The first Europeans to migrate to Australia were the British settlers who arrived on the First Fleet in 1788.
The first settlement, at Sydney, consisted of about 850 convicts and their Marine guards and officers, led by Governor Arthur Phillip. They arrived at Botany Bay in the "First Fleet" of 9 transport ships accompanied by 2 small warships, in January, 1788.
The 1970s was a time with significant intakes of refugees on humanitarian grounds. Many Lebanese and Cypriot people sought refuge in Australia, away from the civil war in Lebanon and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. As many as 2 million civilian Vietnamese were killed in the Cambodia- Vietnam conflict.
The second wave of post-war immigration arrived in the 1950s and 1960s, and consisted of those seeking employment and better living conditions. These included migrants from Italy, Greece, Malta, Croatia and Turkey. These programs were an enormous success.
In 1973 the Whitlam Labor government definitively renounced the White Australia policy. In its place it established a policy of multiculturalism in a nation that is now home to migrants from nearly 200 different countries.
28 February – The federal voting age is lowered from 21 to 18. The state of New South Wales had already enacted such a change in 1970. 31 December – AC/DC perform their first major gig in Sydney. Removal of the "White Australia Policy".
The Menzies and Holt governments (1949–1967) began allowing non-British Europeans to immigrate to Australia, and the Whitlam government passed laws to ensure that race would be totally disregarded as a component for immigration to Australia in 1973.
1 The first people to migrate to the Australian continent most likely came from regions in South-East Asia between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago.
While Indigenous Australians have inhabited the continent for tens of thousands of years, and traded with nearby islanders, the first documented landing on Australia by a European was in 1606. The Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon landed on the western side of Cape York Peninsula and charted about 300 km of coastline.
The first migrants were decidedly involuntary, the convicts transported from Britain, Ireland and, to a lesser degree, other British colonies. Altogether 80,000 arrived in New South Wales between 1788 and 1840.
10 January – The Easey Street murders take place, an unsolved crime in which two women were brutally stabbed to death in their home in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Collingwood. 18 January – Australia experiences its worst railway disaster at Granville, near Sydney, in which 83 people died.
Records show that about 18 Chinese settlers had immigrated to Australia before 1848. The earliest known Chinese immigrant to arrive in Sydney is reported to have been Mak Sai Ying. Born in Guangzhou (Canton) in 1798, he arrived as a free settler in New South Wales in 1818 and purchased land at Parramatta.
Vietnamese migration to Australia was spurred by the Vietnam War. Many Vietnamese people arrived as refugees after the conclusion of the war in 1975. Others arrived as the wives of Australian servicemen or as war orphans.
There is no one Aboriginal word that all Aborigines use for Australia; however, today they call Australia, ""Australia"" because that is what it is called today. There are more than 250 aboriginal tribes in Australia. Most of them didn't have a word for ""Australia""; they just named places around them.
The Immigration Restriction Bill, which enacted the white Australia policy, was initiated in the House of Representatives by Prime Minister Edmund Barton on 5 June 1901, nine sitting days after the Duke of York had opened the Australian Parliament on 9 May 1901.
Between 11,000 and 14,000 Aboriginal people died, compared with only 399 to 440 colonisers. The tallies of the dead are not the only measure of what took place, according to Dr Bill Pascoe, a digital humanities specialist and key researcher on the project. “We are always using conservative estimates,” Pascoe said.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The original inhabitants, who have descendants to this day, are known as aborigines. In the eighteenth century, the aboriginal population was about 300,000.
The Dutch first sighted Australia in 1606 before Captain Cook colonised the land for Great Britain in 1770. The First Fleet of 11 boats arrived at Botany Bay in 1788 to establish New South Wales as a penal colony (receiving convicts until 1848).
It is generally held that Australian Aboriginal peoples originally came from Asia via insular Southeast Asia (now Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, and the Philippines) and have been in Australia for at least 45,000–50,000 years.
Aboriginal Australians could be the oldest population of humans living outside of Africa, where one theory says they migrated from in boats 70,000 years ago. Australia's first people—known as Aboriginal Australians—have lived on the continent for over 50,000 years.
Analysis of maternal genetic lineages revealed that Aboriginal populations moved into Australia around 50,000 years ago. They rapidly swept around the west and east coasts in parallel movements - meeting around the Nullarbor just west of modern-day Adelaide.
From at least 60,000 B.C. the area that was to become New South Wales was inhabited entirely by indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with traditional social, legal organisation and land rights.
In the 1860s, Victoria became the first state to pass laws authorising Aboriginal children to be removed from their parents. Similar policies were later adopted by other states and territories – and by the federal government when it was established in the 1900s.
On 23 December 1901 the Immigration Restriction Act came into law. It had been among the first pieces of legislation introduced to the newly formed federal parliament. The legislation was specifically designed to limit non-British migration to Australia.
White Australia policy, formally Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, in Australian history, fundamental legislation of the new Commonwealth of Australia that effectively stopped all non-European immigration into the country and that contributed to the development of a racially insulated white society.