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  • Australian Immigration: Colonial and Beyond
    • Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan

    Australian immigration refers to the migration of people to Australia since the first development of the British colony there in 1788 down to the present day. This has resulted in the demographic transformation of the continent. Prior to 1788 it was populated exclusively by Aboriginals, numbering somewhere between 750,000 and 1.25 million people. Today, however, the population stands at over 25 million inhabitants from a vast range of ethnic backgrounds. This immigration went through distinct periods - most migrants for the sixty years of Australia’s colonial history being from Britain and Ireland, followed by a growing influx of people from countries like Italy, Germany and Switzerland in the second half of the nineteenth century, and waves of Greeks, Croats, Serbs, Vietnamese, Chinese and Filipinos in the decades following the Second World War.[1]

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    Australian immigration chronology of events

    Bird's Eye View of Sydney
    Bird’s Eye View of Sydney (1888) by Albert Henry Fullwood

    Immigration to Australia began in the late eighteenth century when the British began developing Sydney as the center of the prison colony of New South Wales with convicts from Britain and Ireland. It continued to expand as a penal colony in the decade that followed. By the 1800s New South Wales was sufficiently advanced on the back of penal labor that it was developing a twin purpose as both a penal colony and a civilian colony. As a result of the success of the experiment new penal colonies were eventually established in Queensland, Western Australian and on the island of Tasmania. Voluntary migration to Australia, though, remained relatively limited in the first half of the nineteenth century.[2]

    Things changed rapidly from about 1850. The advent of the steamships and the railways, as well as overpopulation across Europe, saw millions of people leaving the continent and Australia was part of the immigration boom worldwide, along with countries like the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and South Africa. As with many of those other countries the pull factors to Australia included a gold rush after gold seams were discovered in the 1840s and confirmed in 1851. Thus, waves of migrants from countries other than Britain and Ireland began arriving to Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century.[3] By the twentieth century, Australia, which acquired independence from Britain gradually over time, had unofficially adopted a racial policy of preferring white settlers to Australia. Its aid to Jewish refugees from Nazis Germany and Austria in the 1930s was unfortunately limited, only agreeing to take in 15,000 people.[4]

    In the aftermath of the war Australia entered a period of consciously trying to expand its population. It welcomed tens of thousands of people from countries in Eastern Europe like Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania who were fleeing Soviet rule in the second half of the 1940s. Often the policy of encouraging the arrival of ‘New Australians’ in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s included providing financial and material aid for relocation. Many Greeks, Croats, Serbs and other groups arrived as a result. In 1976 the first boat loads of refugees fleeing Vietnam after the war there arrived to Australia. Over the next seven or eight years the Australian government took in an average of 15,000 Vietnamese per year. Thus, overall the story of immigration to Australia over the last 230 years has been a complex one of penal colonies, gold rushes, people in search of economic opportunity and political and religious refugees.[5]

    Extent of migration to Australia

    Prospectors' hut Upper Dargo
    Prospectors during the Victorian Gold Rush

    The level of migration to Australia over the last 230-plus years has been very substantial. Millions of people have left Europe during that time for the southern hemisphere. Where they have been coming from has changed over time. For instance, in the first seventy or eighty years of colonization migrants were primarily coming from Britain and Ireland. Those who came as convicts to the penal colonies numbered 162,000, while over time the flow of civilian settlers simply seeking land and opportunity grew exponentially. Push factors included the appalling urban conditions in England’s industrial cities as a result of the Industrial Revolution and also the Great Potato Famine in Ireland in the 1840s.[6]

    The Victoria Gold Rush of the 1850s saw the range of countries which migrants to Australia were arriving from broaden. Many came from Italy, for instance, as that country’s massive diaspora was beginning to develop in countries like Australia, the United States and Argentina. Others were Chinese miners, while a substantial number of migrants arrived from Switzerland and Germany as well at this time. Many of the latter played a key role in the early development of Australia’s wine industry.[7]

    Australia’s active efforts to encourage immigration in the aftermath of the Second World War led to mass migration from many countries and a growing ethnic diversity. Between 1949 and 1980, for instance, 210,000 Greeks arrived to the country, establishing major communities in cities like Melbourne and Sydney.[8] In the 1960s the government of Josip Tito in Yugoslavia eased migration restrictions and this led to hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Croats and other ethnic groups from the Balkans arriving to Australia in the course of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Many Australians of Balkan descent have become well-known in Australian life in recent times through their prominence in sport, individuals such as Nick Kyrgios (Greek ancestry) and Mark Viduka (Croatian ancestry).[9]

    Demographic impact of Australian immigration

    It is hard to understate how profoundly altered the demographic landscape of Australia has been by the immigration to the country which has occurred since 1788. At that time historians estimate that the continent was very thinly populated by somewhere between 750,000 and 1.25 million Aboriginals. Today the population of Australia is over 25 million and rising with considerable speed. It was just 19 million in 2000, but is expected to have reached nearly 33 million by 2050. Aboriginals only make up roughly 3.8% of the population today, being approximately 900,000 in number, while the bulk of the population are comprised of people of a wide range of ethnic backgrounds.[10]

    Inevitably, given its colonial history, approximately one-third of Australians are primarily of English background, while one in ten have Irish heritage owing to the influx of both Irish convicts and Irish civilian settlers in the first half of the nineteenth century. There are over one million Australians of Italian heritage, while the easing of migration restrictions from Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s saw hundreds of thousands of people from the Balkans arrive to the southern continent, along with a large influx of Greeks. Proximity to Asia has also ensured that there are large communities of people with Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipino ethnic backgrounds in modern-day Australia.

    See also

    Explore more about Australian Immigration: Colonial and Beyond

    References

    1. ↑ https://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/belongings-home/about-belongings/australias-migration-history/index.html
    2. ↑ https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/Convicts_and_the_Colonisation_of_Australia,_1788-1868
    3. ↑ https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/gold-rushes
    4. ↑ https://ergo.slv.vic.gov.au/explore-history/australia-wwii/abroad-wwii/holocaust
    5. ↑ https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/vietnamese-refugees-boat-arrival
    6. ↑ https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/convict-transportation-peaks
    7. ↑ https://thisdayinwinehistory.com/australian-wine-industry/
    8. ↑ https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/greeks
    9. ↑ https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/croatians
    10. ↑ https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-peoples/estimates-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-australians/latest-release


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    Contributors

    Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
    Additional contributor: Max G. Heffler