The history of Australia

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived in Australia for at least 50,000 years and perhaps 65,000, the longest continuous cultural history anywhere on earth. Hundreds of nations, each with its own language, law and country, occupied every part of the continent and its islands when Britain founded a penal colony at Sydney in 1788. Over the following century settlers spread across the land in a process of dispossession, disease and frontier killing that Aboriginal people resisted for decades. The six British colonies federated in 1901 as a self-governing dominion committed to a "White Australia", fought in both world wars, and after 1945 transformed itself through mass immigration into one of the most diverse societies in the world. Since the 1960s the country has been slowly reckoning with its treatment of its First Peoples, a process that remains politically divisive.

The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians came from Southeast Asia during the last ice age, when lower seas joined Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania into a single continent called Sahul. Even then the journey required sea crossings of tens of kilometres, which makes these people among the earliest known seafarers. Excavations at the Madjedbebe rock shelter in Arnhem Land have been dated to about 65,000 years ago, though some archaeologists prefer a date nearer 50,000. People had reached the far south-west by about 47,000 years ago and Tasmania by 39,000 years ago.

At Lake Mungo in western New South Wales, remains about 40,000 years old show a woman who was cremated and a man buried with red ochre, some of the earliest evidence of funeral ritual among modern humans. Rock art in Arnhem Land, the Kimberley and the Burrup Peninsula spans tens of thousands of years, from hand stencils and engravings to later paintings of people, animals and spirit beings. Across the continent, people understood the land as shaped by ancestral beings in the Dreaming, whose law governed kinship, marriage, ceremony and the care of country.

Aboriginal peoples lived through enormous environmental change. As the ice age deepened, the interior dried out and the giant marsupials of the Pleistocene died out, a loss whose causes, climate, hunting or both, are still argued over. When the seas rose again after about 19,000 years ago, Tasmania was cut off some 14,000 years ago and its people developed in isolation, while the islands of the Torres Strait formed between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago. The dingo arrived from Asia around 3,500 to 4,000 years ago, and new tools such as spear-throwers and small stone points spread across much of the mainland.

At the time of British arrival there were perhaps 500 to 600 distinct nations speaking about 250 languages, with many more dialects. Population estimates range widely, from about 300,000 to a million or more. Societies were organised through clans and extended families, with authority held by elders, and complex kinship systems that determined obligations to people and land. Movement across another group's territory depended on invitation, marriage ties or ceremony.

Aboriginal economies were far more managed than early colonists recognised. Controlled burning, practised for tens of thousands of years, opened grasslands, encouraged game and reduced the fuel for wildfires. In western Victoria the Gunditjmara built channels, weirs and ponds at Budj Bim to trap and farm eels, a system dated to around 6,600 years ago and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In parts of the south-east people harvested and stored grain and yams, and lived in stone or timber houses for parts of the year. Trade routes carried ochre, stone axes, pituri and shells over thousands of kilometres.

The Torres Strait Islanders, a Melanesian people related to the peoples of New Guinea, settled the islands between Cape York and Papua from about 4,000 years ago. By 2,500 years ago they had developed a distinct maritime culture, and on some islands they farmed gardens and lived in permanent villages. In the north, Macassan fishermen from Sulawesi in what is now Indonesia sailed each year, from at least the early eighteenth century, to collect sea cucumbers along the Arnhem Land coast, trading with the Yolngu and leaving words and objects in local cultures until the government ended the voyages in the early twentieth century.

Europeans had long imagined a great southern land. In 1606 the Dutch East India Company ship Duyfken, commanded by Willem Janszoon, charted part of the west coast of Cape York, and in the same year the Spanish navigator Luis Váez de Torres sailed through the strait that now bears his name. Over the next decades Dutch ships bound for Batavia in the Dutch East Indies were blown onto the west coast, and the land was named New Holland. Dirk Hartog left an inscribed plate on an island off Western Australia in 1616, and Abel Tasman reached the island he named Van Diemen's Land, later Tasmania, in 1642. The Dutch found nothing they wanted to trade for and made no settlement.

In 1770 James Cook, on his first Pacific voyage, landed at Botany Bay and sailed north along the east coast, nearly wrecking his ship on the Great Barrier Reef. At Possession Island off Cape York he claimed the whole east coast for George III. The British treated the land as available for the Crown to take, an idea later summed up in the term terra nullius, land belonging to no one, ignoring the people they had seen living on it.

After the American Revolution closed the American colonies to transported convicts, the British government decided to send them to New South Wales. The First Fleet of eleven ships under Captain Arthur Phillip reached Botany Bay in January 1788 and moved to Sydney Cove, where the colony was proclaimed on 26 January. It carried around 1,300 to 1,500 people, more than half of them convicts. The early years were close to starvation, but the settlement survived and grew into the town of Sydney.

About 162,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies before the last ship reached Western Australia in 1868. Most were working-class men and women convicted of theft in Britain and Ireland, including many Irish political prisoners. They were assigned to government work or to private masters, and many who served their sentences, known as emancipists, became farmers, traders and officials. Governor Lachlan Macquarie, from 1810, built roads and public buildings and promoted emancipists, angering the free settlers who wanted a society of gentlemen landowners.

New colonies followed: Van Diemen's Land in 1803, the Swan River Colony in Western Australia in 1829, South Australia in 1836 as a planned settlement of free migrants, Victoria, separated from New South Wales in 1851 after settlers took the Port Phillip district from 1835, and Queensland in 1859. Explorers pushed inland in search of rivers and grazing land, guided much of the time by Aboriginal men and women whose knowledge they relied on. Wool became the colonies' great export, feeding the mills of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and squatters ran sheep over immense tracts of Aboriginal land.

For Aboriginal peoples, the arrival of the British was an invasion. Smallpox broke out around Sydney in 1789 and killed perhaps half the local Aboriginal population; whether it came from Macassan contact in the north or from the colony itself, accidentally or deliberately, is disputed. Later epidemics of smallpox, measles, influenza and venereal disease spread ahead of the settlers and devastated communities that had never seen them. Food sources collapsed as sheep and cattle took water and grassland.

Resistance began almost at once. The Bidjigal warrior Pemulwuy led attacks around Sydney in the 1790s until he was killed in 1802, and fighting with the Darug on the Hawkesbury River lasted for years. In 1816 soldiers sent by Macquarie killed at least fourteen Dharawal people at Appin, and in the 1820s the Wiradjuri led by Windradyne fought settlers beyond the Blue Mountains, where martial law was declared. In Van Diemen's Land the Black War of the late 1820s and early 1830s killed hundreds of Aboriginal Tasmanians; the survivors were removed to Flinders Island, where many died, and the colonists long and falsely claimed that Truganini, who died in 1876, was the last of her people.

As pastoralists spread across the continent, massacres became a recurring feature of the frontier. At Myall Creek in 1838 stockmen murdered about 28 Wirrayaraay men, women and children; seven of the killers were hanged, one of the few times settlers were punished for killing Aboriginal people. Others went unpunished: at Pinjarra in Western Australia in 1834, along the Gippsland coast in the 1840s, and across Queensland, where the Native Police, mounted Aboriginal troopers under white officers, carried out systematic killings from the 1850s to the 1890s. The last widely documented massacre took place at Coniston in the Northern Territory in 1928, when police and settlers killed at least 31 people and probably many more.

Historians have produced very different estimates of the toll. Richard Broome suggested about 20,000 Aboriginal deaths and some 1,700 settler deaths in frontier conflict between 1788 and 1928, Henry Reynolds proposed up to 30,000, and some estimates for Queensland alone run far higher. A University of Newcastle project mapping colonial massacres, defined as killings of six or more people, has identified several hundred such events. By the early twentieth century the Aboriginal population had fallen to well under 100,000, and many survivors lived on reserves and missions under "protection" boards that controlled where they lived, whom they married and whether they could keep their children.

The discovery of gold in New South Wales and Victoria in 1851 brought one of the great rushes of the nineteenth century. The colonial population roughly tripled in ten years, and Melbourne became one of the richest cities in the world. Tension over mining licences led to the armed revolt of miners at the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat in December 1854, which troops crushed but which hastened reform. By the late 1850s the eastern colonies had responsible government, and Victoria and South Australia introduced the secret ballot, so widely copied that it was known abroad as the "Australian ballot".

Prosperity also brought hostility to outsiders. Chinese miners, who came in large numbers from China, were attacked in riots at Buckland River in 1857 and Lambing Flat in 1860–61, and the colonies passed laws to restrict Chinese immigration. In Queensland, sugar planters brought in more than 60,000 Pacific Islanders, many recruited by deception or force in the trade known as blackbirding, mostly from what are now Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. A long boom from the 1860s ended in the severe depression of the 1890s, bank collapses and great strikes, out of which the Labor Party was born.

A growing sense of nationhood, fear of foreign powers in the Pacific and the convenience of a common market drove the movement to federate. After conventions and referendums, the six colonies joined as the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January 1901, a constitutional monarchy within the British Empire, with Edmund Barton as the first prime minister and Melbourne as the temporary seat of government until Canberra took over in 1927.

The new parliament's early laws expressed both its democratic ambitions and its racial ones. South Australia had already given women the vote and the right to stand for parliament in 1894, and in 1902 the Commonwealth extended the federal vote to most women, while denying it to most Aboriginal people. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 allowed officials to exclude any non-European through a dictation test in a European language of their choosing, and the Pacific Island Labourers Act led to the deportation of most Islanders from 1906. Together these became known as the White Australia policy. At the same time, the arbitration courts set a basic wage, and old-age pensions arrived in 1909.

For Aboriginal people, the century brought tighter control. State and territory laws gave chief protectors guardianship over Aboriginal children and the power to remove them. Children of mixed descent in particular were taken from their families and placed in institutions, missions and foster homes, or sent to work as domestic servants and stockmen, on the theory that "full-blood" Aboriginal people would die out and their mixed-descent children could be absorbed into white society. These children became known as the Stolen Generations. The 1997 inquiry report Bringing Them Home estimated that between one in ten and one in three Aboriginal children were removed from their families between 1910 and 1970, and described the policy as genocide under the international definition. Removals continued in some places into the 1970s.

When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, Australia, with fewer than five million people, raised a volunteer Australian Imperial Force. On 25 April 1915 Australian and New Zealand troops landed at Gallipoli in an attempt to knock the Ottoman Empire out of World War I; the campaign failed after eight months and some 8,000 Australian deaths, but the landing became the founding story of national identity, remembered on Anzac Day. From 1916 Australian divisions fought on the Western Front in France and Belgium, at Fromelles, Pozières, Bullecourt and Passchendaele, and under General John Monash they played a leading part in the Allied offensives of 1918. Light horse units fought in Sinai and Palestine.

About 416,000 Australians enlisted and around 60,000 died. Two referendums on conscription, in 1916 and 1917, were narrowly defeated after bitter campaigns that split the Labor Party and divided Protestants from many Irish Catholics. At the Paris peace conference Prime Minister Billy Hughes secured a mandate over German New Guinea and opposed a Japanese proposal for a racial equality clause in the League of Nations covenant.

The 1920s brought assisted British migration, new industries and the building of Canberra, but the Great Depression hit an economy dependent on wool and wheat exports and foreign loans. Unemployment reached about 30 per cent in 1932. On 26 January 1938, the 150th anniversary of the First Fleet, Aboriginal activists held a Day of Mourning in Sydney to demand full citizenship rights.

In World War II Australian forces again fought for Britain in North Africa, Greece and Crete, but Japan's entry into the war in December 1941 brought the danger home. Prime Minister John Curtin declared that Australia now looked to the United States. The fall of Singapore in February 1942 sent some 15,000 Australians into Japanese captivity, and days later Japanese aircraft bombed Darwin, killing more than 230 people. Australian troops halted the Japanese advance on Port Moresby along the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea in 1942 and fought through New Guinea and Borneo until 1945, while the American commander Douglas MacArthur directed the South West Pacific campaign from Australian soil. About 39,000 Australians died in the war, and more than a third of the 22,000 taken prisoner by the Empire of Japan died in captivity. In 1942 Australia adopted the Statute of Westminster, formally confirming its legislative independence from Britain.

Convinced that the country had to "populate or perish", the Labor government began a vast immigration programme in 1945. At first it favoured Britons, then displaced persons from eastern Europe, and then large numbers of migrants from Italy, Greece, the Netherlands and Germany who built the Snowy Mountains Scheme and filled the factories and suburbs. The population grew from about seven million in 1945 to over thirteen million by 1975.

The Liberal leader Robert Menzies governed from 1949 to 1966, the longest premiership in the country's history, in an era of full employment, rising home ownership and close alignment with the West in the Cold War. Australia signed the ANZUS treaty with the United States and New Zealand in 1951, fought in the Korean War, and allowed Britain to test atomic weapons at the Monte Bello Islands, Emu Field and Maralinga in the 1950s, exposing Aboriginal communities in the test areas to fallout. From 1962 Australian advisers and then combat troops served in the Vietnam War, with conscripts chosen by a birthday ballot; about 60,000 Australians served and 521 died, and the war provoked the largest protests in the country's history.

Aboriginal campaigns for equal rights gathered force in these years. The federal vote was opened to all Aboriginal people in 1962. In 1965 Charles Perkins led students on a Freedom Ride through segregated country towns in New South Wales, and in 1966 Gurindji stockmen led by Vincent Lingiari walked off the Wave Hill cattle station, a strike over wages that became a claim for their land. In the 1967 referendum more than 90 per cent of voters approved removing two clauses of the constitution that excluded Aboriginal people from the census and from federal laws. The referendum did not, as is often believed, grant citizenship or the vote, but it became a symbol of national acceptance.

The White Australia policy was dismantled in stages. The Migration Act of 1958 abolished the dictation test, and in 1966 the Holt government opened the door to skilled non-European migrants. The Labor government of Gough Whitlam, elected in 1972, removed race from immigration selection altogether in 1973 and passed the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975. Whitlam also ended conscription, introduced free university education and universal health insurance, and recognised the People's Republic of China. Aboriginal activists set up the Aboriginal Tent Embassy outside Parliament House in 1972, and in 1975 Whitlam poured soil into Vincent Lingiari's hand as a symbol of the return of Gurindji land.

On 11 November 1975, in the midst of a budget crisis, the Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed Whitlam and appointed the opposition leader Malcolm Fraser, who won the following election. The dismissal remains the most controversial use of the Crown's reserve powers in Australian history. Fraser's government passed the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act in 1976 and accepted tens of thousands of refugees from Vietnam, the first large Asian migration since the gold rushes, and multiculturalism became official policy.

The Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating from 1983 to 1996 floated the dollar, deregulated banking, cut tariffs and tied the economy more closely to Asia. The Australia Act of 1986 ended the last legal links that allowed British courts and parliament to act for Australia. In 1992 the High Court's decision in the case brought by Eddie Mabo, a Meriam man of the Torres Strait, rejected terra nullius and recognised that native title to land could survive colonisation, leading to the Native Title Act of 1993.

John Howard's Liberal-National government, from 1996 to 2007, responded to the Port Arthur massacre of April 1996, in which a gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania, with strict national gun laws and a buyback of firearms. A 1999 referendum to replace the monarch with a president chosen by parliament was defeated, and Australia led the international force that restored order in Timor-Leste after its vote for independence that year. After the attacks of 11 September 2001 Australian forces joined the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the government began detaining asylum seekers who came by boat in offshore centres on Nauru and Manus Island, a policy later governments of both parties continued in various forms.

Kevin Rudd's Labor government delivered a formal national apology to the Stolen Generations on 13 February 2008. Labor leadership changes brought Julia Gillard, the first woman prime minister, from 2010 to 2013, before a decade of Coalition rule under Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison. Same-sex marriage was legalised in 2017 after a national postal survey. The same year, Indigenous delegates at a national convention issued the Uluru Statement from the Heart, calling for a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament, treaty-making and truth-telling. The Black Summer bushfires of 2019 and 2020 burned huge areas of the south-east, and the COVID-19 pandemic brought border closures and Australia's first recession in nearly three decades. In 2021 Australia agreed the AUKUS pact with the United Kingdom and the United States to acquire nuclear-powered submarines.

Anthony Albanese led Labor back to power in May 2022 and put the Voice to a referendum on 14 October 2023. Supporters argued that it would give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people a lasting say in policies affecting them; opponents argued that it would divide citizens by race or that its powers were unclear. About 60 per cent of voters said No, and it failed in every state, though many remote Indigenous communities voted strongly Yes. In May 2025 Labor was re-elected in a landslide, winning 94 of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives. In October 2025 Australia signed a security and defence treaty with Papua New Guinea, its first new defence treaty in more than seventy years. On 14 December 2025 two gunmen inspired by Islamic State killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, an attack the prime minister said was deliberately aimed at the Jewish community. In 2026 Australia is a federal parliamentary democracy of nearly 28 million people under King Charles III, about 30 per cent of them born overseas, with relations with its First Peoples still among the central questions of national life.