English Australians
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| (7,238,500 ancestry 2011 36.1% of Australia population) |
|
| Languages | |
| Australian English | |
| Religion | |
| Christianity (Anglicanism • Catholicism) | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| English diaspora | |
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English Australians, also known as Anglo-Australians, are Australians of English descent, and are both the single largest ethnic group in Australia and the largest 'ancestry' identity in the Australian Census. In the 2011 census, 7.2 million or 36.1% of respondents identified as "English" or a combination including English, such as English-Australian. The census also documented 911,592 residents of Australia as being born in England. English Australians have more often come from the South than the North of England.
English immigrants have been the largest group to migrate to Australia since the establishment of New South Wales as the first penal colony in 1788.
Sydney was founded by the British government as a penal colony. Visitors described the English character of Sydney for at least the first 50 years after 1788, noting the traditional English appearance of the churches overlooking the convict barracks. First-generation colonial Sydney residents were predominantly English. 160,000 convicts came to Australia between 1788 and 1850. Between 1788 and 1840, 80,000 English convicts were transported to New South Wales, with the greatest numbers coming between 1825 and 1835. The New South Wales Census of 1846 accounted for 57,349 born in England, 47,547 born in Ireland and 14,406 born in Scotland.
Until 1859, 2.2 million (73%) of the free settlers who immigrated were British.
Many more English people immigrated to Victoria by the gold rush of the 1850s. By 1854 there were 97,943 England-born people in Victoria. Immigration policies and assistance schemes helped maintain high levels of immigration from England. Of the 1 million immigrants who arrived between 1860 and 1900, just over half came from England.
When transportation ended, convicts made up 40 percent of Australia's English-speaking population. Between 1840 and 1870 there were more Irish than English assisted migrants which did not change until the 1870s, when there were more English.
At least 75 per cent of all overseas-born people in Australia during the 19th century were from the British Isles. The proportion who had been born in England or Wales remained quite stable (at about 47 per cent) from 1861 to 1911, as did the proportion born in Scotland (about 12 per cent).
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