Commonwealth of Australia

Commonwealth of Australia Yarraanbaa Koey Daudai (among other names)
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	Melbourne
Recognised national languages	English
Dominant mode of production	Capitalism
Government	Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy under a Dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
• Monarch	Charles III
• Governor-General	Sam Mostyn
• Prime Minister	Anthony Albanese
Legislature	Westminster System
• Upper house	Senate
• Lower house	House of Representatives
Area
• Total	7,692,024 km²
Population
• 2024 estimate	27,466,900 (54th)

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a continent and settler-colonial state. Inhabited by humans for at least 65,000 years, Australia is home to possibly the oldest continuing culture in human history. After the British Colonial Invasion of 1788, the continent was gradually settled by European colonizers and convict slaves at the expense of the local Indigenous population, growing into a mostly agrarian country as part of the British Empire. The British Colonies in Australia - New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia - were federated into the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901.

Australia is a capitalist state with a bourgeois liberal democracy and a member of the British Commonwealth. Officially, King Charles III, the British Monarch, is the head of state, represented in Australia by the Governor-General. As a puppet state of the US, Australia is part of the Five Eyes Alliance, ANZUS, and recently, AUKUS.

History

Prehistory

62,000 BCE.

Human habitation of the Australian continent is the subject of ongoing investigation and debate, but is recognised to have begun between 65,000-50,000 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.

The Dargan Shelter is considered the oldest rock shelter in Australia and the highest human-occupied site during the Ice Age. The shelter is located in Dharug Country near the upper Blue Mountains. It is possible that the Dargan Shelter was a meeting and ceremonial site. About 693 stone artifacts were found; most of them were cutting and scraping tools, though there were also some sandstone grinding slabs and a basalt anvil. Artifacts made from materials originating in the Jenolan Cave area and the Hunter Valley region were also discovered, indicating that people were travelling from the shelter to both the north and the south.

Aboriginals of this time were hunting and gathering, living in small semi-nomadic families that travelled across the region depending on the season for food and water. Their lifestyle consisted of hunting, collecting and processing plants, and creating and refining their tools. Socially, the Aboriginals were divided into clans, which were groups of extended family typically organized patrilineally. All the affairs and decisions of the clan were managed in an egalitarian way through a consensus-based process, with input from all family members and guidance from the elder males.

Each clan had an animal, tool, or plant that represented it. These were passed down through generations, and the symbol typically had a special connection to the clan. Belonging to the clan is determined by the child’s origin from the mother’s side (i.e., “you are what your mother is”), though this varies, as in some clans belonging is determined by the father’s side.

Marriage within these clans is determined by the clan leaders to prevent incest and to create alliances between other clans and families through kinship. Marriages had intricate and diverse customary laws and systems that naturally varied between Aboriginal clans. These systems determined an appropriate partner and systematically prevented marriage within close relationships (i.e., incestuous relations) to maintain a healthy gene pool and social order. Some clans enforced a customary law that prevented mothers-in-law from being near their young sons-in-law, with the wife acting as a conduit between them.

Religiously, the Aboriginals are quite complex and vague, as there is no single monolithic Aboriginal religion across Australia. Rather, there are hundreds of distinct religions with their own spiritual systems, each tied to a nation (a union of clans). Due to the animistic nature of these religions, in which everything is interconnected and all things have a soul and spirit, and because they are not consolidated and have no clerical structure, they are passed down through art, ceremonies, oral tradition, and song rather than through a system like a church.

Mapantjara or Mapan (Shamanism) is a common aspect of these religions, though the practices vary greatly between each clan and faith, Mapan or Shamans are spiritual leaders who act as intermediaries between the physical and spiritual through rituals and ceremonies. Jukurrpa or Dreamtime is a fundamental concept of many Aboriginal faiths, it in essence describes there is an ongoing spiritual and cultural continuum that connects the past, present and future.

Evidenced by knowledge, law, technology and cultural values are all passed down through generations and community, identity and culture are all a form of the Dreamtime as they are part of the spiritual and cultural transmission that travels through the past, present and future. Dreamtime is connected to the land of Australia and its creation.

11,000 BCE.

The oldest archaeological instance of agriculture dates back to the beginning of the Holocene, 11,000 years ago. There is evidence of agriculture involving the cultivation of plants and the construction of infrastructure like dams and irrigation systems. Aboriginal clans in some areas grew and irrigated yams while managing eel populations with built fish traps. There is also evidence of slash-and-burn practices within Australia, where forests were cut and burned down to clear the land for farming, while the ash from the burnt trees provided fertility to the soil.

Though agriculture within Australia was not systematic but rather dependent on each clan's geography, Australia is geographically very difficult to irrigate and cultivate. Some clans constructed small pits called “yam pits” only in fertile alluvial soil regions. These pits were designed to capture water during the rainy season and retain moisture to cultivate yams. Some historical accounts also provide evidence of small trenches, dams, and wells used to store water and irrigate crops while attracting animals.

Around 6,600 years ago, the Gunditjmara clan engineered an expansive system of channels, weirs and stone traps to alter the water flow to create an aquaculture system to harvest  kooyang (short-finned eel), this is the oldest aquaculture system in the world, even older than Egypt's pyramids.  Due to colonial records, there has been a common misconception that Aboriginals were not capable of agriculture before the arrival of Europeans, this might have come from the fact that Aboriginals spent more time hunting than cultivating plants due to the dry nature of Australia as well as some settler-colonial chauvinism.

Around this time, rising sea levels flooded the land bridge connecting mainland Australia to New Guinea while also forming the Torres Strait Islands. As the sea levels continued to rise, the land bridge that connected Tasmania to the mainland was also flooded, which isolated the Tasmanians. Archaeological evidence also suggests that around this time the Gunditjmara clan and other clans in western Victoria began building semi-permanent wooden and stone houses on mounds to exploit the food sources (various fish) in the wetlands of Victoria.

Aboriginals also inhabited the Furneaux Group islands, but due to the submersion of the land bridges they became isolated. Since they were in a mid-Holocene climatic shift that brought on the El Niño–Southern Oscillation cycle, which led to drought and wildfires on the islands, this isolation gave the Aboriginals of the Furneaux a difficult time.

5,000 BCE.

Oral traditions from around 5,000 BCE to 4,000 BCE mention multiple meteorite impacts, with some being identifiable, such as the Henbury Crater. The impact of the Henbury Crater is dated to approximately 4,700 years ago (i.e., 2,700 BCE), though others estimate it occurred around 4,200 BCE to 5,000 BCE. It landed south of what is now Alice Springs in Central Australia, where a large nickel meteorite broke into several pieces and created 13–14 craters, the largest of which is 180 meters across.

The oral tradition confirms the meteorite with accounts that a fire-devil fell down from the sun and set the land ablaze. This actually inspired archaeologists and researchers to connect with the Aboriginals for their oral traditions as a valuable information source for archaeology and for a general understanding of the land around the 1930s.

Linguistically, around 4,000 BCE the Pama-Nyungan language family began to spread across Australia and came to cover most of the Australian mainland. Today it covers 90% of the continent and consists of about 300 languages. Due to current speculated but unknown reasons, the Pama-Nyungan language family began to replace pre-existing languages in a relatively short period of time. It is speculated that this might have been due to some technological or cultural innovation of that period; some speculate it may have involved seed-processing technology or possibly a change in ceremony or marriage customs.

Around 2100 BCE, the Torres Strait Islanders began to cultivate bananas, as evidenced by microfossils found on Mabuyag Island. They cultivated not only bananas but also yams and the root vegetable taro. Their methods involved both low-intensity planting and high-intensity cultivation, with them transforming the environment and constructing terraces as well as using slash-and-burn techniques.

Between 5,500 years ago and 3,500 years ago, Indonesian or Guinean seafarers brought dingoes to Australia by boat. These ancient domestic dogs spread rapidly across the land and became vital for the Aboriginals. They were originally wild, but through domestication the Aboriginals began using them for hunting and protection. Around 3,000 BCE, Australia had extensive ancient trade networks across the continent. These systems of overland paths connected different clans and resource-rich locations, and they were not solely for trade, as they were often incorporated with formal gatherings such as marriages, song, and dance.

Aboriginal people used a bartering and gifting system. In many areas, there was a complex network of reciprocal gift-giving and exchange. These trade routes also facilitated the movement of music, language, technology, and art styles. Aboriginal people spent most of their time trading internally within Australia until around 3,000 years ago, when they began trading with Indonesian seafarers, who brought the dingoes. However, much is not known about the identities of these Indonesian seafarers or how they were connected to Australia.

1,000 BCE.

In the neighbouring regions of Oceania around 1,000 BCE, the sea-faring Lapita people began to develop what would become Polynesian culture and started to influence the islands of Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji. Despite the Lapita expansion across Oceania, there was only indirect interaction and cultural exchange with Aboriginal peoples. Lapita trade networks extended to northern Australia and the Torres Strait Islands, with some materials sourced from southern Papua New Guinea.

Aboriginals between 900 and 800 BCE were engaged in sophisticated voyaging and were establishing maritime networks at this time. Archaeological evidence from Jiigurru, or the Lizard Island Group, shows locally produced pottery. This finding challenges the earlier colonial notion that Europeans introduced pottery to Aboriginal people, demonstrating instead that they were involved in ancient maritime networks that connected northeastern Aboriginal groups with southern Papua New Guineans, with whom they traded pottery, technology, and ideas.

Archaeological evidence shows a history of deep connections across the Coral Sea, facilitated by advanced canoe technology and open-sea navigational skills. Finds include cone-shell adornments and bamboo smoking pipes.

The Torres Strait Islands developed a specialized maritime economy around 500 BCE. The islanders were expert seafarers, fishermen, and hunters whose livelihood depended primarily on the seas and reefs; they hunted and ate fish, turtles, and dugong. Despite their focus on maritime activities, some islands in the east developed seasonal horticulture. The Islanders used double-outrigger canoes to travel across the Coral Sea and engaged in extensive trade with both mainland Australia and New Guinea. During this period, the Torres Strait Cultural Complex emerged as they established villages and began to culturally differentiate themselves from mainland Aboriginal peoples.

500 BCE.

The period from 500 to 100 BCE saw intense exploitation of marine resources, especially in coastal areas, due to sea levels stabilizing after the last Ice Age. Widespread shell middens appeared along the Australian coast, particularly from shellfish and other fish. This intensification may be linked to population expansion and the development of new flaked microliths at this time, which led to increased exploitation of these coastal areas.

It was a period of intensification of production of all kinds. As tool production increased, this in turn led to greater exploitation of fish in the coastal areas, which may potentially be linked to population expansion, as people could now acquire food much more efficiently than in previous periods. Pottery shards dating to around 700–600 BCE, found around the Gulf of Papua and on Pulu Island in the Torres Strait, indicate not only increased local pottery production but also growing trade with neighbouring islands and with Southeast Asia.

This period is characterized by an increase in population size across Australia, more frequent trading, and greater production of tools and other products, along with the widespread use of new microliths. It represents an intensification of the continuing culture and lifestyle of Aboriginal peoples.

100 BCE.

...

Colonization

While difficult to determine, it was estimated that at the time of British Invasion in 1788 the population of Australia was a minimum of 300,000, probably between 700,000 and 1,150,000; possibly as high as 3,000,000. In 1971, Aboriginal population had plummeted to barely over 100,000, or 0.9% of the total population. As of the 2021 census, Aboriginal Australians number slightly under 813,000.

Other countries and peoples had already known of Australia's existence since at least the 1400s, Chinese merchants of the Great Ming are thought to have explored some parts of the Northern Australian coastline in the 15th Century, Indonesian fishermen from the Moluccas occasionally made contact around the same areas. Dutch explorers sighted "New Holland" in the 1650s, but no attempt to settle or colonise the continent was made until the 18th Century.

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 seem'd to want for us to be gone". Originally, Cook believed the Indigenous Peoples were hostile, 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 disregard for consumerism and attachment to 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.

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.

Following World War II, Australia was a comprador state on the side of the Pro-US bloc, fighting on the side of the USA in Korea and Vietnam, though such conflicts were unpopular in Australia and only further contributed to a broader cultural trend of animosity towards the USA.

In 1956, Australia joined the imperialist Five Eyes alliance.

Since the era of Donald Trump, Australia and the USA have had a far more strained relationship, though American control of Australia remains strong.

Coup of 1975

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. Since then, Australia has been a de facto vassal state of the USA, far more closely controlled by Washington than before.

Political Economy in Pre-Colonial Australia

Agriculture and Farming

Aboriginal Pre-Colonial economy and politics can be described as a type of Indigenous Communitarianism - no Aboriginal nation (of which there were at least 250 across the continent) had any concept of patriarchy, neither did they practice commodity production and all actively rejected the principle of private property. The reason for this was Australia's unique climate and geography which made European and Asian methods of farming impossible - irrigation and cultivation of the same plot of land was impractical due to critical shortages of water: Australia is the driest continent on earth. Farming methods across Australia were incredibly broad owing to the sheer size of the continent and its varying climates and geography - for instance, staple crops for Aboriginal peoples in one part of Australia may have been Australian Millet, for another, Bush Potatoes, and others still, Wild Rice. Broadly, Aboriginal societies used a combination of direct and a hands-off approach to farming based around land management. Backburning - known to other parts of the world as "Controlled Burns" - for instance, was a common method of "farming" for "Firesticks", tools used to start fires - as well as a type of land management that prevented devastating bushfires and allowed dead scrub to burn off and for fresh grasses and crops to naturally grow in their place.

Another notable example: instead of carving out a plot of land, ploughing it, irrigating it, sowing it, then harvesting, they would modify the environment to grow certain crops and fruits in certain places naturally, foods that could feed humans and animals - and would attract animals to those places regularly, thus creating natural hunting grounds.

One such method was planting Australian Millet (Panicum Decompositum) or Kangaroo Grass (Themeda Triandra) and allowing Kangaroos and other animals to graze on the field. Unlike European crops, the millet actually prefers soil with a high clay and sand content, as well as having as much as 10% protein content, being highly resistant to fire and flooding - so much so that germination of the millet actually increases when exposed to burning plant smoke. The millet has a very short ripening period and could be harvested four times a year, easily crushed into flour and used to make bread, and it was extremely well-suited for grazing - the Kangaroos and other animals that naturally grazed on the field could be easily hunted; though Aboriginal farmers made sure not to over-hunt such animals. Thus, a steady food supply was created, without needing private ownership of property - neither farmland nor the commodification of livestock.

Additionally, many nations had specific farming institutions - for example, logging camps, dams, and quarries. Aquaculture, specifically, particularly for harvesting oysters, eels, and crabs, was an area of farming practiced more directly than the above described methods using nets and traps.

As a result of this, Aboriginals labelled themselves as "Caretakers" or "Custodians" of land, rather than "Owners", although all three terms are often used interchangeably. Additionally, Patriarchal Relations never developed in Australia, rather, Aboriginal cultures were primarily Matriarchal instead. While not "Matriarchal" in a hierarchical sense - women were not prioritised for economic and political control akin to a western patriarchy - the reasoning for this was related to spirituality - Aboriginals reasoned practices like Matrilineal Kinship: a human could technically have many fathers, but since all humans are born from women, then, all humans could only have one mother. Thus, women held significant authority for matters concerning daily organisation of society: "Lore of the Land", and men governed "Celestial Lore", though these roles and responsibilities therein were not exclusive to gender. Women, for example, were often important parts of spiritual or cultural ceremonies. In Aboriginal society, resources were shared communally, hoarding such resources was taboo; likewise, unnecessarily producing more resources than necessary was seen as nonsensical.

Part of the reason for this is that large-scale trade networks between nations did not develop - the Communitarian economy stayed since there was no need to produce more than necessary, and as Australia has no native large mammals like horses or camels, there was no way to transport cargo over long distances except by foot.

War and Government

A common "fact" spread in Australia's colonial era is that Aboriginal people were nomadic - this being an intentional misunderstanding of Aboriginals' rejection of private property. Hardly the case, the several hundred Aboriginal Nations across the Australian continent were genuine "Nations" in the Westphalian sense - with defined borders, organised governments, permanent settlements, and, for some, internal administrative subdivisions. A Nation (or "Country") typically comprised a handful of tribes, each of which had a dedicated section of land they would live in; boundaries between each nation were defined by natural and man-made formations placed along roads or trails - called "Songlines" as navigation involved singing a song in which the lyrics contained information about which landmarks and signs to look out for. Markers for such borders were, for example - carvings or paintings engraved in rocks or walls, alternatively, piles of or arrangements of rocks at certain points; one method of creating a demarcation post was with tree scarring, such as Fused-Limb Trees: taking a tree sapling, pulling it open, placing a large stick inside it, and putting it back together. The sapling would heal with the stick still inside it, and would thus grow into a tree with a large stick inside it. Thus, the tree would become a natural signpost indicating a variety of places, including but not limited to, the border between two nations.

Wars occasionally broke out between tribes, rarely nations, these began for reasons relating to interpersonal conflicts rather than desires for conquest or subjugation. Infringement of hunting rights or an improper incursion by a man of one tribe or nation on another's territory was an uncommon reason for conflict; crimes against women were also points of serious contention. Sometimes these would result in occasional lone-wolf revenge attacks by one or several members of the offended party, rarely would it result in a large-scale conflict akin to a "War". Rarer types of conflict were formal, planned "tournaments" of ritual fighting between tribes and nations. Far removed from violent confrontation, these were cordial engagements planned beforehand that rarely ended in casualties. Additionally, violence could also be inflicted as punishment for a crime - for example, a person who had committed a crime was made to stand trial before other members of their community, and, if found guilty, could be punished with, for example, being speared through the leg. After this punishment was carried out, the transgressor was seen to have been appropriately dealt with, and the matter resolved. The guilty was usually absolved of their crimes henceforth and reintegrated back into society.

Scarification was also a feature of Aboriginal Society, and often part of ritual coming-of-age ceremonies (which typically occurred in early teenage years). The warrior Pemulwuy, for example, had a damaged left foot, possibly part of ritual mutilation to mark his role in society as a Cleverman (healer, lorekeeper, spiritual and cultural guide. Similar to a historian, doctor, and priest all in one).

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.

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.