Australian History For Dummies. Alex McDermott

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south-eastern grasslands, the end product of millennia of firestick farming burn-offs by Aboriginals (performed to attract kangaroos and other game to the new-growth grassland), were discovered to be perfect for grazing sheep on. And sheep grew wool. And wool was just what the new textile industries of Britain’s industrial revolution wanted a lot of. (See Chapter 6 for more on the prosperity brought about by sheep farming and the land grab that followed.)

      

Not for the last time, Australia’s jump into big-time prosperity had everything to do with high demand for raw materials from a nation flexing its muscles as a newly arrived industrial giant. (America, Japan and China would all play similar roles at different times in the 20th century.) Not for the last time, either, would a massive inward surge of investment capital make for a leveraging up of debt levels that meant when crunch time came, as crunch time tends to do, bankruptcies started popping up like toadstools everywhere (see Chapter 7).

Gold, Gold, Gold for Australia

      At the end of the 1840s, Australia and the world were emerging from economic depression. Then along came the discovery of gold to dazzle everyone. The idea of getting your very own hands on a jackpot of wealth was what brought men and women to Australia in their hundreds and thousands in the 1850s, making for a transformation of colonial society.

      Gold, an insanely profitable export, started being shipped out of the country, filling the treasuries of newly self-governing colonies as it did so. (This was in the days before Federation, when the states that now make up Australia acted as independent colonies.) And those who were lucky enough to have found gold and were newly cashed up had no shortage of things to spend their money on, as imports started flooding in. (See Chapter 8 for more on the gold rush and its effects.)

A building boom also followed. While the massive surge of new arrivals was happy enough to live in tents and canvas towns for the first few months, and makeshift shelters, shanties and lean-tos for another few years after that, ultimately they wanted to live in proper houses — which all had to be built. As did roads. And schools for all the children being born. Then railways, telegraphs — why not?! ‘If the world has it, we shouldn’t lack for it’ was the generally agreed sentiment (see Chapter 9). Limitless progress, development and prosperity were there to be enjoyed. The newest inventions and technology were certain requirements as the ‘steam train of progress’ of the 19th century took off with rattling speed, with the colonies demanding to be in the front carriage.

      Welcoming in male suffrage

      Democracy was another accidental by-product of the gold rushes — although, at this stage, for ‘democracy’ read ‘votes for most men’. The Australian colonies were some of the very first places anywhere in the world to grant practically universal male suffrage (voting rights). (And, 40 to 50 years later, Australia would be one of the very first places to give votes to almost all women.)

      

The granting of the right to vote to most men in the 1850s was one of those sublimely unexpected twists in Australian history. In Britain at the time, constraints were placed on who qualified for the franchise (that is, who was allowed to vote). Traditionally, those who owned large amounts of property or paid big amounts of rental qualified to vote. When Australian colonies were granted elected Legislative Councils, constraints similar to those operating in Britain were put in place. But what members of the British parliament didn’t know was that rents were much, much higher in Australian cities. Thanks to gold, everything had shot up — prices, wages, rents, the lot. Without realising it, the British parliament had set constraints that allowed a much higher proportion of men to vote than in Britain. So, without great agitation or publicity campaigns or fanfare, practically all men got the right to vote in elections that formed the colonial governments. Politicians changed their pitch and their promises accordingly. (See Chapter 8 for some of the initial political effects of the more universal male suffrage.)

      

Even after winning the vote, it seemed that many people in the colonies didn’t really care about politics. They hadn’t come here to vote, after all. They’d come here to get rich. And the ‘native-born’ white settler Australians were notoriously unconcerned about political life. Many newly arrived British immigrants were veterans of the great political struggles of 1840s Britain. They complained that all the locals seemed to care about (and here you’d better brace yourself for a bit of a shock) was making money, getting drunk, racing horses and playing sport. How un-Australian can you get?! Wait, better not answer that … (See Chapters 8 and 10 for more on how new immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s influenced colonial politics.)

      So it turns out plenty of defining Australian characteristics were embedded in the culture of the place from very early on. What many people in the colonies wanted most tended to be plenty of leisure time to do with as they saw fit (see the sidebar ‘The great Australian leisure time experiment’).

      THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN LEISURE TIME EXPERIMENT

      In the period of the long boom that followed the gold rushes in Australia, one of the things that people began pushing for was more leisure time. The eight-hour working day movement was very successful (see Chapter 8), and workers often showed that if they had to choose between more pay (and more working hours) and less pay (and fewer working hours), they would choose the latter.

      With this leisure time, many Australians started passionately playing sport and games. In 1858, what became known as Australian Rules, a uniquely colonial code of football, was developed. (In all likelihood, this code drew on an Indigenous game, perhaps Gaelic football and definitely the still-developing British codes of rugby and soccer). In 1861, the Melbourne Cup, the renowned ‘race that stops the nation’, started stopping the nation, with the race results being telegraphed to the rest of the colonies. By 1879, Melbourne Cup Day was a public holiday in Melbourne (as it still is today). From 1865, rugby was being played regularly in Sydney. (See Chapter 10 for more on the use of leisure time during the long boom and the development of different football codes in different colonies.)

      Cricket was played everywhere, including by Indigenous Australians — with the first Australian cricket team to tour England being made up of 13 Aboriginal men. The (white) colonials proved so adept at picking up the game that they were able to defeat English teams first in 1877 in Melbourne then in 1880 in London. This provoked shock and consternation among the English, and some wag placed an obituary in the papers for English cricket, which, the obituary mockingly declared, had died at the Oval — its body was to be cremated and the ashes sent to Australia. These mythical ‘ashes’ of English cricket have been at stake in The Ashes series of test cricket matches between England and Australia ever since.

The crowds that came to watch these burgeoning spectator sports — particularly Australian Rules and the Melbourne Cup — showed a distinctively colonial disregard for old world rigid class distinctions. Workers, business owners, bankers and farmers, men and women — all mingled freely and barracked loudly.

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