Chapter 23

Ten Game-Changing Moments

In This Chapter

Watching convicts assert full legal rights

Considering the staggering effect of gold discoveries

Appreciating what the post-war migration program did to change Australia

Australian history, like any history, has many ‘fork in the road’ moments: Pivotal turning points that change the direction in which things are going. Don’t believe me? Here’s ten of ’em!

Cook Claims the East Coast of Australia

Previous to Lieutenant James Cook sailing up the eastern coast of Australia in 1770, nearly 200 years of discovery and contact between the nations of western Europe and Indigenous Australia had had little effect. Most of the first Europeans had been traders, and the locals (that is, the Aboriginal Australians) had nothing particularly exciting to trade — no cinnamon, coffee, nutmeg, cloves or gold. And the land itself, which Dutch traders and some Spanish and Portuguese explorers had seen along the northern, western and southern coasts, seemed the last word in dull, barren and uninteresting.

Cook arrived on the Endeavour, and sailed up a coast that he found so luxuriant and inviting that when he got to the top he decided to claim the lot on behalf of King George III of England. Without Cook, and this trip, things would have been very much different. We probably wouldn’t even get to periodically belt the Poms at cricket.

Henry Kable Claims a Suitcase — and Rights for Convicts

Like a good soap opera, the story of Henry Kable and Susannah Holmes appealed to everyone. They were young and good-looking, and met in jail while serving time and waiting to get transported. They took a shine to each other and . . . well, soon enough there was a baby. Then, horror, the authorities stepped in and separated them. After some public hue and cry, they were all reunited and happily bound for Botany Bay as part of the First Fleet, with a concerned public having kicked in donations to give them a good start in the new colony.

Getting off the boat in NSW in 1788, it became apparent that the ship’s captain had somehow managed to lose the expensive luggage they’d bought with the public donations. Kable sued the ship’s captain, won the case and got fully compensated.

Here lies our game-changer. In England, a convicted criminal lost all his legal rights: He couldn’t hold property or give evidence in court, and he certainly couldn’t sue a ship’s captain. In the very first days of arrival in NSW, however, that got turned upside down, and the Kable case shaped the basic nature of colonial (and eventually Australian) society more than any governor, bushranger or prime minister.

The precedent set by the Kable case was that, despite the population being chiefly made up of convicted felons, this would be no slave-style society with two distinct legal and economic castes. Soon enough, convicts occupied every economic niche available in the new society, owned more than half the property and wealth, and were acting altogether cocky.

Gold Discovered

After the discovery of gold in NSW and Victoria in 1851, Australia provided one third of the world’s gold for the next decade. In Australia, the population trebled over the same decade, and colonial society was transformed. Australia stopped being the place mothers could use to scare their children into behaving (with something along the lines of, ‘If you don’t behave, you’ll end up bound for Botany Bay’). Now every shipping line in the world was running most of its vessels to the ports of Melbourne and Sydney, as thousands of gold-seekers descended on the colonies. So much for terrible convict exile.

Aside from losing the stigma and shame traditionally associated with the convict colonies, Australia now jumped to the forefront of modern life. Railways, cities, commerce, leisure, sports — by the end of the 1850s, Australia was no longer some marginal backwater that produced wool and not much else; it was at the vanguard of social change and political development.

Women Get the Vote in South Australia and Federally

Australia led the way in granting full votes for most men in most colonies in the 1850s — a good 70 years before Britain — but this was more an accident of inflation rather than the result of a committed campaign (refer to Chapter 8 for more on this quite bizarre turn of events). With women it was different — no-one was going to automatically hand them the vote. It took intelligent organisation, agitation and campaigning.

Women gained the vote (or suffrage) in South Australia in 1894 and in 1899 in Western Australia. This meant that it was also granted to all women nationally after 1901, as the Constitution was designed to accept the most radical colonial legislation as the standard. This was two decades before women in Britain and America, and four decades before women in France. The Australian experiment (along with New Zealand’s version, in 1893), was able to reassure the bigger countries. Women’s suffrage proved to be a game-changer not just in Australia but the whole world, by showing that — surprise, surprise — life as we know it wouldn’t end if women got the vote.

Building a Fortress out of Australia — the White Australia Policy

After Federation in 1901, one of the first things Australia did was pass a draconian, racially exclusive immigration act. Commonly known as the White Australia Policy, the act was designed to keep out any prospective migrants who weren’t from Europe. The act proved so successful that pretty soon it was being used to keep out most people who weren’t British.

Weirdly, a key motivator of this (let’s face it) downright distasteful piece of legislation was the desire to create an egalitarian and progressive society. A ‘fair and reasonable wage’ became law, and old-age pensions were brought in along with ‘New Protection’ legislation to protect local jobs (refer to Chapter 12 for more on all this). The White Australia Policy was brought in to try to protect this — the logic being that foreign workers would happily work for a pittance, thus driving everyone’s wages down. Australia’s success as a social laboratory eliminating the poverty, inequalities and bad wages endemic to most societies of the time was seen to be underwritten by legislation keeping everyone else out.

Unfortunately, the act also made for an increasingly parochial and insular mindset. Australia became increasingly suspicious of outside influences and ideas. Australia was revamped in the last decades of the 20th century — economically and socially — and the White Australia Policy, deeply embedded in the national psyche, proved to be one of the hardest elements to remove even after the legislation had been repealed.

Australia splits over Conscription

It’s not often that you get to split a nation with a referendum. That’s what happened in 1916 and 1917 when the government twice put to the people the question of compulsory military service for the armed forces then fighting in World War I.

Originally, both sides of politics had been keen about Australia’s military involvement in the war, but years went by and casualty lists grew more horrific. Then in 1916 Ireland exploded into insurrection against the English.

In the years since British settlement in colonial Australia, a difficult consensus and unity had been forged, which helped meld traditional ethnic antagonists together — Irish, English, Welsh and Scots, who had hated each other for centuries, had found themselves having to live and work side by side in Australia. For the most part it was extraordinarily successful, with no real ghettoes or ethnic underclasses, but the Irish rebellion fired up old tensions.

Then along came the conscription controversy. The issue split the Labor Party, and it split the country — and Australia took about 50 years to recover fully (refer to Chapter 13 for more detail on this game-changer).

Australia on the Western Front

Everyone thinks ‘Gallipoli’ when you talk about Australia and World War I. But for all its instant-myth drama, Gallipoli was, strategically speaking, a sideshow. The main game in the war was the Western Front in France — whoever won there, would win the war. In 1918 the Australia Corps played a pivotal role as one of the main spearhead thrusts that broke the German lines, shattered their morale and ultimately won victory.

More than any other time before or since in Australia’s history, Australians helped decisively swing the momentum in the main theatre of a global war against the chief enemy. For a country not even 5 million strong, that’s punching above your weight. The success on the Western Front was the decisive event in World War I for Australia, giving the country a new confidence as a nation that could meet all others as equals on the world stage.

The Post–World War II Migration Program

If Australia finished World War I with a new sense of confidence in the world (see preceding section), it finished World War II with a new sense of vulnerability. Brought face to face with the risk of invasion, Australia decided it had to ‘populate or perish’ — and so develop Australia’s economy and industries as rapidly as possible to be better able to handle any other threat of invasion.

This meant throwing the doors open to more than the Brits. For the first time since the gold rush 100 years earlier, people began to converge on Australia from places beyond just Britain. For the very first time, a government was arranging and organising the migration. For the next 30 years, Europeans — including Latvians, Greeks, Germans, Italians and Poles — would make up a significant bulk of the population program. The rigid ‘Brits-only’ restrictions, which had been applied more and more after the White Australia Act was introduced, began to loosen — and Australians finally got to enjoy some decent espresso coffee.

Lake Mungo Woman

In 1969 an archaeological dig in Lake Mungo in NSW uncovered a woman buried about 26,000 years ago. The woman’s body had been cremated then methodically smashed to pieces, presumably in a funeral rite. Five years later in the same area a man’s body was discovered. He was about 30,000 years old, his body a complete skeleton and, even after the thousands of years, it was still clear the body had been heavily marked with red ochre before burial in a grave.

These findings confirmed two things. Firstly, the age of the findings was remarkable — the 1960s was the first decade when such findings forced people to think of Aboriginal occupation of Australian as extending for not just hundreds, or thousands, but for tens of thousands of years. This, by any calendar, is long. Secondly, the findings gave clear evidence of cultural activity (funeral rites) and trading — the red ochre that the man was painted with didn’t come from nearby but from a great distance away. It was some of the earliest evidence of humans behaving in a recognisably modern human way.

Mabo

When Cook first claimed the eastern coast of Australia in 1770 he did so ignoring the original inhabitants’ ownership of the land. The logic was that as the Aboriginals weren’t living in houses, ploughing ground, constructing fences, raising livestock, growing crops (and what-not), they weren’t proper owners of the land — they lived on it too lightly. The country was therefore terra nullius — Latin for ‘land belonging to nobody’. Cook therefore helped himself.

This changed in 1992. The High Court overturned the doctrine of terra nullius, recognising that native title to the land had been in existence when Cook and the British settlers first arrived. The High Court declared that while native title had been eliminated where the Crown had sold land, Aboriginals in those parts of Australia where they continued to live in unbroken connection with the land (such as, in this case, Eddie Mabo’s people on the Meriam Islands in the Torres Strait) continued to have native title.