Australia (AnglophoniZ n°1)

The first inhabitants of Australia were the Aboriginal people, who probably migrated to the continent at least 50,000 years ago and occupied most of it by 30,000 years ago. And, although Australia was not known to the Western world, it did exist in late medieval European logic and mythology: A great Southland, or Terra Australis, was thought necessary to balance the weight of the Northern landmasses of Europe and Asia. The European exploration of Australia took indeed more than three centuries to be completed; so, what is often considered the oldest continent, geologically speaking, was therefore the last to be discovered and colonized by Europeans. Even if many countries (Spain, the Netherlands) had already landed on the Australian shores, the first to explore it was Britain, though it did not explore it fully until the 19th century: Matthew Flinders was indeed the first to circumnavigate the continent from 1801 to 1803. Australia quickly appeared to be a remote and unattractive land for European settlement. However, with the loss of its American colonies in 1783, Britain no longer had a convenient place to send its criminals, and Australia was a suitably distant and terrifying alternative destination for transportation. More than 150,000 convicts were sent to Australia before the British government officially abolished transportation to all of the Eastern colonies in 1852. Approximately 20 percent of the convicts were women, and about one-third were Irish. Many had been repeatedly convicted of petty crimes and many of the women had been prostitutes. The majority of convicts worked as assigned laborers and could earn wages for work done on their own time. Some accumulated substantial wealth and a few founded prominent colonial families.
The establishment of the first convict settlement in 1788 at Port-Jackson, which is present-day Sydney, also marked the beginning of conflicts with the Aboriginal people: a first series of skirmishes took place in 1790 (the Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars), but
the most devastating one opposed the colonists and the Aboriginal population of Tasmania in 1807. "The Black War", as it is termed, caused the death of a major part of the aboriginal population of Tasmania.

Laura Waldvogel