Be it from looking at their flag, their local dialect, their money, or their double-decker
public transport driving on the left, it is abundantly clear that Australia was colonized
by the British. In fact, they colonized the entire country, but they weren‘t the first
to get there, the Dutch were. So, how did the British take over all of this massive
island?
Since ancient times, European scholars and geographers and the like all speculated about
there being some giant landmass at the southernmost edges of the world. After all, there was clearly
a lot of land to the north of the equator, so there must be at least as much land to
the south, just to balance everything out. This is basically how Europe thought of the
map of the world until they decided to actually go and explore that big ball. Of course, Australia,
one such theorized landmass, had already been settled for tens of thousands of years by
numerous different people groups, all with their own languages which sounded nothing
like English, so… what happened that changed all that?
Well, for that, we are going to have to start at the beginning of European colonialism…
or, actually the middle. Basically, now that the Americas, and much of Africa and Asia
had been colonized by different powers, many of these countries started businesses to make
money off of these far-flung territories. Among the most prolific of these was the Dutch
East India Company, or the VOC. Crucially for this, basically the only large territory
that the Dutch Empire was able to hold onto was of course Indonesia, which was the source
of many of the lucrative spices that the VOC would ship back home.
Of course, in a primitive time before the transporter was invented, you still had to
get from the Netherlands to Indonesia. This involved going down the Atlantic, past Africa,
and down to around the 40th parallel south, where traders would take advantage of a trade
wind known as the Roaring Forties. This became known as the Brouwer Route, and involved ships
knowing when to depart these winds and head north toward the East Indies, which was kind
of hard to do if you hadn’t already spotted St. Paul Island or the randomly-named Amsterdam
Island. Because of this, many a Dutch trader would get lost and bump into the west coast
of Australia. Some of these shipwrecked merchants however would take note of this brand new
island, and would name it Nieuw Holland… and found a couple other islands to the east,
and named them after another Dutch province.
So yeah, there’s one key point to why the Netherlands didn’t fully settle Australia;
western Australia kind of sucks. I mean, I’m sure the people there are nice, but it should
be pretty revealing how few of them there are.
Enter the British. From 1768 to 1771, James Cook made a landmark voyage around the world,
specifically the southern parts of the world. He started (naturally) in Britain, and immediately
headed down, around South America, and through the South Pacific, discovering Australia from
the other side. You see, if there’s anything you should know about how Australia is structured
geographically, it’s that it’s mostly barren and empty, except for this very fertile
crescent in the southeast, that we can’t actually call the Fertile Crescent, because
it’s already taken… damn it! This map should show exactly what’s going
on. It’s a map of the average population density throughout Australia, and you’ll
notice that most Australians live near the coasts of South Australia, Victoria, New South
Wales, and Queensland. Oh, and some people in Tasmania of course. This only becomes more
visible if we look at the locations of Australia’s 17 biggest cities, all with a population greater
than 100,000. In decreasing order, they are: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbaine, Perth, Adelaide,
Gold Coast, Newcastle, Canberra, Sunshine Coast, Wollongong, Geelong, Hobart, Townsville,
Cairns, Darwin, Toowoomba, and Ballarat. Only two of these cities, Perth and Darwin, lay
in the western half of the country. This sole fact, combined with the difficulties of just
getting to this part of the world, explain why the Dutch never colonized Nieuw Holland,
but the British did colonize Australia. In short, this is why the most visible source
of Dutch influence in Australia is of course fairy bread. So, keep this in mind as we get
back to the history. So, when we last left off, not-Captain James
Cook was finishing his first voyage around the world in 1771. But what’s this? The
1770’s? Oh, I think I know what this means for Britain’s colonial interests. You see,
Britain’s first overseas colonies were in modern-day North America, but this changed
drastically in 1776, when real history started, and the American revolutionaries kicked the
British out of all of America… *most of America. Then, Britain remembered about that
new fertile land they had just found down south, and also needed to relieve their overly-packed
prison systems, and so established a penal colony in Botany Bay, in the rugged wastelands
of… Sydney, establishing the colony of New South Wales in 1788.
For the first few decades, the British actually decided to not completely jump into taking
over everything they saw, they would do that in the 19th century, first claiming everything
east of 135ºE. Then came the mid-19th century, when the British expanded their claim to the
rest of the island, with the establishment of Western Australia. Then, blah blah blah,
the colonies turned out to be quite liveable, they united together-- minus New Zealand and
Fiji-- and created a new Commonwealth to get more rights and political distance from Britain,
and now they’re a country. Now, admittedly this is an incredibly narrow
scope of Australian history, which is actually incredibly vast in its own right, but anyone
who saw my old History of Australia video that I made just about a year ago (before
I unlisted it, at least) knows what happens when I talk about all of Australian history,
as an ignorant American. I apparently just make a bunch of dumb jokes, and talk more
about the Emu War than actual history. This video was just about a specific part of Australian
history. If you wanted to learn more, I would either recommend this video by Suibhne (who
has the unique advantage of actually being Australian) or this longer video by the late
Brain4Breakfast. This video wasn’t really a collab or anything, their videos will just
probably answer some more questions you might have about Australian history. But hey, at
least now you know why this massive land speaks only one language!
As always, thanks for watching. Please be sure to like and subscribe if you enjoyed
this video, and follow me on Twitter. I currently have less than 400 followers there, so it
would be nice to bump that up, especially given this channel has 40,000 subscribers.
And of course, see you next Sunday.