HISTORY OFAUSTRALIA

Australia a perspective

In the 18^th Century British law prescribed the death penalty for stealing 40 shillings or more, so judges preferred to find thieves guilty of stealing 39 shillings in order to avoid imposing the death penalty. That resulted in prisons and moored ship hulks filling with people convicted of petty crimes such as theft and debt. Until 1783, that pressure on the available jail space was relieved by sending convicts as indentured servants to North America, which was also being settled by voluntary emigrants seeking improvement of their economic lot or else religious freedom.

But the American Revolution cut off the escape valve, forcing Britain to seek some other place to dump its convicts. Initially the two leading candidate locations under consideration were either 400 miles up the Gambia River in tropical West Africa, or else in desert at the mouth of the Orange River on the boundary between modern South Africa and Namibia. It was the impossibility of both these proposals, evident on sober reflection, that led to the fallback choice of Australia’s Botany Bay near the site of modern Sydney.  That was how the First Fleet brought to Australia in 1788 its first European settlers, consisting of convicts plus soldiers to guard them. Convict shipments went on until 1868. With time, four other scattered Australian coastal sites besides Sydney, near the sites of modern cities of Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth  and Holbart were chosen as locations of other convict dumps.

Until 50 years ago, emigration to Australia was overwhelmingly from Britain and Irelaned. Until the early 1970s Australia maintained a “White Australia policy”. Nevertheless in the 1950s many Australians looked fearfully at Australia’s much more populous Asian neighbours, especially Indonesia with its 200 million people. Many Australias felt that it would become a tempting target for Indonesian expansion unless it quickly filled all that empty space. Hence the crash program to attract immigrants as a matter of public policy. Not until the 1970’s did the desire to attract more immigrants than could be recruited from Europe induced the government to remove the legal obstacles to Asian immigration. Nearly 25% of all Australians today are immigrants born overseas.

Many influential Australians, including the recent PM Malcolm Fraser, argue that Australia should try to increase its population to 50 million people. The reasoning invokes a combination of continued fear of the “Yellow Peril” from overpopulated Asian countries, the aspiration for Australia to become a major world power and the belief that the goal could not be achieved if Australia had only 20 million people.

Australia is the most continent: the one whose soils have on the average the lowest nutrient levels, the lowest plant growth rates, and the lowest productivity. Australia’s water problems are obvious and familiar. A disproportionately large fraction of Australia’s area has low rainfall or is extreme desert . Much of Australia’s area remains useless today for any form of agriculture or pastoralism.

From the book Collapse by Jared Diamond