplomatic service,
but thereafter this arm of government (often associated with
trade-oriented services) had expanded. The nation’s new ethnic
diversity increased the need for professional diplomats.
Successive prime ministers were busy travelers, ready to develop
Australia’s image in world eyes. Activity continued within the
UN and the British Commonwealth, but increasingly emphasis lay
on Australia’s role in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.
While this stance was appropriate to Australia’s geopolitical
reality, it entailed problems. Malaysia had long scorned
Australia’s claims to empathy with Asia. Relations with
Indonesia fluctuated and were never so tense as in 1999–2000,
when Australia abandoned its earlier (and much-criticized)
acceptance of the absorption of East Timor within Indonesia and
led the UN forces that oversaw East Timor’s independence.
Troubles in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, all
provoking violence in 2000, posed difficulties to which there
were no easy answers.
By the early 21st century about one-third of “settler”
immigrants were Asian, a situation that became strained as
criticism arose—from across the sociopolitical spectrum—of
policies that seemed likely to result in an ever-expanding
population. Moreover, many would-be migrants differed from the
model of skill, youth, and sociability that governments
inevitably preferred. While basic immigration patterns
continued, greater scrutiny and selectivity prevailed,
especially of those seeking refugee status.
Ed.
