Introduction

Over the past ten years, I have taught first-year university students and been involved in history research on various historical documentaries. During this time, I’ve been struck by the hunger many people have for a clear explanation of what Australian history is all about.

While the Australian history profession of the 1980s, 1990s and today divided itself into rival camps (black armband historians, accused of dwelling only on the negative aspects of Australian history, versus white blindfold historians, accused of being blind to anything that casts a shadow on Australia’s past), ordinary people ended up the losers, because they were missing out on basic story. The story of what made Australia like it is today as well as the most compelling parts of that story. In a nutshell, providing this story is what this book is trying to do.

About This Book

At first glance, Australian history appears to be nice and neat and compartmentalised, most of it fitting into the last 220 years (aside, of course, from the 40,000 years of Indigenous Australian history that preceded it, but we’ll get to that). So it can be positively weird to notice just how often bits of it get sliced, diced and served up as completely different dishes. ‘First contact’ history gets separated out from Gallipoli, say; the conscription controversy of World War I and the Vietnam War might get placed in separate boxes; convicts are set aside from the rise of colonial towns and cities; and it’s all completely separate from the Great Depression . . .

Okay, this separation isn’t always a bad thing — they’re all good topics worthy of being teased apart in isolation. But it can be useful — not to mention interesting! — to also have them available to a reader in one easily accessible, easily readable volume, and this is where the For Dummies books shine.

You might want to read the whole of Australian history from go to whoa — from first indigenous arrivals to practically just last week. With this book, you can do that. Or, this month, you might want to find out what caused separate, self-sufficient colonies to federate into a nation but, next month, be wondering exactly how a supposed convict hellhole managed to create a ‘workingman’s paradise’ within 70 years of first settlement. You can dip, you can skip, you can cross-reference — jump from one item to another as you see fit. The book is designed to work the way you want it to.

Foolish Assumptions

In writing the book, I’ve been making some assumptions about what you as a reader might be bringing to the book. I’ve been assuming that you want to know more about Australian history, and that some or all of the below might apply to you:

You might have done some Australian history at school, but in a hodgepodge sort of way. At different points of your schooling, you might have bumped into convicts, bushrangers, Gallipoli and other different topics. These interested you at the time but you weren’t quite sure how they all fitted together, and what else there was to know about.

Alternatively, you might have hated history at school and tried to ignore it as much as possible. But you’ve always suspected that the actual history of the place might be a darn sight more interesting than what school history did to it, and wondered what that history might look like.

You might be entirely new to Australia and keen to get inside the head of the country, and understand what makes the place tick, and how it came to be this way.

Conventions Used in This Book

I’ve done a few things in this book to make the information easy to get to and understand:

Italics for terms or words that might not be immediately understandable (and I follow the italics up with an explanation in brackets like this one).

Sidebars for things that are interesting in their own right but are a little removed from the main point.

The spelling of ‘Labor’ for the Australian Labor Party. Officially, the spelling was standardised by the party in 1912 to be Labor rather than Labour (although plenty of newspapers ignored this and kept spelling it the old way until after World War II ended in 1945). To make it simpler, I’ve spelt it the same way — ‘Labor’ — all the way through.

The description of the main non-Labor political party as ‘Liberal’ for pretty much all of the 20th century. Even though the final reorganisation of the party into the Liberal Party we know today only happened in 1944, there was a non-Labor party that acted like the Liberal Party, and really was the Liberal party, and sometimes even called itself the Liberal Party, ever since Alfred Deakin got the various liberal forces together under the one banner in 1909. Rather than change the name to reflect the various name-changes they went through over the next 30-odd years (which they did with irritating frequency), I’ve just chosen to call the lot of them Liberals and be done with it.

How This Book Is Organised

The book is divided into chapters that make for a roughly chronological run-down of the vital elements of Australia’s history — but, crucially, it doesn’t have to be read in chronological order! I’ve grouped the main clusters of related chapters into different parts so you can recognise at a glance which of the main historical phases the chapter you’re reading fits into. And to make it even easier, each chapter is itself organised into mini-parts, with each mini-part covering a particular area. See the summary below to see what’s covered where.

Part I: Let’s Get This Country Started

If you’ve got a thing for beginnings, this is the part to please you best. First Australians arriving millennia ago, and explorers, traders and eventually British convict settlers only turning up (comparatively) yesterday. This point is where the nation we now know as Australia gets going and begins to take on some of the attributes we can recognise today.

Part II: 1820s to 1900: Wool, Gold, Bust and then Federation

This part looks at the major jump in exploration and settlement that took place in Australia from the 1820s to Federation. The discovery of gold triggered a rush to Australian colonies that had previously only been known for convicts and wool. The flood of all sorts of gold-seekers helped fuel a long boom as colonial metropolises, railways (and bushrangers) all extended their activities and at different times flourished.

During this phase, Australia acquired the ‘workingman’s paradise’ tag, because wages and standards of living kept pushing upward — until a hard crash snapped people out of their easy optimism about the inevitable progress in the colonies, and got them thinking about Federation.

Part III: The 20th Century: New Nation, New Trajectories

This part takes you to the first experiments of Australia as a newly federated nation in a new (20th) century. Different policies and legislation were put in place that would be crucial to the ways in which Australia developed for the next 70 or 80 years. The part also covers a terrible global war (World War I) that fractured Australian society and some bold and ultimately unsustainable plans to launch Australia into the global big time in the 1920s.

Part IV: 1930 to 1949: Going So Wrong, So Soon?

For a nation that began the 20th century with such a heady mix of determination and optimism about a new society that could be created, the 1930s and 1940s — the main period covered in this part — seemed to pile one bad news story on top of another. A cataclysmic economic depression coupled with another world war threw up a whole series of challenges to be surmounted and survived.

Part V: 1950 to 2010: Prosperity and Social Turmoil

This part details the key elements of a postwar take-off into prosperity in Australia. Oddly, the return to an extended period of material abundance and full employment (not seen since the 19th-century long boom detailed in Part II) posed at least as many challenges as did the difficulties and hardships encountered in Parts III and IV.

Demographic changes, social changes, economic changes, political controversy, the start and end of a long boom and a terrible 1990s recession — the last 70 years have had the lot and it’s all here in Part V (well, a lot of it at any rate).

Part VI: The Part of Tens

This is an old Dummies favourite and it’s easy to see why. In this part, I’ve included handy lists of inventions and innovations that Australians have given the world, along with a breakdown of ten ‘game-changing’ moments in Australian history that radically shifted the path Australian society was travelling on. What’s not to love?

Icons Used in This Book

Along with the parts, the chapters and the mini-parts all explained above, there’s something else in this book that should make your navigating through it a whole lot easier: Different icons placed at different points in the margin of the text to highlight some key things:

The main events, decisions and actions in a country’s history don’t usually just happen — you can often dig up their causes and influences from the past. When I’ve done this for events in this book, I’ve labelled the information with a ‘Historical Roots’ icon.

This icon, I confess, is a special favourite of mine. These are the moments in the book where I get to hand over the metaphorical microphone to the people who made Australia’s history and give them the chance to explain what they thought they were doing — or to contemporary commentators, to explain what Australia was thinking when these events happened. For all the explaining that an historian does (and I promise you I’ve tried to make it as clear and to the point as I possibly can) sometimes there’s just no substitute for getting the actual protagonists or observers to have their say on what was going on. When they do, it carries this icon next to it.

This flags things in Australian history that go directly to explaining the distinctive society that we can recognise today as tellingly Australian.

These are the bits that, if books came with batteries, would flash and buzz ‘Important!’ when you got near them. These are the things that give an essential understanding of exactly how or why Australia has developed the way it did, and by keeping them in mind, you’ll never lose your historical bearings.

This icon highlights further information, like statistics, that can deepen your understanding of the topic, but aren’t essential reading. Read the information so you have some extra facts to impress your mates with, or feel free to skip it.

Where to Go from Here

The short answer to this, of course, is the beauty of a Dummies book — anywhere. You can start at the start and motor along right through the various parts until you get down to the contemporary scene, or you can just jump to a point that explains what you really want to know about right now. If you want to see exactly what Australia did with its new federated nation powers after 1901, then Chapter 12 at the start of Part III is your next stop. If you want to see the colonial world that emerged in the wake of the massive gold finds of the 1850s, then Chapter 8 is a good place to start. If the very first years of convict settlement make you curious, head for Chapter 3, with the following decades of settling in and teething troubles also worth checking out in Chapters 4 and 5.

Remember that aside from the table of contents, you’ve also got an index that alphabetically lists the main events and subject areas. Using all this, you can go pretty much anywhere in Australian history without having to wait around to be told which parts should be considered before first, second and 23rd. It’s there for you to read and use when you need it, as you see fit.