Talk:History of Australia before 1901/Archive 1

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In the paragraph immediately prior to the heading "Discovery" there seems to be a discrepancy. The first sentence of the paragraph puts the Aboriginal population in 1788 at half a million. The last sentence appears to contradict this, claiming that native population numbered 300,000 in 1770. Someone please take a look. Also, please include citations of Aboriginal Census figures for this period. --Smithfarm 08:26, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Census figures? The British hardly bothered to number the people they were dispossesing. Aboriginals were not included in the census until the constitutional amendment of the 1960's. Lacrimosus 09:09, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

A persistent myth. See Australian referendum, 1967 (Aboriginals), which I am about to edit. Adam 12:36, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, that was just a bad joke. What I was trying to say was that the 18th century Aboriginal population figures, whether 300,000 or 500,000, are probably inherently inaccurate, since there was nothing even remotely resembling a census of Aboriginals at the time. How was any figure arrived at? Guessing? Archaeological digs? Anyway, plausibility of the figures aside, the fact that there are two contradictory sentences in one paragraph of the article still stands. Also, the info you present about Aboriginals and the census, and the constitutional amendment, might be good to have in the article somewhere... Just an idea. --Smithfarm 12:25, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

land bridge to Australia? This would mean the Timur sea has to fall dry? I would like to see a source for this astonishing claim. --Yak 16:56, Apr 7, 2004 (UTC)

The land bridge was across the Torres Strait, not the Timor Sea. Adam 01:42, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I've just merged most of History of Australasia into this article. I haven't had time to proofread yet. Here are the "unused portions" of the old article:

Therefore, the arrival of Matthew Flinders in Albany in 1801 and the air attack by the Japanese on Darwin in 1942 have been incorporated into dance and ceremony and could be said to be part of this dreaming.

(The Western Desert word tjukurrpa is commonly used for "dreaming" and carries the additional meaning of "dreaming" being a present alternative timeline that is constantly being created in dreams and history.)

The earliest European visitors were Portuguese like Luis Vaez de Torres (1606) following in the footsteps of Vasco da Gama. From the beginning of the 17th century, Dutch explorers dominated the discovery of Australia until the 1750s when Britain and France began to take an interest. The Dutch had been well estalished in Malaya and Indonesia since the beginning of the 1600s profiting from the trade in spices.

The establishment of a colony of convicts at Port Jackson on Sydney Harbour in 1788 was a direct result of this discovery combined with the growing rivalry with France which was actively seeking colonies in the Asia Pacific region at this time.

-- Chuq 05:20, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)


History of Federation

I think there needs to be a detailed discussion of the history of Federation. Do people think it should be in a seperate article, or form part of this one? Anybody know of any good resources for it? Lacrimosus

Federation of Australia. This could obviously be expanded. Adam 11:04, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Fantasy history

My comment is specifically about the earliest European discoveries/explorations of Australia.

The main "Australia: article contains some information about this: "The land was first discovered by Europeans in 1522 by the Portuguese explorer Cristóvão de Mendonça, but it was only in the 17th century that the island continent became the subject of European exploration, with several expeditions sighting Terra Australis: The Dutch explorer Willem Jansz (1606), the Portuguese explorer Luis Vaez de Torres in Spanish service (1607), and the Dutch explorers Jan Carstensz (1623), Dirk Hartog and Abel Tasman (1642), after whom is named the island of Tasmania, but which he himself originally named after Anthoonij van Diemenslandt."

The main "History of Australia" article contains more: "The land was not discovered by Europeans until the 17th century. It was claimed for Britain in 1770, and first colonised in 1788 as a penal colony. Five other colonies, some penal and some free, were founded in the early 19th century."

But this article fails to referto Mendonça's sighting and possible exploration of Australia. Why? I can see that there are a group of people dedicated to making these articles about Australia's history top notch so I'm reluctant to step in immediately and change it...--Lisa 02:49, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm puzzled by this obsession among some Australians, including many amateur historians, to prove that someone other than the Dutch or the British discovered Australia, the favourite candidates being the Portuguese or the Chinese. There is not a shred of evidence to support this. Specifically, the "mahogany ship" is a myth, and the Dieppe Map could as easily be a map of Mars as of Australia. It is of course not impossible that ships from somewhere saw the Australian coast before Jansz in 1606, but there is no evidence that they did, and this cannot therefore be stated as history. Adam 11:49, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Discovery vs Contact, etc.

This article has a rather European view of Australian history that is taught less in Australian schools now than it used to be. The main sections are currently 'pre-history and aboringal legends', then 'discovery', 'colonisation', 'exploration', 'free settlement' etc. If told from the point of view of the Australian land and people, the sections might be better renamed as "Early history", "Contact with non-Aboriginal cultures", "Colonisation and resistance" etc.

Prehistory usually refers to the stone age, bronze age and iron age - whereas the first paragraph in this article's prehistory section refers to the 9th century (with arab and chinese traders) to the late 1400s with European maps. I propose moving these references to the 'discovery' section, renamed as "Contact with non-Aboriginal cultures" or something perhaps a little less unwieldy. The Macassans, for example, don't really belong in a section called 'discovery'. If no objections i will go ahead and make these changes.

There is also currently nothing in the article on Aboriginal resistance, which includes key events in Australian history, eg.

  • 1790, Pemulwuy, the first of the Aboriginal resistance fighters, spears Governor Phillip's gamekeeper and Phillip orders the first punitive expedition. Pemulwuy leads the Aboriginal resistance in the Sydney area in a guerilla campaign lasting several years. He is captured and executed in 1802, but his son Tedbury continues his resistance.
  • 1799, The Black War begins, a six-year battle waged by Aborigines against white settlement in the Hawkesbury and Parramatta areas of New South Wales.

I will add these and others, but I'm mentioning it here to try to encourage other contributors to take a broader view of what constitutes "history".

I also question the motivation for establishing the colonies which is stated in the article - a solution to overcrowded prisons. I believe the motivation to come to Australia was more commercial (as it was for the Macassans before them). Here is an excerpt from one excellent article making such an argument:

"...the 1788 invasion really developed from a brilliant business idea - an idea as radical as the Internet. This idea, first explored by the Portuguese, was that you could have an empire without territory - a trade empire - all you needed was an archipelago of ports, strung like a necklace around the coast of wherever you wished your ships to ply. Either these ports could be, like Surat in India, already existing facilities which you negotiated the use of with the Mughal emperor and paid for leasehold rights, or else ports which you built yourself, like Bombay, Table Bay at the Cape of Good Hope or Ambon, or - as I am here to say - Sydney. We were always linked in. We were never cut off. The necklace of ports was strung right round the African, Arabian, Indian and Malay coasts.
The three main East India Companies - Portuguese, Dutch and English - were soon fierce rivals for the spice trade. Spice may not sound like much. But in the seventeenth century the investment returns were sensational by any investor’s standard."
The first voyage of the English East India Company in 1604 realized sales of nutmeg and mace for 32,000 times what the captain paid for them. Of course, if he had paid a fair price, the Banda Islanders would still be the inheritors of that wealth and might be among the richest communities of the world.

By the way, I made a complete page Macassan contact with Australia. Please have a look and add improvements and/or comments. cheers! ntennis 06:59, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

In reply:

  • ntennis fails to understand the technical difference between history and prehistory. Prehistory does not "usually refer to the stone age, bronze age and iron age." It refers to the period of time between the arrival of humans in a given place and the beginning of substantial records of human activity in that place. History is a narrative of human events based on documentary evidence, or at least on substantial archaeological evidence. There is no documentary evidence for the activities of humans in Australia before 1606, and almost no archaeological evidence, since the human population of Australia did not have a material culture of a type which created such evidence. Therefore, in Australia, prehistory extends to 1606.
  • Moving forward from 1606 into the historical era, it is still not possible to write history from the viewpoint of the indigenous population because we have no evidence whatever of their views for the period 1606 to 1788, and very little for the period after 1788. All we know about indigenous Australians until the mid 19th century, at the earliest, comes from what European observers said about them. Thus, a chapter heading "Contact with non-Aboriginal cultures" would be no more than a gesture to current historiographical fashion, without any content. The substance of the chapter would still be based entirely on European sources.
  • I agree there should be references to Aboriginal resistance, although I will oppose attempts to inflate it beyond the historical evidence, as some modern writings do.
  • There was no immediate commercial motive for the British settlement in Australia. Its motivations were (a) the prison problem, which was quite genuine from the viewpoint of 18th century social theory, and (b) strategic - the desire to forestall the French in the South Pacific. There was some belief that Australia might be a source of timber and flax for the Royal Navy but this was a very minor consideration. The British were not involved in the spice trade. Australia did not produce spices, as the British knew from Joseph Banks's reports. Those powers that were involved in the spice trade (the Dutch and the Portuguese) had no interest in Australia and made no effort to colonise it.

Adam 09:45, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

OK, thanks for the reply. Though I disagree about the possibility of Aboriginal people having a history 'pre-contact', I have no interest in posting controversial content. However, I'm not clear if you oppose moving the references in the second paragraph to Arab and Chinese traders etc to the start of the 'discovery' section? It feels like a jump forward in time to me; it belongs with the other information about contact from Asia. --ntennis 02:38, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Now done. ntennis 02:04, 10 July 2005 (UTC)