West B.A., Murphy F.T. A Brief History of Australia
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
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If reconciliation includes such concepts as “respect and toler-
ance . . . truth and justice,” as per the UN document announcing the
International Year of Reconciliation (UN General Assembly 2006), the
“forcible acquisition of Aboriginal Land under the NT Intervention
and the ongoing suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act” (cited
in Gibson 2009) hardly seem to fit the criteria. On the brief evidence
so far, reconciliation between Indigenous Australians and the federal
government does not seem to have a bright future.
A second priority of the Keating government that was largely aban-
doned by Howard was looking toward making Australia a republic with
a local head of state to replace the constitutional monarchy nominally
headed by the British monarch. Howard allowed the referendum on the
issue to go through in 1999, but it was defeated by 54.4 percent, largely
because Australians wanted an elected head of state rather than one
chosen by the prime minister or Parliament. Many Australians believed
that the election of a known republican such as Kevin Rudd would
mean some movement toward constitutional change.
In July 2007 four months before being elected prime minister, Kevin
Rudd used the campaign trail to promise that if Labor were elected, a
second referendum on the republic issue would be held (News.com.
au 2007). At the same time, he stated that he did not think it was “a
‘first order concern’ ” (News.com.au 2007) for most Australians and
thus could not put a time frame on when it would be raised. What he
did indicate was that he thought “the time will come before too much
longer when we do have an Australian as our head of state” (News.
com.au 2007). In March 2009 while visiting Queen Elizabeth II in
London, Rudd’s comments on the topic had not changed significantly
since his campaign trail interpretation of the situation 20 months ear-
lier. In response to reporters’ questions, he stated, “Is it (the republic) a
top priority issue? No” (News.com.au 2009), and “Her Majesty is well
loved in Australia and Australia will become a republic and we’ll have
a referendum in due season” (News.com.au 2009). When that “due
season” will arrive, however, remains to be seen.
Two indications that the formation of a republic remains at least
several years in the future emerged in April 2009. The first was a state-
ment by the Australian governor-general, Quentin Bryce, who on April
3 agreed with Kevin Rudd that Australia would eventually become a
republic. Nevertheless, in her statement she used the phrase a “devel-
opment of our democracy in future decades” (italics added) (cited by
Women for an Australian Republic 2009), rather than future months
or years. A second indication that the republic remains a distant prior-
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RECONCILIATION AND REPUBLICANISM? AUSTRALIA SINCE 2007
ity emerged on April 22, the day the government announced actions it
would take on nine of the recommendations made at the Australia 2020
Summit in 2008; action toward creating a republic was not on the list.
In response to questioning about the issue, a government spokesperson
would only say that “it is ‘committed to constitutional reform’ ” (cited
by Women for an Australian Republic 2009).
Despite this relative inaction by the government, other actors in
Australian politics have begun to move ahead on the issue. In November
2008 Bob Brown, senator from Tasmania and leader of the Green Party,
introduced a bill in the Senate, Plebiscite for an Australian Republic Bill
2008, calling for a vote on whether or not Australia should change the
Constitution. The issue that confused the 1999 referendum, the elec-
tion or selection of the head of state, was not mentioned in the bill, as
this vote was designed to ascertain whether or not Australians desired
a republic at all. The question as stated by the bill is “Do you support
Australia becoming a republic?” (Brown 2008, 6). The bill was sent to
committee two days after being read in the Senate and was returned
by the Senate Finance and Public Administration Committee on June
15, 2009. Rather than address the plebiscite issue directly, the commit-
tee recommended that the government establish “an ongoing public
awareness campaign on Australia’s constitutional system” and “that if
any further process advocating constitutional change is undertaken,
including that of a republic, it seek to encourage Australians to engage
meaningfully in the debate” (Senate Finance and Public Administration
Legislation Committee 2009).
Another policy area that Labor used in their 2007 election campaign
was ending the Howard-era “Pacific Solution” for asylum seekers who
arrive by boat at Australia’s offshore islands. As promised, the last 21
refugees held in an Australian detention center on Nauru, all Sri Lankan
men fleeing civil war in their country, were removed from detention in
the first few months of 2008. However, some aspects of the Pacific
Solution have continued, much to the consternation of Australians
concerned with their country’s human rights record. For example,
asylum seekers who attempt to reach Australia by sea are still housed
and processed on an offshore island rather than on the Australian main-
land. In addition, depending on where they are apprehended, many are
still treated according to Howard-era laws that excised some offshore
islands from the country’s regular migration rules.
Gay and lesbian Australians have also had a somewhat mixed first
term under Kevin Rudd’s Labor government. In November 2008 a
bipartisan effort to end discrimination passed through the Parliament
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
252
providing same-sex couples with most of the federal rights granted
to heterosexual couples. Included among the changes were pension
and retirement benefits, veterans’ entitlements, hospital visitation
rights, and inheritance of pension funds, which had previously been
denied same-sex partners. While lesbian and gay rights groups were
very happy with the changes, most also pointed out the one glaring
exception: Same-sex marriage was not included and at the time the bill
passed, “Attorney-General Robert McClelland reaffirmed that same-sex
marriage was not on the agenda” (Dennett 2008).
Many women’s groups were elated when John Howard was finally
defeated in November 2007, and the Rudd government has worked hard
to maintain this key constituency. His choice of Julia Gillard as his dep-
uty prime minister and minister for workplace relations pleased many, as
did his appointment of Australia’s first female governor-general, Quentin
Bryce. The March 2009 overturn of a Howard-era law that, as did the
Mexico City Policy in the United States under Republican presidents,
withheld Australian foreign aid from agencies that provided abortions
and some forms of contraception to the developing world, also received
praise from women’s organizations. The government’s proposal for a new
parental leave bill in May 2009, the first of its kind in the country, and
AU$41.5 million toward fighting violence against women were also seen
as positive steps toward attaining gender equality.
Of course, no government is able to please even its key supporters all
the time, and this is true of the Rudd government, as well. For example,
very early in the Rudd administration, an important policy conference,
the Australia 2020 Summit, was held in which 1,000 people were cho-
sen from around the country to discuss policy options in 10 different
categories, including security, education, the arts, and climate change.
Leading Australians were chosen to chair each of the 10 panels, and
when the final announcements were made, only one of those 10 people
was female: The actress Cate Blanchett was to chair the panel on the
arts. Single mothers also lost out in the 2009 budget, which raised pen-
sions for all other categories of recipients to acknowledge sharp rises in
the cost of living during the global economic downturn.
A second policy area in which the government has almost entirely
made good on its election promises is to rid Australia of Howard’s
industrial relations laws, WorkChoices. This took quite a bit longer
than some had hoped, in part because the coalition retained a hold
on the Senate until July 1, 2008, and in part because of the complex
nature of undoing the multifaceted array of legislation covered by
WorkChoices. Nonetheless, on March 20, 2009, Deputy Prime Minister
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RECONCILIATION AND REPUBLICANISM? AUSTRALIA SINCE 2007
and Minister for Workplace Affairs Julia Gillard announced that Labor’s
own Fair Work Bill had finally passed through the Senate, and thus
WorkChoices was officially dead and buried. Labor’s new set of work-
place laws are based on very different principles from the individualism
and employer-centric emphasis of WorkChoices; they guarantee the
Quentin bryCe
Q
uentin Bryce, Australia’s 25th governor-general since federation
in 1901, was raised in rural Queensland in the 1940s and 1950s,
a time and place in which girls were largely expected to marry and
dedicate their time to family life. Bryce defied her society’s expecta-
tions by graduating from the University of Queensland in 1962 with a
B.A. She went on to marry in 1964, and, while pregnant with her first
child in 1965, finish her law degree at the same university. Immediately
upon graduation, she became just the seventh woman to be admitted
to the bar in her home state. Bryce spent the next three years living
in London with her young family and then was the first woman to be
offered a teaching position in the law school at her alma mater; she
took the position and held it from 1968 through 1983.
Although she did not leave the University of Queensland until 1983,
five years earlier Bryce began the work that was to make her a nation-
ally prominent figure by serving on Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s
National Women’s Advisory Council. By the mid-1980s Bryce moved
permanently from teaching to government service, starting with an
appointment as the director of the Queensland Women’s Information
Service. She remained in that position until 1987, when she became
the director of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
in Queensland. From 1988 to 1993 Bryce was the federal sex dis-
crimination commissioner. Moving from gender equality to children’s
welfare issues, from 1993 to 1996 Bryce helped found and served as
CEO of the National Childcare Accreditation Council.
In 2003 Bryce was nominated by Premier Peter Beattie to serve as
governor, the queen’s representative in Queensland. After nearly five
years of success in the role, Beattie’s successor, Anna Bligh, had hoped
to keep Bryce on in her position. In April 2008, however, Bryce was
nominated by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for governor-general and
she was sworn in on July 29. Many hope she is to be Australia’s last
governor-general and is even allowed to move into the role of presi-
dent with the transition to a republic sometime in the future.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
254
right to collective representation and bargaining, minimum wage, and
at least 10 other benefits such as overtime pay, holidays, and the right
to ask for a flexible schedule (Gillard 2008).
Outside the Government Sphere
From December 2007 through late 2009 the Labor government acted
to change some of the more draconian of the Howard-era policies on
Aboriginal reconciliation, industrial relations, and refugees; women,
lesbians, and gay men have largely benefited, as have those who choose
to be represented by a union. At the same time, Australians have expe-
rienced a number of important events since 2007 that are far from the
vegeMite
v
egemite was invented in 1922 by the Fred Walker Cheese
Company. Seeking a way to utilize the nutritious but unpalat-
able spent yeast left over after the brewing of beer—which contains
high amounts of riboflavin, niacin, folate, and thiamine—Walker called
upon his chemists to create a tasty food product. Dr. Cyril Callister
concocted the best version, which combined the processed yeast
concentrate with liquid onion, celery seed, salt, and a small amount of
caramel; the new product hit shelves in 1923 (Kraft Foods Australia
2009). For 86 years Callister’s recipe was the only form of Vegemite
available, but in 2009 Kraft Foods announced that a more spreadable
form of Vegemite was being made available, after 300,000 Australians
answered questions about what they liked, loved, and disliked about
the iconic product.
Kraft made the change with an important nod to the food’s long
history. In 1923 Walker offered a large monetary prize for naming the
new food; Kraft did the same in 2009. In 2009, however, the process
did not go nearly as smoothly as it had in the 1920s. From amongst
about 50,000 submissions, Kraft’s marketing team chose iSnack 2.0
as the name for their new product, a combination of Vegemite and
cream cheese. In response tens of thousands of Australians com-
plained about the gimmicky name in such diverse forums as letters to
the editors of all major newspapers and even Facebook pages. Almost
immediately Kraft moved to save their new product, conducted a
telephone poll of about 30,000 Australians, and iSnack 2.0 became
Vegemite Cheesybite practically overnight. The alacrity with which
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RECONCILIATION AND REPUBLICANISM? AUSTRALIA SINCE 2007
control of any government. In February 2009 bushfires in Victoria
killed 173 people and injured more than 500 others in Australia’s
worst fire emergency in history. Three months later Queensland’s
seven-year drought was declared officially over when the state received
a year’s worth of rain in just two days. The rainfall would have filled
the equivalent of half of Sydney Harbour, and flooding caused damage
throughout the state (Marriner and Macey 2009). In the same month,
the Tasmanian devil, the world’s largest surviving carnivorous marsu-
pial, was listed as an endangered species due to a facial cancer that has
killed about 70 percent of the species since 1996 (Nguyen 2009).
The global economic downturn also began to affect Australia’s pre-
viously booming economy when prices in such primary industries as
Kraft responded indicated to many Australians that the entire exer-
cise had been a publicity stunt to put the product on the news; Kraft’s
spokespeople deny the charge (Daily Telegraph 2009).
In 1923 when Vegemite failed on the market, Walker persevered
with his product and its name by offering free Vegemite and coupons
with his other food products; he even gave away several cars in con-
tests meant to lure consumers to Vegemite during the depression.
After many years of struggle and financial loss, he finally had a winner
on his hands by the mid-1930s. Word of mouth combined with his out-
rageous give-aways had finally bolstered sales. By the time Australian
soldiers were shipping out to fight in World War II, Vegemite had
become so popular it was included in their rations.
The Australian Fred Walker Cheese Company merged with the
American food giant Kraft in 1926 and became known as the Kraft
Walker Cheese Company. In 1950 the Walker name was dropped
entirely to reflect the fact that Kraft had purchased the product and
process rights after Walker’s death. Despite this change, the only
Vegemite factory in the world remains in Port Melbourne, very near
the laboratory in which Dr. Callister invented his concentrated yeast
product.
Sources: Kraft Foods Australia. “Vegemite Discovery.” 2009. Available
online. URL: http://www.vegemite.com.au.vegemite/page?siteid=vegemite-
prd&locale=auen1&PagecRef=670. Accessed May 21, 2009; Daily Telegraph,
The. “Kraft Backflips on Vegemite Name iSnack 2.0” September 30,
2009. Available online. URL: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/kraft-
backflips-on-vegemite-name-isnack20 /story-e6freuy9-1225781188006.
Accessed October 25, 2009.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
256
iron, coal, and wool dropped in the wake of diminished worldwide
demand. On April 20, 2009, Prime Minister Rudd uttered the words
recession and inevitable in the same breath during a speech in Adelaide,
South Australia, and thus brought the crisis home. Nonetheless,
Australia did not suffer from the downturn as much as the United States
or the United Kingdom, in part because banks remain more regulated
in Australia than in these other countries and the cost of housing has
been maintained at an artificially high level with the implementation
of larger first-time home buyers’ grants. Despite the usual pattern, the
economic slump, from which Australia recovered by late 2009, did
not affect Rudd’s popularity as the preferred prime minister; in early
April 2009 he retained a 65 percent preference rate over his main rival,
the Liberal Malcolm Turnbull, whose rate was just 18 percent (Sydney
Morning Herald 2009a). Nonetheless, by January 2010 a change in
Liberal leadership to Tony Abbott had begun to reverse the trend, with
Rudd’s preference rate down to 57 percent and Abbott’s up to 25 percent
(ABC News 2010).
Conclusion
Depending on your vantage point, Australian history can be seen as
very long or relatively short. A few rural communities of Aboriginal
people have kept alive the world’s oldest continuing culture for some
60,000 years, living off the driest and most inhospitable continent on
Earth, other than Antarctica. The formation of a modern nation-state
by migrants to this continent, however, did not take place until the
start of the 20th century. In addition, until the mid-20th century, most,
although certainly not all, of the migrant population in Australia were
from Britain or Ireland, spoke English, and at least nominally practiced
some form of Christian faith. Since the arrival of Calwell’s migrants
starting in the late 1940s, the migrant community in Australia has
diversified greatly, with the addition of northern and then southern
and eastern Europeans in the 1950s and 1960s, then Asians and Middle
Easterners starting in the 1970s, and small populations of Africans
today.
This mix of Indigenous and migrant, as well as old and new migrants,
has meant that the formation of an Australian national identity has
been complex and continual. The first migrants defined themselves in
opposition to the continent’s Aboriginal population, with the lasting
ramification that today reconciliation between Aboriginal and migrant
societies is fraught with difficulties stemming from institutional rac-
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ism, cultural misunderstanding, and endemic poverty. With the addi-
tion of great migrant diversity in the latter half of the 20th century, the
identity problem was compounded. The first decades of this history
saw assimilation as the order of the day; identity issues were believed
best approached by subsuming the new entirely into the old migrant
patterns. When this failed to lead to a cohesive, unified national com-
munity, multiculturalism and integration replaced assimilation as the
underlying ideology. Again, certain segments of the national commu-
nity rejected the status quo and began searching for new concepts to
take Australia into the 21st century.
Despite the lack of consensus on the nature of Australianness,
Australians will start the second decade of the 21st century with
much to recommend their society. Parliamentary democracy provides
a smooth and stable transition between governing parties every few
years. The economy in 2007 provided a healthy GDP per capita of
AU$37,564, which is somewhat more equally distributed than in the
United States (OECD 2009). Life expectancy is one of the highest in the
world, at 81.4 years (UNDP 2009). Potential challenges to the continu-
ation of these trends, however, do exist. Global warming and drought
are probably the two most serious challenges that Australians now face.
Maintaining the country’s first-world standard of living on the back of
a third-world-style primary exporting economy may also prove difficult
if new caches of iron, coal, and other minerals are not discovered. And,
of course, the complex and continual project of defining Australian
identity will continue unabated.
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Ap p e n d i x 1
basiC faCts about
austraLia
Official Name
Long form: Commonwealth of Australia
Short form: Australia
Government
Australia is a constitutional monarchy with the British monarch serving
as the titular head of state. The monarch’s representative in Australia
is the governor-general, who is nominated by the prime minister and
accepted by the monarch, usually for a term of five years. The gover-
nor-general is advised by an executive council, made up of all current
government ministers and parliamentary secretaries.
Actual governance in Australia is undertaken by the party or coali-
tion of parties with the majority of seats in the 150-seat House of
Representatives. The leader of this party or coalition is the head of
government, or prime minister. The prime minister works with his or
her cabinet, consisting of the most senior members of government, and
ministers, or those in the government responsible for policy areas such
as immigration, health, and workplace relations. Prime ministers must
call elections for the House at least every three years but can call them
more frequently in special circumstances, such as when an opposition-
dominated Senate blocks the government’s access to funds to run the
country, called blocking supply.
In addition to the House of Representatives, Australia has a 76-per-
son parliamentary house of review, or Senate. While members of the
House of Representatives are elected within electorates of about 86,000
people each, which means that states with larger populations send
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APPENDIX 1
more people to the House, every state, regardless of population, sends
12 members to the Senate; the territories each send two. Senators are
elected for a term of six years and every three years, half the Senate
must run for reelection.
The Commonwealth of Australia was formed in 1901 when six
separate British colonies, Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales,
Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia, federated under
a single constitution. Because of this history, each of these states also
has a governor who serves as the British monarch’s representative in
the state, while an elected premier serves as the head of each state par-
liamentary government. Two federal territories, the Northern Territory
and Australian Capital Territory, have similar parliamentary structures
but are governed by chief ministers rather than premiers; they also
lack a governor and their laws can be overruled by the Commonwealth
government.
Australian shires, cities, and towns have a system of local governance
in which elected councils and lord mayors make decisions about local
issues, such as zoning, licensing, infrastructure development, and some
areas of social welfare.
Australia’s democracy is unique in the English-speaking world in
its requirement that all citizens, with a few exceptions such as those
convicted of treason or without the ability to understand their rights
and responsibilities, must both register to vote and participate in all
local, state, and federal elections, including referenda. Not doing so
incurs a fine; thus most elections have a participation rate of at least
95 percent.
Political Divisions
Capital
Canberra
States and territories, capital cities, areas, and populations
Australian Capital Territory, Canberra: 907.88 square miles (2,351.4
km
2
) with 347,800 people
New South Wales, Sydney: 309,389.61 square miles (801,315.4 km
2
)
with 7,041,400 people
Northern Territory, Darwin: 522,078.11 square miles (1,352,176.1 km
2
)
with 221,700 people
Queensland, Brisbane: 669,568.67 square miles (1,734,174.9 km
2
) with
4,349,500 people