Talk:History of Australia/Archive 1
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Misc
I tried to put up a little sentence before the article divides; I personally think articles look better if they have an introduction.---Mihoshi 16:45, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Victoria was first settled in 1835, not 1851
- Settled in 1835, yes. It became a seperate state in 1851. Prior to that it was part of NSW.
The post-European history is very weak at present, barely an overview, and needs considerable expansion. Anyone want to take it on? ____
Tannin, check out this diff: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=History_of_Australia&diff=0&oldid=21828
It is very clear that much of the second half of this article still has US government paid for public domain text. At the very least that source should be listed as a normal information reference so I'm putting the cite back in. If you like you can rephrase the cite so that it looks like the CIA and DoS were used a regular references and not as a source for the actual text. --mav 04:26 29 May 2003 (UTC)
Nonsense: a single sentence does not make an article. That CIA attribution is inaccurate and highly offensive, to Australia, and to the Australians who wrote the vast bulk of the entry. This truly is a case of "Yankee go home". Tannin 16:46 29 May 2003 (UTC)
- Was not the CIA / DoS information still used? Even rewritten text warrents an attribution. But, I guess, having the attrib on the talk page is enough. --mav
A note for posterity: An earlier version of this article incorporated public domain text from the CIA World Factbook 2000 and the 2003 U.S. Department of State website.
"Advanced" as a description of Aboriginal land management practices is vastly more accurate than "rudimentary" - the term that was use to replace it. The evidence for this is conclusive: since traditional Aboriginal land management practices were brought to an end (by European settlers from 1788 on) there has been a vast wave of land degredation and many species extinctions in Australia. Australia has the worst record in the entire world for mammal extinctions, with 22 species recently wiped out. Aboriginal land management practies were complex and often subtle; their cessation is directly implicated in the extinction of a number of mammal species. The land management practies of Europeans, in stark contrast, have been an unmitigated disaster. There may be a better word than "advanced" to indicate the extraordinary sensitivity that Aboriginal people had to their environment, and their ability to work with it rather than against it. "Rudimentary", however, is certainly not it. Tannin 00:36 30 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Excised text -- Tim Starling 14:28 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)
- much more about early history, including rum rebellion, beginning of free settlers, wool, the French ship that almost claimed us etc.*
Dot points for further discussion
- The Gold Rush, bushrangers
- World War II and the realignment away from Britain and towards US. War in general could do with elaboration, starting with the Boer War, then World War I, World War II, Vietnam War, Korean War, Malayan Emergency. Some mention of ANZACs would be worthwhile also.
- The Stolen Generation and treatment of Kooris more generally.
- Postwar immigration, the beginning of the end of the White Australia Policy.
- WA attempt to succeed from the rest of Australia ~1930.
- Economic expansion and cultural sleepiness of the Menzies years.
- Vietnam war, protests and other clashes.
- Whitlam government and the dismissal.
- Arrival of vietnamese boat people, non-discriminatory migration policy
- Economic deregulation of the 1980s.
- Australian participation in project Echelon and US military bases in general.
- Mabo case and Native Title
- Republic debate, Howard's 1996 win, contemporary events, struggles for future
- Also could do with links to subpages (eg. the aus foreign relations page wasn't linked to directly, bound to be others).
- Environmental degradation and the adaptation to the Southern Oscillation.
My eventual goal for this article is to continue expanding for a while, then split the current material into a number of subsidiary articles, leaving a 2-3 page summary here. -- Tim Starling 12:55, Aug 11, 2003 (UTC)
Some comments
I agree that the post-settlement section is weak and I might have a go at writing some text when I have time. Most noticeably there is nothing on constitutional development and the growth of democratic institutions, or on the labour movement.
A couple of small errors in passing:
> Quiros called the islands he discovered Australalia del Espiritu Santo, not Australia del Espiritu Santo. (by the way, what is a Counter-Reformation Catholic and why is it relevant?)
- There's more to that story, and it isn't explained very well here. De Quiros wasn't just a catholic, he was (judging by [1]) commissioned by the pope. From [2]:
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- Viceroys of Spain's American empire regularly sought new lands. One such expedition left Callao, Peru, in December 1605 under Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, a man of the Counter-Reformation who desired that Catholicism should prevail in the southland. De Quiros reached the New Hebrides and named the island group 'Australia del Espiritu Santo' and he and some later Catholic historians saw this as the discovery of Australia.
- The counter-reformation movement is mentioned in Protestant Reformation. -- Tim Starling 02:55, Sep 12, 2003 (UTC)
> Murrumbidgee River, not Murrimbidgee
> The section on Aboriginal mortality is well-balanced, but the reference to poisoned blankets is gratuitous - this persistent myth is based on ONE reported (but not verified) incident.
> The section on federation is seriously deficient. The plural of referendum is referendums.
> ANZAC Day is not "an annual holiday to remember its [Australia's] military's victories and losses." It is a day to remember Australia's war dead.
> A reference to the stolen generation debate without any discusion of Aboriginal affairs in the recent period, such as the 1967 referendum and the land-rights movement, is seriously misleading.
> An Australian republic was NOT "a subject of discussion for much of Australia’s history since Federation." It was barely mentioned until the 1970s, and became a serious issue only during the Keating government.
Dr Adam Carr Melbourne
- Thank you for your help, Adam. Please Be bold in updating pages -- most of the problems here would have taken you less time to correct than to complain about. I know that this article needs much more work, and any contribution you make would be greatly appreciated. I haven't been doing much on it lately, I've been writing MediaWiki code instead. -- Tim Starling 02:02, Sep 12, 2003 (UTC)
Tim: I don't really approve of overwriting other people's work without their permission. That's why I am reluctant to post articles here. If you want to make corrections to your text in the light of what I have said, that is your privilege. I may be wrong after all :)
On constitutional history, I now notice there is a separate page on that. That page has its deficiencies too, but it doesn't need to be duplicated here. I do think a section on the rise of colonial democracy and the labour movement would be valuable for non-Australian readers - it is after all one of the things that makes Australian history distinctive. I might have a go at that when I get time.
AC
- You don't approve of overwriting other people's work? That is because you are a newbie :) From Wikipedia:Be bold in updating pages:
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- For the most part, the instinctive desire of an author to "own" what he has written is counterproductive here, and it is good to shake up that emotional attachment by making sweeping changes at will when it improves the result. And of course, others here will boldly and mercilessly edit what you write. Don't take it personally. They, like all of us, just want to make Wikipedia the best it can be.
- Most common Wikipedia faux pas number 1 is:
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- Worrying too much that you're going to mess things up. You probably will a little; everybody does, to some extent. But then someone else will probably clean up after you. The community encourages participants to be bold in updating pages.
- And number 7 is:
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- Thinking that there is an "author" of any given article you read. A common misconception of new arrivals to Wikipedia is that there are single authors of articles. This leads people to issue critiques on Talk: pages when they could just as easily make changes to articles themselves. The fact of the matter though is that no article here has just one official author, even if only one person has worked on it. Anyone can work on any article, and if you see a problem with an article, you are encouraged to fix it. Don't bother with the Talk: page unless politeness demands you explain what you've changed, or that you ask a question first. For more information, see Be bold in updating pages and Talk page.
- Also, you might want to consider creating a user account. You don't need to supply any personal details, just a username and a password. The benefits are described at Wikipedia:How to log in, but IMHO the greatest benefit is that it provides a method for one Wikipedian to reliably contact another. All that I've written here could have been written on your user talk page, if you had one. -- Tim Starling 04:20, Sep 13, 2003 (UTC)
"Australalia del Espiritu Santo" got no Google hits, so I grabbed my copy of Macquarie University's "People of Australia", a book I bought a week ago for the sole purpose of using it in this article :) It's actually "Austrialia".
"The plural of referendum is referendums." Both Mirriam-Webster's and the Macquarie Dictionary say it can be either referenda or referendums. I've heard "referenda".
Of course neither of those things means that you shouldn't have made the change. I (or someone else) would have checked the facts when you made the change, and we would have duly fixed it. -- Tim Starling 05:10, Sep 13, 2003 (UTC)
Since Tim assures me that it is OK to rewrite this article, I have done so. Anyone who wants to argue with me about anything I have written is welcome to do so :) Dr Adam Carr 13 September
- Nice work, Adam. It's improving significantly. Tannin 13:45, 13 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Aboriginal history - prehistory
I reverted the excision of the Aboriginal history section. That is a vital, perhaps the vital part of Australia's history, for that is the period when the whole shape of our continent, and the creatures that live on it, was determined. To attempt to understand Australia without understanding the history of this land is utterly impossible.
- I didn't excise it, I moved it to a separate page because this one is over 30kb and I am getting a warning message. In any case strictly speaking prehistory is not the same as history so the division is quite logical.
210.10.32.12 13:50, 19 Sep 2003 (UTC)
By all means cut something out and move it then, but not the most important part. Tannin
- I don't see that it is any more important than any other part. I also don't see any other logical place to divide the piece in two. I am happy to suggest that readers should read the prehistory piece first, but in fact prehistory does not belong on a history page. Australian history, properly defined, begins in 1606.Dr Adam Carr 13:59, 19 Sep 2003 (UTC)
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- Then tell me this? Where does our fauna come from? Where does our landscape come from? Why can you see eucalypts spread over 70% of the forested part of the continent? Why is the interior so arid? Why are there no Diprotodons browsing in the Royal National Park? And what of the gross insult to our Aboriginal citizens? Honestly, that was a really really bad idea. If the page needs to be split, then so be it, but the Aboriginal history came first, included a number of crucial events to the creation of this nation as it stands today, and cannot be simply swept under the carpet as if it never existed. Whatever else may have to go, it cannot be the 53,000 years of history that occurred before the white man came. Tannin 14:16, 19 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Do calm down Tannin - let me explain this as carefully as I can. "Natural history," "prehistory" and "history" are three different things. Natural history is what happened in Australia before humans arrived here. Prehistory is what happened between the arrival of humans and the beginning of recorded history. History is the narrative of human events of which we have records. We have no records of anything that happened in Australia before 1606, so that is the beginning of Australian history. Can you name, let alone date, one of these "crucial events" that happened before 1606? You can't, because we have no record of anything that happened before that date.
Of course the fact that Australia was inhabited by humans for 53,000 (or whatever) years is important, but the study of that period is either palaeoanthropology or archaeology - not history. There is nothing insulting or any other such subjectivity about this, it is a standard division of disciplines. It is not insulting to trees to say that their study comes under botany, not zoology.
So, if the page is too long, as seems to be the case, then the logical thing to do is create a prehistory page. I agree that readers should read that page first, so let's call it Australian history 1 or something, and the other page Australian history 2, ok? This slight terminological inexactitude is permissible in the interests of consensus. Dr Adam Carr 14:38, 19 Sep 2003 (UTC)
(Actually, we can date quite a few events - but that is an aside.) As you correctly gather, I am very concerned to retain the Aboriginal history section in its proper place - i.e., first, because it happened first and everything else that has happened since has been (in part) a result of it. I really do believe that this is vital. Relegating it to a sub-page is just not on.
Apart from its importance as a primary shaping factor of more recent history (and of the present day), it would be a huge mistake to think that Australia began in 1788. (You know all this, of course, just as well as I know the difference between palaeoanthropology and history, but I'll spell it out for all to read.)
This is a shared land, with a shared history. We do not have an "us" (post 1788) and a "them" (pre-1788): we just have Australians. It doesn't matter if you were born in London of Cockney parents or in Brunswick of Vietnamese descent, you nevertheless are the heir to an Australian heritage that goes back 50,000 years or more.
Now, to practicalities. Yes, the page 'is getting too long. (And a good deal of that thanks to your efforts!) Something will need to be done about it fairly promptly. However, consigning the 4 or 5 paragraphs of Aboriginal history to a sub-page will only provide a few weeks grace. As a long-term measure, it won't be nearly enough. The split you propose, in other words, is a good idea and indeed an inevitability, but we need to split somewhere closer to the middle. (Middle as in "middle of text", I mean.) Possibly pre-federation and post federation, that would work, I think. It ain't perfect, but it's roughly in the middle of the text, and it provides a convienient cut-off point.
Title? How about Early Australian history and Recent Australian history? Is that better than "1" and "2"?
Best -- Tannin 16:14, 19 Sep 2003 (UTC)
OK Tannin, I don't think it's important enough to have a brawl in our little Aust hist caucus about, so I'm happy to split the file at Federation as you suggest. Eventually we might want to split the file up in a number of ways, either chronologically or thematically, as it gets bigger.
Having said that, I do think it is ahistorical to say that the Aboriginal people before 1788 were "Australians." Surely that is imposing a European construct of nationhood on their very different sense of their own place in the world? 1788 does mark a fundamental rupture in the history of this continent, with the period 1606-1788 serving as a sort of prelude to that rupture. This would be a good topic to explore in a further article, yes?
I am now really keen to know what events in Australian history before 1606 you can name and date. :) Cheers, Dr Adam Carr 04:14, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)
- Hello. I agree with Tannin. To call the period up to 1606 "prehistory" is not the best choice of word. There was a very strong history that the Aboriginal people carried in their heads and passed on to each generation through story and song. In order to get initiated and go through law, you needed to prove you wanted to learn these things - that you were interested in history.
- I don't think the issue of naming and dating is what this is about. Since Europeans have been on this continent for the last five minutes, it's plain silly and conceited to rule out 40,000 years of history prior to that. Confer History of the USA or History of Canada(and yes, certainly a separate article is necessary, as it is for a number of the subjects on this page).
- DRyan
Let's rename the articles to History of Australia before 1901 and History of Australia since 1901 to be more "formal" sounding. --Jiang 07:38, 21 Sep 2003 (UTC)
- You beat me to it! I was just about to suggest this, it's also more consistent with the other history pages, such as History of Germany and History of the United States. Also we should have summaries from those pages included here, under the subheadings. A suggested template follows. --Lexor 12:47, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)
History of Australia before 1901
Main article: History of Australia before 1901
(summary of article here...)
History of Australia since 1901
Main article: History of Australia since 1901
(summary of article here... e.g. Australia was become a federation in 1901 etc.)
seems ok to me - who is going to write it? Dr Adam Carr 13:41, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)
- I went ahead and made the suggested changes, actually took the text from the main page just to start things up. I haven't renamed the pages as yet, I didn't want to do that until the currently active contributors to the page such as yourself were aware of it. Can I do the rename now? --Lexor 13:58, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)
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- OK, rename done now. I've got to go, so I'll change all the links in the tables etc. to avoid the redirects later, if somebody else doesn't beat me to it. --Lexor 14:18, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)
This article really hasn't had much activity at all since last October. In the meantime, the American article has undergone a massive rewrite, and is now seperated up into small chunks of as little as twenty years per article. I doubt we could get that much, but there's a lot of history not included here. Any thoughts on trying to (at least partly) match the American effort? Ambivalenthysteria 04:21, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I am opposed to breaking this article up into smaller ones. Encyclopaedia readers expect to find a broad synoptic national history. People who have more specialised interests can write feeder articles and link them to this one, eg History of Australian music or History of Australia in the 1890s or Economic history of Australia. Adam 06:11, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
- What's wrong with the American format of doing that? (Summary with link to the larger article) Ambivalenthysteria 06:14, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Please give a link to the American article you are refering to. Adam 06:15, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
- History of the United States Ambivalenthysteria 11:58, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Well, if we were to treat Australian history that way, someone would have to do a great deal of writing to create all those subsidiary articles dealing with each period. Once they exist they can be linked to, but there is no point in creating a lot of dead links to articles which no-one has written yet. Adam 14:04, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
- I know that. I was just proposing that we overhaul this article, and try for the level of detail and formatting seen in the American one. If it's okay with you, I'll start trying to expand it when I get the chance. Ambivalenthysteria 00:28, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)
We'll be watching :) Adam 00:52, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Category:History of the Germanic peoples
The original occupants of Australia were certainly not Germanic, over 1000 years of history had passed between the Germanic tribes coming to England and its colonisation of Australia. A large proportion of the immigrants to Australia, throughout its history, were Irish or Scottish. These days a large fraction of Australia's population are either immigrants from non Anglo-Celtic countries or descended from such. Given all that, listing Australia in the "history of the Germanic peoples" seems like a stretch too far, I would have thought. --Robert Merkel 02:01, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)
the side box
How can i edit that little box with the pic of the coat of arms on it. Just cause there is a line put in the middle of the list of the states which seems a little useless. The bellman 12:35, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)
- You'll notice at the top of the article it says {{History_of_Australia}}. This means that a template called "History of Australia" has been included. You can get to this page by going to Template:History of Australia. HOWEVER.. the line in the middle is to separate the city articles (Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney) from the state articles (Tasmania, Victoria, WA) so it does serve a purpose - best to leave it. -- Chuq 12:42, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject History/Status
I have created Wikipedia:WikiProject History/Status, which has some notes about what needs to be done to make this article featured. Please add other suggestions and see what you can to help. Tuf-Kat
reorganisation discussion
a heads up on a discussion on reorganisation for people only watching this main article. chime in at: Talk:History of Australia before 1901#Split into smaller articles?. perhaps that discussion should be moved here. clarkk 12:44, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
- Note my message to User:Toothpaste here on her merging of the history of Aust articles back together. I think we have had a lot of discussion about this and it's unwise to abruptly undo all the thought and hard work that has been put into separating them. Lisa 22:27, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
material added by anon
The following block was added to the top of this talk page by 203.129.47.97. I have moved it to the bottom here, and also point out that it appears to be copied directly from an external site. Please someone advise what to do. Dmharvey 12:51, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
copied portion
Here's my history of Australia in four short parts:
A Very Quick History of Australia
How much understanding of Australian national history should we all have? One would think as much as possible. Knowing some key events and names, an appreciation of the development of Australia from an isolated island continent inhabited by Indigenous Australians to the commencement of occasional contact with visitors from the outside world, to the point where we started to become a confident player on the world stage, would be an impressive start. To help you, we have compiled a thumbnail sketch of the fundamentals of Australian history. One can recognize FOUR PERIODS. Some of these overlap.
1. BEFORE ANY OF OUR HISTORY WAS WRITTEN DOWN the Original Australians lived here for more than 40.000 years. They may be the oldest continuous population in the world. Many hunted and gathered for their livelihood, some lived in semi-permanent villages. They arrived here from the North, group after group and occupied the continent. Occasionally they had visits from their northern neighbours, who came and went in canoes or other boats. These visits are apparently not linked to the arrival of those Europeans who permanently settled here to help make Australia as we know it today. Our knowledge of these visits are not based on written history but on limited archaeological evidence and Aboriginal traditions, and consequently are imprecisely dated, do neither specify names of individual people who landed here or of their vessels, nor the exact location where they may have landed.
Some, like the visits of Makassans, may have occurred over a long period and continued into the next period. They too will have brought home stories that were passed on to other neighbours and other travellers, thereby feeding the legend that there was a great land 'down under'.
2. THE AUSTRALIAN MARITIME CONTACT PERIOD is a most exciting but not well known period, starting in 1606, when the first European mariners sailed into Australian water, recording their observations of this land and the residents they encountered. Every Australian should know the name of Willem Janszoon and his ship the Duyfken, the first recorded ship and crew to chart an Australian coast as well as the first to meet with Aboriginal people. All Australians should also know the name of Louis Vaez de Torres and his ships San Pedro and Los Tres Reyes that sailed through Torres Strait later in 1606. Both Janszoon and Torres made the world aware of our northern coast, even though they did not realize the extent of the land they had stumbled upon. Although 1606 marks the beginning of Australian written history another 52 European ships from a number of nations would make contact and add to the mapping of our coasts by 1770. Most of these were merchant ships, 41 of them from the (Netherlands) United East Indies Company (VOC) and included the ships Zeehaen and Heemskerk of Abel Janszoon Tasman's 1642 first voyage to our land. He established in 1644 that our continent was an island with a north, west and south coast and, logically, an east coast. An Australian state has been named after him. Tasman has this in common with Queen Victoria. The names of most of these early mariners, their ships, what they observed, and when, are certainly well recorded. Consequently names like Dirck Hartog, Pieter Nuyts, Willem De Vlamingh, Francisco Pelsaert must be considered important ones in Australia’s history. The subsequent charting of much of our east coast was carried out in 1770 by Englishman Captain James Cookin his ship Endeavour. Cook confirmed that Tasman had been correct in his conclusion that Australia was an island continent . Cook relied on the accumulated knowledge contained in the maps and journals of earlier mariners to find the east coast. Subsequently the final outline of the coast of Australia, including the realisation that Tasmania was a separate island, was detailed at the beginning of the Colonial Era by mariners such as Bass, Flinders and Baudin, the first two of these sailing from their 'home' base Sydney, Baudin from France.
3. THE COLONIAL ERA, includes the exploratory expeditions into the interior and the slow and often painful contact history on land. It starts with the arrival of the first fleet on the 26 January 1788, in Sydney, lead by Arthur Phillip, to establish a penal colony. This was the main reason for the initial British settlement. That 'start of colony date' now marks Australia Day. During this period colonies were established around Australia, a process often marked by conflict and struggle. Each colony had its own heroes and key events, many of which have become part of national history. It was during this period that many of our towns and cities begin to appear on our maps.
4. AUSTRALIA SINCE FEDERATION, begins with the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 as an independent nation. (Note it was not an 'end of the colony' where the colonists returned to the home country and left the land to the indigenous people as later happened elsewhere). Shortly after women gained the right to vote. Australia “came of age” through its involvement in World War I, particularly with the Anzacs landing at Gallipoli in 1915. Following World War II, in which Australia came under threat from Japan, massive numbers of migrants arrived to make Australia their home. They have had a profound influence in shaping the modern Australia. Another landmark was the constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in a referendum in 1967. In 2001 we commemorated the Centenary of Federation. This most recent period embraces the lives and times of our grandparents, our parents and ourselves. Therefore we are part of history, we are making history, and in 2006 we will be commemorating our history
Edits by Auriong
What are the opinions on the recent edits by Auriong (vide here)? My stance is that they are not worth their while; any benefit that may be gained from the depictions is immediately detracted from by the sheer monstrosity of their organisation. Furthermore, I don't see any need for it, particularly in this article.--cj | talk 11:30, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
- No objection necessarily to the content but the formatting is probably over the top. The maps need ot be better integrated into the text rather than a table. They probably need to appear only once and in the right article.--A Y Arktos\talk 12:07, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
- I think that the maps are great, probably the best article for them is European exploration of Australia. -- Chuq 12:37, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
