R3.4 Indigenous societies and national identity in Australia and New Zealand (circa 1770–2020)

Australia and New Zealand were built as British settler colonies on the land of Indigenous peoples, became independent nations with identities of their own, and have since had to come to terms with how they began. The same questions run through 250 years of their history: who owns the land, who belongs to the nation, and how far the two countries have acted for themselves in the world.

Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Māori societies before colonisation

Aboriginal peoples have lived on the Australian continent for at least 50,000 years; archaeological dates from Madjedbebe in Arnhem Land suggest about 65,000 years, though that figure is debated. In 1788 there were several hundred distinct nations or language groups, speaking more than 250 languages. Estimates of the population in 1788 range from about 300,000 to more than a million, because no count was made and the first epidemics struck before most groups had been seen by Europeans; many historians now favour a figure of 750,000 or more.

The Torres Strait Islanders are a separate people, of Melanesian culture, living on the islands between Cape York and New Guinea. Unlike most mainland Aboriginal groups, they lived in permanent villages, grew gardens of yams, taro and bananas, and fished and traded by canoe. Their distinct culture, and their system of family plots on islands such as Mer (Murray Island), later became central to the Mabo case of 1992.

Country, kinship and the Dreaming

Aboriginal societies were organised through kinship: every person stood in a defined relationship to every other, which set out obligations to share, to marry, to teach and to care for land. Authority lay with elders who held knowledge of law and ceremony, not with chiefs or a state.

Relationship to Country was explained through the Dreaming, the body of law, story and ceremony that tells how ancestral beings shaped the land and set down the rules for living on it. Because the land itself held this law, a group could not sell or give away its Country; it held it as a custodian, with a duty passed from generation to generation. Aboriginal people managed the land actively. Regular, controlled burning (fire-stick farming) kept open grasslands that drew game; at Budj Bim in western Victoria the Gunditjmara built stone channels and weirs to trap and farm eels thousands of years ago.

Māori society in Aotearoa

Māori are the tangata whenua ("people of the land") of Aotearoa New Zealand. Their ancestors sailed from East Polynesia and settled the islands around 1250–1300 CE, making New Zealand one of the last large land masses on Earth to be settled by humans. By the time of Cook’s visit in 1769 the Māori population was probably about 100,000; the historian Michael King thought 110,000 more likely.

Māori society was built on descent (whakapapa). People belonged to a whānau (extended family), a hapū (sub-tribe, the main land-holding and political unit) and an iwi (tribe of related hapū descended from a common ancestor, often traced to an ancestral canoe). Chiefs (rangatira) led through their mana, the authority and prestige that came from ancestry, achievement and generosity. Rules of tapu (sacred restriction) governed behaviour, and utu (reciprocity, including revenge) kept relationships in balance.

Land (whenua) was held collectively by hapū. Rights came from ancestry, conquest and, above all, continuous occupation: a group kept its rights by ahi kā, "keeping the fires burning" on the land. Māori grew kūmara (sweet potato) in the warmer north, fished and gathered widely, and built fortified hilltop villages (pā). Their military skills and their idea of land as an inheritance of the whole group shaped how they met British settlers.

The comparison of ideas about land shows why conflict was likely from the start. To British officials, land that was not fenced, farmed or held under written title looked unused and available; to Indigenous peoples it was already owned, managed and sacred. British law gave colonists a ready justification for taking the land.

Cook, the First Fleet and the first colonies, 1769–1840

The Dutch navigator Abel Tasman had reached New Zealand in 1642, but the British claim to both countries began with the voyage of James Cook in HMS Endeavour. Cook sailed around both islands of New Zealand in 1769–1770, mapping the coast; at Tūranganui-a-Kiwa (Poverty Bay) in October 1769 his men shot and killed several Māori in the first days of contact. He then sailed west, landed at Botany Bay in April 1770, where the Gweagal people tried to turn the landing party away, and followed the east coast of Australia north.

Cook’s secret instructions from the Admiralty told him to take possession of suitable places "with the Consent of the Natives". On Possession Island, off Cape York, on 22 August 1770 he claimed the whole east coast for George III without any attempt at consent.

I now once More hoisted English Colours, and in the Name of His Majesty King George the Third took possession of the whole Eastern coast from the above Lat. down to this place by the Name of New Wales, together with all the Bays, Harbours, Rivers, and Islands, situated upon the said Coast; after which we fired 3 Volleys of small Arms, which were answer'd by the like number from the Ship.

James Cook, journal of the Endeavour voyage, entry for 22 August 1770 (W. J. L. Wharton’s edition, 1893; some manuscript versions read “New South Wales”). Cook wrote for the Admiralty, and the entry records a formal act of possession performed for a European audience; the people of the coast were neither asked nor present. Elsewhere in the same journal Cook wrote that the people of "New Holland" might seem "the most wretched People upon Earth" but were in reality "far more happier than we Europeans", which shows that he saw them as content and self-sufficient, yet still treated their land as open to a British claim.

The First Fleet and the penal colony of New South Wales

After the loss of the American colonies, Britain needed somewhere to send convicts. The First Fleet of eleven ships under Captain Arthur Phillip, carrying about 1,400 people including roughly 750 convicts, reached Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788. The colony of New South Wales was a penal colony: a prison settlement run by a military governor. Between 1788 and 1868 about 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia; transportation to New South Wales ended in 1840, to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1853 and to Western Australia in 1868.

The land around Sydney belonged to the Eora and neighbouring peoples. Phillip was ordered to "conciliate the affections" of the Aboriginal people, and he kidnapped men such as Bennelong to learn their language and customs. Within fifteen months an epidemic of smallpox, which broke out in April 1789, killed a large part of the Aboriginal population around Sydney; its origin is still debated. Armed resistance began soon afterwards: the Bidjigal warrior Pemulwuy led raids on settlers from about 1790 until he was shot in 1802.

New colonies followed as settlers pushed outwards: Van Diemen’s Land (1803), Moreton Bay (Brisbane, 1824, a penal outpost), the Swan River Colony in Western Australia (1829) and South Australia (1836). In 1835 the Tasmanian grazier John Batman signed a "treaty" with Wurundjeri elders to obtain about 240,000 hectares around Port Phillip. Governor Richard Bourke declared it void in August 1835, on the ground that the land already belonged to the Crown; the proclamation shows that colonial law did not recognise any Aboriginal title that could be bought.

Aotearoa before 1840: traders, missionaries and the Musket Wars

New Zealand was not colonised as quickly. From the 1790s sealers, whalers and traders worked its coasts, and the Bay of Islands port of Kororāreka became a busy, lawless trading town. Māori traded flax, timber, pork and potatoes for iron tools and, above all, muskets. The Anglican missionary Samuel Marsden preached the first Christian sermon in New Zealand on Christmas Day 1814, and by the 1830s many Māori were reading the Bible in their own language.

Muskets transformed warfare between iwi. In the Musket Wars (about 1807 to the late 1830s), northern iwi that acquired guns first, led by chiefs such as Hongi Hika of Ngāpuhi, raided far to the south. Perhaps 20,000 people were killed and many more were enslaved or driven from their land; whole iwi migrated, which created conflicting claims to land that later complicated land sales to the Crown.

Lawlessness among British subjects, French interest in the islands and missionary pressure led Britain to appoint James Busby as British Resident in 1833. In October 1835 Busby gathered northern chiefs at Waitangi to sign He Whakaputanga, the Declaration of Independence, which asserted Māori sovereignty and asked the British Crown to act as protector.

All sovereign power and authority within the territories of the United Tribes of New Zealand is hereby declared to reside entirely and exclusively in the hereditary chiefs and heads of tribes in their collective capacity, who also declare that they will not permit any legislative authority separate from themselves in their collective capacity to exist […].

He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni (Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand), article 2, English translation, 28 October 1835; signed by 34 northern chiefs and by 52 by 1839. The Māori text, written with Busby and the missionary Henry Williams, describes this authority as kīngitanga and mana. The declaration served British aims by keeping the French out, but Māori leaders and the Waitangi Tribunal have since treated it as evidence that rangatira did not see themselves as giving up sovereignty five years later.

The Treaty of Waitangi, 1840

By 1839 about 2,000 Europeans lived in New Zealand, and the New Zealand Company was preparing to send thousands more and claimed to have bought huge areas of land. The British government, under pressure from humanitarians in the Colonial Office and the Church Missionary Society, decided to annex New Zealand but to do so with Māori consent. It sent Captain William Hobson as consul and lieutenant-governor to negotiate a treaty.

Hobson arrived in the Bay of Islands in late January 1840. The treaty was drafted in English by Hobson and Busby and translated into Māori overnight by the missionary Henry Williams and his son Edward. After a day of debate at Waitangi, in which some rangatira spoke strongly against it, about 40 chiefs signed on 6 February 1840; Hōne Heke of Ngāpuhi signed first. Copies were then carried around the country. By September about 540 rangatira, at least 13 of them women, had signed, almost all on Māori-language sheets; only 39 signed the single English sheet. Some important chiefs never signed, including Pōtatau Te Wherowhero of Waikato and leaders of Tūhoe, Te Arawa and Ngāti Tūwharetoa.

On 21 May 1840 Hobson proclaimed British sovereignty over the North Island by cession under the treaty and over the South Island by right of discovery. New Zealand was separated from New South Wales and became a colony in its own right in 1841.

The Chiefs of the Confederation of the United Tribes of New Zealand and the seperate and independent Chiefs who have not become members of the Confederation cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England absolutely and without reservation all the rights and powers of Sovereignty […]. Her Majesty the Queen of England confirms and guarantees to the Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand and to the respective families and individuals thereof the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties […]; but the Chiefs […] yield to Her Majesty the exclusive right of Preemption over such lands as the proprietors thereof may be disposed to alienate […].

Treaty of Waitangi, English text (Waikato–Manukau sheet), articles 1 and 2, February 1840. This is the version British officials relied on, but it was signed by only 39 chiefs. Its legal language of cession and pre-emption reflects the Colonial Office’s aim of gaining sovereignty and control of land sales, and it says nothing about the chiefs’ own authority.

Two texts, two understandings

The Māori text, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which almost all chiefs signed, did not say the same thing. In article 1 the chiefs gave the Queen kāwanatanga, a word missionaries had coined from "governor" for the authority of a governor. In article 2 the Queen guaranteed the chiefs tino rangatiratanga, their "full chieftainship" or highest authority, over their lands, villages and taonga (all things they valued). The legal scholar Sir Hugh Kawharu translated article 1 of the Māori text as giving the Queen "complete government" over the land, and article 2 as guaranteeing "the unqualified exercise of their chieftainship".

The table of the two texts shows why the treaty has been disputed ever since. Article 1 of the English text and article 2 of the Māori text contradict each other: the Crown believed it had gained sovereignty, while many rangatira believed they had kept their authority and gained a partner who would control unruly settlers. In 2014 the Waitangi Tribunal found that the rangatira who signed in February 1840 did not cede sovereignty.

The treaty did not protect Māori land for long. As settler numbers grew, governments ignored it; in Wi Parata v Bishop of Wellington (1877) Chief Justice James Prendergast declared it "a simple nullity" because, he said, Māori were not a civilised people capable of making a treaty. That view remained legal orthodoxy until the 1970s, when the Waitangi Tribunal was created to interpret the treaty’s principles.

Immigration, settlement and land to c. 1900

Who came, and how

After the convict era, most migrants to both countries came from Britain and Ireland, and many had their passages paid by colonial governments. Assisted emigration was paid for by selling Crown land, an idea worked out by the reformer Edward Gibbon Wakefield. His theory of systematic colonisation proposed selling land at a "sufficient price": high enough to pay for the passage of young labourers and to keep them working for wages for some years before they could afford farms of their own, so that a balanced society of landowners and workers would grow up.

Wakefield’s ideas shaped South Australia (1836), a colony with no convicts, and the New Zealand Company, which founded Wellington (1840), Nelson and New Plymouth (1841). Church settlements followed at Otago (Dunedin, 1848, for the Free Church of Scotland) and Canterbury (Christchurch, 1850, Anglican). The company’s land "purchases" were often made from people who did not hold the land, or with deeds Māori did not understand; a government commission later reduced its claims sharply, and disputes over them led to violence, such as the Wairau affray of June 1843, in which 22 settlers and at least four Māori were killed.

In the 1870s New Zealand’s colonial treasurer Julius Vogel borrowed heavily in London to build railways and roads and to bring in about 100,000 assisted immigrants. Both colonies were overwhelmingly British by 1900; the main exceptions were Chinese miners, German communities in South Australia and Queensland, and Pacific Islanders brought to work on Queensland sugar plantations.

Squatters and the pastoral economy

In New South Wales the government tried to confine settlement within the "limits of location", the Nineteen Counties around Sydney defined in 1829. Pastoralists ignored the limits and drove their flocks into the interior, occupying huge areas of Crown land without title. These squatters built the wool industry: by the 1840s wool was the colonies’ main export, sent to the mills of Yorkshire.

The government could not stop squatting, so it regulated it. From 1836 squatters paid a licence fee of £10 a year for a run, and an Order in Council of 1847 gave them leases of up to fourteen years in the outer districts with the right to buy part of their land. The wealthiest pastoral families, nicknamed the "squattocracy", dominated the colonial legislative councils. Squatting also drove the frontier forward: every new run took the land and waterholes of an Aboriginal group, which is why pastoral expansion and frontier conflict advanced together.

The Selection Acts

Many of the colonists who arrived in the gold rushes wanted farms, and the elected assemblies of the 1850s gave them a political voice. The demand to "unlock the land" led to the Selection Acts. Victoria passed Land Acts in 1860 (Nicholson), 1862 (Duffy) and 1865 (Grant). In New South Wales the Robertson Land Acts of 1861, named after John Robertson, allowed anyone to choose ("select") between 40 and 320 acres of Crown land, even on a squatter’s run and before it had been surveyed, for £1 an acre, paying a quarter as a deposit and living on the land.

The Acts largely failed to create a class of small farmers. Squatters used dummying (selecting land in the names of relatives or employees) and peacocking (buying the best pieces, such as waterholes and river frontage, so that the land around them was useless to anyone else). Many selectors took up blocks that were too small or too dry for farming in Australian conditions, lacked capital, and sold out to the squatters. Conflict between selectors and squatters became part of rural culture and of bushranger legends such as that of Ned Kelly, the son of a Victorian selector. Small farming succeeded more in the wheat lands of Victoria and South Australia from the 1870s, helped by railways and new farm machinery.

Land in New Zealand

In New Zealand the Crown used its right of pre-emption to buy large areas cheaply, especially in the South Island, where Ngāi Tahu sold about 8 million hectares in Kemp’s Purchase of 1848 for £2,000 and promises of reserves, schools and hospitals that were not kept. After the wars of the 1860s most land passed out of Māori hands through confiscation and the Native Land Court, described in the account of the New Zealand Wars.

Pākehā (European New Zealanders) land was also concentrated in a few hands: in the 1880s huge sheep runs covered much of Canterbury and Otago. The Liberal government of the 1890s set out to break them up. Its Land for Settlements Act 1894, introduced by the minister of lands John McKenzie, allowed the government to buy, and if necessary compulsorily acquire, large estates and divide them into small farms; the Advances to Settlers Act 1894 lent cheap money to new farmers. Refrigerated shipping, first used in 1882 to send frozen meat to Britain, made small farms producing meat and butter profitable.

The gold rushes, 1851–1870

The discoveries

In February 1851 Edward Hargraves, who had returned from the Californian goldfields, found gold near Bathurst in New South Wales and named the site Ophir. The government announced the find in May, and within weeks thousands had left Sydney for the diggings. Victoria, which became a separate colony from New South Wales on 1 July 1851, offered a reward for gold nearer Melbourne; within months rich fields were found at Clunes, Ballarat, Mount Alexander (Castlemaine) and Bendigo. Victoria’s alluvial gold was so rich that in the 1850s the colony produced about a third of the world’s output.

New Zealand’s rushes came a decade later. Gabriel Read found gold at Gabriel’s Gully in Otago in May 1861, and diggers poured in from Victoria; Dunedin grew so fast that it became New Zealand’s largest and richest town. Further rushes followed on the West Coast (Hokitika, 1864–1867) and at Thames on the Coromandel Peninsula (1867), where the goldfield was opened on Māori land.

Social impact

The rushes transformed the size and make-up of the population. Victoria grew from about 77,000 people in 1851 to about 540,000 at the census of 1861, and the population of the Australian colonies as a whole rose from about 400,000 in 1850 to about 1.65 million by 1871. Most newcomers were young men from Britain and Ireland, but they also came from continental Europe, North America and China. The diggings were rough, mobile and largely male, and the experience of working a claim with a "mate" fed a belief that colonial society valued effort over birth and rank.

About 40,000 Chinese miners were in Victoria by 1859, most from Guangdong province, many working in organised groups and reworking abandoned claims. European diggers resented them as competitors, and colonial governments responded with racial laws. Victoria imposed a £10 landing tax on every Chinese arrival in 1855 (many captains avoided it by landing passengers in South Australia, from where they walked hundreds of kilometres to the goldfields), and in New South Wales European miners attacked Chinese camps at Lambing Flat in 1860–1861, after which the colony passed its own restriction act. In Otago, by contrast, Dunedin merchants invited Chinese miners in from 1865–1866 to rework fields that Europeans had left. These conflicts were early roots of the White Australia policy.

For Aboriginal peoples the rushes intensified dispossession. In central Victoria tens of thousands of diggers occupied the Country of the Dja Dja Wurrung and their neighbours within months, cutting down forests, muddying the creeks and destroying food sources. Some Aboriginal people found work as guides, trackers or police, but most were pushed to the edges of the new towns.

The Eureka Stockade, 1854

Victorian miners had to buy a licence costing 30 shillings a month whether they found gold or not, and police enforced it through frequent, often brutal "licence hunts". Miners had no vote, because the franchise depended on owning property. Anger came to a head at Ballarat in late 1854 in what became the Eureka Stockade rebellion, after a hotel-keeper accused of killing a miner was acquitted. The Ballarat Reform League demanded the abolition of the licence, manhood suffrage, the secret ballot and payment of members of parliament.

Some hundreds of miners, led by the Irish engineer Peter Lalor, built a stockade and swore allegiance to a new flag, the Southern Cross. At dawn on 3 December 1854 soldiers and police stormed it in about fifteen minutes; around 22 miners and 6 soldiers were killed. Public opinion turned against the government: Melbourne juries acquitted all thirteen miners charged with treason, a royal commission recommended reform, and the licence was replaced by a cheap annual "miner’s right" that also carried the vote. Lalor was elected to the Legislative Council in 1855.

Economic and political impact

The consequences of the gold rushes, set out in the diagram, reached every part of colonial life. Gold paid for imports, attracted British capital and financed the building of railways, banks and public buildings; wages rose because labour was scarce. The new population also changed politics. Victoria and South Australia introduced the secret ballot in 1856, which became known around the world as the "Australian ballot", and South Australia (1856), Victoria (1857) and New South Wales (1858) introduced manhood suffrage for their lower houses. The miners’ demand for farms produced the Selection Acts of the 1860s.

Historians weigh these effects differently. Geoffrey Serle, in The Golden Age (1963), argued that gold turned Victoria within a decade from a pastoral outpost into a self-confident democracy. Others stress continuities: pastoralists kept their wealth and their power in the upper houses, and the colonies remained British in their institutions and culture. In New Zealand the effects were more regional, shifting the centre of wealth to Otago and helping Dunedin to found New Zealand’s first university in 1869.

Cities and the labour movement

The growth of cities

By the 1880s the Australian colonies were among the most urbanised societies in the world. Wealth from wool and gold, and a flood of British investment, produced a long boom in building and land speculation; in 1885 the visiting English journalist George Augustus Sala called the city "Marvellous Melbourne". By the census of 1891 Melbourne had about 490,000 people, more than many European capitals, and Sydney almost as many. In New Zealand growth was spread between four main centres, Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, none of which dominated the country in the way Melbourne and Sydney dominated their colonies.

Cities offered jobs in building, transport, ports, manufacturing and domestic service, but also crowded housing, poor sanitation and periods of high unemployment. Victoria protected its manufacturers with tariffs from the 1860s, while New South Wales held to free trade, a difference that later shaped the debate over federation.

Unions and the eight-hour day

Skilled workers organised early. Sydney stonemasons won an eight-hour day in 1855, and on 21 April 1856 Melbourne stonemasons marched to Parliament House after their employers agreed to the same; the "8 hours labour, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours rest" principle became a symbol of the colonies as a "working man’s paradise". Trades halls were built in the main cities, and by the 1880s unions were organising unskilled workers such as shearers, miners and waterside workers.

The 1890s: strikes, depression and the birth of Labor

The boom ended in a severe depression. The Melbourne land boom collapsed in 1891, and in 1893 many banks closed their doors; drought from 1895 made the crisis worse in the countryside. Employers, facing falling prices, insisted on "freedom of contract", the right to employ non-union labour.

A wave of great strikes followed. The Maritime Strike of August–November 1890 began when ships’ officers sought to join the Melbourne Trades Hall; it spread to waterside workers, seamen, shearers and miners in Australia and New Zealand, involving tens of thousands of workers, and ended in defeat. In the shearers’ strikes of 1891 and 1894 in Queensland, the government sent troops, and union leaders were jailed for conspiracy after the 1891 strike centred on Barcaldine, where shearers met under a ghost gum later called the Tree of Knowledge.

Defeat convinced many unionists that they needed political power. In New South Wales the new Labor Electoral League won 35 of the 141 seats in the election of 1891 and held the balance of power. In Queensland, Anderson Dawson formed the world’s first Labour government in December 1899, though it lasted only a week. The Australian Labor Party became one of the first mass labour parties anywhere, and in 1904 Chris Watson formed the world’s first national Labour government, briefly, in the new Commonwealth.

New Zealand’s Liberal "social laboratory"

New Zealand’s labour movement took a different path. After the defeat of the Maritime Strike, many workers voted for the Liberals, who won the election of December 1890 and governed until 1912 under John Ballance and then Richard Seddon, premier from 1893 to 1906. Instead of a separate labour party, a reforming middle-class government passed laws that drew international attention to New Zealand as a "social laboratory".

Some Australian colonies moved the same way: South Australia gave women the vote (and the right to stand for parliament) in 1894 and Western Australia in 1899, and Victoria experimented with wages boards from 1896. The table of Liberal reforms shows, however, that New Zealand went further and faster in the 1890s. In both countries the reforms were for settlers: the old-age pension excluded Chinese residents, and Māori pensioners were generally paid about two-thirds of the Pākehā rate.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experiences of colonisation to c. 1900

Disease, dispossession and population collapse

The Aboriginal population fell catastrophically in the first century of colonisation. Introduced diseases were the largest single killer. The smallpox epidemic of 1789 devastated the peoples around Sydney, and a second epidemic around 1829–1831 spread along the Murray–Darling river system, often ahead of the settlers themselves. Influenza, measles, tuberculosis and venereal disease followed, and venereal disease lowered birth rates.

Dispossession made every other cause worse. Sheep and cattle ate out native grasses and fouled waterholes, and fences and guns kept Aboriginal people away from food sources, so hunger weakened resistance to disease. Violence on the frontier killed many thousands directly. By 1901 the Aboriginal population was probably below 100,000 (a commonly cited estimate is about 93,000), a fall of perhaps 70 to 90 per cent depending on which estimate for 1788 is used. Settler society widely assumed that Aboriginal people were a "dying race" whose disappearance was natural and inevitable.

Different world views and the land

The conflict over land was also a conflict between legal and spiritual systems. For Aboriginal groups, Country could not be given up: a people’s law, ceremonies and identity were tied to particular places, so to be driven off was to lose more than a food supply. For the colonists, land became property only through occupation, improvement and Crown grant. Because Britain had not recognised any Aboriginal sovereignty or title, colonial courts treated the whole continent as Crown land; the Privy Council, in Cooper v Stuart (1889), described New South Wales as "practically unoccupied" at annexation. No treaty was made, and Aboriginal people received no payment for their land.

The Frontier Wars

The Frontier Wars is the name now used for the violent conflicts between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and colonists from the first years of Sydney until the early 1930s. Aboriginal groups fought for their land with the methods suited to their numbers and weapons: raids on huts and stock, ambushes, the killing of shepherds, and the burning of crops, avoiding pitched battles against firearms. Colonists answered with punitive expeditions, mounted police and massacres, in which groups of Aboriginal people, often including women and children, were killed in reprisal.

The timeline of frontier conflict shows how resistance moved with the frontier. Around Sydney, Pemulwuy led raids for twelve years, and the Hawkesbury and Nepean River wars lasted until 1816. In 1824 Governor Brisbane declared martial law at Bathurst during the resistance of the Wiradjuri, led by Windradyne. In Western Australia the Noongar leader Yagan fought settlers on the Swan River until he was killed in 1833, and in the Kimberley Jandamarra, a Bunuba man who had worked for the police, led an armed resistance from 1894 until his death in 1897.

Van Diemen’s Land: the Black War, 1824–1831

The most intense conflict came in Van Diemen’s Land, where the Aboriginal population was perhaps 3,000–7,000 in 1803. As sheep runs spread through the midlands in the 1820s, Aboriginal groups attacked settlers and settlers killed Aboriginal people in growing numbers. Governor Arthur declared martial law in November 1828, and in 1830 he mobilised some 2,000 soldiers, convicts and settlers to form the "Black Line", an attempt to sweep the remaining groups of the settled districts into the Tasman Peninsula; it captured only two people.

The war ended through negotiation and removal. Between 1830 and 1834 George Augustus Robinson persuaded the remaining groups to surrender with promises of protection and a return to their land, then moved them to Wybalenna on Flinders Island, where most died of disease. Truganini, who died in 1876, was long described as "the last Tasmanian", but that claim is false. Fanny Cochrane Smith and the Aboriginal families of the Bass Strait islands had many descendants, and the Tasmanian Aboriginal community today numbers in the thousands.

Myall Creek and the problem of justice

On 10 June 1838 twelve stockmen killed at least 28 Wirrayaraay people, mostly women, children and old men, at Myall Creek station in northern New South Wales. Governor George Gipps insisted on a prosecution, and after a second trial seven of the men were hanged in December 1838. It was the first time colonial courts hanged Europeans for the killing of Aboriginal people on this scale, and such convictions remained very rare. Many settlers were outraged by the executions, and later killings were more often kept secret. Aboriginal people could not give sworn evidence in court because they were not Christians, which made prosecutions almost impossible.

The Native Police and the northern frontier

From the 1840s colonial governments used Native Police forces: Aboriginal troopers recruited from distant groups and led by European officers. The Queensland Native Police, which operated from 1849 until about 1900, carried out "dispersals", a word officials used to describe the shooting of Aboriginal people. Queensland’s pastoral frontier was the most violent in Australia, with killings on both sides, such as at Hornet Bank (1857) and Cullin-la-ringo (1861), followed by large reprisals. The Kalkadoon people of north-west Queensland fought one of the last pitched battles at Battle Mountain in 1884.

Killings continued into the twentieth century in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. After the killing of a dingo trapper in 1928, police-led parties killed at least 31 Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye people around Coniston station; Aboriginal accounts put the number far higher, and an official inquiry found the killings justified. The Caledon Bay crisis of 1932–1933 in Arnhem Land, in which Yolŋu men killed Japanese trepangers and a policeman, ended with the High Court quashing the death sentence of the Yolŋu man Dhakiyarr (Tuckiar) in 1934; it is usually treated as the end of the Frontier Wars.

Data: as listed in the table. All figures are estimates. Most killings were never officially recorded, and historians count different things: all frontier deaths, deaths in one colony, or massacres only. The trend of research since the 1980s has been towards higher estimates as records have been examined more closely.

Protection, missions and reserves

Humanitarian pressure in Britain led to a parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines in British settlements (1837), which condemned settler violence across the empire. Its result in Australia was protection policy: the appointment of "protectors" (a Port Phillip Protectorate was set up in 1838), and the gathering of Aboriginal people onto missions and government reserves where they could be fed, converted and kept away from settlers.

Protection soon meant control. Victoria’s Aborigines Protection Act 1869 created a Board for the Protection of Aborigines with power to decide where Aboriginal people lived, where they worked and, in practice, whether children stayed with their parents. The Aborigines Protection Act 1886, known as the "Half-Caste Act", expelled people of mixed descent under 35 from the stations, splitting families on the theory that they should merge into white society. Queensland’s Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 became the model for the twentieth century: it allowed the government to confine people to reserves, control their employment and wages, and restrict their movement and marriages. New South Wales set up an Aborigines Protection Board in 1883 and Western Australia passed its Aborigines Act in 1905.

Aboriginal people did not simply accept these controls. At Coranderrk, a reserve near Healesville in Victoria founded by Wurundjeri and other Kulin people in 1863, residents under the leadership of William Barak built a successful hop farm and petitioned the government, marched to Melbourne and gave evidence to inquiries to keep their land and manager. The Board broke up the community after the 1886 Act, and the reserve was closed in 1924, but Coranderrk shows that Aboriginal people used colonial institutions to defend their interests long before the protest movements of the twentieth century.

The Torres Strait Islands

The Torres Strait Islanders experienced colonisation differently. Missionaries of the London Missionary Society arrived on 1 July 1871, an event Islanders still celebrate as "the Coming of the Light", and Christianity was adopted widely. Queensland annexed the islands in 1872 and 1879, partly to control the profitable pearling and bêche-de-mer (sea cucumber) industries, in which Islanders worked alongside Pacific Islander and Asian divers. Islanders kept their land and villages, but in the early twentieth century they were brought under Queensland’s protection system, which controlled their wages and movements; they responded with a maritime strike in 1936.

Māori experiences of colonisation and the New Zealand Wars, 1840–1900

In the 1840s Māori still held almost all the land of New Zealand and greatly outnumbered settlers, and many iwi did well by growing wheat and potatoes for the new towns and for export to Australia, owning flour mills and coastal ships. That position changed within thirty years. By 1858 Pākehā outnumbered Māori, and as the settler population grew, so did its demand for land and its control of the colonial government, which became responsible to an elected parliament in 1856 in which Māori had almost no voice.

The Northern War, 1845–1846

The first major war began in the north. Hōne Heke of Ngāpuhi, the first chief to sign the treaty, came to believe that it had brought British control, customs duties and the loss of trade. Between July 1844 and March 1845 he cut down the flagstaff flying the British flag at Kororāreka four times, and in March 1845 Heke and his ally Kawiti sacked the town. British troops, supported by Māori allies under Tāmati Wāka Nene, were defeated in an assault on Ōhaeawai pā in July 1845, and the war ended after the fall of Ruapekapeka in January 1846. No land was confiscated, and neither side won outright.

The northern pā showed Māori military skill. Heke and Kawiti built pā designed to withstand artillery, with trenches, bunkers and firing pits, and used them to draw British forces into costly frontal attacks. The historian James Belich argues that these "modern pā" were a genuine military innovation that Victorian writers ignored because it did not fit their belief in British racial superiority.

The Kīngitanga and the wars of the 1860s

From the 1850s many iwi of the central North Island agreed to hold their land together and stop selling it. In 1858 they installed the Waikato chief Pōtatau Te Wherowhero, who had refused to sign the treaty, as the first Māori King. The Kīngitanga (King Movement) aimed to unite iwi under a single authority that could protect land and keep order alongside, not against, the Queen. Settlers and governors saw it as a challenge to British sovereignty.

War came first in Taranaki. In 1859 Governor Thomas Gore Browne accepted an offer to sell the Waitara block from Te Teira, although Wiremu Kīngi Te Rangitāke, the senior chief of Te Āti Awa there, objected. Troops occupied the land in March 1860, and the Taranaki War (1860–1861) ended in a truce without settling the dispute. The Waitangi Tribunal later found the Waitara purchase unjust.

Governor George Grey, who returned in 1861, prepared for a larger war. He built a military road south from Auckland, and in July 1863 he ordered Māori in the lower Waikato to swear allegiance or leave, then sent troops across the Mangatāwhiri River into Kīngitanga territory on 12 July. The invasion of Waikato (1863–1864) used more than 10,000 imperial and colonial troops, with steamers, against a few thousand Kīngitanga fighters. The British took Rangiriri in November 1863 and attacked the undefended village of Rangiaowhia in February 1864, killing civilians. At Ōrākau (31 March–2 April 1864), about 300 defenders under Rewi Maniapoto refused to surrender, a stand remembered through the words attributed to Rewi, "Ka whawhai tonu mātou, ake, ake, ake", a vow to fight on for ever, before breaking out with heavy losses. The Kīngitanga withdrew south into the area that became known as the King Country, which remained closed to Europeans until the 1880s.

The timeline of the wars shows that fighting continued after 1864. At Gate Pā near Tauranga in April 1864 the British suffered one of their worst defeats, though they won at Te Ranga in June. In the later 1860s the wars were fought against new religious and prophetic movements, such as Pai Mārire, which drew on the Bible and Māori belief. Tītokowaru of Ngāti Ruanui won striking victories in south Taranaki in 1868 before his force broke up, and Te Kooti, who escaped from imprisonment on the Chatham Islands in 1868, led a guerrilla war until 1872 and founded the Ringatū church. Many Māori, called kūpapa, fought on the government side for their own reasons, often old rivalries with the iwi in arms.

Data: NZHistory (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), based on James Cowan, The New Zealand Wars (1922–1923). All figures are estimates.

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Confiscation and the Native Land Court

The wars were followed by the loss of most remaining Māori land, through two laws passed during the fighting.

And Whereas the best and most effectual means of attaining those ends would be by the introduction of a sufficient number of settlers able to protect themselves and to preserve the peace of the Country […].

New Zealand Settlements Act 1863, preamble, passed by the colonial General Assembly in December 1863. The preamble blames insurrection by Māori and presents confiscation as a security measure; it was written by a settler parliament that would profit from the land, and it allowed confiscation from iwi who had not fought as well as from those who had.

Under the Act the government confiscated (the Māori term is raupatu) about 1.2 million hectares in Waikato, Taranaki, the Bay of Plenty and elsewhere, some of which was later returned or paid for. The confiscated land was given to military settlers and sold to pay for the war. The Waitangi Tribunal has since found that the confiscations breached the treaty.

The second law worked more slowly but took even more land. The Native Land Court, established under the Native Lands Act 1865, converted customary land held by hapū into titles held by individuals. Until 1873 the names of no more than ten owners could be recorded for a block, however many people had rights to it. Hearings were held in towns far from home, and the costs of surveys, lawyers and accommodation forced owners into debt and then into selling. By 1910 Māori owned only about a quarter of the North Island and very little of the South Island.

Population, representation and resistance

The Māori population fell to its lowest point, about 42,000, at the census of 1896, as a result of disease, poverty, displacement and the effects of war. Many Pākehā, like Australians, assumed that Māori were dying out. They did not: the population recovered steadily from the 1900s, helped by Māori health reformers such as Māui Pōmare and Te Rangi Hīroa (Peter Buck).

Colonial governments combined force with assimilation. The Māori Representation Act 1867 created four Māori seats in parliament and gave all Māori men the vote, twelve years before all Pākehā men; but four seats were far fewer than the Māori population justified. The Native Schools Act 1867 set up village schools that taught in English, and later teachers often punished children for speaking Māori.

Māori resisted by peaceful as well as military means. At Parihaka in Taranaki, the prophets Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi built a large settlement on confiscated land and from 1879 led non-violent resistance to surveys, sending men to plough settlers’ land and to fence across roads. Hundreds were arrested and held without trial in the South Island.

On 5 November 1881 about 1,600 volunteers and Armed Constabulary under the Native Minister John Bryce occupied Parihaka. The villagers met them sitting quietly, with children singing; the leaders were arrested and held without trial until 1883, and much of the village was destroyed. In the 1890s Māori also set up a national Māori parliament, Te Kotahitanga (1892–1902), which petitioned for control of Māori land, and the Kīngitanga created its own council, Te Kauhanganui. These movements laid the foundations for Māori political organisation in the twentieth century.

Comparing the experiences of colonisation to c. 1900

The comparison shows that a treaty made a difference, but a limited one. Māori kept political rights, a voice in parliament and a document to which they could appeal, which helps explain the strength of Māori political movements and the treaty settlements of the twentieth century. But in both countries the outcome by 1900 was the same in its essentials: the loss of most land, a population collapse, and the subordination of Indigenous peoples to settler governments.

Constitutional development and self-government

Both countries moved from rule by governors to elected self-government in the middle of the nineteenth century. New South Wales gained a partly elected Legislative Council in 1842 (an appointed council had existed since 1823), and the Australian Colonies Government Act 1850 allowed the colonies to write their own constitutions. Responsible government, under which ministers answered to an elected lower house, came to New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania in 1855–1856, South Australia in 1857, Queensland (separated from New South Wales in 1859) in 1859 and Western Australia in 1890.

In New Zealand the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 created a General Assembly with an elected House of Representatives and six provinces with their own councils. Responsible government followed in 1856, and in 1876 the provinces were abolished, leaving a single central government in Wellington, the capital since 1865. Both countries remained colonies of the British Empire: London controlled foreign policy, and colonial laws could not contradict British law, a principle set out in the Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865.

Self-government was settler government. Property qualifications limited the vote at first; manhood suffrage came between 1856 and 1879; and women won the vote in New Zealand in 1893, South Australia in 1894 and Western Australia in 1899. Aboriginal men in the south-eastern colonies could in theory vote, but few were enrolled, and Queensland and Western Australia excluded them by law. In New Zealand the four Māori seats gave Māori men a voice but a small one.

The Federation Movement and the Commonwealth of Australia

By the 1880s the six Australian colonies were separate self-governing states with their own tariffs, armies, railways and immigration laws, each linked more closely to London than to its neighbours. In 1901 they united as the Commonwealth of Australia. The federation that resulted divided power between a national government, responsible for defence, foreign affairs, trade, immigration and customs, and the states, which kept most other powers.

Why federate?

Defence was the most urgent argument in the late 1880s. Germany had annexed north-eastern New Guinea in 1884, France held New Caledonia, and Russian warships caused periodic scares. In 1889 the British Major-General James Edwards inspected the colonial forces and recommended that they be organised as one army. The New South Wales premier, Henry Parkes, used the report to launch a campaign for federation.

General Edwards had also advised that the forces of the various colonies should be federated together for operation in unison in the event of war, so as to act as one great federal army. […] One great thing to be accomplished was the massing together of their military forces, and this could not be controlled by any other power than one representing all the colonies.

Report of Henry Parkes’s speech at Tenterfield, New South Wales, The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 October 1889. The newspaper paraphrases Parkes in the third person, so the words are the reporter’s summary rather than an exact record. Parkes chose a town near the Queensland border and stressed defence because it was the argument least likely to divide the colonies; his own colony’s free-trade interests made him cautious about tariffs.

Trade was a second motive. Each colony taxed goods from the others at customs posts on its borders, which irritated merchants and farmers along the Murray River. A federation would create free trade between the states; but protectionist Victoria and free-trade New South Wales disagreed about what tariff the new nation should have, which slowed the process. The depression of the 1890s strengthened the economic case for a single market and a national government that could borrow more cheaply.

Race and immigration were part of almost every argument. Each colony had its own laws against Chinese migrants, but a national government could exclude Asian migrants from the whole continent and end the use of Pacific Islander labour in Queensland. The ideal of a "white Australia" was shared across the political spectrum, and especially by the labour movement, which feared competition from cheap labour.

National sentiment made the others matter. By the 1890s a majority of the colonists had been born in Australia, and organisations such as the Australian Natives’ Association (founded in 1871 for men born in the colonies) campaigned for federation. Nationalist writers in the Bulletin gave the idea of a single Australian people a popular voice, even if many of them distrusted the conservative politicians who led the movement.

The conventions and referendums

The timeline of federation shows how the movement passed from politicians to voters. A conference in Melbourne in 1890 agreed on the principle, and the National Australasian Convention in Sydney in March–April 1891 produced a draft constitution, largely written by Samuel Griffith of Queensland; New Zealand sent delegates. The draft stalled in the colonial parliaments, partly because of the depression and the rise of Labor, which saw the proposed Senate as undemocratic.

The movement was revived from below. At a conference of federation leagues at Corowa on the Murray in 1893, John Quick proposed that the people elect a convention and then vote on its constitution. The elected Australasian Federal Convention met in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne in 1897–1898, with Edmund Barton of New South Wales as its leader and Alfred Deakin of Victoria as a leading member. In the referendums of June 1898 the constitution was approved in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, but the yes vote in New South Wales fell short of the minimum the colony required. After the premiers agreed changes, including a promise that the national capital would be in New South Wales, the referendums of 1899 succeeded, and Western Australia joined in July 1900. The British parliament passed the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, and the Commonwealth was proclaimed in Sydney on 1 January 1901, with Barton as the first prime minister.

The new nation: a white Australia

The first parliament, which met in Melbourne from May 1901, passed the laws that became known as the White Australia policy. The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 did not name any race; instead it used a test that officials could apply to anyone they wished to exclude.

The immigration into the Commonwealth of the persons described in any of the following paragraphs of this section (herein-after called "prohibited immigrants") is prohibited, namely:— (a) Any person who when asked to do so by an officer fails to write out at dictation and sign in the presence of the officer a passage of fifty words in length in an European language directed by the officer […].

Commonwealth of Australia, Immigration Restriction Act 1901, section 3(a). The dictation test was designed to exclude non-Europeans without naming them, partly because the British government, allied with Japan, did not want an openly racial law in its empire. Because the officer chose the language, a migrant could be failed in any European language, which made the test a tool of exclusion, not of literacy. It was not formally abolished until 1958.

The Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 ended the recruitment of Pacific Islanders to the Queensland sugar fields after 1904 and provided for the deportation of most of those still there. About 62,000 Islanders had been brought to Queensland since 1863, many by deception or force, a trade known as "blackbirding". The Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 gave the federal vote to all adult British subjects, including women, which made Australia one of the first countries where women could vote and stand for a national parliament; but it excluded most Aboriginal people and people from Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands (except New Zealand).

The Constitution itself excluded Aboriginal people in two places. Section 127 said that "aboriginal natives" were not to be counted in reckoning the population, and section 51(xxvi) gave the Commonwealth power to make special laws for people of any race "other than the aboriginal race in any State", leaving Aboriginal affairs to the states. Both provisions remained until the referendum of 1967.

New Zealand: from colony to dominion

New Zealand took part in the federation debates but decided not to join. Its delegates attended the conference of 1890 and the convention of 1891, and the constitution of 1900 even listed New Zealand among the colonies that could become states. A New Zealand royal commission reported against joining in 1901. The reasons were distance (about 2,000 kilometres of sea), a sense that New Zealand’s interests, especially its trade with Britain and its Pacific ambitions, were different, fear of losing control over Māori policy and its own labour laws, and the confidence that came from the Liberal reforms of the 1890s. The premier, Richard Seddon, preferred to pursue New Zealand’s interests directly within the empire.

On 26 September 1907 New Zealand changed its status from colony to dominion, after the Imperial Conference of 1907 adopted "dominion" as the title for the self-governing parts of the empire. The change was mostly symbolic: New Zealand already governed itself, and Britain still conducted its foreign policy. Australia, a federation called a "Commonwealth", was recognised as a dominion at the same conference.

Full legal independence came later. The Statute of Westminster 1931 gave the dominions full legislative independence, but it applied to Australia and New Zealand only when their parliaments adopted it: Australia in 1942 (backdated to the start of the Second World War in 1939) and New Zealand in 1947. The delay shows how closely both countries still identified with Britain.

The comparison of the routes to nationhood shows that "dominion status" in 1901 and 1907 meant self-government within the British Empire, not independence. Both nations were proud of being British, and the next stage of their national story, the First World War, was fought as part of the empire.

National identity in the arts and sport

A sense of being Australian or New Zealander, distinct from being British, grew strongly from the 1880s. It was expressed above all in literature, painting and sport.

Australia: the bush legend

The Sydney weekly The Bulletin (founded 1880) was the voice of a radical, republican and nationalist Australia. It published the stories and ballads of Henry Lawson and A. B. "Banjo" Paterson, whose poems "The Man from Snowy River" (1890) and "Waltzing Matilda" (1895) celebrated drovers, shearers and swagmen. Their work created the bush legend: the idea that the true Australian was a practical, independent, anti-authoritarian bushman, loyal to his mates. At the same time painters of the Heidelberg School, such as Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin, painted the Australian landscape and rural work, as in Roberts’s Shearing the Rams (1890), in a new, light-filled style.

Sport gave the nation a stage before it was a nation. Australian cricketers beat England in the first Test match in Melbourne in 1877, and after Australia’s victory at The Oval in 1882 a London newspaper printed a mock obituary for English cricket, from which the "Ashes" series takes its name. Australian rules football, first codified in Melbourne in 1859, became a mass spectator sport in Victoria.

New Zealand: a "Better Britain" and its rugby

New Zealand identity at first stressed the colony’s Britishness: many New Zealanders saw their country as a "Better Britain", freer and fairer than the old country. Rugby became its national sport. The New Zealand Native team of 1888–1889, mostly Māori, toured Britain and Australia; and the 1905 "Originals" tour of Britain, Ireland and France, in which the team won 34 of its 35 matches and was first widely called the "All Blacks", made rugby a symbol of New Zealand’s strength and skill. The team performed a haka before matches, an early example of Pākehā New Zealand adopting Māori culture as part of its national image.

Whose identity?

The national identities of the 1890s and 1900s were exclusive. They were imagined as white and British, so Aboriginal people, Chinese Australians and Pacific Islanders had no place in them; the Bulletin itself campaigned against Asian migration and from 1908 carried the slogan "Australia for the White Man" on its masthead. They were also strongly masculine. Russel Ward, in The Australian Legend (1958), traced the bush ethos to convicts, shearers and the gold rushes and saw it as the core of Australian identity. The feminist historian Marilyn Lake argued in 1986 that the bush legend expressed the values of a male culture of drinking and mateship that many women campaigned against. In New Zealand, Jock Phillips’s A Man’s Country? (1987) made a similar argument about the place of rugby, war and the pioneer in Pākehā male identity.

The First World War: Australia and New Zealand at war

Entering the war

When Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, Australia and New Zealand were automatically at war, because the British government declared war on behalf of the whole empire. Support was overwhelming. During the Australian election campaign, the Labor leader Andrew Fisher promised on 31 July that Australia would defend Britain to its "last man and last shilling"; he became prime minister in September. In New Zealand the Reform government of William Massey offered an expeditionary force at once.

Both dominions acted first in the Pacific. New Zealand troops occupied German Samoa on 29 August 1914 without resistance, and the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force captured German New Guinea in September after a brief fight at Bita Paka. These conquests later became the basis of each country’s claims at the peace conference. Volunteers formed the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF), which sailed together from Albany in November 1914 and trained in Egypt, where they were formed into the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps: the ANZAC.

Gallipoli, 1915

In 1915 the British planned to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war by forcing the Dardanelles and taking Constantinople. After a naval attack failed, troops landed on the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April 1915. The ANZACs landed at what became Anzac Cove, on steep, scrub-covered ridges, and were held close to the beach by Ottoman forces under commanders including Mustafa Kemal. For eight months the campaign was a stalemate of trenches, heat, flies and dysentery.

The August offensive was the last attempt to break out. Australians attacked at Lone Pine (6–10 August) and, at the Nek (7 August), dismounted Light Horsemen were killed in waves as they charged across a narrow ridge. On 8 August the Wellington Battalion under Lieutenant-Colonel William Malone captured the summit of Chunuk Bair, one of the main heights, but it was lost two days later. The force was evacuated in December 1915 without loss of life. About 8,700 Australians and about 2,800 New Zealanders died in the campaign, alongside much larger numbers of British, French, Indian and Ottoman soldiers.

The Western Front and the Middle East, 1916–1918

The heaviest losses came later, in France and Belgium. At Fromelles on 19–20 July 1916 the 5th Australian Division suffered 5,533 casualties in one night, and at Pozières in July–August 1916 the Australians lost about 23,000 men in six weeks. The New Zealand Division fought on the Somme at Flers in September 1916, and helped capture Messines in June 1917. On 12 October 1917, at Passchendaele, more than 800 New Zealanders were killed in a few hours, the country’s worst day of the war.

By 1918 the Australian divisions were combined in an Australian Corps under John Monash, an engineer and citizen-soldier of German-Jewish descent, whose carefully planned attacks at Hamel (4 July) and in the Allied offensive from 8 August made the corps one of the most effective formations on the Western Front. In the Middle East, Australian Light Horse and New Zealand Mounted Rifles fought in Sinai and Palestine; the Light Horse charge at Beersheba on 31 October 1917 helped open the way to Jerusalem.

Data: Australian War Memorial; NZHistory, Ministry for Culture and Heritage. The table of service and losses shows the scale of the war for two small societies: about 39 per cent of Australian men aged 18 to 44 enlisted, and almost every family and town lost someone.

The Anzac legend

The way the war was remembered became as important as the fighting. The British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett’s dispatches on the landing, published in Australia in May 1915, praised the colonial troops as natural soldiers. The Australian correspondent C. E. W. Bean, who landed with the troops, later wrote the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18, which presented the qualities of the Australian soldier as those of the bushman: independence, initiative, endurance and loyalty to mates.

In no unreal sense it was on the 25th of April, 1915, that the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born.

C. E. W. Bean, The Story of Anzac, volume II of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (1924). Bean was an eyewitness and a careful researcher, but he was also writing a national history for a country that had lost 60,000 men, and he wanted their sacrifice to have meaning. His claim that the nation was "born" at Gallipoli is a judgement, not a fact; it ignores federation in 1901, and it defines the nation through white male soldiers.

Anzac Day was first marked on 25 April 1916 and became a national day of remembrance in both countries in the 1920s, with dawn services, marches of returned soldiers and memorials in almost every town; the historian Ken Inglis called these memorials "sacred places" of an Australian civil religion. In New Zealand Anzac Day was also important, but the memory of the Western Front, and especially of Passchendaele, weighed more heavily than in Australia.

The impact of the war at home

Political impact: conscription and division in Australia

The war greatly increased the power of national governments. Australia’s War Precautions Act 1914 allowed the government to censor the press, intern "enemy aliens", control prices and rule by regulation. As casualties mounted and enlistments fell in 1916, the Labor prime minister Billy Hughes, who had replaced Fisher in October 1915, decided that Australia needed conscription for service overseas. Because he could not get it through the Senate, he put it to the people in a referendum.

The results of the referendums show how deeply the issue divided Australia. Opponents included most of the labour movement, which feared that conscripts would be replaced at home by cheap labour; many farmers, who needed their sons; and many Irish Catholics, angry at Britain’s suppression of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, whose most prominent voice was the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix. Supporters accused opponents of disloyalty, and the debates turned on class, religion and loyalty to Britain.

The first referendum split the Labor Party. In November 1916 Hughes and his supporters left Labor and, in February 1917, joined the Liberals to form the Nationalist Party, which won the election of May 1917. Labor, now led by opponents of conscription, spent most of the next 25 years out of federal office. The second referendum, in December 1917, was defeated by a larger margin. The split confirmed sectarian divisions between Catholics and Protestants that lasted for decades.

Political impact in New Zealand

New Zealand avoided the same crisis because its government simply introduced conscription. The Military Service Act 1916 came into force in August 1916, and the first ballot took place in November. A national coalition government held office from 1915, and there was much less open conflict than in Australia, although socialists and some Irish Catholics opposed conscription. The New Zealand Labour Party was founded in July 1916 by anti-conscription socialists, several of whom were jailed for sedition. Conscientious objectors were treated harshly: in 1917 fourteen, including Archibald Baxter, were sent to the front, where Baxter was subjected to Field Punishment No. 1, being tied to a post for hours.

The peace conference of 1919

The war changed each dominion’s place in the world. Both signed the Treaty of Versailles in their own right and joined the League of Nations as separate members. At Paris, Hughes fought hard for Australian interests: he insisted on keeping German New Guinea, which Australia received as a C-class mandate under the mandate system, and he opposed Japan’s proposal to write a statement of racial equality into the League Covenant, fearing that it would threaten the White Australia policy. New Zealand received Western Samoa as a mandate, and the two dominions shared the phosphate island of Nauru with Britain.

Social and economic impact

The war economy brought both profit and hardship. Britain bought Australian wool and wheat and New Zealand meat, butter and wool in bulk, guaranteeing markets, but shipping shortages left goods piling up, and prices rose faster than wages. In August–September 1917 a strike by railway workers in New South Wales against new time-keeping methods became a general strike involving tens of thousands of workers. Both governments borrowed heavily, leaving large war debts.

Society became more uniform and less tolerant. Nearly 7,000 people of German and other "enemy" origin were interned in Australia, German-language schools and newspapers were closed, and dozens of German place names were changed in 1918; Hahndorf in South Australia became Ambleside. Women raised funds, knitted for soldiers, worked for the Red Cross and served as nurses overseas, but unlike in Britain they did not move into industry in large numbers. Temperance campaigners used the war to win early closing of hotels: six o’clock closing came to South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria during the war and to New Zealand in 1917, and it lasted for decades.

The returned soldiers shaped both societies for a generation. Governments created repatriation departments, war pensions and soldier-settlement schemes that placed tens of thousands of ex-servicemen on farms; many of the farms were too small or too poor and failed in the 1920s and 1930s. The Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League in Australia (from 1916) and the Returned Soldiers’ Association in New Zealand (also from 1916) became powerful political voices.

The influenza pandemic arrived with the end of the war. In New Zealand about 9,000 people died in a few weeks of late 1918, and the death rate among Māori was about seven times that of Pākehā. In Western Samoa, under New Zealand military rule, the administration allowed the ship Talune to land passengers carrying influenza in November 1918, and about 8,500 people, around a fifth of the population, died. American Samoa, which imposed a quarantine, had no deaths. The disaster fuelled the Samoan independence movement, the Mau, and New Zealand formally apologised to Samoa in 2002.

Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Māori experiences of the First World War

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander soldiers

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men were officially barred from enlisting, because the Defence Act 1909 excluded people "not substantially of European origin or descent" from compulsory training and the army applied this to volunteers. Some recruiting officers ignored the rule, and from 1917, when the army needed men, it accepted men of mixed descent with one European parent. More than 1,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men served in the AIF, at Gallipoli, on the Western Front and in the Light Horse in Palestine.

In the army many found a degree of equality they had never known: they received the same pay as other soldiers and fought alongside them. At home nothing changed. Returned Aboriginal soldiers were mostly excluded from soldier-settlement schemes, some returned to find that their own land on reserves had been taken for white soldier settlers, and they remained under the protection laws that controlled their wages and movement. Their service was largely left out of the Anzac story until the late twentieth century.

Māori soldiers and the Waikato refusal

Māori leaders were divided. The Māori members of parliament Āpirana Ngata and Māui Pōmare, leaders of the Young Māori Party, saw military service as a way to earn equal citizenship and respect, and recruited actively, especially among iwi such as Ngāti Porou. A Native Contingent landed at Gallipoli in July 1915 and fought in the August offensive; in 1916 it was reorganised as the New Zealand (Māori) Pioneer Battalion, which served on the Western Front. In all, 2,227 Māori and 458 Pacific Islanders (from the Cook Islands, Niue and elsewhere) served with the battalion, and 336 died.

Waikato and Maniapoto, whose land had been confiscated in the 1860s, refused to serve. Their leader, Te Puea Hērangi, granddaughter of the second Māori King, argued that Waikato would not fight for a Crown that had taken its land and had not returned it. In 1917 the government extended conscription, which had not applied to Māori, to Waikato–Maniapoto alone, and in 1918 military police arrested young men at Te Paina pā and sent them to camp, where some were punished for refusing to wear uniform. The episode shows that for Māori the war revived the grievances of the New Zealand Wars as much as it built a shared national identity.

The comparison of Indigenous experiences of the war shows that Māori, with their own leaders in parliament, could negotiate the terms of their service in a way that Aboriginal people, without votes or political representation, could not. In both countries, however, Indigenous service did not lead to equal rights after the war.

From the First World War to 1945: a brief bridge

Between the wars both countries remained loyal dominions, dependent on British markets and on the British navy based at Singapore. The Great Depression hit them hard: in 1932 almost a third of Australian trade unionists were unemployed, and in New Zealand the first Labour government (1935–1949) under Michael Joseph Savage answered the crisis with the Social Security Act 1938, the foundation of the welfare state.

Aboriginal political organisation grew in these years. On 26 January 1938, the 150th anniversary of the First Fleet, the Aborigines Progressive Association led by William Ferguson and Jack Patten, with the Australian Aborigines’ League of William Cooper, held a Day of Mourning in Sydney.

WE, representing THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA, assembled in Conference at the Australian Hall, Sydney, on the 26th day of January, 1938, this being the 150th anniversary of the whitemen's seizure of our country, HEREBY MAKE PROTEST against the callous treatment of our people by the white men in the past 150 years, AND WE APPEAL to the Australian Nation to make new laws for the education and care of Aborigines, and for a new policy which will raise our people to FULL CITIZEN STATUS and EQUALITY WITHIN THE COMMUNITY.

Resolution of the Day of Mourning conference, Sydney, 26 January 1938 (published copies differ slightly in spelling). Its authors deliberately chose the day of the official sesquicentenary celebrations to present the arrival of the First Fleet as a "seizure", and they asked for full citizenship within the nation rather than separation from it, the main aim of Aboriginal activism for the next 30 years.

The Second World War was the turning point in foreign policy. After Japan entered the war in December 1941, Singapore fell in February 1942 and Darwin was bombed on 19 February 1942. The Labor prime minister John Curtin had already written in December 1941 that Australia now looked to the United States, and American forces under General Douglas MacArthur made Australia their base for the Pacific war. New Zealand kept its main division in the Mediterranean, where the 28th (Māori) Battalion won a famous reputation; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men also served in large numbers, including in the Torres Strait Light Infantry Battalion.

Australia after 1945: society and culture

After 1945 Australia changed from an inward-looking, overwhelmingly British society into one of the most diverse societies in the world, with a long economic boom followed by a painful restructuring of the economy. The table of governments gives the political frame for these changes.

Immigration and the making of a multicultural society

The war convinced Australian leaders that a population of 7 million could not defend or develop the continent. In 1945 Arthur Calwell became the first minister for immigration and launched a programme summed up in the slogan "populate or perish". Australia aimed to grow its population by 2 per cent a year, half of it through immigration. Calwell preferred British migrants, and more than a million came on assisted passages costing £10 (the "Ten Pound Poms"), but there were not enough. Australia therefore accepted about 170,000 displaced persons from European refugee camps between 1947 and 1954, and then large numbers of Italians, Greeks, Dutch, Germans, Maltese and Yugoslavs.

Migrants built post-war Australia. More than 100,000 people from over 30 countries worked on the Snowy Mountains Scheme (1949–1974), which dammed rivers for hydro-electric power and irrigation, and migrants filled the factories of the car, steel and textile industries. At first governments expected them to assimilate, abandoning their languages and customs to become "New Australians".

The White Australia policy was taken apart in stages. The Migration Act 1958 abolished the dictation test; in 1966 the Holt government allowed more non-European migrants with useful skills; and in 1973 the Whitlam government removed race from immigration selection altogether. The first boat carrying Vietnamese refugees reached Darwin in April 1976, and the Fraser government accepted tens of thousands of Indochinese refugees, the first large non-European intake. The government’s Galbally Report (1978) made multiculturalism official policy, funding migrant services and creating the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS).

Multiculturalism was contested. In 1984 the historian Geoffrey Blainey argued that Asian immigration was moving faster than public opinion would accept, and in 1996 the independent MP Pauline Hanson claimed in her first speech that Australia was in danger of being "swamped by Asians"; her One Nation party won almost a quarter of the vote at the 1998 Queensland election. From 2001, when the Howard government refused to let the Norwegian freighter Tampa land rescued asylum seekers, the treatment of asylum seekers arriving by boat became one of the most divisive issues in Australian politics. By the 2016 census more than a quarter of Australians had been born overseas, with China and India among the largest sources.

Social and economic policies

From 1945 to the early 1970s Australia enjoyed a long boom, with almost full employment, rising home ownership and high wool prices, especially during the Korean War. Governments of both parties maintained what historians call the "Australian settlement": high tariffs, centralised wage fixing, White Australia and dependence on a great power. Labor under Chifley believed in planning and public ownership; the Liberal–Country coalition under Menzies, which ruled for 17 years, stressed private enterprise, the family home and anti-communism, and won the 1954 and 1955 elections after the Petrov affair and a split in the Labor Party over communism.

The Whitlam government (1972–1975) tried to change Australia quickly: it abolished university fees, created Medibank (universal health insurance), passed the Racial Discrimination Act and the Family Law Act (which introduced no-fault divorce), and expanded funding for schools, cities and the arts. Inflation, the oil crisis of 1973 and a series of scandals undermined it, and on 11 November 1975 the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, dismissed Whitlam after the Senate blocked the budget, a decision that still divides Australians.

From 1983 the Hawke and Keating governments dismantled much of the Australian settlement. Working through an Accord with the trade unions, which accepted wage restraint in return for social benefits such as Medicare, they floated the dollar in December 1983, deregulated the banks, cut tariffs, privatised government businesses and introduced compulsory superannuation. The reforms are credited with the long period of growth from 1991 to 2020 without a recession, but they also brought the deep recession of 1990–1991 and the decline of manufacturing towns. The Howard government (1996–2007) introduced a goods and services tax, national gun laws after 35 people were killed at Port Arthur in April 1996, and, in WorkChoices, a weakening of union rights that helped defeat it in 2007.

Experiences of women

In the 1950s government policy assumed that married women would stay at home: until 1966 women in the Commonwealth Public Service had to resign when they married, and the basic wage for women was set at 75 per cent of the male rate. Change came from the late 1960s. The Arbitration Commission accepted equal pay for equal work in 1969 and equal pay for work of equal value in 1972. The Women’s Electoral Lobby (1972) pressed candidates on women’s issues, and Whitlam appointed Elizabeth Reid as the world’s first adviser to a head of government on women’s affairs in 1973.

Law caught up in the 1970s and 1980s: the Family Law Act 1975 made divorce easier and fairer to women, the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 outlawed discrimination on grounds of sex and marital status, and the Affirmative Action Act 1986 required large employers to promote equal opportunity. Women’s participation in paid work rose steadily, though a gap in pay and in senior positions remained. Julia Gillard became the first woman prime minister in 2010, and her speech against sexism in parliament in October 2012 became widely known around the world.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experiences after 1945

Assimilation and the Stolen Generations

In 1951 federal and state ministers adopted assimilation as national policy. Under it, Paul Hasluck, minister for territories, said that Aboriginal people were expected in time to live like other Australians, with the same rights and the same customs. In practice assimilation meant continued control by state boards, the closing or tightening of reserves, and the removal of Aboriginal children, especially those of mixed descent, from their families to be raised in institutions or by white families.

Removal was justified as protection and as a way to give children a better future, but many removed children suffered abuse, lost their language and culture and never found their families again. The effects have passed down the generations in trauma, poverty and distrust of government. The Bringing Them Home report (1997) of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission concluded that the policy met the international legal definition of genocide, because its aim was that Aboriginal people would disappear as a distinct group; that conclusion remains disputed.

Campaigns for equal rights, 1957–1967

From the late 1950s Aboriginal people and their supporters organised nationally, notably through the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines (from 1958). In 1962 all Aboriginal people gained the right to vote in federal elections. In 1963 the Yolŋu people of Yirrkala sent bark petitions, painted with their clan designs, to federal parliament to protest against a bauxite mine on their land, the first traditional documents recognised by the parliament. In February 1965 the Aboriginal student Charles Perkins led a bus of Sydney University students on a Freedom Ride through country towns of New South Wales, exposing segregated swimming pools, cinemas and hotels.

In August 1966 about 200 Gurindji workers led by Vincent Lingiari walked off Wave Hill cattle station in the Northern Territory. They began by protesting against low wages and poor conditions, but the strike became a claim to their land. In 1975 Prime Minister Whitlam poured a handful of soil into Lingiari’s hand as a symbol of returning part of the land, the first major land return in Australia.

The referendum of 27 May 1967 changed two sections of the Constitution: it deleted section 127, so that Aboriginal people would be counted in the census, and removed the words that excluded "the aboriginal race in any State" from Commonwealth power, so that the federal government could make laws for Aboriginal people. Over 90 per cent of voters and all six states voted Yes, the largest majority ever for a referendum. The result was symbolic as well as legal: it was widely seen as a vote for equality, although it did not in itself give citizenship or the vote, which Aboriginal people already had.

Self-determination and land rights, 1972–1992

Frustrated by slow progress, young activists set up the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawns of Parliament House on 26 January 1972, after the McMahon government rejected land rights. The Whitlam government replaced assimilation with self-determination, creating a Department of Aboriginal Affairs and funding Aboriginal-run legal and medical services. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, passed by the Fraser government, allowed Aboriginal groups to claim unalienated Crown land in the Northern Territory and created land councils to manage it; by the 2010s nearly half of the territory’s land was held by Aboriginal people. The states moved more slowly.

Inequality remained severe. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987–1991) investigated 99 deaths and found that Aboriginal people died in custody at no higher rate than other prisoners, but were imprisoned at vastly higher rates, which it traced to dispossession and disadvantage. In 1988 tens of thousands marched in Sydney on 26 January to protest against the bicentenary celebrations of the First Fleet, which many Aboriginal people called "Invasion Day".

Mabo and native title

In 1982 Eddie Koiki Mabo and other Meriam people of Mer (Murray Island) in the Torres Strait began a case in the High Court claiming that their land had always been theirs under their own law. On 3 June 1992, in Mabo v Queensland (No 2), the High Court decided by six to one that the Meriam people held native title to their land. Justice Gerard Brennan wrote that the legal fiction which had treated Indigenous rights in land as non-existent had "no place in the contemporary law of this country". The decision overturned the doctrine of terra nullius in Australian law, though it found that native title had been extinguished wherever the Crown had granted freehold land.

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The Keating government answered with the Native Title Act 1993, which set up a tribunal to hear claims. In Wik (1996) the High Court found that native title could coexist with pastoral leases, which alarmed farmers and miners; the Howard government’s Native Title Amendment Act 1998 limited claims. Six months after the Mabo decision, Prime Minister Paul Keating gave a speech in Redfern Park, Sydney, to launch the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People.

Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice.

Paul Keating, speech at Redfern Park, Sydney, 10 December 1992 (Prime Minister’s transcript). Keating spoke to a mainly Aboriginal audience in the inner-Sydney suburb most associated with urban Aboriginal life, and he addressed non-Indigenous Australians as "we". Coming from a prime minister, the acceptance of national responsibility was new, which is why the speech is remembered; its critics, such as Geoffrey Blainey and later John Howard, saw it as an example of a "black armband" view of history.

Reconciliation, the Intervention and the Apology

A Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation worked from 1991 to 2000, and in May 2000 about 250,000 people walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in support of reconciliation. Prime Minister Howard, however, refused to make a formal apology for the Stolen Generations, arguing that the present generation should not take responsibility for the actions of earlier ones, and he favoured "practical reconciliation" through spending on health, housing and education.

In June 2007, after a report on child abuse in remote communities, the Howard government launched the Northern Territory Emergency Response, known as the Intervention: it sent in police and the army, controlled welfare payments, banned alcohol and took leases over communities, and it suspended the Racial Discrimination Act to do so. Supporters saw it as protecting children; critics, including many Aboriginal leaders, saw a return to paternalism.

On 13 February 2008, as the first act of the new parliament, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd moved a National Apology to the Stolen Generations, saying "we say sorry" for the laws and policies that had removed children. The government also adopted targets to "Close the Gap" in life expectancy, health, education and employment; by 2020 most of the targets had not been met. In May 2017 a national convention of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates at Uluru set out what reform they wanted.

We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution. Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination. […] In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard.

Uluru Statement from the Heart, First Nations National Constitutional Convention, Uluru, 26 May 2017. The statement was agreed after regional dialogues among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and its appeal is addressed to "the Australian people", not to the government. Its reference to 1967 places it in a long line of Indigenous claims for recognition. The Turnbull government rejected the proposal for a Voice in October 2017 (a later referendum on it in 2023 falls outside this period).

Australian foreign policy after 1945

From Britain to the United States

The fall of Singapore in 1942 showed that Britain could no longer defend Australia. Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, Prime Minister Curtin wrote in a New Year message in the Melbourne Herald that "without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom". The statement angered Churchill, and in practice Australia remained close to Britain for two more decades, but it marked the start of a shift.

The post-war Labor foreign minister, H. V. Evatt, worked through the new United Nations, where he was president of the General Assembly in 1948–1949, and supported Indonesian independence from the Dutch. The Menzies government that followed sought what Menzies called the support of "great and powerful friends". The ANZUS Treaty, signed with New Zealand and the United States on 1 September 1951, committed the three to consult and to "act to meet the common dangers" if any of them was attacked in the Pacific. Australia wanted it as a guarantee against a rearmed Japan, whose generous peace treaty the United States was negotiating, as well as against communism. In 1954 Australia joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), set up in Manila to contain communism in Southeast Asia.

Links with Britain weakened in stages. Australia supported Britain at Suez in 1956 and allowed British atomic tests on its territory, at the Monte Bello Islands (1952) and at Emu Field and Maralinga in South Australia (1953–1957); a royal commission in 1984–1985 found that Aboriginal people and servicemen had been exposed to radiation. When Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973, Australian farm exports lost their privileged access to the British market. The Australia Act 1986 ended the last legal links, including appeals to the Privy Council, and in 1999 Australians voted against becoming a republic by about 55 per cent to 45, partly because of disagreement over how a president would be chosen.

Involvement in the Cold War

Australia’s Cold War policy rested on forward defence: fighting communism in Asia before it could reach Australia. More than 17,000 Australians served in the Korean War (1950–1953), of whom 340 were killed. Australian forces fought in the Malayan Emergency and defended Malaysia during Indonesia’s Confrontation (1963–1966) in Borneo. At home the Menzies government tried to ban the Communist Party; the High Court struck down the law, and a referendum to change the Constitution failed narrowly in 1951.

The longest commitment was Vietnam. Advisers went in 1962, and in April 1965 Menzies announced that a battalion would be sent, at Australia’s own request as well as the United States’. About 60,000 Australians served, including conscripts chosen by a birthday ballot under the National Service Act 1964, and 521 died. Opposition grew, and the Moratorium marches of May 1970 drew huge crowds in Melbourne and other cities. Combat troops were withdrawn by the end of 1971, and the Whitlam government ended conscription in December 1972. The war showed the costs of dependence on the alliance, as well as its strength.

Changing regional relations: Japan, China, Southeast Asia and the Pacific

Trade drew Australia towards Asia before diplomacy did. The Agreement on Commerce with Japan of 1957, negotiated by the trade minister John McEwen only twelve years after the war, opened Japan to Australian wool, coal and iron ore; by the late 1960s Japan had replaced Britain as Australia’s largest export market. Australia sold wheat to the People’s Republic of China from the early 1960s although it did not recognise it, and the Whitlam government recognised the PRC in December 1972. China became Australia’s largest trading partner in 2007. Hawke and Keating promoted engagement with Asia: Australia led the creation of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in 1989, and the foreign minister Gareth Evans helped design the United Nations plan that ended the Cambodian civil war in 1991.

Relations with Indonesia, the nearest large neighbour, were the most difficult. Australia accepted Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975 and later recognised its annexation; after East Timorese voted for independence in 1999 and pro-Indonesian militias attacked them, Australia led the United Nations-backed INTERFET force that restored order in September 1999. In the Pacific, Australia guided Papua New Guinea to independence on 16 September 1975, and led the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) from 2003. By 2020 relations with China had become strained, as China restricted imports of Australian goods after Australia called for an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19, while China’s growing presence in the Pacific led Australia to announce a "Pacific Step-up" in 2018.

The table of successes and failures shows a pattern: Australian governments were most successful when they combined the US alliance with an independent regional policy, and least successful when they followed a great power into conflicts or neglected the interests of neighbours. Historians such as Allan Gyngell, in Fear of Abandonment (2017), argue that the fear of being left alone in Asia drove Australian policy from 1942 to the present.

New Zealand after 1945: society and culture

New Zealand came out of the Second World War with a welfare state already built by the first Labour government and an economy tied closely to Britain. Over the next 75 years it became a more urban, more Polynesian and Asian, and more bicultural society, and it went through one of the most radical economic reforms in the developed world.

Immigration, Pacific peoples and a multicultural society

After 1945 New Zealand, like Australia, sought British migrants through assisted passages, and it also took in Dutch migrants and displaced persons. Unlike Australia, it did not aim at mass non-British European immigration. The distinctive new migration came from the Pacific. Workers from Western Samoa, the Cook Islands, Niue and Tonga, who as citizens of New Zealand territories or under special schemes could enter easily, filled factory jobs in Auckland and Wellington in the 1960s and early 1970s; Auckland became the largest Polynesian city in the world.

When the economy weakened after 1973, Pacific Islanders were blamed for unemployment. In the Dawn Raids of 1974–1976, police raided homes early in the morning in search of people who had overstayed their visas, and stopped people in the street who looked Polynesian, although most overstayers were from Britain and other countries. The Polynesian Panthers, founded in 1971, organised against the raids; the New Zealand government formally apologised in 2021. The Immigration Act 1987 ended the preference for migrants from Britain and Europe, and selection by skills (a points system from 1991) brought large numbers of migrants from China, India, Korea and the Philippines. By 2018 more than a quarter of New Zealand’s residents had been born overseas.

The growth of migration raised a question particular to New Zealand: how multiculturalism fitted with biculturalism, the partnership between Māori and the Crown under the Treaty of Waitangi. Many Māori argued that the treaty made them tangata whenua with a special status, not one ethnic minority among many.

Social and economic policies

Until the 1970s New Zealand was one of the richest countries in the world per head, selling butter, meat and wool to Britain. Governments of both parties kept a highly regulated economy, with import licensing, farm subsidies, state housing and full employment. The National government’s defeat of the waterfront workers in the 151-day 1951 waterfront dispute, under emergency regulations that restricted civil liberties, showed the limits of union power.

The 1970s brought crisis: Britain’s entry into the EEC in 1973 and the oil shocks hit exports, and inflation rose. Robert Muldoon (1975–1984) tried to protect living standards through borrowing, large state energy projects called "Think Big", and finally a freeze on wages and prices. By 1984 the country faced a currency crisis.

The fourth Labour government (1984–1990) responded with Rogernomics, named after the finance minister Roger Douglas. It floated the dollar (1985), removed farm subsidies and import controls, introduced a goods and services tax (1986), turned government departments into profit-seeking state-owned enterprises and began privatisation, and gave the Reserve Bank independence to target inflation (1989). The National government of the 1990s continued the reforms, cutting welfare benefits in 1991 and passing the Employment Contracts Act 1991, which weakened unions. Supporters argue that the reforms made the economy more efficient and ended chronic inflation; critics point to unemployment above 10 per cent in the early 1990s, widening inequality and the collapse of many small towns.

Anger at reforms carried out without electoral mandates led voters to change the electoral system itself. In a referendum in 1993 they chose mixed-member proportional representation (MMP), first used in 1996, which ended single-party majority governments for a generation and increased the number of Māori, Pacific and women MPs. The Clark Labour government (1999–2008) introduced tax credits for families and KiwiSaver, while Jacinda Ardern’s government (from 2017) responded to the killing of 51 people at two Christchurch mosques on 15 March 2019 with a ban on military-style semi-automatic weapons within a month.

Experiences of women

The pattern of women’s experience was close to Australia’s. In the 1950s most married women did not work for wages, and policy assumed a male breadwinner. From the late 1960s the women’s liberation movement and organisations such as the Women’s Electoral Lobby (1975) campaigned for change. The Equal Pay Act 1972 required equal pay for women and men doing the same work; the Domestic Purposes Benefit (1973) gave single parents, mostly mothers, an income of their own; the Matrimonial Property Act 1976 divided property equally on divorce; and the Human Rights Commission Act 1977 outlawed discrimination on grounds of sex. A Ministry of Women’s Affairs was created in 1984.

Women rose to the highest offices faster than in most countries: Jenny Shipley became the first woman prime minister in 1997, followed by Helen Clark (1999–2008) and Jacinda Ardern (from 2017), and in 2005–2006 women held the offices of prime minister, governor-general, chief justice and Speaker at the same time. Contested issues remained, especially abortion, which was not removed from the criminal law until 2020, and the lower pay of women, particularly Māori and Pacific women.

Māori experiences after 1945

Urbanisation and integration

The most important change for Māori after 1945 was the move to the cities. In 1945 about a quarter of Māori lived in towns and cities; by 1986 nearly 80 per cent did. Young Māori moved for work in factories and offices, often to Auckland and Wellington, far from their marae (tribal meeting places) and iwi. Urban life brought higher incomes and new opportunities, but also discrimination in housing and work, loss of te reo Māori (the Māori language) among children, and high rates of imprisonment.

Government policy shifted from assimilation to "integration". The Hunn Report of 1961, written by the public servant Jack Hunn, described Māori disadvantage in housing, health, education and land, and proposed that Māori and Pākehā should combine while Māori kept some distinct culture; in practice policy still aimed to bring Māori into the Pākehā mainstream. The Māori Affairs Amendment Act 1967, which made it easier to convert Māori land into general land, was resented as a new attack on what land remained.

Protest and the Māori renaissance

From about 1970 a new generation of urban, educated Māori led a cultural and political revival. The group Ngā Tamatoa protested at Waitangi Day ceremonies and in 1972 presented a petition with more than 30,000 signatures asking for te reo Māori to be taught in schools. In September–October 1975 the 79-year-old Whina Cooper led a land march from Te Hāpua in the far north to Parliament in Wellington under the slogan "Not one more acre of Māori land"; about 5,000 people arrived in Wellington.

The Labour government responded with the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, passed in October 1975.

An Act to provide for the observance, and confirmation, of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi by establishing a Tribunal to make recommendations on claims relating to the practical application of the Treaty and to determine whether certain matters are inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty.

Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, long title (New Zealand Parliament). The wording shows both the importance and the limits of the Waitangi Tribunal: it was to interpret the "principles" of the treaty, not its exact text, and it could only make recommendations, not binding decisions. As first passed, it could hear only claims about actions after 1975.

Protest continued. In January 1977 Ngāti Whātua occupied Bastion Point (Takaparawhau) in Auckland, land taken from them that the government planned to sell for housing; the occupation lasted 506 days until police and soldiers removed 222 protesters in May 1978. The land was later returned. In 1978 Eva Rickard led a protest to recover land at Raglan taken for an airfield in the Second World War and later used as a golf course. The 1981 tour of New Zealand by the South African rugby team divided the country and drew many Māori and Pākehā into opposition to racism at home as well as apartheid abroad.

Language, the treaty and settlements

The revival of te reo Māori was one of the movement’s greatest achievements. The first kōhanga reo (language nests, pre-schools where children are taught entirely in Māori) opened in 1982, followed by Māori-language schools (kura kaupapa Māori) from 1985. The Māori Language Act 1987 made Māori an official language, after the Waitangi Tribunal found that the language was a taonga protected by article 2 of the treaty.

The Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act 1985 allowed the Tribunal to hear claims going back to 6 February 1840, and the courts began to give the treaty legal force. In the Lands case of 1987, New Zealand Maori Council v Attorney-General, the Court of Appeal ruled that the treaty created a partnership in which the Crown and Māori must act reasonably and in good faith towards each other. From the 1990s governments negotiated settlements of historical claims: the Sealord fisheries deal (1992) gave Māori a large share of the commercial fishing industry; Waikato-Tainui (1995) received NZ$170 million in land and money and a formal apology for the invasion of 1863, signed into law in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II; and Ngāi Tahu (1998) received a similar settlement and apology for Kemp’s Purchase and later breaches.

Settlements were limited and contested. Their value was a small fraction of the land lost, and governments set a cap, the "fiscal envelope" of NZ$1 billion proposed in 1994, which many Māori rejected. In 2003 the Court of Appeal ruled that Māori might hold customary rights to the foreshore and seabed; the Clark government responded with the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004, which vested them in the Crown. A hīkoi (protest march) of thousands went to Parliament, the Labour minister Tariana Turia resigned, and the Māori Party was founded in July 2004. Later settlements recognised Māori world views in new ways: Te Urewera (2014) and the Whanganui River (2017) were made legal persons, reflecting the Māori view that people belong to the land and rivers as much as the reverse.

New Zealand foreign policy after 1945

Changing relations with Britain

New Zealand was slower than Australia to loosen its ties with Britain. Its Labour leaders supported the United Nations and collective security, and it adopted the Statute of Westminster only in 1947, but its economy depended almost entirely on the British market. When Britain first applied to join the European Economic Community in 1961, New Zealand faced the possible loss of its main customer.

The chart of exports to Britain shows how the dependence ended. Successive governments lobbied hard in London and Brussels, and when Britain joined the EEC on 1 January 1973, Protocol 18 of its accession treaty guaranteed New Zealand butter and cheese declining access for a transition period. The shock was still severe, and with the oil crisis it contributed to the economic troubles of the 1970s. New Zealand diversified its markets towards Japan, the United States, the Middle East and Asia, and signed the Closer Economic Relations (CER) agreement with Australia in 1983, one of the most complete free-trade agreements in the world.

ANZUS, SEATO and involvement in the Cold War

New Zealand joined Australia and the United States in the ANZUS Treaty of 1951, the first major treaty it signed without Britain. Like Australia, it wanted protection against a revived Japan as well as against communism; it was also rewarding the United States for the generous peace with Japan that Wellington had reluctantly accepted. It joined SEATO in 1954.

New Zealand’s military commitments were small but steady. About 4,700 New Zealanders served with the army contingent, Kayforce, in the Korean War, and a further 1,300 in navy frigates; 45 died. New Zealand forces fought in the Malayan Emergency and in Borneo during Confrontation. In Vietnam, the Holyoake government sent artillery and later infantry from 1965, mainly to support its allies; about 3,500 New Zealanders served between 1964 and 1972, and 37 died. The war was increasingly unpopular, and the Kirk Labour government withdrew the last troops in December 1972.

The anti-nuclear policy and the break with ANZUS

Opposition to nuclear weapons grew out of the Pacific. France tested nuclear weapons at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia from 1966, and in 1973 the Kirk government sent a naval frigate into the test zone in protest and took France, with Australia, to the International Court of Justice. In 1984 the Labour Party under David Lange came to power promising to ban nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered ships from New Zealand ports. In February 1985 the government refused a visit by the destroyer USS Buchanan because the United States would neither confirm nor deny whether it carried nuclear weapons.

On 10 July 1985 agents of the French secret service bombed the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour to stop it leading a protest flotilla to Mururoa, killing the photographer Fernando Pereira. The attack by a supposedly friendly state strengthened public support for the anti-nuclear policy. In 1986 the United States suspended its ANZUS obligations to New Zealand, and in 1987 Parliament wrote the policy into law.

The Prime Minister may only grant approval for the entry into the internal waters of New Zealand by foreign warships if the Prime Minister is satisfied that the warships will not be carrying any nuclear explosive device upon their entry into the internal waters of New Zealand.

New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987, section 9(2). The law put the burden of proof on the visiting navy, which the United States’ policy of neither confirming nor denying made impossible to meet. Passed by a Labour government with strong public support after the Rainbow Warrior bombing, it turned a dispute over ship visits into a statement of national independence, and it was kept by every later government.

Historians and contemporaries disagree about the policy’s success. Critics argued that it cost New Zealand its main alliance, its access to US intelligence and military exercises, and influence in Washington. Supporters, and the historian Malcolm McKinnon in Independence and Foreign Policy (1993), see it as the moment New Zealand defined its own foreign policy and identity as a small, independent Pacific nation. Relations with the United States were rebuilt without changing the law in the Wellington Declaration (2010) and the Washington Declaration (2012).

Changing regional relations: Japan, China and the Pacific Islands

Japan became one of New Zealand’s main markets from the 1960s. New Zealand recognised the People’s Republic of China in December 1972, at the same time as Australia, and in 2008 it became the first developed country to sign a free-trade agreement with China, which became its largest trading partner in the 2010s. Like Australia, it joined APEC and built links with Southeast Asia.

New Zealand’s closest regional responsibilities were in Polynesia. Its rule of Western Samoa after 1914 had been marked by the influenza disaster of 1918 and by the suppression of the Mau independence movement, including the shooting of its leader Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III and others at a procession in Apia on 28 December 1929 ("Black Saturday"). After the Second World War New Zealand led Western Samoa to independence on 1 January 1962, the first Pacific Island state to become independent, and the Cook Islands (1965) and Niue (1974) became self-governing in free association with New Zealand, whose citizens their people remain. In 2002 Prime Minister Helen Clark apologised to Samoa for the wrongs of New Zealand rule. New Zealand imposed sanctions after the military coups in Fiji (1987, 2000, 2006), hosted the talks at Burnham army camp in 1997 that led to a truce in the Bougainville civil war, and contributed to peacekeeping in East Timor (1999) and Solomon Islands (2003).

The table of New Zealand’s foreign policy shows a country that turned weakness into a distinct identity: forced away from Britain by the EEC and from the United States by its own anti-nuclear policy, it built a reputation for independent diplomacy, free trade and Pacific engagement. Its successes in regional relations and trade were greater than its influence over the great powers.

Comparing Australia and New Zealand after 1945

The comparison of the two countries after 1945 shows parallel journeys with different emphases. Both moved away from Britain, opened up to Asia and became more diverse, but New Zealand’s treaty gave Māori claims a legal foundation that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples lacked until Mabo, and New Zealand’s smaller size and different security position allowed it to break with ANZUS in a way Australia never seriously considered.

Perspectives and debates

Frontier violence and the "History Wars" in Australia

For much of the twentieth century Australian history books said little about Aboriginal people after the first chapters. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner called this "the great Australian silence" in his Boyer Lectures of 1968. From the 1970s historians broke the silence. Henry Reynolds, in The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), used colonial records and Aboriginal testimony to show that Aboriginal people had resisted colonisation in a sustained, intelligent way across the continent, and estimated that about 20,000 died in frontier violence. In Why Weren’t We Told? (1999) he described how the violence had been forgotten.

A conservative reaction followed. In his Latham Lecture of 1993, Geoffrey Blainey criticised what he called a "black armband" view of Australian history, too focused on guilt and wrongdoing; Prime Minister John Howard adopted the phrase. Keith Windschuttle, in The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, volume 1 (2002), argued that historians of Tasmania had exaggerated or invented killings, and counted only 118 "plausible" killings of Aboriginal people by colonists between 1803 and 1834. Robert Manne edited a collection of replies, Whitewash (2003), which challenged Windschuttle’s use of evidence and his assumption that unrecorded killings did not happen. Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark’s The History Wars (2003) set out the dispute, which also covered the Stolen Generations and the school curriculum.

Since then research has moved towards higher estimates. Lyndall Ryan’s Tasmanian Aborigines (2012) and the Colonial Frontier Massacres map she led, and the Queensland study of Raymond Evans and Robert Ørsted-Jensen (2014), suggest that Reynolds’s figure was too low. The debate shows how the evidence itself is disputed: colonial records were written by perpetrators who had reasons to hide killings, while Aboriginal oral histories were long ignored by historians.

Aboriginal economies and land

A second debate concerns how Aboriginal people used the land. Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011) argued that Aboriginal people managed the whole continent with fire as a carefully planned estate. Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014) went further, arguing that many groups practised agriculture and lived in villages, and so were not simply hunter-gatherers. The anthropologist Peter Sutton and the archaeologist Keryn Walshe, in Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate (2021), replied that Pascoe misread the sources and that calling Aboriginal economies "agriculture" judged them by European standards. The debate matters because ideas about who "used" the land were central to the justification of terra nullius.

The Treaty of Waitangi and the New Zealand Wars

An older New Zealand view held that the country had "the best race relations in the world", a view Keith Sinclair began to question in A History of New Zealand (1959). James Belich, in The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (1986), argued that Māori had often won the wars’ battles through innovations such as the modern pā, and that Victorian writers explained British defeats away because they assumed British superiority. Claudia Orange, in The Treaty of Waitangi (1987), showed the differences between the two texts and argued that most chiefs understood the treaty through the Māori text, which promised them continuing authority. Ranginui Walker, in Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End (1990), wrote the history of colonisation from a Māori perspective as a continuous struggle for land and rangatiratanga from 1840 to the present.

These works shaped the Waitangi Tribunal’s findings and the treaty settlements, which has led some critics to argue that history written for claims is too present-minded, judging nineteenth-century actors by modern standards. Others answer that the Tribunal’s reports are based on detailed research and that the Crown has accepted their main findings in its apologies.

Federation and national identity

Older historians tended to explain federation through practical interests: defence, trade and the need for a common tariff. John Hirst, in The Sentimental Nation (2000), argued instead that federation was carried by a popular, almost religious nationalism, the idea that a continent should hold one people. Helen Irving, in To Constitute a Nation (1997), wrote a cultural history of the constitution. Historians of race such as Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, in Drawing the Global Colour Line (2008), place White Australia at the centre, as part of a worldwide movement to defend "white men’s countries". On national identity, Russel Ward’s bush legend (1958) has been challenged by feminist and Indigenous historians for leaving out women and Aboriginal people.

Anzac

C. E. W. Bean created the Anzac legend in his Official History and in the Australian War Memorial he helped found. Ken Inglis, in Sacred Places (1998), showed how war memorials made Anzac a civil religion. From the 1980s Anzac Day revived strongly after a period of decline, which led critics to question its meaning: in What’s Wrong with Anzac? (2010), Marilyn Lake, Henry Reynolds and others argued that the militarisation of Australian history pushed aside other sources of national identity, such as democratic and social reform. Joan Beaumont, in Broken Nation (2013), showed that the war divided Australian society over conscription, class and religion. In New Zealand, Christopher Pugsley’s Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story (1984) recovered a distinct New Zealand experience of the campaign.

Foreign policy after 1945

The central debate is about dependence and independence. One view, associated with Menzies’ phrase "great and powerful friends", holds that a small population in a vast continent needed a great-power protector, first Britain and then the United States, and that ANZUS has served Australia well. Critics argue that dependence led to costly wars and to neglect of Asia; Allan Gyngell’s Fear of Abandonment (2017) traces how the fear of being left alone shaped every Australian government since 1942, while others praise the "middle power" diplomacy of Evans and Keating. In New Zealand the debate centres on the anti-nuclear policy, seen either as principled independence or as a costly gesture that damaged the alliance.

Weighing these perspectives means asking what evidence each historian uses and why they chose it. Reynolds and Windschuttle disagree less about particular documents than about whether silence in the records means that killings did not happen; Orange and the older view disagree about which text of the treaty matters; and the Anzac debate is partly about the present, about which values Australians and New Zealanders choose to honour.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Questions on the colonial period, the emergence of the nations and the First World War may ask about both countries, so read the wording carefully. Questions on the years after 1945 are set on either Australia or New Zealand: pick one country and keep your evidence focused on it. Use the current names throughout: the Frontier Wars, the New Zealand Wars, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, Māori.

Question 1: land and conflict to c. 1900

Question 2: the causes of federation

Question 3: the First World War

Question 4: Indigenous experiences after 1945

Question 5: foreign policy after 1945

Self-check

• To do:

  I can describe Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Māori societies before colonisation, including their relationships to land.

• To do:

  I can explain Cook’s claim of 1770, the founding of New South Wales in 1788 and the idea of terra nullius.

• To do:

  I can explain the patterns of immigration and settlement, including Wakefield’s systematic colonisation and the New Zealand Company.

• To do:

  I can explain the role of squatters, the Selection Acts and the Land for Settlements Act in distributing land.

• To do:

  I can assess the social, economic and political impact of the gold rushes of 1851–1870 in both countries, including Eureka and Chinese migration.

• To do:

  I can explain the growth of cities and the labour movement, the strikes of the 1890s and New Zealand’s Liberal reforms.

• To do:

  I can explain the demographic impact of colonisation on Indigenous peoples and the reasons for population decline.

• To do:

  I can describe and assess the Frontier Wars, including the problem of estimating deaths, and protection policy.

• To do:

  I can compare the English and Māori texts of the Treaty of Waitangi and explain its role in New Zealand history.

• To do:

  I can explain the causes, course and consequences of the New Zealand Wars, including raupatu and the Native Land Court.

• To do:

  I can explain constitutional developments in both countries, the Federation Movement and the National Australasian Conventions.

• To do:

  I can explain how Australia and New Zealand achieved dominion status in 1901 and 1907, and what it meant.

• To do:

  I can analyse the growth of national identity through the arts and sport, and who it excluded.

• To do:

  I can assess the political, social and economic impact of the First World War, including conscription, on both countries.

• To do:

  I can explain the experiences of the ANZACs, including Gallipoli, and the creation of the Anzac legend.

• To do:

  I can compare the experiences of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Māori peoples in the First World War.

• To do:

  I can explain immigration and the development of multicultural societies after 1945 in Australia or New Zealand.

• To do:

  I can assess social and economic government policies and the experiences of women after 1945 in Australia or New Zealand.

• To do:

  I can explain the experiences of Indigenous peoples after 1945, from assimilation and integration to native title and treaty settlements.

• To do:

  I can assess the successes and failures of foreign policy after 1945, including ANZUS, SEATO, the Cold War and relations with Britain, Japan, China and the Pacific Islands.

• To do:

  I can explain the main historical debates (the History Wars, the treaty, federation, Anzac, foreign policy) and weigh the evidence behind them.