Commonwealth of Australia

Commonwealth of Australia Yarraanbaa Koey Daudai
Flag Coat of arms
Anthems: Advance Australia Fair (Official), Waltzing Matilda (Colloquial)
Map of Australia with Antarctic claim in light green
Capital	Canberra
Largest city	Sydney
Recognised national languages	English
Dominant mode of production	Capitalism
Government	Dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
• Monarch	Charles III
• Governor-General	David Hurley
• Prime Minister	Anthony Albanese
Legislature	Westminster System
• Upper house	Senate
• Lower house	House of Representatives
Area
• Total	7,692,024 km²
Population
• 2023 estimate	26,636,700

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a continent and settler-colonial state. Since the CIA overthrew the Australian government in 1975, Australia has been a de facto vassal state of the USA.

History

Pre-History

Human habitation of the Australian continent is the subject of ongoing investigation and debate, but is recognised to have begun between 80,000-50,000 years ago with the arrival of humans migrating from Southeast Asia. Over the next 5,000 years, humans spread across all areas of the continent, becoming the Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander Peoples - two distinct groups, the former being indigenous to the Australian Mainland (and surrounding islands, such as Tasmania and Kangaroo Island), and the latter being of specifically Melanesian origin in the Torres Strait Islands. This is confirmed by archeological evidence, such as the oldest human remains on Earth being found in Lake Mungo, New South Wales - such remains are estimated at being around 41,000-50,000 years old. As such, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) peoples are recognised as the oldest group of humans on Earth.

British Invasion and Early Colonial Period

In 1770, Captain James Cook claimed Australia for the British according to the terra nullius (nobody's land) principle despite that it had already been inhabited for tens of thousands of years - even writing that the Aboriginal people he did encounter "only seemed to be happy upon our departure". Originally, Cook believed the Indigenous Peoples were hostile and wanted the Europeans to leave, a myth commonly used to illustrate the supposed savage hostility of the natives - however, in reality, the Aboriginals actually thought Cook and his entourage were ghosts: the white sails of HMS Endeavour were thought to be a low-lying cloud, which, in the local Dharawal culture, is a sign of the spirits of the dead attempting to return to the realm of the living.

Cook also noted the Aboriginal apparent blissful ignorance for the concept of private property:

“From what I have said of the Natives of New-Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff &c., they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholesome Air. . . . In short they seem’d to set no Value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them; this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities.”

In 1788, Captain James Cook claimed Australia for the British Empire according to the terra nullius (nobody's land) principle, ignoring the indigenous people he'd already met there. The first European settlement was established at Sydney cove on January 26, 1788. In spite of early difficulties in food security, infrastructure, and many other problems, the colony became self-sustaining after Europeans adapted to farming conditions on the new continent, though immediately came into contact and conflict with the Indigenous population. In 1790, a Bidjigal man named Pemulwuy began a twelve-year guerrilla campaign against the settlers when he fatally speared Philip John McEntire. He raided settlers' farms, both to obtain food and as revenge for violence against other Aboriginals. He survived two bullet wounds but was eventually killed in 1802. In 1808, a military coup took over the colonial government of Governor William Bligh in response to his efforts to break the New South Wales Corps' monopoly on trade. The subsequent Junta was dismissed by orders from the British crown in 1810 and Governor Lachlan Macquarie was appointed afterwards, whose reforms helped transition the colony of New South Wales from a Penal settlement into a civil society.

In 1803, the British landed on the island of Tasmania, which was inhabited by 5,000 people, initially to deter any French claims on the land. Gradually a colony was established, which came into a violent conflict with the indigenous population known as the Black War - a genocidal campaign that reduced the indigenous population from 5,000-7,000 in 1805 to just 12 by 1850.

The early colonial era was marked by fierce resistance to any concept of democratic or political representation from the ruling classes of the country, even going so far as to forbid the construction of a Town Square in the city of Melbourne under the pretext that it would "promote democracy". Regardless, an advisory board to the Governor was assembled in 1820, and the first Parliament(s) in Australia - the City Council of the City of Sydney and the City Council of the City of Adelaide - were formed in 1840, as the pretext to the formation of the first Parliament in Australia opening in Sydney in 1843, with voting rights available exclusively to white (non-convict) men with more than £1,000 in property (equivalent to £156,000, or ~$300,000 AUD (~$190,000 USD) in 2023).

The colonial period is referred to in Australia as a British or European Invasion of Australia, both for political reasons and due to the fact that such a description was how the colonisers at the time described their presence. For both Indigenous peoples, free settlers, convicts, and slaves brought into the country via "Blackbirding", working and political rights were practically nonexistent, any attempts to secure such rights were violently crushed. A constant armed guerrilla war - the Frontier Wars - was fought between Indigenous nations and European invaders, lasting from around 1790 all the way until 1934. Some indigenous peoples remained uncontacted by colonial authorities until well into the 1960s.

In August 1824, the Bathurst region of New South Wales was placed under martial law after conflicts between Aboriginal people led by Windradyne and settlers. Yagan, a Noongar leader, led the resistance in Western Australia until being killed in 1833.

Later Colonial period

In 1854, gold miners in Ballarat, Victoria began an uprising known as the Eureka rebellion. The rebellion was sparked by police harassment and arrests of miners.

Independence

In January 1901, Australia became an independent federation. Soon after, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was passed, preventing non-Europeans from entering the country.

In 1956, Australia joined the imperialist Five Eyes alliance.

1975 coup

See main article: 1975 Australian coup d'état

In 1972, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam from the Labor Party was elected and implemented universal healthcare and free college. In 1973, the White Australia policy was officially removed. In 1975, he recognized independence of Papua New Guinea and returned ancestral lands to the Gurindji people but was overthrown by the CIA shortly after with the help of governor-general John Kerr, who was a former CIA asset.

Aboriginal genocide

Map of indigenous nations in pre-colonial Australia

Early contact between Indigenous Nations and Settlers was first characterised by Indigenous curiosity at the new settlers, though this had largely ended by 1790 and was followed by hostility and violence. While acts of Indigenous enslavement and genocide were constant throughout much of the 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries, deliberate persecution has now largely ended; though many Indigenous groups recognise that Colonial Genocide in Australia is still ongoing. Australia is the only Colonial Settler-State to never sign any form of agreement or treaty between the colonisers and the colonised. "Sovereignty was never ceded" is a common Aboriginal Land Rights slogan, the question of Aboriginal rights have been a consistent and constant part of Australian politics for centuries.

Early governors of New South Wales sent detachments to terrorize the indigenous populations. In Queensland alone, 65,000 Aboriginals were killed by white settlers from 1820 to the early 1900s. Throughout Australia, more than 140 frontier massacres occurred between 1831 and 1918, though as most were not reported, it is unknown how many actually occurred. In Tasmania, the entire indigenous population was wiped out by 1876. The most recent massacre was in Coniston in the Northern Territory, where 60 Aboriginals, including children, were killed after the death of one settler in 1928.

Frontier Wars and British Warfare against Indigenous Nations

British Colonialism began in what is now the city of Sydney and gradually spread across the Eastern Seaboard, first south to the now-states of Victoria and the island Tasmania, then westward. During this time of gradual urbanisation, violence between Aboriginal and White Australians escalated dramatically. The historian Henry Reynolds points out how Government offices at the time often described themselves as being "At war" with Aboriginal nations, using words like "invasion" and "warfare" to describe their own presence in Australia. Indigenous Resistance, near-constant and a stark contrast to the myth of peaceful expansion of "Australian" society, amounted to nothing less than all-out Guerrilla war against the encroachments of white settlers. David Collins, senior legal officer of the Sydney Colony, wrote of the Aboriginal Australians:

While they [Aboriginals] entertain the idea of our having dispossessed them of their residences, they must always consider us as enemies; and upon this principle they [have] made a point of attacking the white people whenever opportunity and safety concurred.

In Western Australia, the barrister E.W. Landor likened the Colonisation of Australia akin to Julius Caesar's conquest of Britain:

We have seized upon the country, and shot down the inhabitants, until the survivors have found it expedient to submit to our rule. We have acted as Julius Caesar did when he took possession of Britain.

One Settler in Launceston, Tasmania, wrote in a letter to a local newspaper:

We are at war with them: they look upon us as enemies – as invaders – as oppressors and persecutors – they resist our invasion. They have never been subdued, therefore they are not rebellious subjects, but an injured nation, defending in their own way, their rightful possessions which have been torn from them by force.

Black War and Extermination of Aboriginal Tasmanians

Tasmania in particular was a site of especially violent colonial genocide - one that resulted in the (nearly) total extermination of the Aboriginal Population.

Dutch explorer Abel Tasman sighted the island on 24 November 1642, naming it "Van Diemen's Land" after his sponsor Anthony Van Diemen, governor of the Dutch East Indies. In 1798-99, George Bass and Matthew Flinders sailed the Bass Strait, confirming for the first time that Tasmania was an island.

In 1803, the British landed on the island, which was already inhabited by roughly 3,000-7,000 people in nine seperate nations. Originally setting up an outpost to deter any possible French claims on the island, it was expanded to a penal colony, exploited for natural resources and sheep farming, coming into contact and conflict with the local Aboriginal population. Explorer and Naval Officer John Oxley noted the "many atrocious cruelties" inflicted by White Settlers against the Aboriginals, prompting the latter to exact revenge killings - While Leiutenant Governor David Collins arrived in February 1804 with instructions from London that attacks against Indigenous Peoples by Europeans were to be punished, he failed to publish these instructions, leading to no legal framework under which such punishments could be carried out. On 3 May 1804, roughly 9 months after the British had arrived, soldiers fired grapeshot at a group of roughly 100 Aboriginal Tasmanians, with supporting Musket fire from settlers - while official inquiries stated 6 dead, witnesses reported at least 50 men, women and children were killed. This, combined with the dramatic transformation of the land itself which harmed indigenous livelihoods and farming, eventually led to the escalation of conflict into the Black War, a brutal guerrilla war between the White Settlers and Indigenous Tasmanians between 1824 to 1831. In November 1826, Governor Sir George Arthur issued government notice declaring that settlers were free to kill Aboriginal people when they attacked settlers or their property - subsequently, more than 200 Aboriginal Tasmanians were killed in the following eight months as reprisal for the deaths of 15 settlers.

The war ended in the near-total annihilation of the Indigenous population, having fallen from 5,000 in 1815 to 300 in 1830. Afterwards, the Aboriginal population was coerced or forced into moving to either Flinders Island or the Tasman Peninsula, where the remainder of the population either left Tasmania or succumbed to disease. Though Aboriginal Tasmanians have survived in some amount to this day, last full-blooded Aboriginal Tasmanian, a woman named Truganini, died in 1876. Many historians argue that this violence constitutes an act of Genocide.

Blackbirding and Slavery

While Australia never formally adopted slavery, with the Slave Trade being abolished in the British Empire in 1807, an informal practice of slavery quickly became commonplace in Australia from the first fleet in 1788 until as recently as the 1970s - nicknamed "Blackbirding". Blackbirding involved kidnapping Aboriginal People (but also Indian, Chinese, Indochinese, Melanesian or Pacific Islanders, who were collectively referred to as "Coolies"), sometimes children, and forcing or coercing them into indentured servitude as labourers, servants, or the like. While not technically slavery, those in such conditions were effectively under the same conditions as slavery: they could not escape their confinements, usually due to the threat of violence, and those who did were hunted by police. They were almost never paid for their labour - if they were, it was rarer still to be paid in money; "payments" usually consisted of food, or commodities like tea or tobacco. This was justified as Blackbirded Labourers were "Savages who did not understand the use of Money".

Though this practice was legally dubious, It was not illegal, and as such extremely widespread. Aboriginal Australians were not considered citizens until the constitutional referendum of 1967, and were not legally required to receive payment from any kind of work, be it coerced slavery or not, until the victory of the Pilbara strike of 1946-49. However even in spite of this, Blackbirding of both Indigenous Australians and Pacific Islanders continued informally in much of Australia for decades afterwards.

Stolen Generations, Cultural Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing

Stolen Generations is the name given to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children who were kidnapped or otherwise forcibly removed from their parents, either through the process of Blackbirding or, more formally, as a result of deliberate policies of Colonial Authorities specifically designed to exterminate the Aboriginal population of Australia through assimilation. It is estimated that at least one in ten to as much as one in three of all Indigenous Australians born between 1900 and 1977 (around 100,000-300,000 people) were affected by this policy.

After colonisation, the population of Aboriginal Australians dramatically declined. This led to a belief of scientific racism: the "Doomed Race" theory. The theory assumed that "full-blooded" Aboriginal peoples were unable to support themselves and their communities and thus were doomed to extinction, and would eventually be erased by interbreeding with whites and assimilated into Anglo-Saxon [White] Society. This theory originated around the 1860s and was propagated as late as 1930. Other justifications usually centred on vaguely-defined "concern" for the welfare of Aboriginal Children, the sincerity of which was even at the time questioned. At least two (out of 135) members of the New South Wales parliament opposed the Aborigine Protection Amending Act 1915, which would have provided the Aborigine Protection Board the ability to remove Aboriginal Children from their families "without having to establish in court that they were neglected", on the grounds that it would allow the government to "steal the child away from its parents", and potentially render Aboriginal Children into unpaid working conditions in state care "Tantamount to Slavery". In other cases, justifications for the removal of Aboriginal Children was blatantly stated - at least one member of the Aborigine Protection Board justified their removal of a child on the basis that it was "being Aboriginal."

Regardless, the parliaments of various Australian colonies passed legislation that authorised federal and state authorities (and in some cases, Church missions) to forcibly remove Aboriginal children from their families and place them under the care of the state or white families. This act of deliberate Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing was first enacted as the Aboriginal Protection Act 1869 in the colony of Victoria, and continued officially for the next 101 years until being de jure scrapped in 1970. However, although the policy was officially dropped, the Stolen Generations still carried on well into the 1970s, and still continues to exist de facto through the actions of Federal and State Child Protection Agencies.

Additionally, the Stolen Generations also provided an unofficial basis for Segregation in Australia, which, like Blackbirding, was never formally legal on a state or federal level but was de facto extremely widespread in many businesses and communities. The legal basis for the Stolen Generations was that gradually each colony (and later state) appointed an offical to be the "Aboriginal Protector", who was the sole legal guardian of all Indigenous Australians up to the age of either 16, 18, or 21 depending on the colony/state. Police or other agents of the state (some designated as "Aboriginal Protection Officers") were given the power to locate and transfer babies and children of mixed descent from their mothers, families, and communities into institutions for care, whereupon they were forcibly assimilated into white families and had their "Aboriginality" removed from them - made to forget any connection they had to their original culture and identity, forbidden from speaking any indigenous language. In most instances, the main targets of the Stolen Generations were those of mixed-race, referred to as "half-castes", and, depending on the generation in which they were mixed-race, "crossbreeds", "quadroons", and "octoroons", terms now considered derogatory by Indigenous Australians. Removal was often violent; most parents resisted from having their children taken. In some cases, infants were stolen from their parents shortly after birth - in the overwhelming majority of cases, families and children never saw each other again. A firsthand account of the Stolen Generations from 1935 in Western Australia was recounted as such:

I was at the post office with my Mum and Auntie [and cousin]. They put us in the police ute and said they were taking us to Broome. They put the mums in there as well. But when we'd gone [about ten miles (16 km)] they stopped, and threw the mothers out of the car. We jumped on our mothers' backs, crying, trying not to be left behind. But the policemen pulled us off and threw us back in the car. They pushed the mothers away and drove off, while our mothers were chasing the car, running and crying after us. We were screaming in the back of that car. When we got to Broome they put me and my cousin in the Broome lock-up. We were only ten years old. We were in the lock-up for two days waiting for the boat to Perth.

"Care" within foster families was also often abusive and violent. 7.7% of Men and 17.6% of Women within such arrangements reported experiencing some form of Sexual Assault, speaking indigenous languages, among other alleged offences, was often violently punished, and, according to the Bringing Them Home Report:

the physical infrastructure of missions, government institutions and children's homes was often very poor and resources were insufficient to improve them or to keep the children adequately clothed, fed and sheltered.

Since the rise of the term "Stolen Generation", coined by historian Peter Read in 1981, acknowledgement of the Stolen Generations has increased in public consciousness. First in tokenistic gestures, such as the organisation of the first "National Sorry Day" in 1998, in the 21st Century Australian States have all adopted some version of a reparations scheme for Aboriginal Australians who "experienced abuse while in state care", though the strength and sincerity of these compensation schemes vary significantly from each state, and have only come about after increasing numbers of legal cases against the state governments by individual Aboriginal claimants. New South Wales, for example, ended its reparations scheme in 2022, neither Queensland nor Western Australia's is exclusive to Indigenous Australians, the maximum awarded payments for those eligible ranges between AU$20,000-AU$50,000 in South Australia, and AU$100,000 in Victoria. However, few are able to actually access these payments.

"Closing The Gap"

"Closing The Gap", in Australia, refers to "the Gap" in reference to Indigenous Australians - a distinct and noticeable disparity between the vital statistics of Indigenous Australians and their non-Indigenous counterparts as a result of intergenerational trauma and the effects of colonialism. More than 35% of Australian Aboriginals are now unemployed. In some rural areas, it is as high as 90%. Aboriginal life expectancy is 20 years lower than the rest of Australia and Aboriginals are 29 times more likely than settlers to be in prison. Despite making up a small percentage of the young population, indigenous youth account for 75% of mandatory sentences.

Uluru Statement and Voice to Parliament

In 2017, delegates from 250 indigenous communities made a proposal for an indigenous advisory body to the Australian parliament. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull ruled out a referendum that could have enshrined the proposal in the constitution.

In 2022 the Anthony Albanese Government supported such an advisory body, and laid out its plans to establish just that, an Indigenous "Voice to Parliament", established through a constitutional referendum. This was been met with widespread criticism and rejection from both left and right wings of politics, mostly due to the fact that the proposed Voice "Did not have Veto Power", and therefore was non-binding, and so could be ignored by Parliament at will.

In spite of this, the proposal was supported by many working-class organisations, such as the Australian Council of Trade Unions and most left-wing organisations. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Australia has announced a position of critical support in favour of the voice; acknowledging its uselessness but citing the dangers of bolstering far-right politics if the referendum fails. In contrast, the Australian Communist Party and some Aboriginal Nationalist Groups have rejected the voice, declaring it to be a useless tokenistic gesture that only serves to placate and stifle more radical movements such as Landback and Decolonisation. The referendum was held on 12 October 2023, and failed, with 60.8% voting against to 39.2% in favour.

Denialism

In order to avoid persecution for the genocide of the indigenous peoples, the Australian government refused to recognize genocide as a crime until 2002 and has continued to refuse to make it apply to previous genocides.

Foreign policy

Aggression against China

In September 2021, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States formed the AUKUS trilateral military pact, which is almost explicitly aimed at combating China in the Indo-Pacific.

Australian major general and war criminal Jim Moran said in 2021 that Australia was going to go to war with China within 10 years and perhaps as early as 2024. He called pacifists "panda huggers" and said China would invade Australia after reunifying with Taiwan. Australian news program 60 Minutes said that Australians must be prepared to die to protect the Republic of China and called New Zealand "New Xi-Land" for refusing to align with the United States.