History of Australia (1851-1900)

The History of Australia (1851–1900) refers to the history of the indigenous and colonial peoples of the Australian continent during the 50-year period which preceded the foundation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901.

Gold rushes and agricultural industries brought prosperity and autonomous Parliamentary democracies began to be established throughout the colonies from the mid-19th century. British settlers continued their expansion across the continent into the lands of the Indigenous Australians and European explorers were sent deep into the interior. The development of railways and the telegraph brought the disparate settlements closer together and a stronger sense of national identity emerged, evidenced in the writings of the bush balladeers and painters of the Heidelberg School. A movement for the six colonies to come together in a federation gathered strength and by the close of the century the colonies had voted to unite.

The discovery of gold, beginning in 1851 first at Bathurst in New South Wales and then in the newly formed colony of Victoria, transformed Australia economically, politically and demographically. The gold rushes occurred hard on the heels of a major worldwide economic depression. As a result, about two per cent of the population of Britain and Ireland immigrated to NSW and Victoria during the 1850s. There were also large numbers of continental Europeans, North Americans and Chinese.

The rushes began in 1851 with the announcement of the discovery of payable gold near Bathurst by Edward Hargraves. In that year New South Wales had about 200,000 people, a third of them within a day's ride of Sydney, the rest scattered along the coast and through the pastoral districts, from the Port Phillip District in the south to Moreton Bay in the north. In 1836 a new colony of South Australia had been established, and its territory separated from New South Wales. The gold rushes of the 1850s brought a huge influx of settlers, although initially the majority of them went to the richest gold fields at Ballarat and Bendigo, in the Port Phillip District, which in 1851 was separated to become the colony of Victoria.

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