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Answer

Who colonized Australia?

Oceania — the powers that ruled Australia, the dates, and what independence did and did not change.

In short

Who colonized Australia?

Britain. The British claimed the continent in 1770 and began penal settlement in 1788 under the legal fiction of terra nullius, which the High Court overturned only in 1992.

Australia was colonised on a legal claim that nobody lived there. Terra nullius made dispossession a matter of paperwork rather than conquest, and it stood as law until 1992.

World map showing imperial possessions and spheres of rule in 1914
A world map of imperial possessions in 1914, offered as global context only. It is a single snapshot: countries that became independent earlier, later occupations, disputed borders and differences between colonies and protectorates require the chronology below.Source — Wikimedia Commons

How rule changed in Australia

These periods describe different governing arrangements. The presence of a trading company, a military occupation and direct colonial government are not interchangeable; the notes preserve those distinctions where the record identifies them.

Political chronology

Rulers, periods and governing arrangements

PeriodRuler or administrationContext
for at least 65,000 yearsAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nationsSee the chronology and context below.
1788–1901British coloniesSee the chronology and context below.
since 1901Commonwealth of AustraliaSee the chronology and context below.

Periods may overlap where control differed by territory. A national independence date does not imply that every enclave or dependency changed status on that day.

At a glance

Key facts

Colonising powers
Britain
Independence
Federation 1901; full legal autonomy 1942/1986
Legal doctrine
Terra nullius — 'nobody's land' — for 204 years
Frontier killings
Mapped massacres number in the hundreds across the continent
Apology
Delivered by parliament in 2008

Chronology

Key dates

  1. 1788

    First Fleet arrives at Sydney Cove.

  2. 1824–31

    The Black War in Tasmania.

  3. 1838

    Myall Creek massacre; a rare colonial prosecution.

  4. 1901

    Federation, with the White Australia policy as founding legislation.

  5. 1910–70

    The Stolen Generations: child removal as state policy.

  6. 1992

    Mabo decision overturns terra nullius.

Context

What the record shows

Tasmania is the extreme case: the Black War of the 1820s and 30s and the removals that followed came close to destroying an entire island population.

Questions

Frequently asked

Who colonised Australia?
Britain, from the 1788 penal settlement at Sydney Cove.
What was terra nullius?
The legal doctrine that Australia belonged to no one before the British arrived, which allowed the Crown to claim sovereignty without treaty or purchase. It was overturned by the Mabo judgment in 1992.
Is Australia still a British colony?
No. It federated in 1901 and holds full legal autonomy, though the British monarch remains head of state.

Read on

Related in the archive

References

Sources — colonial Australia

  1. [1]Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552).
  2. [2]Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
  3. [3]Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (Monthly Review Press, 1971; English 1973).
  4. [4]Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
  5. [5]Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (Random House, 1991).
  6. [6]Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (Hurst, 2017).
  7. [7]Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005).
  8. [8]Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Wisconsin, 2009).
  9. [9]Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
  10. [10]Jürgen Zimmerer, "The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism", Patterns of Prejudice 39:2 (2005), on the German South-West Africa → Holocaust lineage.
  11. [11]Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1972).
  12. [12]Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Chapter 31 ("Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist").

All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.