A Brief History of Australia, Second Edition

Barbara West, Frances Murphy

Description

A Brief History of Australia, Second Edition provides a clear, lively, and comprehensive account of the history of Australia from ancient times to the present day. It relates the central events that have shaped the country and details their significance in historical context, touching on all aspects of the history of the country, from political, international, and economic affairs to cultural and social developments. Illustrated with full-color maps and photographs, and accompanied by a chronology, bibliography, and suggested reading, this accessible overview is ideal for the general reader.

Coverage includes:

• Diversity—Land and People


• Indigenous History


• European Exploration and Early Settlement


• Gold Rush and Governments


• Federation and Identity Formation


• Realignment


• Populate or Perish


• Constitutional Crisis


• Contradiction and Change


• The Howard Years


• Australia in Turmoil

Sujets

• Histoire
• Lifestyle
• Geography
• Demography
• Politics
• World
• History
• Australia
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438199528
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

A Brief History of Australia, Second Edition
Copyright © 2021 by Barbara A. West
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, contact:
Facts On File An imprint of Infobase 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001
ISBN 978-1-4381-9952-8
You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.infobase.com
Contents Introduction Chapters Diversity—Land and People Indigenous History European Exploration and Early Settlement Gold Rush and Governments Federation and Identity Formation Realignment Populate or Perish Constitutional Crisis Contradiction and Change The Howard Years Australia in Turmoil Support Materials Aussie Terms and Phrases with Translations into American English Australian Prime Ministers since 1901 Chronology Bibliography Suggested Reading
Introduction

Australia is a mass of contradictions. The oldest land on Earth was one of the last to be seen by European sailors during the Age of Exploration. Members of the oldest continuously surviving culture on Earth became full citizens of the country in which they live only in 1967. The sixth-largest country in the world by landmass in 2020, it is conversely only the 55th largest by population. Despite its relatively low population, about 25.5 million in 2020, and very low population density, about 9 people per square mile (3 people per sq. km), Australia is sometimes said to be overpopulated relative to the amount of water and fertile soil available for human use.
In trying to understand these and a host of other contradictory and unfamiliar aspects of the country, both academic and popular authors writing about Australia often try to pin down the entire place in a single catchphrase. The historian Geoffrey Blainey, before his reputation was sullied by claims of racism in the late 1980s and 1990s, was one of the country's most respected writers on the nature of Australian identity. He located the key to understanding the place and its people in The Tyranny of Distance (1966), that is, both Australia's distance from Europe and North America and the great distances one has to travel within the country to move between cities. Other attempts at locating Australia's identity in a catchphrase title include The Working Man's Paradise (Lane 1948), The Lucky Country (Horne 1971), A Secret Country (Pilger 1992), and In a Sunburned Country (Bryson 2000). While all of these titles capture some essence of the place, none of them works entirely. Australia is all of these things, and more.
This brief history of Australia begins with a chapter that places it in context, exploring the land and its people in broad brushstrokes. This is followed by a chapter on precontact Indigenous culture based on the work of archaeologists and other prehistorians, as well as ethnographers who have spoken at length with contemporary Indigenous people about their histories. The remainder of the book takes a largely chronological look at Australian history since the first documented sighting of the landmass by a European in the 17th century. From William Janszoon through David Dungay, colonialism through gay rights, Australia's political, economic, and social trends are explored in greater or lesser detail, depending on available resources and the interests of nonspecialist readers. In conjunction with the suggested reading list, a chronology, two other appendices, and extensive bibliography, A Brief History of Australia, Second Edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the country and its people.
Warning : Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this volume may contain images and names of deceased persons.
Entry Author: West, Barbara A., with Frances T. Murphy.
Chapters
Diversity—Land and People

To have a basic understanding of a people's history, events in time and place must be put into their proper context. This chapter provides a brief overview of the land upon which generations of Australians have made their mark and some of the most important demographic features of today's population.
Land
Australia is the world's sixth-largest country by territory, more than 2.9 million square miles (7.6 million sq. km) in size. In addition to the mainland and island-state of Tasmania, about 155 miles (250 km) apart at their closest points, Australia controls 8,222 other islands, from the well-known tourist destinations of Kangaroo Island and Fraser Island to the uninhabited Nepean Island, just off the coast of the more famous Norfolk Island, site of one of Australia's most brutal penal colonies. Similar in size to the continental United States, Australia measures about 2,300 miles (3,700 km) from Cape York in far north tropical Queensland to South East Cape in Tasmania, and 2,485 miles (4,000 km) from Byron Bay, New South Wales, to Steep Point, Western Australia. The total length of Australia's coastline is 37,118 miles (59,736 km), about 60 percent of which is the mainland and 40 percent islands. Since 1936, Australia has also held a large amount of the Antarctic territory but without the possibility of sovereignty with the implementation of the Antarctic Treaty of 1959.
Politically, Australia is divided into six states: New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia, and two territories similar to Washington, D.C. in the United States: the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and the Northern Territory, both administered by the Commonwealth government from Canberra in the ACT. The island-continent is also divided into three time zones: eastern, central, and western.

Australia is divided into six states and two territories. It has a relatively small population, with most people living in cities in the southeast.
Source: Infobase.
Within these natural and political boundaries, Australia encompasses a wide variety of landscapes and forms; even within states and territories, deserts and rain forests exist within fairly close proximity of each other. The average rainfall for the country as a whole differs from year to year but ranges from just 6.5 inches (165 mm) to slightly more than 11.8 inches (300 mm) per year. Across all years, the driest region in the country is Lake Eyre in South Australia with just five inches (125 mm) per year, while the wettest is at Bellenden Ker, Queensland, with nearly 313 inches (7,950 mm) of rain per year (Geoscience Australia 2020).
This vast variation, however, masks the fact that the continent is dominated far more by its lack of water than by the few areas with an abundance of this resource; Australia is the second driest continent on Earth after Antarctica. About 35 percent of the Australian continent can be classified as desert because of lack of rainfall, while a further 35 percent receives less than 20 inches (500 mm) of rain per year and is thus considered arid or semiarid. The largest desert is the Great Victoria Desert in South Australia and Western Australia, at 134,653 square miles (348,750 sq. km), or about 4.5 percent of the Australian mainland (Geoscience Australia 2020b). An interesting feature of Australian deserts is that they do not resemble the Sahara or high deserts of California and Nevada. Because of the great antiquity of Australian deserts, plants have had time to adapt to the arid conditions and thus in most places where rabbits, camels, or cattle have not overgrazed the land, they are covered with grasses, shrubs, and even trees.

The age of the Australian desert means that a plethora of plants have adapted to the dry conditions; newer deserts, such as the Sahara, have far less plant life.
Source: Robyn Mackenzie. Shutterstock.
While the desert regions in Australia have been expanding for hundreds if not thousands of years, especially in the western plateau and central lowlands, the area covered by forest has been shrinking precipitously. In the 2019–20 bushfire season alone, forest area larger (48,000 square miles) than the U.S. state of Pennsylvania (46,000 square miles) was destroyed in a matter of weeks (Sliman 2020). This loss is considered even more tragic in that Australia as far back as 2012 was evaluated by ecologists as having "little left to lose" of its native forest cover due to forest clearing since the colonial era (Bradshaw 2012).
Australia is also currently experiencing severe degradation of some of its most important river systems. The country's largest system, the Murray-Darling, which covers about 386,102 square miles (1 million sq. km) in South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, the ACT, and Queensland, is experiencing such stress that areas near its mouth in South Australia are under immediate threat of permanent degradation due to high acidity and salinity. The Macquarie River system in New South Wales is under similar stress, as are many others in southern and central Australia, resulting in vociferous debate between environmentalists and irrigators over the amount of water that can be taken from these rivers each year.
In the early 1980s another of Australia's river systems, the Franklin-Gordon in the island state of Tasmania, was the site of the fiercest environmental battle the country has yet seen. From 1979, when the Hydro-Electric Commission (HEC) named the Franklin-Gordon as an appropriate place for a dam project, through the summer of 1982–83, when the Franklin River blockade saw more than 1,200 people arrested for civil disobedience in the region, the entire country focused on the battle between the state government and HEC on one side and the federal government and environmentalists on the other. Eventually, in July 1983, a narrow, one-vote victory in Australia's highest court put a permanent stop to the dam project. The region was then able to move forward