Australian History Quotes

“The European discovery rather than Aboriginal occupation constitutes Australia's pre-history. Australia — its economy, society and polity — is a construction of European civilisation. Australia did not exist when traditional Aborigines occupied the continent. Aborigines have been participants in Australian history, but that story begins with all the others in 1788.”
― John Hirst, Sense & Nonsense in Australian History

“Since Australia is an outgrowth of England, European civilisation is also the field of study for an intelligible history of Australia. This does not mean that every history of Australia has to begin with Charlemagne. It does mean that Australian history not set within European civilisation will convey a very poor understanding of Australian society.”
― John Hirst, Sense & Nonsense in Australian History

“In Australia the pressure of the Scots and especially of the Irish forced the abandonment of 'English' as the identity of the colonies in favour of 'British'. The Irish of course could still bridle at a British identity even when it included them as equals. In time, with the passing of the first generation born in Ireland and the growth of a distinctively Australian interpretation of Britishness, they were prepared to accept it.”
― John Hirst, Sense & Nonsense in Australian History

“Ironically Britain claimed the whole continent simply in order to claim a few isolated harbours astride trade routes. It was like a speculator who, buying a huge wasteland flanking a highway because it had a few fine sites for road cafes and filling stations, found later that much of the land was fertile and productive.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History

“As the poets sang, Australia was pure, set apart, free from old-world rivalries and wars. That this was due to physical isolation or divine favour were pleasing illusions. Australia enjoyed its peace because the old-world power responsible for the continent was much more powerful than the others.”
― John Hirst, The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth

“A turbulent emptiness seized the people as they moved into a post-Christian, post-Enlightenment era. No one any longer knew the direction of the river of life. No one had anything to say.”
― Manning Clark, Manning Clark's History of Australia

“Distance is the continual theme and has been one of the main conditioning factors in Australian history. She was distant and dependent, a continent swinging on a long chain in antipodean darkness.”
― Marjorie Barnard, A history of Australia

“There is a delicate balance between shielding people and encouraging them, and the USA perhaps went too far in one direction and Australia in the other. The Soviet Union, born in 1917 and influenced a little by the exciting Australian and New Zealand experiments, would eventually show how the umbrella, if too big and cumbersome, exposed people far more than it protected them.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, A Shorter History of Australia

“Much of Australia's history had been shaped by the contradiction that it depended intimately and comprehensively on a country which was further away that almost any other in the world. Now the dependence had slackened, the distance had diminished. The Antipodes were drifting, though where they were drifting no one knew.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History

“The First Fleet was the biggest single overseas migration the world had ever seen at the time.”
― David Hill, 1788: The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

“Far from seeing it as Lord Ellenborough's 'summer excursion', most of the convicts regarded transportation as the most severe punishment available next to death, one that was intended 'to purge, deter and to reform'. They would be exchanging familiarity for hardship, hostility and the unknown.”
― David Hill, 1788: The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

“The English were the predominant group numerically among the Australian colonists and their ideas and customs gave the new Australia its chief characteristics ... Yet the English majority dissolved into unhyphenated Australians even more quickly than the minorities.”
― Geoffrey Partington, The Australian Nation: Its British and Irish Roots

“The history of Australia, black or white, is not only the struggle between peoples but the struggle between nature and people. Nature tamed many of the settlers, sometimes defeating them, but people held many victories, sometimes at high cost.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, A Shorter History of Australia

“Multiculturalists encourage vagueness about 'contributions' to give the impression of equal participation, as in the 'new age' school sports where every player in the team must handle the ball before a goal can be scored. If one were to compose a more precise ethnic history it would read something like this: The English, Irish and Scots were the founding population; they and their children established the Australian nation.”
― John Hirst, Sense & Nonsense in Australian History

“Whereas for thousands of years there was some prospect that the economic and social life of the Aborigines would be reshaped by the entry of immigrants from the Indonesian archipelago or New Guinea, the real reshaping was to be drastic. Whereas gardening could be grafted onto a semi-nomadic life, the economic activities and energies of England of 1800 would shatter the social and economic customs of the Aborigines. Tragically, the largest region of nomads in the world was now face-to-face with the island which had carried to new heights that settled, specialised existence that had arisen from the domesticating of plants and animals. People who could not boil water were confronted by the nation which had recently contrived the steam engine.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia’s People Vol. I: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia

“Many convicts were bewildered by the first days of the voyage to Australia. Most had never seen the open sea until they boarded the convict ship, and few had travelled in a ship. And now, by sentence of the courts, they were about to begin one of the longest voyages any traveller could make.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia’s People Vol. I: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia

“The birth of a nation called for many fathers, none of whom could be pre-eminent, and when Parkes died the federation was only a balloon floating beckoningly in the air.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia's People Volume 2: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia

“The committed federalist leaders—Parkes, Deakin, Griffith, Barton, Inglis Clark and others—were pursuing a sacred ideal of nationhood. They can be thought of as both selfish and pure. Selfish, in that the chief force driving them was the new identity and greater stature they would enjoy—either as colonists or natives—from Australia’s nationhood. Pure, in that the benefit they sought did not depend on the particular form federation took. In a sense any federation would do. They knew of course that interests had to be conciliated and other ideals not outraged; they shared some of these themselves. But they were not mere managers or lobbyists; underneath all the negotiation and campaigning there was an emotional drive.”
― John Hirst, Sense & Nonsense in Australian History

“Legend has it that the South Sydney Rugby League team acquired their ‘Rabbitohs’ nickname because, in the late 1920s, several players worked in the trade on Saturday mornings, later taking the field in their bloodied jerseys.”
― Jan O'Connell, A Timeline of Australian Food: From Mutton to Masterchef

“Weet-bix has been the best selling [sic] breakfast cereal in Australia for more than 35 years. [at the time of publication, of course, which was 2017]”
― Jan O'Connell, A Timeline of Australian Food: From Mutton to Masterchef

“The inventor of Aeroplane Jelly was a tram driver.”
― Jan O'Connell, A Timeline of Australian Food: From Mutton to Masterchef

“In the days before plastic containers, families took their saucepans along to be filled with takeaway food.”
― Jan O'Connell, A Timeline of Australian Food: From Mutton to Masterchef

“[describing ‘nouvelle cuisine’] …’children’s portions put on a plate by an interior decorator’…”
― Jan O'Connell, A Timeline of Australian Food: From Mutton to Masterchef

“A whole generation of Australians may well agree that abolition of school milk was one of the finer achievements of the Whitlam government, up there with free university education and ending conscription.”
― Jan O'Connell, A Timeline of Australian Food: From Mutton to Masterchef

“Civilization did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The reason lies partly in the environment and way of life of the people inhabiting the continent before the coming of the European, and partly in the internal history of those Hindu, Chinese, and Muslim civilizations which colonized and traded in the archipelago of south-east Asia. The early inhabitants of the continent created cultures but not civilizations.”
― Manning Clark, A History of Australia, I: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie

“By the middle of the seventeenth century the Dutch had written the very first page in the history of European civilization in Australia by stating that there was no good to be done there. William Dampier popularized this idea amongst the English reading public half a century later.”
― Manning Clark, A History of Australia, I: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie

“The inhospitable environment and the past had predisposed the minds of its European inhabitants to hand over the government of their country to men who were wary of visionaries and all those who held out a promise of better things for mankind. Australians seemed chained for decades to come to the role of being a New Britannia in another world. The young Henry Lawson and all the other prophets of Utopia were doomed to a bitter disenchantment.”
― Manning Clark, A History of Australia, V: The People Make Laws, 1888–1915

“Deep down there is the feeling that what we participated in was morally wrong, and can never be looked upon as legitimate. We can make all kinds of excuses, but it can never justify the murder, the savagery and the barbarism that was inflicted on the Vietnamese people under the guise of saving the world from communism.”
― Terry Burstall, The Soldiers' Story: The Battle at Xa Long Tan Vietnam, 18 August 1966

“Vietnam was never a threat to America or Australia, but it was a threat to their perceived interests. For those selfish interests we fought and were maimed and died. It was not for patriotism, and not to save freedom or humanity: it was to save vested interests.”
― Terry Burstall, The Soldiers' Story: The Battle at Xa Long Tan Vietnam, 18 August 1966

“Blunder Down Under (The Sonnet)

Humans be human, alive and aware,
not tokens of ancestral blunder.
Awake, arise and right the wrongs,
whether in the west or down under.

We gotta fight on the beaches,
We gotta fight on human grounds.
This time we gotta fight as human,
not as puppets to colonial clowns.

Fight as brave lions for sacred inclusivity,
not for saffronication as domesticated cows.
Fight for justice, rejuvenated by reason,
not for prejudice, decreed by apeman vows.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets