40 interesting facts about Australian history

Sometimes it’s the details that stick with you.

Almost 20 years ago I read Tim Blanning’s acclaimed history of Europe from 1648 to 1815: The Pursuit of Glory. It’s a rich 650+ tome and part of the Penguin History of Europe series. With the passage of time, I can’t remember most of it. But I can tell you that it took about 256 hours to get from Edinburgh to London in 1700, and about 60 hours by 1800.

I like these kinds of facts, interesting in their own right but which reveal something significant; in this case the movement of goods and ideas in a crucial century that saw the dawn of the industrial revolution.

So without further ado, here are some interesting ‘facts’ about Australia - although perhaps ‘well evidenced propositions’ would be more accurate. I’ve noted the source material for almost all of them, which I've largely taken from mainstream secondary literature.

Some of these ‘facts’ are interesting in a minor way; others are fascinating in a significant way, and not always positive. All of them, I hope, shed some light on Australia.

1. Between 150 and 500 million people may have lived and died in Australia before 1788 (British colonisation). Admittedly, I’ve opened my list of ‘facts’ with a guessing game - but there is, still, a fact here - which is that no matter how you cut the numbers, there was an impressive human footprint on the Australian continent long before European settlement, starting from about 65,000 years ago. Geoffrey Blainey has 500 million as his ballpark, but it all depends on the assumptions, in particular the average population size over time. In estimating that latter figure, historians generally look to the human population just prior to 1788 as a starting point with which to work backwards; a number that is itself contested. (I usually go with 750,000 as the middle ground of that debate). Archeological insights into the population variance over time also helps.

2. There is evidence of a human ritual being practised for around 12,000 years, surviving into the late nineteenth century. In Cloggs Cave in GunaiKurnai Country, eastern Victoria, archeologists found two tiny fireplaces with trimmed wooden sticks smeared with animal or human fat, closely matching a ritual later recorded by the ethnographer Alfred Howitt in 1886 in the same area. That would imply a knowledge transfer across some 500 generations.

3. The steep decline of the Indigenous population meant that the total Australian population was probably lower in the 1848 than 1788. If we accept that the pre-contact population was 750,000+ then this claim is very plausible. The Australian Bureau of Statistics historical series estimates the non-Indigenous population at 332,328 at the end of 1848. Standard demographic reconstructions estimate the Indigenous population at around 200,000 - 220,000 by 1850. The gold-rush immigration likely carried Australia’s population above its 1788 level sometime in the 1850s. Another way of looking at the same fact is that the aggregate GDP of the ‘Indigenous’ economy was probably larger than the colonial economy up until around 1840, given the relative sizes of the two economies were largely determined by population.

4. The last "first contact" between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia reportedly occurred in the 1980s. In 1984, nine Pintupi people living independently on Country near Wilkinkarra, or Lake Mackay, with virtually no direct contact with settler society, encountered Pintupi relatives. They moved with them to Kiwirrkurra, where they reportedly saw a white person for the first time. Most of them became artists, and two of them - Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri and Yukultji Napangardi - became internationally acclaimed painters. In 1986, Aboriginal relatives made contact with the Rictor family in the Great Victoria Desert. They are generally regarded as the last known Aboriginal family in Australia to have been living independently without regular contact with settled communities.

5. Before the British government chose Botany Bay in 1786 as a site for a new penal settlement, there was an earlier proposal in 1783 to give asylum in New South Wales to the American Loyalists who took Britain’s side in the American Revolution. James Mario Matra, a New York-born American Loyalist who had sailed on Captain Cook’s Endeavour, submitted a proposal to the British government in August 1783 titled ‘A Proposal for Establishing a Settlement in New South Wales’. He suggested that the settlement would be a place of refuge for loyalists to ‘repair their broken fortunes and again enjoy their former domestic felicity’.

6. For much of the eighteenth century, Australia’s most significant overseas relationship was with Indonesia. Fishermen from Makassar made repeated seasonal voyages to northern Australia to harvest and process trepang, a sea cucumber known for its aphrodisiac qualities, which they sold to Chinese markets. At their annual peak, the fleet of fishermen likely numbered around 1,500, about as big as the First Fleet in 1788. Millions of cured sea slugs went back each season, ultimately to Canton. For some northern coastal Australian communities, this Indonesian contact was more sustained and significant than British contact until the early 20th century.

7. Early Sydney was one of the healthiest places on earth to be a (European) child. What evidence there is suggests a very low child mortality rate compared with Europe or the Americas. Geographic isolation was a natural quarantine, so killer childhood diseases like measles or scarlet fever barely reached the colony. Additionally, only a negligible number of children immigrated to New South Wales in the early years, the average migrant being a convict in their mid-twenties, already immune. Accidents were the main cause of death of children. (Source: Portia Robinson, The Hatch and Brood of Time - A study of the first generation of native-born white Australians, 1788 - 1828, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp.34-36)

8. Infanticide, a persistent concern in eighteenth-century England and Europe, was virtually absent in early Sydney. In England, an unwanted pregnancy meant instant dismissal and “loss of character” for servant girls. In the colony, pregnancy for convict women more often meant reduced work hours and in some cases increased support from the Government Store. Having already arrived with the convict ‘stigma’, the loss of character was far less of a consideration. (Source: Portia Robinson, The Hatch and Brood of Time - A study of the first generation of native-born white Australians, 1788 - 1828, Oxford University Press, 1995, p.37)

9. After the disaster of the Second Fleet to Australia in 1792, it was safer to sail to Australia as a convict than to America as a free migrant. The arrival of the second-batch of convicts in 1792 was an unmitigated disaster, with poor conditions on the ships leading to an extraordinarily high death rate. Subsequent administrative changes, including paying contractors per convict landed alive, substantially improved things. An early example of administrators understanding organisational economics. (Source: John Hirst, Freedom on the Fatal Shore: Australia’s First Colony, Black Inc, 2008, p.8)

10. A cow cost as much as £84 in 1796, about several years’ wages for an English labourer. Only government, or its military/civil officers, owned cattle and horses in 1796, which were extraordinarily hard to import in the first decade, having to survive the long distance from South Africa or India. In England, an ordinary cow would have cost around £10.

11. In 1820 a Sydney merchant could ship a barrel of whale oil to London more cheaply than to a point 100 miles inland from Sydney. An insight from Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance (see chapter 6). Unlike major European and North American ports, Sydney had no navigable waterway linking its harbour with productive country deep in the bush. Instead, a wall of mountains runs close to the east coast, leaving little room for long rivers flowing from the interior. Without railroads, Australia could not have developed a large interior economy.

12. In convict-era Australia, people generally avoided using the word "convict". Maybe the first instance of Australian political correctness? The word was avoided by general convention, the preferred terms being "government man" or "assigned servant". To call a convict a convict was considered offensive by the most important labour resource of the colony. Once they served their term, convicts wanted to be treated like everyone else. By 1820, ex-convicts had accrued significant power in their own right, owning about half the colony’s wealth. (Source: John Hirst, Freedom on the Fatal Shore: Australia’s First Colony, Black Inc, 2008, p.157)

13. The first modern play about Australia was written by a Frenchman, Citoyen Gamas, in 1792. Called Les Emigres aux Terres Australes, ou Le dernier chapitre d’une grande révolution, Comedie (The Emigrants to the Southern Lands, or The Last Chapter of a Great Revolution: A Comedy), it imagined French aristocrats, rather than British criminals, transported to the Sydney penal settlement.

14. Australia was the richest country on earth, per capita, for decades. After the 1850s gold rush, up until the 1890s depression, Australia had the highest per capita income in the world. In 1850, probably only the United Kingdom and the Netherlands sat above Australia, by about 20 per cent, with the United States 9 per cent below. After the gold rushes Australia passed both, and from 1860 to 1890 the gap over the United States ran at 25 or 30 per cent.

    Comparative GDP per capita relative to USA (US=100)

    

    Source: Ian McLean, Why Australia Prospered - The Shifting Sources of Economic Growth, (Princeton University Press: 2013), p.12

15. Australians also had the shortest working hours in the world until the 1930s, alongside some of the highest real wages. Why? Labour scarcity during the gold rush is one obvious explanation that kicks it off, epitomised by the victory of Melbourne stonemasons winning an eight-hour day in 1856. To a degree, union-friendly legislation subsequently locked this effect in. Geoffrey Blainey offered a demographic reason too: Australia was a country of young, unmarried men, with a high male-to-female ratio. A single man with good wages saw greater benefit in more leisure time. By the 1990s, however, the Australian working week had drifted above the world average.

    Hours of work per week, 1870-2000

    

    Source: Martin P. Shanahan, ‘Wealth and Welfare’, in Simon Ville & Glen Withers (eds.), Cambridge Economic History of Australia, (Cambridge University Press: 2015), p.499

16. Within the first generation of settlement, British Australians were enjoying something like the living standards of Britain itself. This was possible by two important factors. Firstly, enormous British subsidies. Imperial expenditure on the penal settlements averaged around two-thirds of colonial GDP between 1788 and 1822. Secondly, a very high workforce-to-population ratio. A colony of transported convicts had almost no children and few elderly people. The result was a massively subsidised welfare economy, aided by forced labour, that delivered high per-capita incomes on modest productivity. Perhaps here lie the seeds of Australia’s ‘relaxed and comfortable’ ethos. (Source: N.G. Butlin., Forming a Colonial Economy: Australia 1810–1850, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 40)

17. The founders of the Australian legal profession included convicts who were once criminal lawyers. Before the arrival of solicitors who were also free settlers, legal representation was sometimes provided by convicts who had been attorneys in Britain or Ireland before being transported to Sydney. George Crossley is a notable example, practicing as an English attorney and solicitor for more than two decades. He was transported after being convicted of perjury. Governor Bligh relied on Crossley for legal advice during the crisis that led to the Rum Rebellion. George Chartres was another convict who provided legal work while still a convict. Even more symbolic of the early labour shortage was the employment of convicts as police.

18. By the late 1820s, press freedom in New South Wales was arguably greater in some respects than in England. In the ‘mother country’, newspapers had to pay a heavy stamp duty on every copy they sold. In 1827, the NSW Governor attempted to likewise impose a fourpenny stamp duty as well as newspaper licensing. The licensing scheme was blocked by Chief Justice Francis Forbes on the grounds that it was inconsistent with English law. Forbes also forced the withdrawal of the stamp tax on the grounds that it had been imposed improperly. (Source: John Hirst, Freedom on the Fatal Shore: Australia’s First Colony, Black Inc, 2008, p.151)

19. Scotland barely participated in convict transportation. Of every twenty convicts reaching eastern Australia, thirteen were English and six Irish. Scotland supplied roughly one. That’s about half as many convicts as its population would suggest. Scottish courts simply didn't imprison many people, retaining their separate legal system after the Union of 1707, which included a fundamentally different body of common law. Petty crimes tended not to attract as severe sentencing compared with England.

20. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor seriously discussed running off to Australia. Mill was an active supporter of the movement that founded South Australia, joining the South Australian Association. Harriet’s younger brother, Arthur Hardy, migrated to South Australia and became a pastoralist and politician there. Liberals hoped that South Australia would become a progressive leader in political and social equality. Indeed, South Australia became the first self-governing jurisdiction in the world to allow women to vote and stand for parliament, in 1895. (Source: Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: A Biography, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.109)

21. The achievement of manhood suffrage in the 1850s was, in large part, a political accident. The British Government were persuaded to halve the proposed New South Wales property qualification for voting. Why? Because otherwise, poorer free settlers would be disenfranchised and at the mercy of wealthy ex-convicts. Shortly afterwards, gold-rush inflation pushed rents up so far that by 1856, 63% of adult men in settled NSW could vote and 95% in Sydney, against about 20% in England. (Source: This is a John Hirst argument, but you can read a condensed version in Judith Brett’s From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting, Text Publishing, 2019, see chapter 2)

22. The gold rush made Australia a nation of migration on an almost unbelievable scale. Gross migration in 1851–60 was 602,200 people, equal to 93 per cent of the entire 1851 population. In 1852, 86,000 people left the UK for Australia, a record not broken for another 61 years. (Source: Andrew Seltzer, ‘Labour, skills and migration’, in Simon Ville & Glen Withers (eds.), Cambridge Economic History of Australia, Cambridge University Press: 2015, p.180; Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance, Pan Macmillan Australia, 2001, p.182)

23. Sydney and Melbourne were importing nearly half of Britain’s book exports by the 1880s. The gold rush in Victoria attracted hundreds of thousands of people with capital who could pay their own fare, and these people were more literate than the average migrant. Ten years after the gold rush, in 1861, only 11 per cent of European men and 22 per cent of women over twenty-one in Victoria were illiterate, which was less than half the UK proportions, and likely better than London itself. (Source: Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1851 - 1861, Melbourne University Press, 1963, p.371)

24. Even a hundred years later, in 1960, Australians still spent more per head on books than any other English-speaking people, with relatively twice as many bookshops as Britain and four or five times as many as the US. (Source: Geoffrey Serle, From deserts the prophets come : the creative spirit in Australia 1788-1972, Monash University Publishing, 2014, p.193)

25. In 1859, Chinese immigrants made up 8% of Victoria’s population but, because so few were women, about 20% of the colony’s men. About 40,000 Chinese miners worked in Australia between 1858 and 1880. Chinese goldminers in NSW actually outnumbered European goldminers in NSW in 1861 (12,000 to 8,000). The race politics of Chinese immigration during this time is fascinating and has its fair share of surprises. Needless to say it doesn’t reflect well on most, but not all, European miners. To the extent there was a pro-Chinese faction, it came from the conservatives in the Legislative Councils. They knew from parliamentary inquiries that most aspersions against Chinese immigrants were factually wrong. To them it revealed what they knew in their hearts to be true: that democrats and ‘the mob’ could not be trusted. (Source Geoffrey Blainey, The Rush that Never Ended, Melbourne University Press, 1963, p.88); John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, Monash University Publishing, 2017, p.36; John Hirst, Freedom on the Fatal Shore: Australia’s First Colony, Black Inc, 2008, see chapter ‘Excluding the Chinese’).

26. Thanks to the gold rush, Melbourne's Government House was larger than the Viceroy of India's, and its ballroom larger than Buckingham Palace's. Victoria’s Parliament House was the grandest in the Empire outside of Westminster. (Source: Geoffrey Serle, From deserts the prophets come : the creative spirit in Australia 1788-1972, Monash University Publishing, 2014, p.48)

27. During the great London dock strike of 1889 – up to that point the most significant maritime strike in British history – Australians contributed around two-thirds to the strike fund, or £37,000. Of that amount, over two-thirds came from Victoria. This has always struck me as the perfect ‘Exhibit A’ of Australia’s strange class based-but-also-classless political culture in the late nineteenth century. Very attuned to labour issues, but classic ‘working class’ sympathy extend well into middle class households of the kind that could afford to contribute generously to strike funds. One reason why state and federal labour parties had political success in this period is because they had widespread appeal beyond wage labourers. (Source: Guy Collender: ‘“Hands across the sea”: Strikes, solidarity and diverging outcomes in port cities in Britain and Australia in the late nineteenth century’, Coastal Studies and Society, Vol.3, Issue 2-3, Sept 2024)

28. In 1822, Tasmania (then Van Diemen’s Land) had six times as many men as women, and among convicts the ratio was sixteen to one. The high male-to-female population ratio caused problems. It likely accelerated the ‘Black War’ in Tasmania as a result of the sexual violence against and abduction of Aboriginal women. In 1848, the Tasmanian convict population was reported as 84% male and 16% female, leading to fears of “unnatural crimes” between the male convicts, which became a major argument against convict transportation.

29. Australia’s 1890s economic depression was worse than the 1930s Great Depression. Real GDP per capita fell by around 20 per cent over the 1890s, compared with a fall of only about 10 per cent over the 1930s. Unlike America, Australia’s banking system largely remained intact during the 1930s. In part, that is because Australian banks remembered the catastrophic banking collapse of the 1890s, fuelled by huge credit growth and lax standards, particularly in Victoria. Of the 64 deposit-taking institutions in Australia in 1891, 54 were closed by 1893. A severe drought made economic recover even more difficult. Counterfactuals are a guessing game, but I’d wager that if there were no severe drought, and more sensible banking policy in the 1880s, Australia federates earlier and its racial politics is decidedly less toxic than it became in the early 1900s.

    Real GDP per capita

    

    Source: Reserve Bank of Australia, ‘Two Depressions, One Banking Collapse’, RDP 1999-06

30. Charles Dickens’ youngest and favourite son, Edward, migrated to Australia and became a politician in New South Wales. His father named him Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, after the Victorian author Edward Bulwer Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with the now ridiculed line “It was a dark and stormy night”. Affectionately known as Plorn by his father, Edward was called Ted by his Aussie mates. Charles Dickens famously held Australia aloft as a kind of utopia, a place of freedom and opportunity. Alas, the two of his children who migrated there (the other being Alfred Tennyson Dickens) had mixed success; partly victims of the 1890s depression. Ted was a gambler and fell into heavy debt. He represented the electorate of Wilcannia, by all accounts competently, for five years, from 1889 to 1894. The term nepo-baby wasn’t around, but the public certainly knew the concept. “The most interesting thing about you is that you are the son of Charles Dickens”, said one editorial letter, cruelly. Thomas Keneally wrote an underrated novel about him in 2020, The Dickens Boy.

31. Arguably the only WWI enemy attack on Australian soil was in 1915, when two Afghan cameleers attacked a holiday excursion train near Broken Hill out of loyalty to the Ottoman Emperor. It’s less appreciated today that at the turn of the century, camels were the main carriers across more than half the continent. The “Afghan” drivers’ religious devotion had a commercial benefit: forbidden alcohol themselves, they were often entrusted with carting booze to outback pubs.

32. The Joe Rogan diet. In 1900 Australians ate 318 grams of meat per day versus 136 grams in Britain. And contrary to its macho self-image, Australians drank a third to a half less beer than the British at the turn of the century. They were bigger tea drinkers though. (Source: Lionel Frost, ‘Urbanisation’, in Simon Ville & Glen Withers (eds.), Cambridge Economic History of Australia, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p.250)

33. Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 presidential platform was attacked as a “rehash of policies long in vogue in Australia and New Zealand”. American progressives in the late 19th/early 20th century saw Australia as a political laboratory from which to draw ideas on social welfare and racial policies. In 1912, Roosevelt proposed a range of reforms already trialled or practiced in Australia, including minimum wage commissions, the concept of a “living wage,” workers’ compensation, restrictions on women’s and children’s labour, social insurance, and women’s suffrage. Roosevelt had read and recommended to others the 1894 book by the Australian democratic Charles Pearson, National Life and Character: A Forecast. (Source: Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform, Harvard University Press, 2019, p.7)

34. The first university course in Australian history was taught at Stanford, California, in 1907–08; the first full course in Australia was introduced at the University of Melbourne, by Ernest Scott, in 1927. The historian Geoffrey Serle makes the claim - correctly, as far as I can tell - that it didn't become a standard annual course anywhere until 1946, when the University of Melbourne established one. (Source: Geoffrey Serle, From deserts the prophets come : the creative spirit in Australia 1788-1972, Monash University Publishing, 2014, p.154)

35. The Story of the Kelly Gang, an Australian silent film about the famous bushrangers, is generally recognised as the world’s first feature-length narrative film. It was released in Melbourne on Boxing Day 1906. In keeping with the national tradition of banning things, from the 1910s, several Australian states either restricted or banned ‘bushranger films’. Most censorship was lifted in the 1930s, or 1940s for New South Wales.

    

36. By mid-twentieth century, Australian alcohol consumption per head was roughly comparable to England's. But convictions for drunkenness were about twenty times the English rate. Why? Likely because of heavy pub/hotel regulation, restricting their number and opening times. “On week days drinking is done in lunch hours and in the short time between the end of work and the closing time of hotels, which in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia is six o’clock, and is normally referred to in newspapers as ‘the six o-clock swill’. Drinking behaviour often shows evidence of a race against the clock.” (Source: O.A. Oeser and F.E. Emery, Social Structure and Personality in a City, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1954, pp.34-35)

37. Australia was probably the last developed Western democracy to permit Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, lifting its import ban in 1965. Even the 1997 film version starring Jeremy Irons caused controversy. In 2020, newly released cabinet papers from 1998-99 revealed that the federal government debated whether to fund a formal application to the Australian classification board to effectively prevent the movie from being screened. They decided against it.

38. During the Great Depression, Australia's four government munitions factories survived by making lipstick containers, golf irons, motor-car spare parts and talking-film projectors, and other items to keep its essential staff employed when the Armed Forces placed negligible orders. (Source: S. J. Butlin, War Economy 1939–1942, Australia in the War of 1939–1945, Australian War Memorial, 1955, p.5)

39. Relaxed and Comfortable. A 1948 Gallup poll found Australia the happiest nation among surveyed countries (but not very ambitious).

    

    What did happiness mean to Australians? Their top three answers were ‘contentment’, ‘good family life’, and ‘economic security’. When asked the question ‘If you had the choice, would you prefer a steady job or a better paying job?’, 85% per cent said steady job. (Source: O.A. Oeser and F.E. Emery, Social Structure and Personality in a City, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1954, pp.34-35)

40. Trains on the busiest intercity route, Sydney–Newcastle, were slower in 2010 than in 1937. The late-1930s Newcastle Express was very quick, with a non-stop service taking 2 hours 20 minutes. Of course, this is a bit of a ‘cheat’ fact as today’s services aren’t non-stop expresses because they run along a very busy commuter corridor, taking 2.5-3 hours. But still … 1938 was almost 90 years ago! Also, in the 1920s Don Robertson drove Sydney to Melbourne in 10 hours 5 minutes, not too different than today, and still faster than modern train services (yes, no one sane takes a train from Melbourne to Sydney). (Source: Robert Lee, Transport: An Australian History, UNSW Press, 2010, p.350)