Long before the pyramids or writing existed, humans were already living in Australia. Archaeological evidence from sites such as Madjedbebe, in the Northern Territory, puts the arrival of the first peoples at least 65,000 years ago. They made an astonishing sea journey from Southeast Asia across the ancient continent of Sahul, when sea levels were much lower. Their descendants, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, make up the oldest continuous living culture on Earth. They were never a single, uniform people. When Europeans arrived there were hundreds of distinct nations speaking more than 250 languages and some 800 dialects, each with its own territory, law and kinship system.
At the heart of this worldview is the Dreaming (also called the Dreamtime), a concept that doesn't translate neatly. It refers at once to the ancestral era when creator beings shaped the landscape, to the laws that govern life, and to a spiritual reality that is always present. According to these traditions, ancestors such as the Rainbow Serpent travelled across a flat, shapeless land, creating mountains, rivers, species and people as they went, and leaving their tracks in songlines that cross the continent. These stories weren't written down. They were handed from generation to generation through song, dance, ceremony and rock art, and some examples in Kakadu or the Grampians are tens of thousands of years old.
Far from the stereotype of the nomadic hunter who "left no mark" on the land, Aboriginal peoples actively managed the continent for millennia. They practised firestick farming, controlled burns that renewed grasslands and made hunting easier. They built complex stone fish traps such as those at Budj Bim, in Victoria, now a World Heritage Site. And they had deep knowledge of astronomy, botany and ecology. The Torres Strait Islanders, in the far north, were a different people altogether: Melanesian gardeners and seafarers, culturally distinct from mainland Aboriginal peoples. This ancient diversity isn't a closed chapter. Today the First Peoples number close to a million, and their art, their music and their call for recognition are central to contemporary Australian identity.
Dutch navigators had sighted and charted parts of the coast, Willem Janszoon in 1606 and Abel Tasman in the 1640s, and named it New Holland. Still, no European power saw any value in that dry land "without riches". The turning point came in 1770, when Lieutenant James Cook, in command of HMB Endeavour, sailed the entire east coast and landed at Botany Bay, which he described as fertile and habitable. On 22 August he formally claimed the eastern coastline for the British Crown under the name New South Wales. Cook acted as if the land were empty, applying the legal doctrine of terra nullius, which completely ignored the people who lived there.
The practical reason to colonise came from an unexpected direction. When the Thirteen Colonies of North America won independence in 1783, Britain lost the place it had been sending its convicts, and its prisons and prison hulks were overflowing. The government in London decided to set up a penal colony on the other side of the world. Under Captain Arthur Phillip, the First Fleet (eleven ships carrying about 1,400 people, around 750 of them convicts) sailed from Portsmouth in 1787. After an eight-month voyage it reached Botany Bay in January 1788, but the bay lacked fresh water, so Phillip moved the settlement a few kilometres north to the magnificent harbour of Port Jackson.
On 26 January 1788 the British flag was raised at Sydney Cove and the colony was founded. That date is celebrated today as Australia Day, though for many Aboriginal people it is Invasion Day or a Day of Mourning, the start of their dispossession. The first years were brutal: famine, difficult soils and conflict with the Eora, the traditional owners of the harbour. For the Eora the arrival was catastrophic. In 1789 a smallpox epidemic devastated the Sydney clans, and disease combined with violence drastically reduced the original population. So the first stone of modern Australia was laid on the suffering of exiled convicts and dispossessed peoples alike.
In its early decades, New South Wales was above all an open-air prison run by the military. It was shaken by episodes such as the Rum Rebellion of 1808, the only successful armed coup in Australian history, when the New South Wales Corps deposed Governor William Bligh. But the colony soon began to change. The discovery that merino sheep thrived on its pastures, pushed by pioneers such as John Macarthur, made wool the first great engine of the economy, "the wealth that rode on the sheep's back". The hunger for grazing land sent settlers and their flocks out to conquer the interior, and new colonies split off from New South Wales: Tasmania (1825), Western Australia (1829), South Australia (1836), Victoria (1851) and Queensland (1859).
That expansion didn't happen on empty land. As pastoralists and their livestock pushed into Aboriginal country, a long, scattered and bloody conflict broke out, which recent historians call the frontier wars. It wasn't one big formal war but a string of skirmishes, acts of resistance and massacres that lasted from 1788 well into the 20th century. Aboriginal warriors such as Pemulwuy in Sydney and Windradyne in Bathurst fought back fiercely, but firearms, disease and punitive raids caused enormous loss of life. Episodes like the Myall Creek massacre (1838), after which white settlers were hanged for killing Aboriginal people for the first time, reveal how brutal that frontier was.
The other big change of the period was the end of convict transportation. Between 1788 and 1868 Britain sent around 162,000 convicts to Australia, many of them sentenced for petty crimes born of poverty. But as free settlers arrived and society grew wealthier, the old penal stain became intolerable. New South Wales stopped receiving convicts in 1840, and the system wound down colony by colony until the last ship reached Western Australia in 1868. By then the emerging colonial society, with a free press, representative government and a growing class of locally born settlers, was starting to see itself as a nation in the making.
The year 1851 split Australian history in two. Gold was found near Bathurst, in New South Wales, and soon after came the even richer fields of Ballarat and Bendigo, in the newly created colony of Victoria. Together they set off one of the biggest gold rushes the world has seen. The news travelled the globe and triggered a flood of migrants: in just one decade, between 1851 and 1861, Australia's population tripled, from about 430,000 to more than 1.1 million. Prospectors came from the British Isles, continental Europe and the United States and, most notably, tens of thousands came from China's Canton province. They brought their own techniques and faced intense racist hostility.
Gold transformed the country completely. Melbourne, until then a village, became one of the richest cities in the world within a few years, the lavish "Marvellous Melbourne" of theatres, banks and mansions. The money paid for railways, ports and monumental buildings, and the population's centre of gravity shifted to the southeast. Sudden wealth also created a new, more egalitarian and unruly society, in no mood to accept inherited authority.
That tension exploded in the Eureka rebellion. On the Ballarat goldfields, miners were protesting against costly monthly licences and brutal police raids, and demanding political rights. On 3 December 1854, after burning their licences and swearing an oath under the Southern Cross flag, a group of miners entrenched behind the Eureka Stockade was attacked by troops and police. Around twenty-two rebels and several soldiers were killed. It was a military defeat but a political victory: public outrage forced reforms, the licences were abolished and voting rights for men came sooner. Many historians see Eureka as the birth of Australian democracy and of a certain egalitarian spirit, and its flag remains a powerful symbol.
At the start of the 1890s, Australia was a jigsaw of six self-governing British colonies: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania. They worked almost like separate countries, with tariffs between them, railways built to different gauges and even their own armies. The idea of uniting as one nation gained ground for practical reasons (trade, defence, immigration), but also because of growing national feeling among a population increasingly born on Australian soil. Figures such as Henry Parkes, nicknamed "the father of Federation", drove the movement forward with memorable speeches like the one at Tenterfield in 1889.
The road was slow and deliberate. Through the 1890s, constitutional conventions were held and a constitution was drafted that combined the British Westminster parliamentary system with US-style federal features: a Senate representing the states equally and a House of Representatives based on population. Remarkably, the union was decided by popular referendum in each colony rather than imposed. Voters approved the constitution and the British Parliament passed it into law. On 1 January 1901, in Sydney's Centennial Park, the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed, and Edmund Barton became its first prime minister.
In many ways the new nation was a pioneer and a progressive one. Australia was among the first countries in the world to give women the vote nationally (1902, though Aboriginal people were excluded), it pioneered the secret ballot, the so-called "Australian ballot" later exported around the world, and it passed advanced labour laws that earned it the nickname "social laboratory". Yet that democracy was born with a hard limit: it was for white people only. The same elite that celebrated equality and industrial arbitration built the structure of racial exclusion, and one of the new Parliament's first laws would enshrine that vision.
One of the very first laws of federated Australia was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, the cornerstone of what became known as the White Australia Policy. Its aim was to keep the country ethnically European, and above all British, by shutting the door on immigrants from Asia, the Pacific Islands and anywhere else outside Europe. Because the law couldn't openly exclude people by race without scandalising the Empire, it relied on a hypocritical but effective tool: the dictation test. An official could give this writing test in any European language of their choosing, and it was designed so that no unwanted applicant could ever pass.
The policy's roots lay in gold rush fears about competition from Chinese miners, and in blackbirding, the often coercive recruitment of thousands of Pacific Islanders (the "kanakas") to work on Queensland's sugar cane plantations. Many of those Islanders were deported after Federation. For more than half a century the policy shaped the country's demographics and projected the image of an Anglo-Saxon stronghold afraid of being "swamped" by Asia.
It was dismantled gradually. The Second World War and the post-war years, with their urgent need for people and workers, forced the country to accept millions of non-British Europeans and wore away the racial logic. Restrictions eased through the 1950s and 1960s, and finally, in 1973, Gough Whitlam's Labor government scrapped every racial criterion in immigration, replacing it with a policy that made no distinction by race, colour or origin. The end of White Australia marked the shift to official multiculturalism and to today's diverse, Asia-Pacific Australia.
When Britain entered the First World War in 1914, Australia, just thirteen years after Federation, immediately joined the imperial war effort. Its baptism of fire came on 25 April 1915 on the Gallipoli peninsula, in present-day Turkey. Troops of the combined Australian and New Zealand corps, the ANZAC, landed under Ottoman fire in a badly planned campaign that bogged down in eight months of bloody trench warfare before the evacuation. Of the roughly 50,000 Australians who fought there, more than 8,000 died. It was a military defeat, but from that disaster came the nation's founding myth: the ANZAC spirit, with its values of courage, endurance and, above all, mateship. 25 April, Anzac Day, is today the most solemn day on the Australian calendar.
In total, the First World War cost a country of fewer than five million people some 60,000 dead and more than 150,000 wounded. The losses left deep scars and divided society over two referendums on conscription, both rejected. Australian soldiers also fought with distinction on the Western Front, at places such as Pozières, Villers-Bretonneux and Amiens.
The Second World War brought the threat to Australia's own shores. After the fall of Singapore in 1942, where thousands of Australians were taken prisoner by Japan, Japanese aircraft bombed Darwin and other northern towns, and midget submarines attacked Sydney Harbour. For the first time the country felt directly vulnerable, and Prime Minister John Curtin made a historic shift, turning to the United States rather than distant Britain to guarantee its security. Australian troops halted the Japanese advance in the brutal Kokoda Track campaign in New Guinea, another episode etched into the national memory. The war cemented the realisation that Australia's future lay in the Pacific and Asia, no longer in Europe.
The Second World War left Australia with a conviction summed up in a slogan: "populate or perish". The huge, sparsely populated country had felt dangerously exposed to Japan, and its leaders concluded it needed to multiply its population and its industrial base. In 1945 the government created a Department of Immigration for the first time, headed by Arthur Calwell, and launched an ambitious assisted migration programme that subsidised new settlers' fares.
The ideal was still British (the famous "ten pound Poms" paid just ten pounds for the voyage), but the sheer scale of the plan forced the doors open to Europeans of every background. Hundreds of thousands of "displaced persons" arrived from war-ravaged Eastern Europe, followed by waves of Italians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Dutch, Maltese and Germans. A perfect symbol of this transformation was the Snowy Mountains Scheme, the colossal engineering project begun in 1949. Two-thirds of its workers were immigrants from more than thirty countries, and many see it as the true birthplace of Australian multiculturalism.
With the end of the White Australia Policy in 1973 and the arrival, from that decade on, of Vietnamese refugees and migrants from all over Asia, Australia left forced assimilation behind and officially embraced multiculturalism as state policy. The result is remarkable: today nearly half of all Australians were born overseas or have at least one parent born overseas, hundreds of languages are spoken at home, and cities like Sydney and Melbourne rank among the most cosmopolitan in the world. Once an Anglo-Saxon outpost afraid of Asia, the country has become one of the most successful and diverse immigrant societies on the planet.
If Australia's colonial history began with the fiction of terra nullius, the idea that the land was legally empty, much of its modern history has been the slow and still unfinished process of righting that wrong. For most of the 20th century Aboriginal people lived under state control without full citizenship. Until the 1970s, thousands of children of mixed descent were forcibly taken from their families under assimilation policies. They are the Stolen Generations, and they remain an open wound in Australian society.
The first big milestone was the referendum of 27 May 1967, passed by an overwhelming 90.77% of voters, the strongest result in the country's constitutional history. It allowed the federal government to make laws for Aboriginal people and to include them in the national census. Then, after years of campaigning, came the High Court's Mabo decision of 3 June 1992. By recognising the traditional rights of the Meriam people of Mer Island, led by Eddie Mabo, the court buried the doctrine of terra nullius for good and opened the way for Native Title, legal recognition of Indigenous title to land, which was written into law the following year.
More milestones followed, both symbolic and political. On 13 February 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered the historic Apology to the Stolen Generations in Parliament, a deeply emotional moment. The most recent attempt at constitutional change, however, failed. On 14 October 2023, Australians rejected in a referendum the proposal for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice), an advisory body that would have recognised the First Peoples in the Constitution. The "No" vote won with around 60%. The result showed that, half a century after the 1967 referendum, the relationship between Australia and its First Peoples is still an open and sensitive national debate.
Since the post-war years, Australia has established itself as a stable, prosperous parliamentary democracy and a monarchy—the head of state is still the British monarch, represented by a governor-general—with power long alternating between the centre-right coalition (Liberals and Nationals) and the Labor Party. A moment of constitutional tension came in 1975, when governor-general John Kerr dismissed Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam, the greatest institutional crisis in the country's history. The question of becoming a republic was put to a referendum in 1999 and rejected, although the debate resurfaces from time to time.
Economically, Australia has followed one of the most remarkable paths in the developed world: it strung together almost three decades of uninterrupted growth, largely thanks to a huge commodities boom—iron ore, coal, gas—fuelled by demand from China, which became its main trading partner. That turn towards Asia redefined its place in the world: while remaining a close ally of the United States and the United Kingdom—as the 2021 AUKUS pact shows—Australia fully embraced its role as a middle power in the Indo-Pacific.
The challenges of the 21st century have a lot to do with its own geography. As the driest inhabited continent on Earth, Australia is on the front line of climate change: prolonged droughts, the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef and disasters such as the "Black Summer" bushfires of 2019-2020 have put the issue at the centre of public debate. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its border closures between 2020 and 2022, also left a deep mark on recent life. A country of extreme contrasts—overwhelmingly urban and coastal, yet home to an almost empty outback—Australia enters the second quarter of the century as a rich, diverse nation facing the Pacific, still grappling with the two great questions that run through its entire history: its relationship with the First Peoples and its bond with a land as ancient as it is fragile.
The 8 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Long before Canberra existed, the valley where the capital now stands was home to the Ngunnawal people, with the Ngambri, Ngarigo and other neighbouring groups around its edges, who had lived in the region for some 21,000 years. The name Canberra itself probably comes from a local Aboriginal word, often taken to mean "meeting place", a reference to the large seasonal gatherings that different nations held in the area to celebrate the arrival of the bogong moth, a prized seasonal food in the nearby mountains.
European settlement of the region began in the 1820s with the arrival of graziers and pastoralists, who took over the valley of the Molonglo River. For almost a century the area was a quiet rural district of sheep and wheat, with no idea of the monumental future waiting for it in the early 20th century.
When the Australian colonies federated in 1901, a thorny problem came up: which city would be the new country's capital? The two big rival cities, Sydney and Melbourne, fought over the honour so fiercely that it was impossible to pick one over the other. The solution, written into the Constitution itself, was a Solomon-like one: build an entirely new capital in its own federal territory, located in New South Wales but no less than 100 miles from Sydney, while Parliament sat temporarily in Melbourne.
After weighing up various sites, the Molonglo Valley was chosen in 1908, and in 1911 the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) was handed over. On 12 March 1913, at a ceremony on Kurrajong Hill, the foundation stone was laid and the city's name was officially announced: Canberra. So was born one of the few capitals in the world planned and built entirely for that purpose, in the style of Washington or Brasília.
To design the new capital, an international competition was held, won in 1912 by a pair of American architects from Chicago, Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony Griffin, who had worked with Frank Lloyd Wright. Their plan, inspired by the Garden City movement, imagined a city woven into the landscape, with grand geometric axes, radiating avenues, large green spaces and an artificial lake at its centre.
Construction was slow, held up by the two world wars and the Great Depression, and by bureaucratic disputes that led Griffin to leave the project. Parliament didn't move from Melbourne to Canberra until 1927. The centrepiece of his vision, Lake Burley Griffin, named in his honour, wasn't completed until 1964, when the Molonglo River was dammed. Canberra grew throughout the 20th century as a designed city, green and orderly, very different from the crowded coastal cities.
As the seat of the federal government, Canberra is home to Australia's major national institutions: the imposing new Parliament House, opened in 1988 on Capital Hill; Government House; the High Court; and a remarkable cluster of national museums and galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Museum, the National Library and the moving Australian War Memorial, the country's great memorial to its war dead.
The Australian Capital Territory gained self-government in 1989 and today elects its own legislative assembly. Although it's sometimes caricatured as a city of public servants, Canberra has one of the most highly educated and highest-income populations in the country, a lively university scene centred on the Australian National University and a well-kept natural setting. Every spring, the Floriade flower festival fills its parks with tulips, and Lake Burley Griffin is the focus of its outdoor life.
Before 1788, the region that is now New South Wales was home to many Aboriginal nations who had lived there for tens of thousands of years. Around present-day Sydney lived the coastal peoples known collectively as the Eora nation—a term meaning "here" or "from this place"—organised into about thirty clans. Among them, the Gadigal were the traditional owners of the southern shore of Port Jackson, exactly where the city would rise. Further inland lived the Dharug, the Dharawal and the Gundungurra of the Blue Mountains, and to the west and south dozens of other groups such as the Wiradjuri, the largest nation of the interior.
These peoples lived by fishing, hunting and gathering, managed the landscape with fire and left their mark in thousands of rock engravings on the sandstone of the Sydney basin. The arrival of the British was devastating: the smallpox epidemic of 1789 killed a large share of the coastal clans, and armed resistance—embodied by warriors such as Pemulwuy—was crushed. Even so, Aboriginal culture survived, and today place names such as Parramatta, Woolloomooloo and Ku-ring-gai recall that original layer.
On 26 January 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip founded the continent's first European colony at Sydney Cove, an open-air prison populated by convicts, soldiers and their families. Named New South Wales by James Cook in 1770, the colony in theory covered half of Australia. Its early years were marked by hunger and hardship, but under governors such as Lachlan Macquarie (1810-1821) the penal settlement began to turn into a society: streets were laid out, public buildings went up and emancipated convicts were given a place in colonial life.
The crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 by Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth opened the vast inland plains to grazing and multiplied the colony's wealth. Merino wool became its great export. One after another, all the other colonies would split off from this mother colony: Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria, Queensland. Convict transportation to New South Wales ended in 1840, when the growing population of free settlers was already calling for a respectable, self-governing society.
In 1851, Edward Hargraves announced the discovery of gold near Bathurst, setting off the Australian gold rush. Although the richest fields would turn out to be in neighbouring Victoria, New South Wales had its own stampede, and goldfields such as Hill End and Sofala filled with prospectors. Gold drew immigrants from all over the world, including thousands of Chinese, and hastened the end of the old penal order.
The second half of the 19th century was a time of expansion: railways were built, the interior was settled with wool and wheat stations, and cities such as Newcastle grew on the coal of the Hunter River basin. Sydney, as port and capital, became one of the great cities of the southern hemisphere. It was also in New South Wales that politician Henry Parkes, with his Tenterfield speech of 1889, made the decisive call for the federation of the colonies.
With Federation in 1901, New South Wales became the richest and most populous state in Australia, and Sydney its largest city. The 20th century brought the symbols that define it today: the Sydney Harbour Bridge, opened in 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression as a huge public works project, and the Sydney Opera House, the daring work of Danish architect Jørn Utzon, opened in 1973 and now a World Heritage Site and an emblem of the whole country.
Post-war immigration turned Sydney into one of the most multicultural cities on the planet, with huge Italian, Greek, Lebanese, Vietnamese and Chinese communities. In 2000, the city was in the global spotlight when it hosted an Olympic Games hailed as one of the best in history. Today Greater Sydney is home to more than five million people and is the financial and cultural heart of Australia.
Beyond Sydney, New South Wales is a state of enormous geographical and historical variety. In the arid west, the city of Broken Hill was born in 1883 on one of the world's largest silver, lead and zinc deposits; it gave rise to BHP, today one of the biggest mining companies on the planet, and to a strong trade union tradition. In the far south-west, Mungo National Park protects the dry lakes where Mungo Man and Mungo Lady were found, some 42,000 years old, among the oldest human remains in Australia and evidence of how deep Aboriginal occupation runs.
The coast, by contrast, is a string of natural destinations: the Blue Mountains and their Three Sisters just a short trip from the capital, the dazzling white sands of Jervis Bay, bohemian Byron Bay at the easternmost point of the continent, the historic wineries of the Hunter Valley—the country's oldest wine region—and the Snowy Mountains, with Mount Kosciuszko, the roof of Australia. That diversity—from red desert to snow, from ancient rock art to a global metropolis—sums up much of Australian history.
In many ways, the Northern Territory is the most Aboriginal part of Australia: around a third of its population is Indigenous, the highest proportion in the country, and in many of its remote communities the original languages and cultures are still the foundation of everyday life. From the tropical Top End to the desert Red Centre, dozens of nations have lived in the region for tens of thousands of years: the Larrakia around Darwin, the peoples of Arnhem Land such as the Yolŋu, the Arrernte around Alice Springs and the Anangu (Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara) in the desert around Uluru.
This territory holds some of humanity's oldest cultural treasures. In Kakadu and Arnhem Land, Aboriginal rock art spans tens of thousands of years, with galleries such as Ubirr and Nourlangie recording the wildlife, ceremonies and worldview of the people who made them. It was here in the Northern Territory, at the Madjedbebe site, that the evidence was found placing human presence in Australia at least 65,000 years ago.
European colonisation of the tropical north came late and was hard going. After several failed attempts to settle the coast, Palmerston, the future Darwin, was founded in 1869 on Larrakia land. The big driver of settlement was the Overland Telegraph Line, built between 1870 and 1872 across more than 3,000 kilometres of desert to connect Australia to the world via Darwin and the undersea cable to Java; stations such as Alice Springs grew up along its route.
For decades, the vast, sparsely populated territory was run by South Australia and later directly by the federal government; it only gained its own government, with limited self-rule, in 1978. Darwin, the tropical capital, suffered two disasters that shaped its history: the Japanese bombing raids of the Second World War, which from 19 February 1942 made it the only Australian city to come under large-scale attack, and Cyclone Tracy, which flattened almost all of it on Christmas 1974 and forced it to be rebuilt from scratch.
At the geographic heart of Australia stands Uluru, the great red sandstone monolith that changes colour at sunset. It is one of the country's best-known symbols and a deeply sacred place for its traditional owners, the Anangu people, who understand it through their law and their stories of Tjukurpa (their Dreaming). Beside it rise the domes of Kata Tjuta (the Olgas).
On 26 October 1985 came one of the milestones of Indigenous recognition in Australia: at a ceremony in the community of Mutitjulu, the government handed the title deeds to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park back to the Anangu. The Anangu, in turn, leased the land back to the government for joint management for 99 years. Since then the park, a mixed World Heritage Site for both its natural and cultural value, has been co-managed by its traditional owners, and in 2019 climbing the rock was banned for good, out of respect for the wishes of the Anangu.
In the middle of the territory, Alice Springs, which grew out of the telegraph station, is the capital of the Red Centre and the starting point for exploring the red desert: the walls of Kings Canyon in Watarrka, the gorges of the MacDonnell Ranges and the huge distances of the outback. It was also in Alice Springs and the communities of the Western Desert that, from the 1970s, the Aboriginal desert art movement took off (the dot painting of Papunya), bringing Indigenous Australian painting to the world's great museums.
The territory is also home to legendary outback services such as the Flying Doctors, the air medical service, and the School of the Air, which teaches children on remote stations by radio. Alice Springs is still the cultural hub of Central Australia and a key centre for contemporary Aboriginal art and culture.
The territory's tropical north, the Top End, is home to one of Australia's great parks: Kakadu, a mixed World Heritage Site for its nature and its culture. Its more than 19,000 square kilometres take in wetlands full of birds and crocodiles, waterfalls, sandstone escarpments and Aboriginal rock art galleries up to 20,000 years old, managed together with their Bininj/Mungguy owners.
Close to Darwin, Litchfield National Park has waterfalls and natural pools that are safe for swimming, plus its striking "magnetic" termite mounds, while the thirteen gorges of Nitmiluk (Katherine) are made for exploring by canoe or boat cruise through a canyon carved out by the river. With its two great faces, the red desert of the centre and the lush tropics of the north, the Northern Territory brings together the oldest, wildest and most deeply Aboriginal side of Australia.
Queensland, Australia's second-largest state, was home to a huge diversity of Aboriginal peoples: the Turrbal and Jagera around Brisbane, the rainforest peoples of the north such as the Kuku Yalanji of the Daintree—whose living culture is intertwined with the forest—and many nations of the interior and the Gulf. In the far north, on the islands of the Torres Strait, lived a distinct people: the Torres Strait Islanders, of Melanesian origin, seafarers and gardeners who in 1992, through Eddie Mabo, would win the ruling that changed land law across the whole country.
The tropical rainforest of northern Queensland, the oldest in the world, has been continuously inhabited for millennia, and its rock art and botanical knowledge bear witness to that long occupation. Colonisation, the spread of cattle grazing and the raids of the Native Police caused especially intense frontier violence in Queensland throughout the 19th century.
Queensland's colonial history began as a penal chapter of New South Wales. In 1824 a convict settlement was set up on the Redcliffe Peninsula and soon moved to the Brisbane River; the Moreton Bay penal settlement, meant for the hardest repeat offenders, operated until 1842, when the area was opened to free settlers. The city of Brisbane grew from that core.
As in Victoria, the rapid settlement of the north by pastoralists and their flocks fuelled the desire to break away from distant Sydney. On 6 June 1859, Queen Victoria signed the creation of the colony of Queensland—named in her honour—with Brisbane as its capital. The young colony set out to settle its vast tropical and subtropical territory, pushing the frontier with Aboriginal peoples even further.
The tropical climate of the north made sugar cane Queensland's great crop. To work the plantations, between 1863 and 1904 some 50,000 to 60,000 South Pacific Islanders were brought in, the so-called "Kanakas", many of them recruited by deception or simply kidnapped in a trade known as blackbirding, a form of forced labour close to slavery. After Federation, the White Australia policy ordered the deportation of most of these islanders, although their descendants, the Australian South Sea Islanders, remain a recognised community.
Queensland also had its own gold rushes—at Gympie, Charters Towers and the Palmer River, which drew thousands of Chinese miners—and built up a powerful cattle industry in the outback, "sheep and cattle country". At Longreach, in the heart of that outback, the airline Qantas was founded in 1920, and at Barcaldine the great shearers' strike of 1891 gave rise to the Australian Labor Party, one of the oldest workers' parties in the world.
For much of the 20th century, Queensland was a mainly rural and conservative state, marked by decades of governments such as that of long-serving premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen (1968-1987). Coal mining in the Bowen Basin and, more recently, gas and iron ore turned it into an export powerhouse. But it was tourism that redefined its image.
From the middle of the century, the sunny climate and beaches of the south-east turned Queensland into Australia's great holiday destination. The Gold Coast, with its high-rises facing Surfers Paradise and its theme parks, and the Sunshine Coast filled up with tourists and retirees, earning the state the nickname "Sunshine State". Brisbane, the capital, went from big country town to modern metropolis, and in 2032 it will host the Olympic Games.
Queensland's natural heritage is on a planetary scale. Off its coast stretches the Great Barrier Reef, the largest reef system in the world, more than 2,300 kilometres long, visible from space and declared a World Heritage Site in 1981. It is both a sanctuary of biodiversity and a symbol of the climate crisis, threatened by repeated coral bleaching events. Every day thousands of divers set out from Cairns, Port Douglas and the Whitsunday Islands, home to dazzling Whitehaven Beach.
Where the rainforest meets the reef lies the Daintree, the oldest continuous tropical rainforest on the planet, more than 180 million years old, home to the cassowary and to extraordinary biodiversity, cared for by the Kuku Yalanji people. Add to that wonders such as Fraser Island (K'gari), the largest sand island in the world and a World Heritage Site, with its freshwater lakes and its dingoes, and a string of coral islands such as Lady Elliot and Magnetic Island. More than anything else, it is this natural heritage that defines Queensland's identity as a destination today.
The Adelaide Plains, between Gulf St Vincent and the Mount Lofty Ranges, are the ancestral country of the Kaurna people, who had lived there for millennia when the settlers arrived. The Kaurna, who may have numbered several thousand, lived by hunting, fishing and gathering, and managed the land with fire. Colonisation, disease and displacement reduced their numbers drastically within a few decades, and their language came close to extinction, although today it is being actively revived.
Beyond Kaurna lands, the vast, arid territory of South Australia was home to many other nations: the Ngarrindjeri of the lower Murray and the lakes, the Adnyamathanha of the Flinders Ranges, whose stories explain how Wilpena Pound was formed, and desert peoples such as the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara of the north-west, who today hold title to the vast APY Aboriginal lands. Notably, this state was a pioneer in recognising rights, with Aboriginal land laws that came early by Australian standards.
South Australia holds a unique place in the country's history: it was the only colony that never received convicts. It was born in 1836 as the practical application of the theories of reformer Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who proposed "systematic colonisation": selling land at a fixed, modest price to free settlers and using that money to fund the emigration of workers, creating an orderly, balanced society without the stain of the penal system.
The first settlers arrived in 1836, and the surveyor Colonel William Light made an inspired choice of site for Adelaide, on the banks of the River Torrens, designing it as a planned city surrounded by parkland (the Adelaide Park Lands). The colony attracted an unusual number of religious dissenters and German Lutheran immigrants fleeing persecution, who settled in the Barossa Valley and the Mount Lofty Ranges, giving South Australia a strong tradition of religious tolerance, a free press and reform.
With no gold to make it rich overnight, South Australia prospered on wheat, wool and, above all, copper: the mines at Kapunda and Burra, worked partly by Cornish miners, saved the colony from ruin in the 1840s and earned it the nickname "the copper colony". German, Italian and other immigrants planted the vines that would make the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale some of the most celebrated wine regions in the world, the birthplace of Australian Shiraz.
Deeply shaped by its origins among free settlers and dissenters, South Australia was a land of pioneering democratic reforms. In 1856 it adopted one of the most advanced electoral systems in the world, and in 1894 it became one of the first places on the planet to give women the vote, and the first to also let them stand as candidates for Parliament. That reforming spirit lived on into the 20th century.
Adelaide earned two nicknames that sum up its character. "City of churches", for the many places of worship built by the different faiths that founded it, and "city of festivals", for its lively cultural scene: the Adelaide Festival and the Fringe make it one of the cultural capitals of the southern hemisphere every southern summer. Elegant, orderly and surrounded by parkland, it embodies its founders' ideal of a planned city.
In the 1970s, under Premier Don Dunstan, South Australia once again led the way with progressive social reforms. Today the state combines that cultural heritage with an economy in transition, from manufacturing to renewable energy production, where it leads the nation. But it is its culture of good food and good wine, fed by the wine regions all around it, that defines much of its identity today.
Much of South Australia is arid, spectacular outback. In the northern desert lies Coober Pedy, the opal capital of the world, a town so punished by the heat that many of its residents live in underground homes dug into the rock. Further east, the Flinders Ranges offer the imposing natural amphitheatre of Wilpena Pound and ancient red landscapes, rich in geological and Aboriginal history.
On the coast and islands, the state shows another side. Kangaroo Island is a wildlife sanctuary with sea lions, koalas and the sculptural Remarkable Rocks; the Eyre Peninsula offers world-famous seafood and cage diving with great white sharks; and the wine regions of the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale, a short hop from Adelaide, round things off. From the dryness of opal country to the abundance of the vine, South Australia packs in many of the continent's contrasts.
When sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age, some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, Bass Strait cut Tasmania off from the mainland, and its Aboriginal inhabitants, the Palawa or Pakana, were isolated from the rest of humanity for all that time, making them one of the longest-isolated human populations on the planet. Divided into around nine nations and dozens of bands, they lived by hunting, shellfish gathering and foraging along the island's coasts and forests, and managed the landscape with careful burning.
This long history, stretching back tens of thousands of years, would be brutally cut short by colonisation. Aboriginal Tasmanians suffered one of the most devastating colonial processes of any people, to the point that for a long time it was wrongly claimed that they had "died out". They had not: their descendants, today's Palawa Aboriginal community, keep their identity and culture alive and have won recognition of their continuity.
The British occupied the island in 1803-1804, partly to get ahead of the French, and named it Van Diemen's Land, founding Hobart in 1804. It soon became one of the harshest penal colonies in the empire: between 1803 and 1853 more than 75,000 convicts were transported there, and its prisons were known as the most severe, reserved for repeat offenders. The Port Arthur penal settlement, on the Tasman Peninsula, operated from 1830 as a model "machine for grinding rogues into honest men", and is now a World Heritage Site and one of the most visited places on the island.
The island's penal reputation became such a burden that when convict transportation ended in 1853 and the colony gained self-government, its people decided to change its name to shake off the stigma. In 1856, Van Diemen's Land became Tasmania, in honour of the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman, the first European to sight it in 1642.
The darkest chapter in Tasmanian history is the Black War, the frontier conflict between settlers and the Palawa people from the mid-1820s to 1832. The spread of sheep farms across Aboriginal hunting grounds set off a spiral of violence and reprisals that left hundreds dead on both sides, but disproportionately among the Palawa.
In 1830, Governor George Arthur organised the "Black Line": a human chain of some 2,000 settlers and soldiers that swept across the island to corner the surviving Aboriginal people, in a hugely expensive operation that nonetheless captured only one man and one boy. The remaining Palawa were eventually persuaded, or forced, to surrender by the mediator George Augustus Robinson, and moved to Flinders Island, where many died of disease and the loss of their homeland. It is one of the most tragic chapters in all of Australia's colonial history.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Tasmania was the smallest, poorest and most peripheral of the Australian colonies and states, with an economy based on mining, farming, wool and logging. That isolation, however, ended up becoming its greatest asset. In the 1970s and 1980s the island was the stage for Australia's first great environmental battles: the campaign to stop the Franklin River being flooded by a dam, which succeeded in 1983, marked the birth of the Australian green movement and of the world's first green party to win seats in parliament.
Today more than a third of Tasmania is protected, and its vast wild areas, the Tasmanian Wilderness, are a World Heritage Site. The island has reinvented itself as a destination for nature and food: its gourmet produce, its whiskies and wines, and the arrival of the MONA art museum in Hobart in 2011 turned it into one of the most fashionable places in Australia.
Tasmania's great treasure is its untouched nature. In the heart of the island, Cradle Mountain and Dove Lake are the icon of its highlands, the starting point of the famous Overland Track and home to wombats and Tasmanian devils. On the east coast, the perfect curve of Wineglass Bay, on the Freycinet Peninsula, between pink granite mountains and turquoise sea, is one of the most photographed beaches in the country, and the Bay of Fires dazzles with its rocks covered in orange lichen.
Add to that Georgian Launceston beside Cataract Gorge, Bruny Island with its lighthouses and its food, and a capital, Hobart, that combines the historic Salamanca Market, the imposing Mount Wellington (kunanyi) and a vibrant cultural scene. On an island the size of Ireland, Tasmania offers some of the purest air and wildest landscapes on the planet.
For tens of thousands of years, the territory of Victoria was home to the nations of the Kulin confederation—Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung, Wathaurong and others—in the centre and south, and to many other peoples such as the Gunditjmara in the west. Far from the cliché of the simple nomadic hunter, more than 6,600 years ago the Gunditjmara built at Budj Bim one of the oldest aquaculture systems in the world: a network of channels and volcanic-stone traps for raising and catching eels, which supported almost permanent settlements. Budj Bim was declared a World Heritage Site in 2019, solely for its Aboriginal cultural value.
These peoples maintained complex trade and ceremonial networks, and their rock art survives in places such as the Grampians (Gariwerd), the largest collection of Aboriginal rock paintings in south-eastern Australia. Colonisation from the 1830s onwards was especially fast and violent in Victoria and devastated these nations, but their descendants keep their identity and their claims alive, and in 2023 Victoria became the first state to begin a formal treaty process with the First Peoples.
Unlike other colonies, Victoria did not begin as an official penal settlement but as a private venture. In 1835, entrepreneur John Batman "negotiated" with Kulin elders the transfer of some 240,000 hectares around Port Phillip Bay—the so-called "Batman's Treaty", the only attempt at a formal treaty with Aboriginal people in Australian colonial history—but the Crown immediately annulled it, on the grounds that all the land belonged to the king. That same year the settlement was founded that in 1837 would be named Melbourne, after the British prime minister.
For fifteen years, the Port Phillip District was part of New South Wales, but the rapid growth of its settlers and flocks fuelled the desire for self-government. On 1 July 1851, the colony of Victoria officially separated, named in honour of Queen Victoria. Almost at the same moment, a discovery would change its fate at dizzying speed.
Weeks after separation, in 1851, gold was discovered at Ballarat and Bendigo, sparking one of the biggest gold rushes in history. Victoria became the world's epicentre: in the 1850s it alone produced a huge share of the planet's gold, and its population grew sixfold. Prospectors poured in from the British Isles, Europe, America and China, and from that sudden wealth emerged "Marvellous Melbourne", which within a few decades became one of the richest and most elegant cities in the world, with grand boulevards, theatres and monumental buildings.
Gold brought not only wealth but also an egalitarian, rebellious spirit. On the Ballarat diggings, miners fed up with costly licences and police repression rose up in the Eureka rebellion: on 3 December 1854 they swore allegiance to the Southern Cross flag and held out behind the Eureka Stockade, where they were crushed by troops, leaving around twenty dead. The military defeat became a political victory, and the episode endures as a founding myth of Australian democracy. The living museum of Sovereign Hill, in Ballarat, recreates that world today.
When Australia federated in 1901, Melbourne was chosen as the country's temporary capital, and the national Parliament sat there for 26 years, until Canberra was ready in 1927. Victoria became the industrial and manufacturing heart of Australia, with factories, car plants and a strong working class that made the state a stronghold of the trade union movement and the Labor Party.
Post-war immigration—Italians, Greeks and later Vietnamese, with one of the largest Greek populations outside Greece—reshaped Melbourne into one of the most multicultural and cultured cities in the world, famous for its art-filled laneways, its cafés, its trams and its passion for sport, from cricket to Australian rules football, which was born on its fields. Repeatedly ranked among the most liveable cities on the planet, Melbourne today embodies the European, cosmopolitan side of Australia.
Beyond Melbourne, Victoria packs an extraordinary variety of landscapes into a small area. Its jewel is the Great Ocean Road, built between 1919 and 1932 by soldiers returned from the First World War as a living memorial to the fallen—the largest war memorial in the world—winding along cliffs above the Southern Ocean and past the famous Twelve Apostles. It is one of the most spectacular coastal roads on the planet.
The state also offers the nightly penguin parade on Phillip Island, the sparkling-wine cellars of the Yarra Valley, the lookouts and rock art of the Grampians, the wombats and unspoilt beaches of Wilsons Promontory—the southernmost point of the mainland—and the colourful bathing boxes and hot springs of the Mornington Peninsula. That mix of nature, food and wine, and gold-rush history is a large part of the appeal of mainland Australia's smallest state.
The vast south-west of Western Australia is Noongar country. The Noongar's fourteen language groups have lived in the region for tens of thousands of years and remain one of the largest Aboriginal communities in the country. Around present-day Perth lived the Whadjuk Noongar groups, for whom the Swan River (Derbarl Yerrigan) and Mount Eliza (Kaarta Gar-up, now Kings Park) were sacred places. Further north and across the immense deserts of the interior lived dozens of other nations, such as the Martu and the peoples of the Kimberley.
In the remote north-west, the Kimberley holds some of the oldest and most enigmatic rock art in the world, such as the Gwion Gwion (Bradshaw) figures and the Wandjina spirits, thousands of years old. Colonisation reached this gigantic state late and unevenly, but when it came it brought frontier violence, forced labour in the pearling and pastoral industries, and segregation policies that lasted well into the 20th century.
Although the British had set up a military outpost at Albany in 1826 to get ahead of the French, real colonisation came in 1829 with the founding of the Swan River Colony by Captain James Stirling. Unlike the eastern colonies, it began as a settlement of free settlers, not convicts, and Stirling founded the town of Perth inland and the port of Fremantle on the coast.
For decades the colony struggled with isolation, labour shortages and difficult soils. Things got so bad that, in an ironic twist, the settlers themselves asked for convicts so they would have workers: between 1850 and 1868, Western Australia was the last colony to receive British prisoners, who built much of its infrastructure. Even so, it remained the poorest and most sparsely populated of the Australian colonies until, at the end of the 19th century, something changed everything.
In 1892-1893 gold was discovered at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, some 600 kilometres east of Perth, setting off a rush that pulled the colony out of its slumber. Kalgoorlie's Golden Mile turned out to be one of the richest goldfields ever found, and Western Australia's population multiplied. To bring water to the parched desert fields, an astonishing feat of engineering was built: a pipeline more than 500 kilometres long designed by C. Y. O'Connor.
Made wealthy by gold, the colony joined Federation in 1901, though not without doubts and strong opposition at home. Throughout the 20th century, a sense of remoteness and grievance towards the federal government in distant Canberra even fuelled a secessionist movement: in a 1933 referendum, two thirds of Western Australians voted to leave the Commonwealth, although secession never happened.
Western Australia's second great transformation began in the 1960s with the discovery of gigantic iron ore deposits in the Pilbara region. Driven by insatiable demand first from Japan and later from China, mining for iron ore, natural gas and other resources made the state Australia's export engine and one of the richest mining regions in the world.
That wealth turned Perth, the capital, into a modern metropolis of skyscrapers beside the Swan River. Lying more than 2,000 kilometres from any other major city, Perth holds the title of the most isolated major city on the planet, closer to Jakarta or Singapore than to Sydney. Next to it, the historic port of Fremantle keeps its colonial architecture and bohemian feel, and nearby Rottnest Island, with its quokkas, is one of the state's favourite getaways.
Western Australia's scale is hard to grasp: at more than 2.5 million square kilometres, it is the second-largest state or province in the world and covers almost a third of the continent. That vastness brings an astonishing range of landscapes. In the remote north, the Kimberley is one of the last great wilderness areas on Earth, with the striped domes of the Bungle Bungles, gorges, waterfalls and the legendary Gibb River Road; on the coast, Broome offers sunset camel rides on Cable Beach and a pearling past with a notable Japanese and Asian community.
Further south, Ningaloo Reef lets you swim with whale sharks straight from the beach; Shark Bay, a World Heritage Site, has dolphins that come up to the shore at Monkey Mia; and the red iron gorges of Karijini, the Pinnacles of the Nambung desert and the petrified granite wave of Wave Rock are one-of-a-kind sights. In the far south-west, by contrast, the Margaret River region produces world-class wines alongside karri forests and surf breaks, and Esperance boasts some of the whitest beaches in the country. From the tropics to temperate forest, Western Australia is a state of extremes.
Hardly anything that happened to Australia happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
