Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott

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big turnaround took place in the late 1970s, when Malcolm Fraser launched a policy of multiculturalism and also began accepting large numbers of predominantly Asian migrants — refugees from the Vietnam War (see Chapter 20). The idea behind multiculturalism — that it was okay for immigrants to want to retain their own culture while living in Australia, and that Australia might actually benefit from these cultures — was a shift in Australia’s approach to the world and its attitude to itself so profound as to be seismic.

      By the late 1980s, the policy of multiculturalism was provoking murmurs of discontent. A report to the Hawke Labor Government concluded that the pendulum had now swung too far in the other direction — that many people were worried that embracing multiculturalism and diversity meant valuing and esteeming all other cultures and heritages but downgrading and devaluing Australia’s own, the core British–Australian culture that had provided all the building blocks for modern Australia.

      

The tensions came to flashpoint in the late 1990s, when resentment against the economic changes of the 1980s, the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and suspicion about the influx of new immigrants coalesced into support for Pauline Hanson’s ‘One Nation’ political movement. This movement combined nostalgia for the certainties of old Australia with the rejection of economic and social revolutions refashioning Australia. In the short-term it was a short-lived phenomenon, dissipating as economic circumstances improved and something resembling boom conditions returned to Australian life for the first time in 30 years. But it was also a harbinger of some of the debates and divisions which would challenge Australia in the 21st century as well.

      Aside from ‘the China Question’, other global challenges haven’t been shy about imposing themselves. How best to deal with climate change continues to vex us, and has triggered the fall of Prime Ministers, Opposition leaders and whole governments. The Islamist attacks of September the 11th, 2001, (aka ‘9/11’) was followed by another terror attack on Australian and other western tourists at Bali in October 2002. The ‘War on Terror’, and protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan was another by-product of the 2001 terror attacks, and have ensured argument amongst Australians on the rights and wrongs of this practically ever since. Whilst all this was happening other issues also demanded attention: Indigenous reconciliation, Same Sex Marriage, Asylum Seekers, sexual harassment of women, free speech and the freedom of religion have all elicited debate, much of which continues ongoing. And then there was that COVID thing …

      As the third decade of the new millennium gets under way, the ongoing story of Australia is showing no signs of slowing up any time soon.

      First Australians: Making a Home, Receiving Visitors

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      

Finding our way to Australia with the first indigenous arrivals

      

Meeting the early explorers and traders who passed through

      In this chapter, you get to stand back and take the long, long view. While most of the rest of the book is chiefly concerned with the events that took place after British settlers started arriving in the late 18th century, this chapter looks at the almost unthinkably long period of human occupation of the Australian continent before that.

      Indigenous Australians arrived multiple millennia ago. They developed a uniquely successful system of living that stood the test of time. Then, in the last few hundred years before British settlement, other visitors started turning up too. In this chapter, I provide some sense of the world Indigenous Australians developed and maintained, and a feel for what was going on with the Macassans, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch later on.

      Australia is the driest, flattest inhabited continent in the world. The country is a vast span of stony deserts with only a fringe of arable land clinging to the edges where the weather is milder and rain more reliable. But during the last Ice Age (around 40,000 years Before Present), the situation was much, much worse. Almost all the world’s fresh water was locked up in the enormous glaciers that covered the north of Europe, leaving scarcely any to spare for the Great Southern Land. The continent of Australia was a landscape desolate beyond anything we can picture now.

      Settling in early

      During the Ice Age, sea levels were much lower than today (all that ice had to come from somewhere, after all). One advantage of this was that it was a lot easier to walk to new places, as distinct from swimming or sailing. Australia and New Guinea were connected by a giant land bridge, which explains why these now-distant countries have so many plant and animal species in common. Nevertheless, it was still a long way over open water for prehistoric humans to get to Australia, so whatever else we may conjecture about the first settlers, we’re certain they knew their way around a boat.

      No-one knows exactly when the First Australians arrived. The evidence is scanty and, at times, contradictory. Even genetic research is unable to resolve whether Aboriginal people came in one big push or many successive waves. Like all humans, they originated in ancient Africa, but after that, their lineage is still quite murky.

Map depicts Aboriginal Australia pre’European settlement.

      Aboriginal tribes of Australia / by Norman B. Tindale, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, M3 804eca/1788/1.

      FIGURE 2-1: Aboriginal Australia pre–European settlement.

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