Exploration and Settlement in Australia

Exploration and Settlement in Australia

The island continent of Australia was the last to be discovered and explored by Europeans. It was called Terra Australis Incognita, the unknown southern land. The first European to sail into the Australian waters was a Dutchman, Abel Tasman, working for the Dutch East India Company, who discovered the western and southern coast of an island he named Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania) in 1618. Subsequent Dutch explorers of areas of coastal Australia called it New Holland.

In the mid-18th-century France and Great Britain also became interested in exploring the unknown land. Between 1768 and 1776 Captain James Cook, an officer of the British Royal Navy, made three great voyages of discovery.

His first voyage sailed around New Zealand and then the eastern coast of Australia. Sir Joseph Banks, a scientist and naturalist who accompanied Cook, recorded the flora and fauna of southeastern coastal Australia, which he named New South Wales, indicating its possibilities for settlement.


Fifteen years after Cook’s discovery, British Home Secretary Lord Sydney decided to set up a penal colony in Botany Bay (named by Banks), where Sydney is today. This was to accommodate the overflowing British jails resulting from the American Revolution, when former British colonies would no longer accept British convicts.

In January 1788 Captain Arthur Philip arrived at Sydney Harbor in charge of 11 ships, 717 convicts and an army detachment named the New South Wales Corps formed for the purpose of guarding them.

Philip oversaw the settlement through 1792, its most critical years, due to lack of food and the unsuitability of convicts as pioneers. Although free settlers began arriving in Sydney from 1793 the main purpose of the settlement remained a repository of convicts.

Three lieutenant governors followed Philip; the third, William Bligh, earlier of the mutiny on the Bounty, was a man of such fiery temperament that his tenure ended with the Rum Rebellion. The cause was the illegal liquor traffic by officers of the New South Wales Corps, the prevalence of drunkenness, and consequent problems.

Bligh’s attempt to rein in the officers resulted in his ouster. Although the leaders of the revolt were punished, the British government recalled Bligh and undertook reforms.

The new governor was Colonel Lachlan MacQuarie who came with his own Scottish regiment. The New South Wales Corps was disbanded and replaced by regular British army units that were rotated for tours of duty.

MacQuarie made extensive reforms, built up the infrastructure, and encouraged exploration into the interior as well as free immigration with land grants. The governors who followed him continued his policies, resulting in accelerated development.

Between 1802 and 1803, Matthew Flinders circumnavigated Australia, proving that it was an island continent and that there was no separate island called New Holland. Flinders recommended the name Australia for the continent, which was accepted. In 1829 Great Britain laid claim to the whole continent.

In 1813 the first overland expedition penetrated the low mountain range that separated the coastal plains of eastern Australia from the interior. Many explorations into the interior discovered river valleys and great grassy plains suitable for agriculture and pasturage.

Waves of settlers followed, encouraged by liberal land grants to free settlers and emancipists (convicts who had served their terms). The natives, known as aborigines, were hunter-gatherers and no match for the white settlers; they were killed, driven off, or survived on the fringes of white society.

Great Britain established several other penal colonies in Australia in addition to the one in Sydney. One established in 1803 in Tasmania was used to house the most violent convicts and to preempt a possible French attempt to seize the island; another was on Norfolk Island, off the eastern coast.

In 1824 Brisbane, north of Sydney on the eastern coast, became another penal settlement—it became the capital of a colony called Queensland. In 1850, convicts were sent to Western Australia at the request of free settlers there because of a severe shortage of labor. Two colonies, Victoria and South Australia, never had penal settlements.

End of the Penal System

As the number of free settlers grew, local opposition to continued transportation gained ground in the Australian colonies. At the same time, the transportation of convicts to remote colonies was questioned in Britain. In 1837 a parliamentary committee investigating the question reported against its continuation, beginning the movement to abolish it.

The last convicts were landed in New South Wales in 1840. By then it had received almost 75,000 convicts, with 25,000 still under sentence. No more convicts were transported to Tasmania in 1853, it having received 67,000 since 1803.

The first move toward representative government came to New South Wales in 1823 with an appointed legislative council. It was enlarged in 1842 to include some elected members, the electorate limited to men, including emancipists, paying certain taxes.

In 1850 the British parliament passed the Australian Colonies Government Act that gave each colony the right to set up its own legislature, determine franchise, tariffs, and make laws, subject to royal confirmation.

The six Australian colonies became states: New South Wales (capital Sydney), Victoria (Melbourne), Queensland (Brisbane), South Australia (Adelaide), which also administered the Northern Territory, Tasmania (Hobart), and Western Australia (Perth).

Each state adopted a constitution that with slight variations provided for a bicameral legislature of elected members (initially on a restricted male franchise) and a cabinet government on the British model.

By the mid-19th century, the interior of Australia had been crisscrossed; gold and other mineral deposits had been discovered and were being worked; steamships and telegraph connected it with other parts of the world; and railway lines were being built. The foundations of an Australian nation had been laid.

Self-government to Federation in Australia

The Proclamation of South Australia

Beginning with the establishment of the legislative council for New South Wales in 1823, the Australian colonies had gradually received increasing measures of self-government from the British Colonial Office.

In 1850 the British parliament passed the Australian Colonies Government Act that allowed the colonies to set up their own legislatures, pass laws to determine the franchise, tariff rates, and alter their constitutions, all subject to royal confirmation. In the following years, most of the colonies adopted their constitutions with slight variations.

All provided for a bicameral legislature of elected members and a cabinet on the British model (except for the most recently settled and most sparsely populated Western Australia, which established responsible government in 1890).


Evidence of their autonomy was indicated when Great Britain accepted a law passed by the legislature of New South Wales in 1851 that forbade the landing of convicts in that state. The last state to stop receiving British convicts was Western Australia, in 1867.

There was rapid progress on many fronts during the second half of the 19th century, shown by the founding of public universities in each state and the introduction of compulsory public education.

Railway building began in 1850, followed by the arrival of regular steamships that shortened the time of voyages, and the opening of telegraphic communications with other parts of the world.

Other signs of maturity are indicated by the withdrawal of British forces from the continent in 1870 as the colonies established their own militias and the colonies agreeing to subsidize financially the British naval squadron stationed in Australian waters in 1890.

However, the lack of a central government for the continent created problems and confusion. For example, each of the states built its railways using different gauges: the standard gauge of 4 feet 8 1⁄2 inches for New South Wales, the wide gauge of 5 feet 3 inches for Victoria, and a narrow gauge of 3 feet 6 inches for South Australia, Western Australia, and Queensland. Another question that needed a common approach was immigration.

Few non-British immigrants had settled in Australia up to 1850. However, in the aftermath of the discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851, peoples of many nationalities flooded to the gold fields. Disputes over taxation resulted in an uprising by German and Irish gold miners in November–December 1854 who proclaimed the Republic of Victoria—it was quickly put down.

It was the presence of 33,000 Chinese in the gold rush that led the legislature of Victoria to pass laws in 1855 that levied a heavy poll tax and put other restrictions on the Chinese that shut down Chinese immigration. New South Wales and South Australia followed with their own laws to restrict Chinese immigration, and they prevailed despite British government pressure against them.

Two other issues also affected all the Australian colonies. One involved the importation of laborers from the Solomon and other islands to work in Australia, mostly in the sugarcane fields in Queensland.

The condition of these laborers (called Kanaka) approached slavery and needed regulation. Another involved national security over control of the eastern portion of New Guinea (the Netherlands had annexed the western half).

Queensland was located nearest to New Guinea and was most anxious to control all western New Guinea. However, due to British reluctance to act promptly, Germany had already claimed the northern half, leaving only the southern part, which became a British colony in 1884.

These many issues contributed to the sentiment for forming a federation of all the Australian colonies. In 1885 the British parliament established a federal council to meet every two years to consult on problems that concerned all the colonies, but it was inadequate because it had no enforcement powers. The first Australian Federal Convention to create a union with more power met in Sydney in 1891.

It was composed of members of all colonial legislatures, including those from New Zealand, another British possession, presided over by Sir Henry Parkes, and failed to win acceptance of all the states. A second convention met in Hobart (Tasmania) without New Zealand in 1897 and drafted a constitution that won acceptance.

The union was called the Commonwealth of Australia, a federation that resembled the United States. The federal government was to control foreign affairs, defense, trade, tariffs, currency, citizenship, post and telegraph, etc.

It would be headed by a governor-general who represented the British monarch but would be governed by a prime minister and cabinet that had a majority in the lower house of Parliament called the House of Representatives, whose members represented districts based on population. The upper house, or Senate, had six senators from each state. A supreme court guarded and interpreted the constitution.

A new city whose location would be determined later would become the federal capital. (A site in New South Wales was later chosen and named Canberra, Australian Capital Territory.)

After acceptance in a referendum held in all states, the British parliament passed a bill of ratification. The Commonwealth of Australia came into being on January 1, 1901. After Canada (in 1867), Australia became the second self-governing dominion of the British Commonwealth.