Australia travel guide

Although the earliest human remains found in New South Wales date back to 40,000BC, scientists are confident humans existed in Australia some 30,000 years before that with Indonesians the most likely candidates to have settled along the coast. Sea faring Malay were known to make the seasonal crossing to northern Australia in search of sea slugs to sell to Chinese traders but aside from these early forays into what was considered pretty inhospitable and worthless territory, no one had the wherewithal to inhabit the land Down Under other than the Aboriginal people.

Aboriginals in Australia worked with the land to learn from it and to become part of it creating a healthy and sustainable balance between humans, animals, land and sky. The symbiotic relationship between Aboriginal people and the land was invisible to the first European explorers which led to Australia being termed terra nullius (empty land) which would in turn import English laws to the land as it was deemed as not having been settled. Astonishingly, these laws remained unchallenged until the early 1990s where they would be overturned through a combination of archaeological finds, encrypted artwork, oral storytelling and European settler records, giving Australian Aboriginals rights and interests to their land under the Native title.

Back in the 1770’s, James Cook was mapping Australia’s east coast before returning to Blighty with news of ‘noble savages’ interesting wildlife and very little else of interest to the powers that be in London. Undaunted by the lack of interest, Cook named the newly charted region New South Wales and Botany Bay in NSW would be decreed the ideal spot for a penal colony.

It was the spring of 1787 when the first fleet of eleven ships set sail for Botany Bay from London with a human cargo of 730 convicts, around a quarter of whom were women. They wouldn’t land until early 1788 when Captain Arthur Phillip’s convict colonisers docked in Sydney Cove. Wild weather and Aboriginal hostility led to the first two years in Sydney being disastrous for the colonists with little or no chance of growing anything in the rock hard soil. Even the trees were way too tough to cut and pretty much buckled axes on first swing. Around a third of the colonists were resettled 1,500km up the coast on Norfolk Island in an attempt to find more forgiving land although this didn't stop another fleet of convicts being shipped out, many of whom would die before ever seeing land again.

Flogging and incarceration were regular for any convicts not pulling their weight and the New South Wales Corps, the Navy regiment who'd accompanied the first shipment, exercised a considerable amount of power over the, mainly Irish, colonists. The first free settlers arrived in 1793. They were farmers wishing to make a new life for themselves, with settlements to the west of Sydney, known as Liberty Plains, one of the first farmsteads to be issued to non-convicts. Conditions were extremely harsh for the convicts as they laboured here in unbearable conditions as road gangs, land workers and general builders. Slowly but surely things began to grow thanks, in part, to a former Cornish farmer, James Ruse, who had originally been given a seven year sentence for breaking and entering.

As Ruse had been a farmer back in England he pleaded with Arthur Phillip, the NSW governor, to be given a chance to work the land and in he was allowed to experiment with growing corn. Ruse's attempts were to prove successful and although he hadn't produced enough corn to feed the entire Sydney Cove penal colony he'd done enough to provide seed for the subsequent growing season. Following the completion of his seven year sentence, Ruse became the colony's first official landowner.

During this time Phillip aimed to maintain relatively good relations with the indigenous people living in and around Sydney Cove although he could do little to prevent the spread of smallpox brought over by the settlers, which would all but decimate the local Aboriginal community. Despite his desire to work alongside Aboriginal communities, land rights were not something that could be resolved overnight. The officers of the NSW Corps thought that they should be entitled to land with the likes of Lieutenant John Macarthur, who arrived with the second fleet in 1790, quitting his army post and pursuing a life of sheep farming. With the wool industry, corn production and an illegal rum trade well established in New South Wales, convicts and penal officers began taking matters into their own hands in the, by now, anarchic New South Wales' colony. It wouldn't be until 1810 and the appointment of governor Lachlan Macquarie, that a semblance of order began to take shape with former convicts being granted more rights and positions of power. Macquarie's reforms and leadership led him to be dubbed ‘The Father of Australia' and conditions improved so much that by 1819 NSW was one of the most important destinations for immigrants voluntarily coming over from Britain.

The name 'Australia' was first coined by explorer Mathew Flinders who circumnavigated the mainland in 1803 and was inspired to use the name stemming from the Latin word for southern - australis.

Although Macquarie's integration of landowners and former convicts was viewed, by some, as a success, his successor, Thomas Brisbane viewed it otherwise. After New South Wales was granted British colonial status in 1823, Brisbane would go about moving former convicts as far away from the 'free land owners' as possible with Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania all deemed worthy as new British settlements. During this time, Aboriginals were treated as little more than an intrusion, with Tasmania in 1830 being cleared of Aboriginal people as they were rounded up and placed in hastily assembled reserves. Similar actions were commonplace across Australia with waterhole poisoning and “food gifts” laced with arsenic both methods used by some settlers in order to combat the threat of sheep stealing or land disputes. Due to Aboriginal people in Australia having no one clear identity it was relatively straightforward for the British settlers to exploit the lack of unification with Aboriginals rounded up and placed into reserves well away from their rightful and traditional lands. Worse news was to follow as gold was struck in 1851, resulting in a flood of British, American and Chinese prospectors staking their claim to land. With every boom there's a bust, however, and mass unemployment led to a recession resulted in the 1901 Immigration Act. This was also termed the White Australia Policy, and it restricted non-Europeans moving to Australia. 1901 was also the year Australia was placed within the Commonwealth with a governor general who represent the best interests of Britain. Aboriginal voices were all but nullified and the White Australia Policy didn't even recognise them within the national consensus until the late 1960s.

However, things were beginning to change.

The Aboriginal Lands Trust Act in 1966 was created to offer native Australians in South Australia a lease on their own land. Western Australia followed suit in 1972 and the Northern Territory in 1976. Under the Australian Labor Party in the 1980s Aboriginal rights began to advance, slightly, but it would be Aboriginal campaigners, such as Eddie Mabo, who would fight to really make themselves heard and result in the landmark overturning of the legal ruling regarding terra nullius. Mabo fought to legally inherit land on Murray Island and in so doing inspired the Native Title Act in 1993. This formally recognised the legal rights of traditional land owners, co-existing with farming leases and other land interests. Up until the present day, Native Titles are applied for and fought for in the courts with buzzwords like 'mutual obligation' and 'shared responsibility' leading to the first SRA (Shared Responsibility Agreement) in 2004. These sorts of agreements require certain changes in Aboriginal behaviour, often regarding healthcare, in return for financial aid for much needed community resources. Although legally the whole of Australia has now been recognised as rightfully belonging to the Aboriginal people, with apologies being issued by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008, it does little to defer from the fact that the occupation of Australia resulted in the death, displacement and dishonour of the original land owners. The horrors of the 'Little Children are Sacred' report, released in 2007, and the deaths of Aboriginal activists in custody add to the European settler legacy that should be at least talked about when visiting Australia as a responsible traveller. Visiting sacred sites and reading up on Aboriginal history will give you a much deeper understanding of the history of Australia alongside the European version.