Sixty thousand years in three chapters

History

The history of Australia is, by far, the history of its first inhabitants: forty thousand years before any European ship arrived.

The first inhabitants

The first inhabitants of Australia arrived 42,000 to 48,000 years ago, nomadic hunter-gatherer immigrants with a complex oral culture, with spiritual values founded on reverence for the Earth and on the belief in the Dreamtime. They crossed from south-east Asia when the sea level was far lower, and ended up occupying the whole continent, from the tropical rainforest of the north to the central desert.

The arrival of the Europeans

The first European to see its coast was the Dutchman Willem Janszoon, in 1606, and for a century and a half the maps called it New Holland without anyone settling there. In 1770 James Cook charted the east coast and claimed possession of it for Great Britain. On 26 January 1788 the First Fleet landed at Port Jackson, where Sydney stands today, and founded a penal colony there.

The federation

On 1 January 1901 the six British colonies of the continent joined into a single federal state, the Commonwealth of Australia. Melbourne was its provisional capital until in 1927 parliament moved to Canberra, a city built expressly to be one and placed, not by chance, between the two cities that were disputing the title.