The amount of historical events that can be summed up with a person holding a sign that says 'Sounds pricey' is simultaneously insane and understandable
@MartinCraig-zt2sv how so? I always thought it was because they couldn't stop the maoris from attacking them in the north and they couldn't fight them very well in the forests but idk I did get told that from a Maori could be a case of biased storytelling haha
Fun Fact: when the Japanese started attacking the north of Australia in WWII, it was decided that should an invasion force actually land on our northern shores and try to make their way inland towards the major population centres on the east coast, Australian forces wouldn't bother fighting back. They would simply wait for the enemy to die in the deserts before ever making it that far on land. That's how big, & harsh, the Australian interior is.
unsure how wonderful that strategery would have worked. japan was a naval power and would likely have fortified the northern coast, using them as bases to raid the major southeastern cities. japan would ignore perth and the west, except to bomb the crap out of the rails.
@@zimriel You know what, my comment above was based on something I learned in either late Primary School or early high school. I even remember seeing maps of Aust with big red lines across the continent. No further research was made before I offerred my comment. Having now researched it ("The Brisbane Line"), I've come to learn that it was all just political bullshit, missunderstanding of policy by the politicions of the day & manipulation / scare mongering of the Aust people for political gain. Clearly, nothing has changed in politics in 80 years, but I apologise for calling it "fact" or referring to it as actual policy.
"Gapho replied: "zimriel The straits between PNG and AUS wouldn't be crossable by carriers and destroyers, and the islands were already fortified before the bombing of Darwin." I assumed the Torres would be fortified. I also assumed they wouldn't be fortified *very well*. Singapore showed how rotten WW2-era Britain's fortification schemes could get. And Japan's shallow-water game was pretty good, as shown in the Philippines. It may be the Aussies were more-motivated than the Filipinos to defend their own (although the Filipinos proved valiant resistance fighters after-the-fact).
@@zimrielThe Philippines was an American colony, Filipinos were US nationals, and therefore the Philippines had no standing army. The US military in the Philippines was ill prepared, and Hawaii had been bombed which means no reinforcements. Douglas McArthur fled Manila to Australia. Filipinos had no choice but to surrender. This was an embarassment to the USA, and Filipinos as US nationals made them targets to the Japanese massacres.
It is worth noting that there is actually a lot of highly valuable mineral resources in Australia but serious prospecting didn't really occur until the British had already staked quite a strong claim. Melbourne was at one point the second richest city in the empire for a number of decades due to the immense amount of gold pouring out of north west Victoria. Cash crops might have made America, fur made Canada, spices made Indonesia, oil made Saudi Arabia, but gold made Australia.
Cattle and sheep made Australia too, due to the flat, drier and grassy interior of the continent. Which allowed for a large number of farms to be built and settle.
@@Merennulli That was a pretty sweet meeting, one of those 'had to be there' kinda moments. Excellent pastries too. Sure glad I didn't miss out on it, boy would I have felt like a loser.
Actually maps of Australia were not completed until the epic journeys of Matthew Flinders time. His maps were so good they were used into the 20th century in many places. Foreigners(non brittish) did not map the Australian coastline except in sections and they guessed the rest, even joining Australia to New Guinea and other countries on various maps. The coastline is so large it took Flinders decades to complete his task(albeit interrupted) in many cases sailing the coast in a small boat for thousands of kms(nautical miles i guess?🤔). Remember the Australian coastline is 34,000 kms. One of the great navigators of history
@@jasonbennett7002 mathew flinders was the first person to navigate the coast inshore. And Baudin did not map all of Australia. Im not sure he even sailed the whole coast did he?
Another fun fact is that Sweden under Gustav III were heavily interested in building colonies in India (built a factory a few miles south of Pondicherry before it got raided) and most importantly, Australia. The king hired a Dutch-English explorer William Bolts to survey and settle near modern day Perth. However, the king and Sweden overall got struck with a sudden case of payback against Russia and the colonial venture got immediately cancelled.
Starting around 1638, Sweden had a colony on the Delaware River too, in North America. But they lost this New Sweden to the Dutch in 1655, who then lost it -- along with the rest of New Netherland -- to England in 1664. The Dutch captured both areas back in 1673, but lost them to England again in 1674. In the years after, the former New Sweden was split off from New York (former New Netherlands) and partitioned between the colonies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. ...Which all became part of the newly-independent US from 1776/1783.
Its funny how the Mughal empire was India's last real chance of staying independent, as well as a great power. But I guess Indians never really desired unity unless its on their terms.
To be fair, the Maratha Empire before 1763 seemed like a good option too, but after said date it more less devolved into a confederacy of smaller states.
Marathas were never a good option. They were state based purely on raiding. Plus, it was a confederacy in which no one person had the real say in things. Every tribe of the confederacy wanted to dominate the state and it eventually fell to infighting. The Mughal empire on the otherhand, had an absolute monarch who was synonymous with the state itself. If only the later emperors were as competant as Aurangzeb or Akbar.
@@bakrahabibi5471 Probably becuase the mughals were incompetent ?. I think anyone, not just indians would desire a capable ruler like Shivaji who actually reformed instead of inbred monarchs who wanted to impose islam because "muh troo relijin"
If people back then knew just how resource-rich Australia was there absolutely would have been a scramble for it. Having 17% of the worlds gold and 30% of the worlds iron alone would have made it worth it.
The one thing that amazes me is how Kerry Packer, the Australian mining millionaire used metal detecting technology, magnetic anomoly detection, from WW2 originally used to detect submarines to detect literal mountains of Iron ore in Australia. Another is that the worlds heaviest and longest trains are used to ship endless quantities of coal to seaports on the east coast for transhipment to Far East nations.
It's amazing how I didn't think of this topic, but the moment I realized "No empire rushed for Australia" I immediately rushed to see the video. Good job History Matters.
*AS FAR* as I can tell, Australia is the only single-nation continent in recorded history. And I predict it won't remain that way. Climate change is starting to affect resource and land availability. Similarly, populations in Asia are putting increasing pressure on their resources. Antarctica is gradually being colonized by China and other nations, even including Russia - which will mean an expansion of naval and commercial seafaring around our southern perimeter. China is also expanding into the Pacific and pushing into Australia's traditional area of influence. *I'D SAY* within 100-200 years someone will annex the northwest or west of Australia with the intention of claiming mineral resources, fishing rights, habitable land, and transforming arid areas into fertile territory for food production.
@@elrey8876honestly, I really doubt that. Reason being is America is already building up the military in Australia to prepare exactly for this to potentially happen. We have strong allyship with the British and Americans, they wouldn’t let another country take us just out of pride. Add in how little land is actually liveable here and global warming destroying a lot of it, it’s not worth it for any country to attempt it. At least not unless something big changes here.
In my EU4 game, having just won the protestant league as Denmark, i got a popup saying "Portuguese Australian Colonial nation formed" or something like that. It was 1604 lolz.
i appreciate that your videos aren't needlessly long, and always are straight to the point without repeating information constantly to hit an arbitrary length. hard to find nowadays on youtube, much appreciated - good work
There's just not a whole lot in Australia. It's mainly just mineral resources which were also usually abundant in Africa as well. And with 99% of it being completely hostile to human life, there wasn't a lot of competition for it. Also I love how the Dutch were offered Western Australia. You know, the part (outside of Perth) that's almost completely uninhabited.
Please please do a video on the following subjects: 1. Why did the People's Revolution of 1848 fail in the Germanies and Spain? 2. Why do people drive on different sides of the road in different countries?
@@dragostocai973 probably the most convenient one-word answer, my thanks. It’s pretty hard to live in the world where everyone would answer “Britain” instead 😁 I would widen by telling “Napoleon and long-range wagon trains in North America”
Prussia overlapped on Australia is one of those joke reference details i love this channel for (aside from, well, it being nice informative channel about interesting history)
Once again, History Matters answers a question I’d never even thought to ask, and I love this channel for always posing and answering interesting questions.
Isn't Google just the greatest company ever? They give us our history, our search engine, our videos, our email, our browser, our education, our maps, our operating systems, and it's all 100% free. And now that they control the Internet they even cancel, censor, and demonetize anyone who goes against current political and social trends. We love you Google. Thank you for keeping us safe.
Anyone notice the single Australia-New Guinea landmass on the Dutch map? Turns out everyone ignored Luís Vaz de Torres, who sailed between them in 1606, for 150 years, while the Dutch sailed across the Torres strait without even noticing it was one.
It turns out that Australia and New Guinea share similar birdlife and plantlife. "Wallace Line". If you went to one cape and saw the same sort of thing as you saw on another cape, it was reasonable to assume they're the same landmass. And yeah they used to be the same continent
It's a patchwork of islands. Biologists note that it's only a matter of time before a bat brings a virus across from Asia, by island hopping across Torres Strait. One of these could be Nipah Virus.
Insanely, Perth was founded before Melbourne and Adelaide were. This was before railways were used here (1829). There were no settlements for thousands of kilometres (as the crow flies, sydney is more than 3,000km away). It's a 4,100km sailing trip from Perth to Sydney. Prevailing westerly winds make the journey *relatively* quick from Perth to Sydney, but in the opposite direction it took forever to get back. It was far quicker to supply Perth from India than from Sydney. Perth had very little to do with the rest of Australia until steam transport was invented.
Just one small comment. At the 1:53 mark you show the ship going along the south coast of the country and flags being planted at Adelaide, Melbourne, Tasmania. But after Sydney and Parramatta, the next settlement was in Tasmania and then after that, Queensland, followed shortly after by Albany on the south coast of Western Australia and then Perth a couple of years later, then known as the Swan River Colony. What is now South Australia was one of the last parts of the country to be settled. So I know you probably did it for simplicity sake, but it makes the colonisation look different to how it actually played out.
And why when they choose Queensland did they choose the Town of 1770 to land yet to this day it is a sleepy seaside twin town. And when Cook landed, where did Banks go with his men and where are those records of the sweetest sweet bread in the world! And the baker’s family remnants are where? No where to be seen. Everything the convicts built was already here. A forgotten (erased) civilisation.
@@chriskostopoulos8142 the swan river colony was established 1829 but didnt receive convicts until 1842. so we didnt start as a penal colony but did eventually take in prisoners. south australia *never* received prisoners
My great grandfather was one of those pesky krauts, a botanist working for the Kaiser in SA (South Australia during the 1880s. Although the east was settled by that point, much of SA was only claimed, and not settled. Even today, Australia is one of the least densily populated countries in the world, but it doesn't feel like it driving the M7 during peak hour.
La Perouse landed in botany Bay 6 days after the first fleet in 1788. Then sailed to the New Caledonia area and promptly got killed. The French did not find out for 20-30 years what was here. By then it was too late.
For a future video, maybe you should explore the "convict" angle of this a bit more. My understanding is that this crowd didn't consist of robbers and murderers as one might suspect, but rather of petty thieves and government critics and just generally poor people.
Yeah, a lot of the 18th century was pretty hard on England so you had a lot of petty theft, mostly of bread or occasionally of animals, just to keep people fed. The government didn't really like this because obviously, and so rather than doing things to try to make all the theft unnecessary, they just dumped all involved in Australia, which... I guess sorta worked out in the end.
Laws were harsh in Britain at the time of early colonisation (earning the name "The Bloody Code") but then they were harsh everywhere in the world. Nobody today would ever want to live under the legal framework of that world! The Georgian British just _really_ didn't like prisons. They thought the concept of lengthy incarceration was inhumane and brutal - and they had a point, 18th century prisons everywhere where horrible places. Cold, damp, rat infested flea pits that made people sick or insane. For serious crimes, execution was seen as a mercy and for lesser crimes, Transportation was seen as doing convicts a favour, sparing them the horrors of prison life. Transportation was not normally forever. There'd be a term of years that would have to be spent in the colony, but at the end of that time they could travel back home if they so wished (and could stump the money to afford the ticket). Some did indeed return at the end of their sentence but many did just build whole new lives in their fated destinations. The system of transportation withered away as the penal and justice system of the UK modernised in the Victorian period. By which time many were setting sail for those distant colonies willingly. I guess it made little sense to send someone somewhere for free as a punishment when others were selling their whole livelihoods to make the same journey! I don't know when Transportation stopped entirely but by the 1850s it was becoming a very rare sentence.
You are correct. The international joke is that Australia was a land of English criminals. But all the murderers and rapists (in England) were hanged. But Britain wasn't in the habit of hanging people for stealing loaves of bread to feed their family, nor things like minor acts of fraud or stealing sheep or getting into an altercation with someone and getting caught. So yes, generally starving people at a time when there was zero welfare - even rich people who were down on their luck were often incarcerated - many of them educated tradespeople. So these are the sorts of people who were shipped off to Australia. Not heinous criminals. Among them, MANY Irish people (catholics) who were a disparaged minority in extremely protestant England and therefore were overrepresented in prisons. ALSO - don't forget, to sail a whole bunch of prisoners there, you ALSO need naval officers (ie NOT prisoners but actual British officers with naval commissions), skilled sailors and shipmen, armed soldiers, various architects and builders, physicians, engineers and their wives and families. Many of the convicts themselves were also quite educated but just, for whatever historical reason, incarcerated.
Chartists were among the transported too. Some of their ideas found traction in the Australian colonies, though; the secret ballot was also known as the Australian ballot.
Botany Bay was the initially selected site for what is now Sydney due to positive reports on it from Captain Cook, HOWEVER the new arrivals found Botany Bay unsatisfactory and moved north to what is now known as Sydney Harbour. Americans commonly make this mistake in thinking that Botany Bay was the site of the first European settlement in Australia, most notably in the movie Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan
Both the Dutch and the Portuguese were just around the corner on the island of Timor, but the Australian coast on the North of the continent didn't look very inviting, the region is still very scarcely populated until today. So they concentrated on their spice business with the tropical island North of Australia and never explored the much more inviting Southern and Southeastern coast.
At 0:50 you have a "mapped" coast on The Great Australian Bight and South Australia being mapped in "late 18th Century." This coastline was first mapped in 1802 by Matthew Flinders.
A good summary…may have been worth mentioning that the reason Hobart was chosen as the 2nd place to set up a colony was due to finding out it was actually an island and not subject to the original claim…something that probably would have been seized upon by France after the Baudin expedition
something i don't get about early australian colonisation is where tf did this idea that you can claim entire islands if you just find it first come from? i've never seen anyone talk about that in any other context, where they'res a lot of islands that got partitioned in history
Worth considering: There was an agreement between Spain and Portugal brokered by the pope for a no conflict partition of unclaimed land. The demarcation line runs through Australia, and as Portugal is an ally of Britain from time immemorial the possible Portuguese claim was respected by the British who officially claimed only the Spanish side. Unofficial settlements followed on the Portuguese side to which Portugal did not object. The demarcation line set by the pope remains a state line of in modern Australia for that reason. 2:54
I've always heard about the convicts meme regarding Australia, but I hadn't considered that it also made colonizing the place less risky (since if they were lost, the govt wouldn't care). Thanks for another great video.
Finland and some of the Baltic regions were treated pretty well such as self governing cities. It was actually a common opinion at the time that Russia had freed the Baltics and Finland from Swedish imperialism so people weren’t in favor of ruling over them on bad terms which is why elites and traditional laws were very well integrated/ allowed. You could also consider that Russia wanted good relations and to keep them around to sort of treat Finland as a buffer state between them and Sweden. Similar to what China does with North Korea and keeping away SK and Japan. Things began to really fall apart with Polish uprising which is unfortunate since the Russian Empire didn’t even want the entirety of Poland anyways. They wanted mainly territories with cultural/language similarities.
A moment of silence for all the people arriving in Australia without knowing how absolutely bonkers the wildlife was. Even the plants were racking up kill streaks.
I really like watching these videos and pausing after the question to think about potential answers and with this video for example its really cool to see how it not only expands upon answers i had come up with but also provides ones that i didn't think of at all. Like i had the idea that if there was already a scramble for Africa it would seem like too much effort to just sail even further to somewhere without a guarantee of resources but watching this video i feel this is actually so much more detailed than the entirety of my Australian primary school teaching on the first settlers.
I read an account of a French person visiting early Sydney Town. Lots of interesting observations, visiting Manly etc, and noticing "the curious English habit of flogging".
One important detail you didn't mention is that British settlement happened while the exploration of the continent was still ongoing so other European powers quite literally hadn't charted these places yet. Sydney was already a proper city by the time Australia was even confirmed to be a single landmass.
Thankyou. I left the uk in 81 for sydney oz, still in sydney. Done loads of reading re oz since and aquiredva politics ba degree from a good oz uni. You little 3 mon presentation here answered a question I never really consudred and it is an important one in understanding oz etc. Thanyou so much.
Fun fact: Botany Bay was where the first fleet went, but they found it was lacking in fresh water (and not lacking in angry indigenous people), so they moved the fleet up to Sydney harbor instead. Botany Bay today is home to a lot of industry, and runways for the international airport. Not very botanical.
Yeah, both Germany and, while I am at it, Italy, unified as late as 1871; that's not even two centuries ago! P.S. After the Napoleonic Wars, I think Prussia should have started a campaign, not unlike China's Age of the Warring States, where they focused on unifying all the German states whether through conquest or marriage; whichever was most convenient.
@@marlonmoncrieffe0728 'here they focused on unifying all the German states' They did. That was the entire bedrock of politics in the German states throughout the 19th century with the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 being the deciding factor in which of the two most powerful German nations would rule over the rest.
To be fair, Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck fought a pretty courageous war in East Africa during the First World War, even surrendering after the armistice and once allied with the bees to to defeat Entente forces (the Battle of the Bees).
@@marlonmoncrieffe0728 Prussia did have a war with Austria Hungary over the German lands which is why it was only under Hitler in 1938 that Austria and Germany united , dunno about the German speaking portions of Switzerland
Great White Shark, Box jellyfish, trap-door spider, massive desert, forest fires where there isn't desert. I know this a short video but it really could have been even shorter.
The French did try to enter the Swan River (what is now modern Fremantle/Perth) but they couldn't get past the old sandbank at the entrance. The British on hearing this secretly sent Mitchell to investigate and with smaller craft got past the sandbank and found fresh water and pastoral land around the upper Swan suitable for a new colony which became Western Australia. Fun Fact: As a result of the British originally only claiming 1/2 to 2/3 of the continent and calling it New South Wales, Western Australia was a completely separate colony and never part of NSW. WA only agreed to join in with the rest in 1900 just in time to become a state of the federation of the new nation of Australia which began on Jan 1, 1901. So, Australia choosing Jan 26 (1788) as its national public holiday in 1994 makes no historical sense whatsoever. The national day should be Jan 1, 1901.
Perth wouldn't have worked by itself at the time, for the exact reason the French found. There is a lack of natural harbours with freshwater supplies across the entire state.
Jan 26 is the most appropriate national day, as it is the date in 1788 when the future course for the entire landmass changed so much that it will be clearly visible in the fossil record. In comparison, forming a federation between the colonies was just an administrative tweak 112 years later.
Plenty of Danish immigrants eventually made their way over and produced offspring and there's been a steady stream of Danish backpackers passing through for decades.
If Baudin actually survived after seeing Australia , and got back to see Napoleon things could've been different . Also 2 french ships landed in Port Jackson Bay a few days after the First Fleet had started camping but they disappeared in a storm heading home 1788 and were only re discovered in 2018. The Mutiny on the Bounty story had a very close encounter when the Royal Navy was sent to find the mutineers and missed their wreckage by weeks or ignored them
Some French sailors "stayed with" - can't think of how else to put it - with Tasmanians for about 6 months in the 1770s. An account I read said they both adopted some culinary practises of the other.
As a Russian who has learned some Dutch, ik vind dat geen mooie idee. Engels is het meest internationale taal, dat zou genoeg zijn voor germaanse taalen. However, if the implication is that there should be a different demographic and/or migration policies in the Netherlands and Belgium, then sure, if that's in those countries' best interest.
@jarnodatema Sounds like something a Dutch coloniser would say are realising that the nature of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia left you bastards with 270 million less Dutch speakers haha
It would be interesting to know about the British encounters with the Australian salt water crocodile and the stories surrounding them. It's kind of like the 18th century meets the Cretaceous period. Sure it made for great fireside stories when they got back home, assuming they made it home.
Fun fact: the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman discovered New Zealand as well as many other islands in that area in 1642, but he somehow managed to miss Australia entirely and Australia wouldn’t be discovered until 1770, 128 years after Abel discovered New Zealand.
As a Frenchman I can only remember Nicolas Baudin’s expediation from 1800 to 1803 to explore and map New South Wales and Tasmania, he met british explorer Matthew Flinders near Kangoroo Island, Flinders spoke French and Baudin spoke English, they talked and exchanged knowledges, and decided to name the place Encounter Bay
In actual fact, the American wilderness is far more dangerous than Australian countrysides, with far more deaths and injuries, by all metrics, annually. It's a class misconception. Once more, the nation is as big as the US, minus Alaska, with a huge range of diverse climate zones.
Not sure why the Dutch went all the way to Australia for New Holland. There is one much closer in Lincolnshire in England. They could have used the North Sea ferry.
There's also a New York in Lincolnshire (population: 150) bearing no relation to the one in America though which as we know was previously named by the Dutch!
I'm 6 Generation Australian. The Portuguese discovered Australia . early Portuguese navigators were the first Europeans to sight Australia between 1521 and 1524, well before the arrival of Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon in 1606 on board the Duyfken
Was looking for this comment. The first europeans to discover the land down under were the Portuguese, I'm surprised the British narrator didn't know that as it's a well known fact in Europe.
@@wildspirit3182He also could have thrown in the fact that the dingo (an Asian dog-wolf hybrid) was left in Australia 7,000 years ago by Southeast Asian seafarers and coconut palms which are not native to Australia and require physical planting were found growing all along Australia's extreme northern coastlines. Southeast Asian seafarers (probably from Borneo) and possibly Polynesian seafarers visited Australia before Europeans without a doubt.
@@anthony.3614 Polynesians and asian nations definitely had contact thru trade with indigenous people down under, hence write I wrote "first" europeans. This is how the Portuguese navigators knew of its existence and possible routes for ships to safely sail. The dingo theory is neither here nor there for me, they are very much at home here. Many use it as an argument to cull numbers but 7,000 years makes anything intrinsically part to the ecosystem. Stating an organism as native or not discounts biological changes that have been happening since the dawn of time. Otherwise practically everything is foreign to where it is now. I have observed coconuts self-seeding and growing naturally on their own along tropical shorelines without human intervention. By design they float across oceans on tides and plant themselves on tropical beaches. Sure they grow on masse the closer to the equator but inland is where planting is done by humans.
Yeah, most of Australia's population lives along a strip across the eastern coast. 🤔 But I wonder now why Australia does not have a high-speed rail line stretching from Melbourne to Brisbane to Sydney...?? P.S. 🐑 By the way, have you ever visited the Israel-sized ANNA CATTLE STATION in the Outback?
@davidhouseman4328 I think that's part of the reason our internet speed is terrible aside from our incredibly old politicians who actually said Australians aren't ready for fast internet... It's a long way to lay fibre optic cable. And there are so many tiny towns spread all over the place.
Actually the French landed in Sydney just a few days after the British had landed and claimed Botany Bay. They stayed for about six weeks to restock then departed. Relations were cordial with the British.
Most of Australia was in the Portuguese "half" of the world. The line defined by the Treaty of Zaragoza in the 16th century put the central and western thirds (which the Dutch would map in the 17th century) in the Portuguese sphere and the eastern states (where Britain would found its colonies in the 18th century) in the Spanish sphere. Strangely, if the Portuguese did find it first-a possibility raised by some apparently earlier maps used by the earliest Dutch and French explorers-the coasts they mapped included the southeast quadrant: the same area that the British settled following Cook's expedition.
I think these days, no Australian would dispute your theory. We were taught in school in some detail of the various sightings and landings dating from notably those of William Dampier and Dirk Harthog, well before Captain Cook's voyage. Although not documented as far as I am aware, it must be that the Chinese saw or visited the land mass when considereing their extensive connections in South East Asia in the preceeding centuries.
@@jasonhaven7170 Australia was literally 99.99% uninhabited you didn't even need to displace natives to settle most of it. Modern aboriginals claiming the entire continent when there were only abut 500k people in such a massive landmass is ridiculous
@@incognito-px3dz u are wrong abt that, there were so many 'nations' at that point in time, and aboriginals werent even considered humans. it was their home first and colonisers did a lot worse as time went on.
The amount of historical events that can be summed up with a person holding a sign that says 'Sounds pricey' is simultaneously insane and understandable
And is it a Moneymaker or not? Kelly didn't think so.
Fact
here before this blows up
How is it in any way "insane"? You guys overexaggerate everything.
true
Britian: Nah don't want it
"France wants it"
Britain: *NO ITS MINE*
“France can’t have nice thinks”
Every british foreign minister ever
And that's pretty much the story of New Zealand the the Treaty of Waitangi 1840
Australia specifically, or just in general?
Not you. NEVER you!
@MartinCraig-zt2sv how so? I always thought it was because they couldn't stop the maoris from attacking them in the north and they couldn't fight them very well in the forests but idk I did get told that from a Maori could be a case of biased storytelling haha
As a Romanian, I'm heartbroken by our lack of Australian empire.
I think the people of Romania should immediately come here and assert their claim, I'd back them for their cuisine alone.
@@jameslawrie3807
Aw, mate, wherever in Australia you are, bless you. That warmed me to my heart ❤️
To be fair we have thousands of bats in Australia.
Aaah ... we need a township called ... South Bucharest? ... Trans-Transylvania? 😊
@@andrewnewton2246you mean, in Australescu?
Fun Fact: when the Japanese started attacking the north of Australia in WWII, it was decided that should an invasion force actually land on our northern shores and try to make their way inland towards the major population centres on the east coast, Australian forces wouldn't bother fighting back. They would simply wait for the enemy to die in the deserts before ever making it that far on land. That's how big, & harsh, the Australian interior is.
Also the Japanese were 'allowed' to invade, because Hitler didn't want Australia, he only liked Tasmania, otherwise we'd be speaking German.
unsure how wonderful that strategery would have worked. japan was a naval power and would likely have fortified the northern coast, using them as bases to raid the major southeastern cities. japan would ignore perth and the west, except to bomb the crap out of the rails.
@@zimriel You know what, my comment above was based on something I learned in either late Primary School or early high school. I even remember seeing maps of Aust with big red lines across the continent. No further research was made before I offerred my comment. Having now researched it ("The Brisbane Line"), I've come to learn that it was all just political bullshit, missunderstanding of policy by the politicions of the day & manipulation / scare mongering of the Aust people for political gain. Clearly, nothing has changed in politics in 80 years, but I apologise for calling it "fact" or referring to it as actual policy.
"Gapho replied: "zimriel The straits between PNG and AUS wouldn't be crossable by carriers and destroyers, and the islands were already fortified before the bombing of Darwin."
I assumed the Torres would be fortified. I also assumed they wouldn't be fortified *very well*. Singapore showed how rotten WW2-era Britain's fortification schemes could get. And Japan's shallow-water game was pretty good, as shown in the Philippines.
It may be the Aussies were more-motivated than the Filipinos to defend their own (although the Filipinos proved valiant resistance fighters after-the-fact).
@@zimrielThe Philippines was an American colony, Filipinos were US nationals, and therefore the Philippines had no standing army. The US military in the Philippines was ill prepared, and Hawaii had been bombed which means no reinforcements. Douglas McArthur fled Manila to Australia. Filipinos had no choice but to surrender. This was an embarassment to the USA, and Filipinos as US nationals made them targets to the Japanese massacres.
It is worth noting that there is actually a lot of highly valuable mineral resources in Australia but serious prospecting didn't really occur until the British had already staked quite a strong claim. Melbourne was at one point the second richest city in the empire for a number of decades due to the immense amount of gold pouring out of north west Victoria.
Cash crops might have made America, fur made Canada, spices made Indonesia, oil made Saudi Arabia, but gold made Australia.
The other thing that makes America is the crazy good river network, which offers cheap transport
And sheep.
Cattle and sheep made Australia too, due to the flat, drier and grassy interior of the continent. Which allowed for a large number of farms to be built and settle.
@@victorsamsung2921 Obviously livestock mattered. We do not live in a world where a region can only produce one resource
@@DIY_Miracle Mmm, _lovestock._
Is nobody gonna talk about how he managed to fit Prussia's borders within Australia while simultaneously making it look nice?
No, we all agreed not to talk about it at the meeting you missed earlier.
@@Merennulli Oh, I see.
ok
@@Merennulli lol i have never heard that one before
nice
@@Merennulli That was a pretty sweet meeting, one of those 'had to be there' kinda moments. Excellent pastries too. Sure glad I didn't miss out on it, boy would I have felt like a loser.
I think it worked out pretty well.
Vary vary nice
Good
Great
👍
Great
Actually maps of Australia were not completed until the epic journeys of Matthew Flinders time. His maps were so good they were used into the 20th century in many places. Foreigners(non brittish) did not map the Australian coastline except in sections and they guessed the rest, even joining Australia to New Guinea and other countries on various maps. The coastline is so large it took Flinders decades to complete his task(albeit interrupted) in many cases sailing the coast in a small boat for thousands of kms(nautical miles i guess?🤔). Remember the Australian coastline is 34,000 kms. One of the great navigators of history
@@jasonbennett7002 mathew flinders was the first person to navigate the coast inshore. And Baudin did not map all of Australia. Im not sure he even sailed the whole coast did he?
They found his grave a few years ago when digging up an old cemetery to lay a new rail line. He was reinterred last summer in his home village.
Another fun fact is that Sweden under Gustav III were heavily interested in building colonies in India (built a factory a few miles south of Pondicherry before it got raided) and most importantly, Australia.
The king hired a Dutch-English explorer William Bolts to survey and settle near modern day Perth. However, the king and Sweden overall got struck with a sudden case of payback against Russia and the colonial venture got immediately cancelled.
Starting around 1638, Sweden had a colony on the Delaware River too, in North America. But they lost this New Sweden to the Dutch in 1655, who then lost it -- along with the rest of New Netherland -- to England in 1664. The Dutch captured both areas back in 1673, but lost them to England again in 1674.
In the years after, the former New Sweden was split off from New York (former New Netherlands) and partitioned between the colonies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. ...Which all became part of the newly-independent US from 1776/1783.
Its funny how the Mughal empire was India's last real chance of staying independent, as well as a great power. But I guess Indians never really desired unity unless its on their terms.
To be fair, the Maratha Empire before 1763 seemed like a good option too, but after said date it more less devolved into a confederacy of smaller states.
Marathas were never a good option. They were state based purely on raiding. Plus, it was a confederacy in which no one person had the real say in things. Every tribe of the confederacy wanted to dominate the state and it eventually fell to infighting. The Mughal empire on the otherhand, had an absolute monarch who was synonymous with the state itself. If only the later emperors were as competant as Aurangzeb or Akbar.
@@bakrahabibi5471 Probably becuase the mughals were incompetent ?. I think anyone, not just indians would desire a capable ruler like Shivaji who actually reformed instead of inbred monarchs who wanted to impose islam because "muh troo relijin"
If people back then knew just how resource-rich Australia was there absolutely would have been a scramble for it. Having 17% of the worlds gold and 30% of the worlds iron alone would have made it worth it.
We got a lot of Uranium too, though I guess it was just another weird rock to folk back then
The problem then, as now, is how remote and difficult to extract most of those resources are.
The one thing that amazes me is how Kerry Packer, the Australian mining millionaire used metal detecting technology, magnetic anomoly detection, from WW2 originally used to detect submarines to detect literal mountains of Iron ore in Australia. Another is that the worlds heaviest and longest trains are used to ship endless quantities of coal to seaports on the east coast for transhipment to Far East nations.
Don't they also have some of the most high quality coal, which made Chinas recent sanctions backfire?
@@mikkelrwyes
It's amazing how I didn't think of this topic, but the moment I realized "No empire rushed for Australia" I immediately rushed to see the video. Good job History Matters.
ok
*AS FAR* as I can tell, Australia is the only single-nation continent in recorded history. And I predict it won't remain that way.
Climate change is starting to affect resource and land availability.
Similarly, populations in Asia are putting increasing pressure on their resources.
Antarctica is gradually being colonized by China and other nations, even including Russia - which will mean an expansion of naval and commercial seafaring around our southern perimeter.
China is also expanding into the Pacific and pushing into Australia's traditional area of influence.
*I'D SAY* within 100-200 years someone will annex the northwest or west of Australia with the intention of claiming mineral resources, fishing rights, habitable land, and transforming arid areas into fertile territory for food production.
@@elrey8876honestly, I really doubt that. Reason being is America is already building up the military in Australia to prepare exactly for this to potentially happen. We have strong allyship with the British and Americans, they wouldn’t let another country take us just out of pride. Add in how little land is actually liveable here and global warming destroying a lot of it, it’s not worth it for any country to attempt it. At least not unless something big changes here.
@@elrey8876Western Australia ready have a history of trying to annex themselves from the mainland lol
In my EU4 game, having just won the protestant league as Denmark, i got a popup saying "Portuguese Australian Colonial nation formed" or something like that. It was 1604 lolz.
i appreciate that your videos aren't needlessly long, and always are straight to the point without repeating information constantly to hit an arbitrary length. hard to find nowadays on youtube, much appreciated - good work
There's just not a whole lot in Australia. It's mainly just mineral resources which were also usually abundant in Africa as well.
And with 99% of it being completely hostile to human life, there wasn't a lot of competition for it. Also I love how the Dutch were offered Western Australia. You know, the part (outside of Perth) that's almost completely uninhabited.
Hey, we British are generous. If it looks horrible, let someone else have it!
Mate, it's not 99% inhabitable, it's closer to 79% from what I've experienced living there all my life
Why didnt we ever keep it or get it lie wtf
@@tadcastertory1087 the south west Lion Cape has a good climate and fertile soils
God bless the kalbari reef for keeping the Dutch out
If you've ever been to Australia then you'll already know why there was never a scramble for it.
Pretty much that if it isn't shoreline, it's dry as hell.
And yet the Great Powers eventually scrambled for the Sahara.
Not to mention all the animals out to get you.
I mean, the french scrambled over sahara, the outback in comparison sounds positively pleasant
@@highgrounder5238 Probably since they already had interests in Algeria. Australia was a world away and France lacked naval power to go there
That Prussia in Australia at 2:15 is gold ngl
Under Prussia
Except that Prussia is like 6 times bigger than what it actually is
0:01 that first sign explains it all
As an Australian, the western and central parts of Australia are just big deserts however the eastern costal part (where I live) is very nice.
Please please do a video on the following subjects:
1. Why did the People's Revolution of 1848 fail in the Germanies and Spain?
2. Why do people drive on different sides of the road in different countries?
for #2 the answer is Napoleon
I second that!
I would also like to know why the ottomans didn’t participate in the napoleononic wars
@@Xris10BULthey did, when Napoleon invaded Egypt
@@dragostocai973 probably the most convenient one-word answer, my thanks. It’s pretty hard to live in the world where everyone would answer “Britain” instead 😁
I would widen by telling “Napoleon and long-range wagon trains in North America”
0:16 As a Romanian , I was really proud that the western part of Australia has been attributed to us !
Plot twist, it was the flag from chad.
Why? Are you proud to be a coloniser?
@@jasonhaven7170 Romania never colonised anyone. The comment was intended to be humourous.
I hate to say that there's not much in that portion of Australia. Mostly iron, some gold, some crocs, and a lot of people on meth. That's about it.
@@Banana_Split_Cream_Bunses you did... The dacians... And the vampires.
Prussia overlapped on Australia is one of those joke reference details i love this channel for (aside from, well, it being nice informative channel about interesting history)
Apparently New Zealand missed out on being a French colony by a matter of weeks. That would make an interesting video. :)
... and then France surrenders to the Maori and, today, Paris, Nice, and Marseilles speak Polynesian dialect instead of Arabic
@@zimriel Churr monsieur
@@zimriel The Great Maori Empire
Actually that was Australia, the British beat the French to botany bay
@@dirksegerius5No, the French tried to colonise the South Island of NZ too
“An ongoing event of freedom” 😂. This channel is great.
That headline looks like the ultimate blue herring
I love the description of the Revolutionary War as 'an ongoing event of freedom'
Meh, more like a difference in opinion on taxation.
That sounds like a great band name
@@maasro Well, we did want our right as British citizens to be represented to be respected, and they didn't, so I suppose it could be called that.
It depends how you describe it. I call it an illegal mutiny against their rightful king, but that's just my view.
@@Dave_Sisson
There is a such thing as a legal mutiny?
Once again, History Matters answers a question I’d never even thought to ask, and I love this channel for always posing and answering interesting questions.
Isn't Google just the greatest company ever? They give us our history, our search engine, our videos, our email, our browser, our education, our maps, our operating systems, and it's all 100% free. And now that they control the Internet they even cancel, censor, and demonetize anyone who goes against current political and social trends. We love you Google. Thank you for keeping us safe.
type Australia into wikipedia and get the rest of the facts
Anyone notice the single Australia-New Guinea landmass on the Dutch map? Turns out everyone ignored Luís Vaz de Torres, who sailed between them in 1606, for 150 years, while the Dutch sailed across the Torres strait without even noticing it was one.
It turns out that Australia and New Guinea share similar birdlife and plantlife. "Wallace Line". If you went to one cape and saw the same sort of thing as you saw on another cape, it was reasonable to assume they're the same landmass.
And yeah they used to be the same continent
It's a patchwork of islands. Biologists note that it's only a matter of time before a bat brings a virus across from Asia, by island hopping across Torres Strait. One of these could be Nipah Virus.
Australia was finally remembered by someone
And New Zealand remains ignored.
meanwhile in New Zealand:
@@andrewhopkins886 tf is a New Zealand stop making stuff up
@@bababababababa6124 I think it's this thing beyond Earth, said to be inhabited by mysterious beings who sees the earth in a 2D form.
@@edwinhuang9244 no way that’s actually real surely no one believes that
Insanely, Perth was founded before Melbourne and Adelaide were. This was before railways were used here (1829).
There were no settlements for thousands of kilometres (as the crow flies, sydney is more than 3,000km away).
It's a 4,100km sailing trip from Perth to Sydney. Prevailing westerly winds make the journey *relatively* quick from Perth to Sydney, but in the opposite direction it took forever to get back. It was far quicker to supply Perth from India than from Sydney.
Perth had very little to do with the rest of Australia until steam transport was invented.
Interesting thought that India supplies Perth more easily than Sydney does
Thank you 👍🏻
Albany was founded in 1826 as a military base prior to Perth & Fremantle.
@@89Djm That's dope, didn't know that, cheers.
Perth arguably still has little to do with the rest of Australia lol
@@planetdisco4821 thankfully, we don’t like them there westerners😂
Just one small comment. At the 1:53 mark you show the ship going along the south coast of the country and flags being planted at Adelaide, Melbourne, Tasmania.
But after Sydney and Parramatta, the next settlement was in Tasmania and then after that, Queensland, followed shortly after by Albany on the south coast of Western Australia and then Perth a couple of years later, then known as the Swan River Colony. What is now South Australia was one of the last parts of the country to be settled. So I know you probably did it for simplicity sake, but it makes the colonisation look different to how it actually played out.
Yeah i noticed that he left out Perth which is older than Melbourne and Adelaide
And why when they choose Queensland did they choose the Town of 1770 to land yet to this day it is a sleepy seaside twin town. And when Cook landed, where did Banks go with his men and where are those records of the sweetest sweet bread in the world! And the baker’s family remnants are where? No where to be seen. Everything the convicts built was already here. A forgotten (erased) civilisation.
And, bonus for S.A. it's the only state not first settled by convicts.
@@Tamaresque Neither was western Australia nor victoria I believe.
@@chriskostopoulos8142 the swan river colony was established 1829 but didnt receive convicts until 1842. so we didnt start as a penal colony but did eventually take in prisoners. south australia *never* received prisoners
2:09 I love how Germany just rises out of the sea
My great grandfather was one of those pesky krauts, a botanist working for the Kaiser in SA (South Australia during the 1880s. Although the east was settled by that point, much of SA was only claimed, and not settled. Even today, Australia is one of the least densily populated countries in the world, but it doesn't feel like it driving the M7 during peak hour.
It’s cos more than half of us live in 3 cities haha.
australia is literally the second least dense country in the world
they spent too much on immigrating half the world here and not enough on upgrading our cities so they can actually hold that many people comfortably
Me too, our great great etc grandfathers may have known each other
Australia is the one of the most urban countries in the world...irony hey.
Europa Universalis players know that it was the Mamluks and Brittany that actually colonized Australia
Ottomans always seem to like colonizing Australia in my playthroughs. Also they like swiping Taiwan from China.
Brittany .... is still the British !
The clue is in the name 😊
@@hachwarwickshire292 lmao , British as in Celtic peoples , the English are foreigners (Germanic )
For me always spain
Best animated history channel ever.
La Perouse landed in botany Bay 6 days after the first fleet in 1788.
Then sailed to the New Caledonia area and promptly got killed. The French did not find out for 20-30 years what was here. By then it was too late.
I always love how he talks about topics that most people had no idea even happen. Keep up the amazing work!
Fellow protogen
@@TheSilverCanine_R3D-H goober >:3
Nothing happened. That's the whole point.
Yet another great video from this channel I love it!
For a future video, maybe you should explore the "convict" angle of this a bit more. My understanding is that this crowd didn't consist of robbers and murderers as one might suspect, but rather of petty thieves and government critics and just generally poor people.
Yeah, a lot of the 18th century was pretty hard on England so you had a lot of petty theft, mostly of bread or occasionally of animals, just to keep people fed.
The government didn't really like this because obviously, and so rather than doing things to try to make all the theft unnecessary, they just dumped all involved in Australia, which... I guess sorta worked out in the end.
Laws were harsh in Britain at the time of early colonisation (earning the name "The Bloody Code") but then they were harsh everywhere in the world. Nobody today would ever want to live under the legal framework of that world!
The Georgian British just _really_ didn't like prisons. They thought the concept of lengthy incarceration was inhumane and brutal - and they had a point, 18th century prisons everywhere where horrible places. Cold, damp, rat infested flea pits that made people sick or insane. For serious crimes, execution was seen as a mercy and for lesser crimes, Transportation was seen as doing convicts a favour, sparing them the horrors of prison life.
Transportation was not normally forever. There'd be a term of years that would have to be spent in the colony, but at the end of that time they could travel back home if they so wished (and could stump the money to afford the ticket). Some did indeed return at the end of their sentence but many did just build whole new lives in their fated destinations.
The system of transportation withered away as the penal and justice system of the UK modernised in the Victorian period. By which time many were setting sail for those distant colonies willingly. I guess it made little sense to send someone somewhere for free as a punishment when others were selling their whole livelihoods to make the same journey! I don't know when Transportation stopped entirely but by the 1850s it was becoming a very rare sentence.
Fields of Athenry 🎵 🎶
You are correct. The international joke is that Australia was a land of English criminals. But all the murderers and rapists (in England) were hanged. But Britain wasn't in the habit of hanging people for stealing loaves of bread to feed their family, nor things like minor acts of fraud or stealing sheep or getting into an altercation with someone and getting caught. So yes, generally starving people at a time when there was zero welfare - even rich people who were down on their luck were often incarcerated - many of them educated tradespeople. So these are the sorts of people who were shipped off to Australia. Not heinous criminals. Among them, MANY Irish people (catholics) who were a disparaged minority in extremely protestant England and therefore were overrepresented in prisons.
ALSO - don't forget, to sail a whole bunch of prisoners there, you ALSO need naval officers (ie NOT prisoners but actual British officers with naval commissions), skilled sailors and shipmen, armed soldiers, various architects and builders, physicians, engineers and their wives and families. Many of the convicts themselves were also quite educated but just, for whatever historical reason, incarcerated.
Chartists were among the transported too. Some of their ideas found traction in the Australian colonies, though; the secret ballot was also known as the Australian ballot.
The Portuguese pre date the Netherlands, the earliest charted maps of the Australian coastline were done by the Portuguese.
Another great video. I am amazed how good these mini documentaries are informative and entertaining. Please keep up the good work.
Brit 1: Sir the French are showing interest in Australia again
Brit 2: *sigh* Build another settlement
Botany Bay was the initially selected site for what is now Sydney due to positive reports on it from Captain Cook, HOWEVER the new arrivals found Botany Bay unsatisfactory and moved north to what is now known as Sydney Harbour.
Americans commonly make this mistake in thinking that Botany Bay was the site of the first European settlement in Australia, most notably in the movie Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan
Botany Bay was the first site. It failed, THEN they moved to Sydney Harbour. 🤗
Botany Bay? Botany Bay?! Oh no!!
@@tepidtuna7450 Watson's Bay I believe. Don't blame them, it's lovely.
@sgu02nsc66 Well they sent them there with just the contents of a few cargo containers. Noone bothered to check on them.
@@ironfist7789 captain Kirk never bothered to check on their progress!
Many think that Australia was colonised by Britain but it was really James Bissinette that did all the hard work
With assistance from Kelly Moneymaker
Both the Dutch and the Portuguese were just around the corner on the island of Timor, but the Australian coast on the North of the continent didn't look very inviting, the region is still very scarcely populated until today. So they concentrated on their spice business with the tropical island North of Australia and never explored the much more inviting Southern and Southeastern coast.
Romanian Australia would’ve been a superpower
Free sarmale for every dead emu
What Romanian? Chadian! Chad was independent that time.
or they would have sent all the Gypsies there, like the UK did with convicts
Rosemary Poppa
@@mikloscsuvar6097chad wasnt even a country at the time.
Genuinely my favourite TH-cam channel
Even Lex Luthor asked to be given Australia when Zod took over.
At 0:50 you have a "mapped" coast on The Great Australian Bight and South Australia being mapped in "late 18th Century." This coastline was first mapped in 1802 by Matthew Flinders.
Only three years out.
Romanian Australia isn't real, it can't hurt you
0:16
A good summary…may have been worth mentioning that the reason Hobart was chosen as the 2nd place to set up a colony was due to finding out it was actually an island and not subject to the original claim…something that probably would have been seized upon by France after the Baudin expedition
something i don't get about early australian colonisation is where tf did this idea that you can claim entire islands if you just find it first come from? i've never seen anyone talk about that in any other context, where they'res a lot of islands that got partitioned in history
@@duskpede5146 St Martin is the most bonkers example. The French and the Dutch split 84 sq km between them. WHY
Because the Emus already colonized it...
Worth considering:
There was an agreement between Spain and Portugal brokered by the pope for a no conflict partition of unclaimed land. The demarcation line runs through Australia, and as Portugal is an ally of Britain from time immemorial the possible Portuguese claim was respected by the British who officially claimed only the Spanish side. Unofficial settlements followed on the Portuguese side to which Portugal did not object. The demarcation line set by the pope remains a state line of in modern Australia for that reason. 2:54
huh. thats a cool piece of trivia. do you have a source for it?
Ken oath.
@@duskpede5146 Kenneth McIntyre's 1977 book, The Secret Discovery of Australia; Portuguese ventures 200 years before Cook.
I've always heard about the convicts meme regarding Australia, but I hadn't considered that it also made colonizing the place less risky (since if they were lost, the govt wouldn't care).
Thanks for another great video.
The map of Prussia on Australia is an act of GENIUS!
As an Aussie this is a really good summary in under 3 mins 🎉
Video idea as a loyal Patreon supporter: Why was Finland 🇫🇮 given autonomy in the Russian Empire?
Would be great, +
UPD sheesh you really do ask this under every video? 🙄
You spam this every video
Bro just search it up yourself if you care so much. You ask this every time.
Finland and some of the Baltic regions were treated pretty well such as self governing cities. It was actually a common opinion at the time that Russia had freed the Baltics and Finland from Swedish imperialism so people weren’t in favor of ruling over them on bad terms which is why elites and traditional laws were very well integrated/ allowed. You could also consider that Russia wanted good relations and to keep them around to sort of treat Finland as a buffer state between them and Sweden. Similar to what China does with North Korea and keeping away SK and Japan. Things began to really fall apart with Polish uprising which is unfortunate since the Russian Empire didn’t even want the entirety of Poland anyways. They wanted mainly territories with cultural/language similarities.
Bet he's not even a patreon supporter
A moment of silence for all the people arriving in Australia without knowing how absolutely bonkers the wildlife was. Even the plants were racking up kill streaks.
Imagine wanting to willingly deal with an animal that is the embodiment of “Do you even lift bro?”
Koalas are scary
Every day is leg day bro... I only box for the leg cardio.
2:13 That's a weird sha... omg that's so clean
Your videos are amazing to watch
1:43 This border still partially exists today as the Queensland - Northern Territory border.
I really like watching these videos and pausing after the question to think about potential answers and with this video for example its really cool to see how it not only expands upon answers i had come up with but also provides ones that i didn't think of at all. Like i had the idea that if there was already a scramble for Africa it would seem like too much effort to just sail even further to somewhere without a guarantee of resources but watching this video i feel this is actually so much more detailed than the entirety of my Australian primary school teaching on the first settlers.
I read an account of a French person visiting early Sydney Town. Lots of interesting observations, visiting Manly etc, and noticing "the curious English habit of flogging".
You make really good videos!
Shout out to Boogalywoogalie & the Mcwhopper. They are the two names I always remember at the end of the video.
One important detail you didn't mention is that British settlement happened while the exploration of the continent was still ongoing so other European powers quite literally hadn't charted these places yet. Sydney was already a proper city by the time Australia was even confirmed to be a single landmass.
Poor Tasmania, you are not the only one to consider the place unaustralian, it's too cold, wet and mountainous to qualify as properly Australian.
Thankyou. I left the uk in 81 for sydney oz, still in sydney. Done loads of reading re oz since and aquiredva politics ba degree from a good oz uni.
You little 3 mon presentation here answered a question I never really consudred and it is an important one in understanding oz etc. Thanyou so much.
0:55 Botany Bay was also the name of the lost ship in Star Trek 2 wrath of Khan
It's almost as if there's a connection between the two...
Fun fact: Botany Bay was where the first fleet went, but they found it was lacking in fresh water (and not lacking in angry indigenous people), so they moved the fleet up to Sydney harbor instead.
Botany Bay today is home to a lot of industry, and runways for the international airport. Not very botanical.
There is still the national Park, but apart from that there's a lovely view of the shipping yard.
Because James Bisonette personally purchased it from the natives, then gave it to Britain as a present.
Too bleak to be funny... Unless you know nothing about the history of Australia I guess.
Nah it's funny
@@Susisidee Proving ignorance is bliss?
@@john2g1 na but he right tho, it's pretty funny
@@john2g1 Calm down emily.
Snakes. Spiders. Jellyfish. Sharks. Unspecified deadly animals that only love there.
I swear, imperial German colonial history can be summarized in two words “too late”
Yeah, both Germany and, while I am at it, Italy, unified as late as 1871; that's not even two centuries ago!
P.S. After the Napoleonic Wars, I think Prussia should have started a campaign, not unlike China's Age of the Warring States, where they focused on unifying all the German states whether through conquest or marriage; whichever was most convenient.
@@marlonmoncrieffe0728
'here they focused on unifying all the German states'
They did. That was the entire bedrock of politics in the German states throughout the 19th century with the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 being the deciding factor in which of the two most powerful German nations would rule over the rest.
To be fair, Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck fought a pretty courageous war in East Africa during the First World War, even surrendering after the armistice and once allied with the bees to to defeat Entente forces (the Battle of the Bees).
@@marlonmoncrieffe0728 Prussia did have a war with Austria Hungary over the German lands which is why it was only under Hitler in 1938 that Austria and Germany united , dunno about the German speaking portions of Switzerland
Great White Shark, Box jellyfish, trap-door spider, massive desert, forest fires where there isn't desert. I know this a short video but it really could have been even shorter.
As an Australian, I think it worked out pretty well.
Yeah the British get a lots of flack. But compared to some countries in the game we did get it pretty good
Um, the slaughtering and oppression of the Aboriginals?
As a Brit, I concur - it's good that there's people in the world with a similar sense of humour to us Brits :)
@@robtoe10 and also that we can laugh at ourselves as much as we laugh at each other
not for the abbos
Well the kids would certainly learn something from this . Would be great to see the adult version
The French did try to enter the Swan River (what is now modern Fremantle/Perth) but they couldn't get past the old sandbank at the entrance. The British on hearing this secretly sent Mitchell to investigate and with smaller craft got past the sandbank and found fresh water and pastoral land around the upper Swan suitable for a new colony which became Western Australia.
Fun Fact: As a result of the British originally only claiming 1/2 to 2/3 of the continent and calling it New South Wales, Western Australia was a completely separate colony and never part of NSW. WA only agreed to join in with the rest in 1900 just in time to become a state of the federation of the new nation of Australia which began on Jan 1, 1901. So, Australia choosing Jan 26 (1788) as its national public holiday in 1994 makes no historical sense whatsoever. The national day should be Jan 1, 1901.
Yes but everyone would still be hungover from New Years so they gave us a few weeks to sober up before hitting the piss again.
Perth wouldn't have worked by itself at the time, for the exact reason the French found.
There is a lack of natural harbours with freshwater supplies across the entire state.
Jan 26 is the most appropriate national day, as it is the date in 1788 when the future course for the entire landmass changed so much that it will be clearly visible in the fossil record.
In comparison, forming a federation between the colonies was just an administrative tweak 112 years later.
Australia Day on Jan 26 started in 1994? What was I doing on the twenty odd other Jan 26's that had occurred in my lifetime prior to that point?
@@HoratioFitzbastardThat 1994 comment makes me wonder if the OP is Australian or has ever visited Australia.
A Danish colony in southern Australia is a wild idea. But I guess it’s not much stranger than the Norwegian islands off of Antarctica.
Joh Bjelke-Petersen ended up ruling Queensland anyway
Plenty of Danish immigrants eventually made their way over and produced offspring and there's been a steady stream of Danish backpackers passing through for decades.
@@danidejaneiro8378 It’s not that much of a colonizing country, especially outside of the North Atlantic.
@@theknightswhosay - sorry I'm not sure how that relates to my comment.
@@danidejaneiro8378 it seemed like you were saying such a thing seemed realistic
Because no one wanted to mess with the emus
If Baudin actually survived after seeing Australia , and got back to see Napoleon things could've been different . Also 2 french ships landed in Port Jackson Bay a few days after the First Fleet had started camping but they disappeared in a storm heading home 1788 and were only re discovered in 2018. The Mutiny on the Bounty story had a very close encounter when the Royal Navy was sent to find the mutineers and missed their wreckage by weeks or ignored them
Some French sailors "stayed with" - can't think of how else to put it - with Tasmanians for about 6 months in the 1770s. An account I read said they both adopted some culinary practises of the other.
The image of Prussia’s outline being forced onto Australia will forever be burned into my mind.
As a Dutchman I wish there were more parts of the world that spoke Dutch
As a Russian who has learned some Dutch, ik vind dat geen mooie idee. Engels is het meest internationale taal, dat zou genoeg zijn voor germaanse taalen.
However, if the implication is that there should be a different demographic and/or migration policies in the Netherlands and Belgium, then sure, if that's in those countries' best interest.
Considering the genocide and slavery perpetrated by the Dutch, no thanks.
You should annex Flanders
AMERICANS use Dutch every day: COOKIE! BOSS! ORANGE! ....
@jarnodatema Sounds like something a Dutch coloniser would say are realising that the nature of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia left you bastards with 270 million less Dutch speakers haha
I Salute Romanian Australia 🇷🇴🇷🇴🇷🇴🇷🇴
Glory to Australia Românească
Can the Moldovans have a small space for musical entertainment? Your entries are kinda good, but somehow, the Moldovans are better.
@@Nikki-tx6kh the idea of Moldovans with didgeridoos scares me
@@donpollo3154 fun fact: carpathians have their own didgeridoos, look up *trembita/trâmbiță*
@@Nikki-tx6khhow about, no?
It would be interesting to know about the British encounters with the Australian salt water crocodile and the stories surrounding them. It's kind of like the 18th century meets the Cretaceous period. Sure it made for great fireside stories when they got back home, assuming they made it home.
Spain giving a try to Australia would be fun. Aussies have enough drunk fame to add sangria to the mix. But Kangaroo Paella sounds kinda dope.
Churro on the barbie
I was in a band called Kangaroo Paella once. We were a mariachi Men at Work cover band.
Wow, so they can do even more genocide and slavery?
@@Mrhalligan39
Did you sound kinda dope?
@@Mrhalligan39Must've sounded like Overkill.
0:10 It was actually Portugal in 1521/1524.
Spot on :)
From Timor they were aware of bird migrations south, but exploration was considered secret.
Also Britain was at its greatest relative industrial and naval strength in the 1815-1850 period, which is when the coastline of Australia was settled.
Fun fact: the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman discovered New Zealand as well as many other islands in that area in 1642, but he somehow managed to miss Australia entirely and Australia wouldn’t be discovered until 1770, 128 years after Abel discovered New Zealand.
Awesome video. I'm an Aussie and would love to know more about the British setting up colonies in places the French had shown interest in
As a Frenchman I can only remember Nicolas Baudin’s expediation from 1800 to 1803 to explore and map New South Wales and Tasmania, he met british explorer Matthew Flinders near Kangoroo Island, Flinders spoke French and Baudin spoke English, they talked and exchanged knowledges, and decided to name the place Encounter Bay
at 0:37, why the angels over the dutch east india company logo?
Probably because of all the crazy animals and insects down there. My cousin the Yowie is the most normal animal there
Bruh every continent has worse animals theres no tigers or wolfs or bears
@@kumardickshit1530Those continents don't have to deal with something that could murder you with venom every day
@@kumardickshit1530 Australia has giant saltwater crocodiles.
In actual fact, the American wilderness is far more dangerous than Australian countrysides, with far more deaths and injuries, by all metrics, annually.
It's a class misconception. Once more, the nation is as big as the US, minus Alaska, with a huge range of diverse climate zones.
this is how fast all informative videos should be - over in three minutes so I can get back to what I was doing.
Not sure why the Dutch went all the way to Australia for New Holland. There is one much closer in Lincolnshire in England. They could have used the North Sea ferry.
There's also a New York in Lincolnshire (population: 150) bearing no relation to the one in America though which as we know was previously named by the Dutch!
it was sort of accidental
It's weird they created also New Amsterdam (york) in the America's, while America is also in the Netherlands
I'm 6 Generation Australian.
The Portuguese discovered Australia . early Portuguese navigators were the first Europeans to sight Australia between 1521 and 1524, well before the arrival of Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon in 1606 on board the Duyfken
Was looking for this comment. The first europeans to discover the land down under were the Portuguese, I'm surprised the British narrator didn't know that as it's a well known fact in Europe.
@@wildspirit3182He also could have thrown in the fact that the dingo (an Asian dog-wolf hybrid) was left in Australia 7,000 years ago by Southeast Asian seafarers and coconut palms which are not native to Australia and require physical planting were found growing all along Australia's extreme northern coastlines. Southeast Asian seafarers (probably from Borneo) and possibly Polynesian seafarers visited Australia before Europeans without a doubt.
@@anthony.3614 Polynesians and asian nations definitely had contact thru trade with indigenous people down under, hence write I wrote "first" europeans. This is how the Portuguese navigators knew of its existence and possible routes for ships to safely sail.
The dingo theory is neither here nor there for me, they are very much at home here. Many use it as an argument to cull numbers but 7,000 years makes anything intrinsically part to the ecosystem.
Stating an organism as native or not discounts biological changes that have been happening since the dawn of time. Otherwise practically everything is foreign to where it is now.
I have observed coconuts self-seeding and growing naturally on their own along tropical shorelines without human intervention. By design they float across oceans on tides and plant themselves on tropical beaches. Sure they grow on masse the closer to the equator but inland is where planting is done by humans.
This is very debated and not accepted as fact as the evidence isn’t strong enough.
Not only found Portugal Australia first Portugal founded also found New Zealand first 😁
As an Australian, I valued this video and thank you for it.
Damn words about books podcast got the double shout out.
0:25 - "...by the Dutch, who named it New Holland, _after Holland back home."_
I have always wondered about this. 😐
🤦🏼♂️
Mate, it's a desert. Even today, nobody wants to live in the Outback except a few brave hearts.
Yeah, most of Australia's population lives along a strip across the eastern coast.
🤔 But I wonder now why Australia does not have a high-speed rail line stretching from Melbourne to Brisbane to Sydney...??
P.S. 🐑 By the way, have you ever visited the Israel-sized ANNA CATTLE STATION in the Outback?
@@marlonmoncrieffe0728 While it's most of Australia's people it still isn't a lot of people for a thousands miles of track.
@davidhouseman4328 I think that's part of the reason our internet speed is terrible aside from our incredibly old politicians who actually said Australians aren't ready for fast internet...
It's a long way to lay fibre optic cable. And there are so many tiny towns spread all over the place.
You realise Aboriginals exist? They were there before you and it's their land.
@jasonhaven7170 Where are you from yourself there, Jason?
It's the spiders mate, they're a daily problem for me here.
I am Australian and huntsmen spiders terrify me.
I love how most of this guys videos can be answered with “because Britain”
Actually the French landed in Sydney just a few days after the British had landed and claimed Botany Bay. They stayed for about six weeks to restock then departed. Relations were cordial with the British.
The Portuguese arguably found it first, but as it was in the Spanish half of the world, they swept it under the rug and kept moving.
Most of Australia was in the Portuguese "half" of the world. The line defined by the Treaty of Zaragoza in the 16th century put the central and western thirds (which the Dutch would map in the 17th century) in the Portuguese sphere and the eastern states (where Britain would found its colonies in the 18th century) in the Spanish sphere.
Strangely, if the Portuguese did find it first-a possibility raised by some apparently earlier maps used by the earliest Dutch and French explorers-the coasts they mapped included the southeast quadrant: the same area that the British settled following Cook's expedition.
I think these days, no Australian would dispute your theory. We were taught in school in some detail of the various sightings and landings dating from notably those of William Dampier and Dirk Harthog, well before Captain Cook's voyage. Although not documented as far as I am aware, it must be that the Chinese saw or visited the land mass when considereing their extensive connections in South East Asia in the preceeding centuries.
Romanian Australia is now something I need
Hoi4 is ur friend
@@royale7620more like eu4
You're hoping Romanians were genocidal colonisers?
@@jasonhaven7170 Australia was literally 99.99% uninhabited you didn't even need to displace natives to settle most of it. Modern aboriginals claiming the entire continent when there were only abut 500k people in such a massive landmass is ridiculous
@@incognito-px3dz u are wrong abt that, there were so many 'nations' at that point in time, and aboriginals werent even considered humans. it was their home first and colonisers did a lot worse as time went on.
Colonial Englishman : "It was also uninhabited... Hue hue hue"