When, as from 1606, the discoveries of the first Spanish and Dutch navigators made it possible to recognize the coasts of Australia, that undoubtedly made centuries that explorers and traders Asian and Oceanian were already in liaison with the natives.  

On arrival of Europeans, at the end of the XVIII E century, the Aboriginals, according to various sources, some 300 ' 000, were dispersed in a multiplicity of small groups nomadisant on vast territories. That they knew or not the principle of agriculture, they did not practice it and remained faithful to a kind of life based on hunting and the gathering, to which the products sufficed for their reduced needs.

But the extreme simplicity of their lifestyle, in extreme cases apparent of survival, did not prevent the development of a cultural life and spiritual very rich. The indigenous people created in his loneliness a very original civilization. The wandering hordes, which were found in fixed places at certain periods of the year, celebrated by ritual complexes and exchanges their unit social and the “time of the dream” of their origin, i.e. the mythical universe from where emerged the ancestral heroes who built the world and worked the Australian landscape.  

Beginnings of colonial Australia

In 1642, the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman drew up the chart of part of the Tasmanian coast. The English William Dampier explored the Western coast in 1688, then again in 1699, but it was only into 1770 that its compatriot, the James Cook captain, ventured with Endeavor in the Southern Pacific to trace the chart of the Eastern coast of this immense territory, which was then called News-Holland.

In the name of the British crown, Cook, took possession of the Eastern half of the continent. The British administration, which had just lost its colonies of North America become independent, sought a place then where to establish large penitentiaries to empty the jails London over-populated. It chooses the new colony of the antipodes announced by Cook and his naturalist, Sir Joseph Banks, like a hospital ground.

On January 26th, 1788, the captain Arthur Phillip, ordering the “First Fleet”, unloaded in Botany Bay with 732 “convicts”, and 450 sailors or soldiers accompanied by their families, in order to establish a penal colony. The penitentiary was not long in being transferred in the more favorable site from Jackson Port, which will become Sydney.

In 1802-1803, the captain Matthew Flinders carried out the full rotation of the continent. Other colonies were then established in Norfolk, in the ground of Van Diemen (Tasmanie), then in the west of the country. Fearing the French presence in the area, the British occupied the whole of the continent and proclaimed their sovereignty there.  

In eighty years, until the official stop of the deportation, the Australian colonies accepted 160 ' 000 convicts, for most common law criminal, except for the Irishmen, deportees political for rebellion towards the Crown. After very difficult beginnings (food shortage), the penal colony could finally provide for its needs, when the first harvests of corn and potatoes were made as from 1794. It is into 1814 that the British navigator Matthew Flinders who, at the end of his tour had charted to it quasi totality of the coasts of the continent, proposed to give him the name “Australia”.  

The colony of News-Wales of the South of the British Crown, site of the installation of the first colonists, understood the grounds then of what constitutes today the States de Tasmanie (then called Ground of Van Diemen), of Queensland and Victoria, that is to say the two-thirds of the whole of the territory. Western Australia, which remained longest a penal settlement, and South Australia, which never accommodated British convicts, were thereafter founded as completely separate colonies.  

The introduction of the sheep merino and the discovery of the pastures of the large plains of the West - beyond the barrier of the highlands - opened in Australia the ways of another destiny. Thanks to clear-sighted governors, the released convicts could receive grounds, thus creating a first fabric of colonization, while free colonists and soldiers at the end of the service founded fields, sometimes very vast, by employing penal labor. John MacArthur, former officer of the “First fleet”, become commercial and gentleman farmer, was the first to be bet on wool like product of export, and to make fortune there, at the end of the XVIII E century. But apart from the penal settlements, which extended on the coasts by creating the embryos from the future Australian States, the interior of the continent remained ignored.  

The exploration of the interior started in 1840 and lasted nearly sixty years. This saga is illustrated by Robert O' Hara Burke, John Edward Eyre or John Forrest, who discovered with disappointment an arid nature, inhospitable and threatening. The division of Australia in six separate colonies was officialized in 1850, when the British government decided to grant a limited autonomy to them.

The discovery of gold in 1851 in Bathurst caused a rush and sounded truly the end of the era of the prison. New cities were founded, like Bendigo and Ballarat. Australia became a prosperous ground and the stirring up population of the minors melted itself in the flood of the arrived first: people and an national identity started to be affirmed.  

 But of the conflicts burst between the colonial governments and the population, young person and readily turbulent, who claimed a greater autonomy. In 1859, Australian Colonies Government Act conferred the power on the various Australian colonies: News-Wales of the South, Tasmanie, Victoria, Australia of the South and Queensland (Western Australia following a little later). The economic prosperity of the colonies was real until the beginning of the year 1890, when the prolonged dryness, combined with the bankruptcy of several banks and to the collapse of world rates of wool, put an end to one half-century of prodigality as men and money. Prosperity only returned very slowly after 1895.  

The Australian federation

The taking possession of New Caledonia by the French in 1853 worried the Australian colonists. This fear, that the problems caused by the division of the country in colonies reinforced, led the Australian ones to seek the way of a political union.

From 1880, the movement in favor of a federation and a “large national government for all Australia” became extensive, with Sir Henry Parkes (1815-1896), five times Prime Minister of News-Wales of the South, which was one of the burning defenders. In the final analysis, after several national conventions and after all the colonies had adopted by referendum the approval of the national constitution, the British Parliament the law voted instituting the Federation of Australia on on July 5th, 1900. In 1901, the six Australian colonies federated to create the Commonwealth of Australia. The Territory of North, lately created, was included in the federation in 1911.  

The new Commonwealth, with initially Melbourne for capital, then Canberra as from 1927, left with the old colonies a political autonomy and legislative relatively important. It accentuated economic protectionism, adopted officially the policy of “white” Australia started at the beginning of the XX E century, practiced a policy of social protection and high wages and developed the instruction. Profiting from a favorable economic situation, Australia quickly reached one of the highest standards of living of the world. But the effects of the recession of 1929-1930 were felt hard in the country, whose protectionist attitude was already very marked; at the national level, they reinforced the centralizing tendencies of the young federation.  

During the First World War, Australia brought from the start its support for the United Kingdom and sent nearly 300 ' 000 men to take part in the campaigns of France and the East. The attack bloody and despaired of the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Body) on the beaches of Gallipoli in Dardanelles remained famous. Australia left ravaged the war, whereas intensified the nationalist feeling. Politically, the Federal state reinforced its powers on the States. Become member of the League of Nations, Australia obtained a mandate on the old German colonies of New Guinea and Nauru. It thus inaugurated an active foreign policy in the Southern Pacific.  

The release of the Second world war saw Australia again lining up behind the United Kingdom. Labor the Prime Minister John Curtin directed Australia during the conflict with skill and determination. The Japanese attack and the fall of the British base of Singapore, on on February 15th, 1942, reduced 22 ' 000 Australian privates to the captivity; the country appeared without defense vis-a-vis the enemy attack. Curtin then decided the return of the committed Australian troops in the East, in spite of the opposition of Churchill. Threatened Australia avoided finally the invasion, thanks to the American victories in the Pacific.  
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Contemporary Australia

From 1949 to 1972, Australia was controlled by a coalition of the conservative parties and liberals, that Robert Gordon Menzies directed until his political retirement in 1966. The Menzies era was characterized by a policy solved in favor of the immigration of nonBritish Europeans (of the east and the south of the Old world) and, at the economic level, by the hydroelectric installation of Snowy Mountains, in News-Wales of the South. One discovered new mining wealths out of iron and nickel (Western Australia), like out of bauxite in the north of Queensland. This period of the post-war period is that of the great Australian prosperity.  

The interior policy since is marked by alternation between preserving alliance (liberals and national party) and the workers party. This last returned to the power in 1972 with Edward Gough Whitlam, who broke with the traditional alignment of the foreign policy on that of the United States and the United Kingdom. Australia recognized officially popular China and Viet-Nam of North and inaugurated a policy of relationships much more marked to the bordering Asian nations, whatever the nature of their political regime. She also endeavoured to put a term at the massive surge of the foreign assets. In spite of the economic problems, of its fall in 1975 and return of the liberals with Malcolm Fraser, Whitlam leaves the memory of a prophetic and nationalist statesman.

It is besides this image which the members of the Labor Party used to return to the power with Robert (known as Bob) Hawke in 1983. The government continued with moderation the foreign policy of Whitlam, but appeared much more liberal as regards economic policy. This tendency, which was concretized by a wave of privatizations, aiming in particular at destroying the protectionist old demons, was accentuated with the replacement, in December 1991, of Bob Hawke by Paul Keating, who was re-elected in March 1993. But, in 1996, the John Howard liberal triumphed with the legislative elections. In charge of a coalition government between the parties liberal and national, this last gained the organized legislative elections in October 1998.

The year 1999 saw the position of the government of John Howard reinforced, in particular thanks to a general economic prosperity (bigger rise of the benefit of the companies), but also because of its political commitment and soldier with Timor-Eastern, largely supported by the opinion. In addition, the voters guaranteed once again his government scheme vis-a-vis that defended by the members of the Labor Party, while deciding massively against the transformation of the constitutional monarchy into a republic and against the addition with the Constitution of a preamble on the Australian people.  

The Aboriginals, which had to wait until 1967 to obtain the right to vote, assert, with the movement of the “Land right”, the lost grounds. The law on the indigenous land document of title (“native title bill”) voted into 1993 recognizes a right to them on the nonprivate grounds, thus cancelling two centuries of British jurisprudence.  
 Except the framework of the Commonwealth, Australia broke its institutional bonds with the United Kingdom and concluded a military agreement from defense with the United States and New Zealand (ANZUS). It also signed, in 1986, a treaty aiming at creating a zone denuclearized in the Southern Pacific, in order to insulate France which it vigorously reproached its underground atomic experiments Mururoa and its policy, qualified the colonial one, in the Pacific. In January 1988, Australia celebrated the bicentenary of its foundation.

Years 1990-1995 were remembered by a growth more moderate than during the previous decade. In 2000, whereas the Olympic Games proceed in Sydney, Australia turns more and more to the Asia-Pacific zone, in particular within the framework of the Economic cooperation the Asia-Pacific (APEC). In 2001, Australia will celebrate the hundredth birthday of its foundation like unified democratic nation.