Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills’s attempt to cross the continent from south to north on behalf of the Victoria Philosophical Institute was also to end in tragedy. With around fifteen men, twenty-seven horses, twentyfive camels and two wagons, they headed for the continent’s centre.
After a series of blunders and arguments’ the group separated and Burke and Wills then reached Cooper’s Creek, one of the rare permanent sources of water in the continent. Here they established an advanced base and proceeded to the Gulf of Carpentaria with just three men, SL”X camels and a horse.
Their two-month-long journey took them to a few hundred yards from the sea, which they could not see because of the thick mangrove forest. They returned towards Cooper’s Creek but, exhausted by the climate and lack of food, their rate of progress slowed down. By a tragic stroke offate, on failing to see them return, their companions had abandoned base a few hours before their return. Burke and his companions died of hunger trying to reach the colonial settlement of Mount Hopeless.
Although it was almost entirely unexplored, the Crown claimed sovereignty over the entire continent and declared it an uninhabited terra nullius. Attempts at armed resistance by the Aborigines escalated into massacre and those who sought to escape the onslaught of military technology were killed by diseases of European
Gold fever emptied the cities, men abandoned their jobs in search of fortune. The first great wave of immigration arrived. Shiploads of immigrants arrived from all over Europe, China and California. By 1863, in twelve years, the population of Australia had grown from 400 thousand to more than one million inhabitants.
import. In 1860, when the Aboriginal Act established the first laws for their protection in Victoria, less than 50 thousand Aborigines had survived throughout the entire country.
They lived in the desert lands of the central and western regions, the marshes of the Northern Territory and the jungles of Queensland. The inhospitable nature of their lands had saved them from genocide.
It was the discovery of gold that revolutionised the history of Australia. Mter the first nuggets were found in 1851 at Bathurst in Jew South Wales, the gold rush was on.
In a few months the precious metal was found in Ballarat, Bendigo, in other parts of Victoria and in the torrents of the Great Dividing Range.
In search of gold the pioneers struck further into the outback and set up villages on the banks of the rivers Darling and Murray. Gold turned Melbourne into a city, with its own hotels, theatres, banks and public lighting system. The discovery of silver, copper and zinc beds, in different parts of the country, paved the way for its massive mineral exploitation. The gold rush also caused
the only episode of rebellion against the Crown in Australian history. In 1854, the Reform League was set up in protest against the levying of a mining tax, and thousands of gold -diggers burned their licences in protest and raised a stockade. After a few days they were attacked by the army: the battle left thirty miners and five soldiers on the ground, but the tax was abolished. The episode went down in history as Eureka Stockade, and survives in the country’s folklore alongside the legendary Australian spirit of “mateship” between men used to facing the hostile side of nature. Together, they would represent the foundations of Australian culture which would lead to the birth of the trade-unions.
Gold enabled further exploration of the outback. In 1862, Iohn McDouall Stuart was the first man to travel the continent from south to north, covering the nearly 2,000 miles from Adelaide to Darwin. On the route he covered, thirtyfive thousand telegraphic poles were erected ten years later, connecting Darwin to the south, which was already in communication with London via Singapore, Bombay and Aden. At the centre of Australia, the Telegraph Station was built, around which the city of Alice
Springs would later rise. Gold also encouraged armed bandits with legendary anti-heroes such as Ned Kelly, who became one of the central figures of Australian folklore. He grew up in the middle of the nineteenth century among the Irish peasants of Victoria and in 1877 wounded a policeman with a firearm. He sought refuge in the bush and, together with a pair of friends and his brother Dan, formed a band of outlaws and killed three policemen in a shooting match.
He became a symbol for the oppressed standing up for themselves, a sort of Robin Hood who robbed the banks and attacked the self-satisfied rich. For the middle-class, however, he was a dangerous criminal who had to be eliminated as soon as possible. He roamed the bush for three years using guerrilla tactics, he would go on raids and then seek refuge in the Wombat forest. In 1880, the authorities discovered his whereabouts from a secret informer and sent a train full of policemen to capture him. Kelly and his band took the inhabitants of the village of Glenrowan hostage, locked them in tl1e pub and tore up the rail tracks on which the police were due to arrive. Shortly before derailing, the train came to a halt. Kelly barricaded himself in the pub; shooting lasted all night long. Wearing a makeshift shield, Kelly tried to escape but was shot down. WOlU1ded, he was imprisoned in Melbourne and condemned to the gallows on Ll.th November 1880 at the age of26.
In 1868 deportations of convicts from England ceased, and the five colonies into which the island was divided started life as a normal country. In 1901, Australia became an independent federation in the British Commonwealth and the policy of “white Australia” was launched. Racial discrimination thus became official. Even as early as 1887, Chinese immigration was prohibited and laws were passed allowing only Europeans into the country.
At the start of the twentieth century the gold-digging and mining boom took off. Oil was struck in Queensland; mountains of ferrous materials, bauxite, tin, uranium and mineral sands were exploited; the largest bed of opals in the world was found at Coober Pedy in South Australia; and huge reserves of coal
were discovered.
Melbourne had become the provisional capital but to lay the eternal rivalry with Sydney to rest, ten years after independence, the government purchased the land where the Australian Capital Territory would later rise and appointed American architect Waiter Burley Griffin to handle the project for building Canberra.
In 1914, Australia declared war on Germany alongside Great Britain. The battle of Gallipoli in Turkey the following year marked its baptism of fire as ~ nation. Gallipoli became a national legend commemorated in the film by Peter Weir, the most l”opular Australian director. In 1927, for the first time Parliament met at Canberra, the new capital.
During the great depression of the thirties, a third event formed the trio of myths including Ned Kelly and the battle of Gallipoli. Phar Lap, a horse that started to run in 1929 and won thirty-six races in two years, became such a safe bet in years of hunger and unemployment that the bookmakers withdrew him from the stakes.
In 1941, Australia declared war on Japan, which planned to invade the island and was to bomb the city of Darwin over the following years. In the post-war period, the Australian economy, based on cattle-farming, extensive cereal cultivation and mining, was in full boom. The government encouraged immigration with free passages from a rationed, war-torn Europe. As a result immigrants arrived in their hundreds. People world-wide viewed Australia as a land of plenty, a land of milk, honey and, above all, room. Germans, Italians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Poles and Lebanese poured in behind the massive shiploads of British and Irish. Australia provided a future for five million Europeans. In the sixties, it became one of the richest countries in the world, a lucky country offering opportunities that would be inconceivable elsewhere. The white collars surpassed the blue collars; the mythical COW1try of workers supported by tradeunions branched out into prosperity. Unprecedented wealth created by a new mining boom inflated the middle-class and granted Australians the highest standard of living in the world and the construction of futuristic cities. In 1965, Australia became involved in the Vietnam war alongside the Americans. In 1966, racial discrimination was dismantled and the doors opened to Asian immigrants. In the 1967 referendum, 90 per cent of Australians voted to give the right of citizenship to the Aborigines. 1973 brought a change to the economy, with the entrance of Great Britain into the European Community. Australia saw
its main financial and cultural partner move away. But then the inhabitants of English origin had become only half the population, and with one hundred and forty different ethnic groups, Australia had become a multicultural society. Over the last few years, although Australia has remained a predominantly western COlU1- try, it has become aware of its eastern location, and not just geographically. Its panorama is taking on an increasingly oriental aspect: Japan has become its main economic partner and half of the immigrants today come from Asia.
Australia, a country the size of a continent, has a rich assortment of colours that make up its geographical structure: a red sun-drenched outback, a deep blue sea, an emerald-green jungle, gold sand dunes, white salt deserts, yellow wheat fields and grey-green eucalyptus forests. To fly from coast to coast takes five hours by jet, or a week to drive over the 2,500 miles of interminable eucalyptus forests between Perth and Sydney from the Indian to Pacific Ocean. In this case, the occasional petrol station, a reminder of modern technology in the middle of a landscape that remains monotonous for days, and appears almost forgotten by time, is a stark reminder of man’s presence.
The arid “bush” covering most of the outback presents a bare panorama dominated by the thorny spinifex bushes that often roll in the swirling dust on the sun-cracked earth. Straight narrow roads cut through the bush evoking early pioneers’ destinies. One should drive along slowly and should stop at sunset, for at night there are plenty of wild animals about.
Accidents can be caused by kangaroos bounding along the road as they are often dazzled by headlamps and get run over by speeding vehides. The kangaroo, which has become the country’s symbol, is the most well-known of the numerous wildlife species populating Australia.
Because of its isolation from the rest of the world, nature and wildlife have trodden a path of evolution all of their own. Eighty-five per cent of the plants that grow in Australia are found only here. The animal species are among the most primitive on the planet. Of mammals the placentals include only dingos, which were probably introduced around ten thousand years ago from Indonesia, and certain bat species. There are many different marsupial species in the country, animals which, after a brief gestation period, complete their growth in a pouch attached to their mother’s belly. In addition to the kangaroos, the general term used to describe the forty-two different giant-footed species, are many different wallabies, small marsupial creatures, often so small that they are mistaken for mice. Dutch navigator Willem De Vlamingh, who landed on an island in 1696, facing the lake where Perth now stands, called it Rottnest – “rat nest” because it was inhabited by quokkas, tiny kangaroos the size of rats with dark hides.
Around fifteen varieties of opossum fall into the biggest Australian animal family. These animals vary in size and shape and often resemble squirrels or bears, yet they have in common their night-time habits and are scavengers. In many cities they can be found rooting among the dustbins, whilst those in the national parks are more like Yogi bear, always
on the lookout for picnickers’ fare. The timid little koala bear that crouches all day long among the eucalyptus trees from which it gains its sole source of solid and liquid nourishment is also a marsupial.
The fat, clumsy wombat, with proportions resembling a pig’s, is definitely less elegant. In four species, it mainly inhabits the temperate forests of the south-eastern regions where it digs its lair out among the tree roots. The presence of this animal has given a mountainous chain in Victoria the name of the Wombats. The thylacine, a carnivorous marsupial the size of a wolf but better known as the tiger of Tasmania because of its black stripes, is now extinct. Other carnivorous species have survived, such as the quell, a small animal the size of a squirrel, four marsupial varieties of “cat”, and the Tasmanian devil, a beast the size of a small dog, but with sharp teeth and a killer’s grin. These are all predators that survive by hunting rabbits, opossums, wallabies and birds.
The monotremes, which lay eggs and produce urine and excrement all from the same orifice, are even more primitive than marsupials. They hatch eggs in the same way as reptiles and suckle their young by soaking up milk through their abdominal hairs as nature has provided them with mammary glands but not nipples. The duck-billed platypus, a sort of beaver with a duck’s beak and falcon’s claws, and the porcupine
ant-eater, a large hedgehog with a cigar-shaped face, also belong to this order. The presence of other animal species is determined by the differing environmental conditions, from the tropical to the temperate, in this land – the size of Europe minus Scandinavia – which stretches from the tenth parallel below the Equator right down to the low latitudes vexed by the Roaring Forties and peopled by Antarctic fauna.
The arid outback is the habitat of many bounding marsupials, predatory dingos and an infinite variety of coleopters and other insects, such as the white ants, which build spectacu- 1ar terrnitaries up to 13 feet high.