Thursday, July 7, 2016

How can I describe the rise of the English Empire in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Australia?

The first records of English explorers arriving to the Australia/New Zealand region are from 1606; they referred to the huge unknown southern landmass as Terra Australis Incognita, which means "unknown southern landmass"---but the name Australia stuck.

(Aotearoa is simply the Maori name for New Zealand, originally the Maori name for the north island but later expanded to the whole country. I'm more used to calling it New Zealand, so that's what I'll use.)

New Zealand was first reported by European sources in 1642, by Abel Tasman, for whom Tasmania is named. It is rumored he was actually looking for this mysterious Terra Australis Incognita but got lost.

By that time, Aborigine people in Australia and Maori people in New Zealand had already been living there for thousands of years, having migrated ultimately from Southeast Asia roughly 70,000 years ago.

Several different European nations explored the region, mainly with trading vessels en route to China; but no one officially claimed Australia until 1770, when Lieutenant James Cook claimed the entire continent for England. (Yes, apparently, one can just do that. Eddie Izzard has a hilarious routine about this: "Do you have a flag?")

English colonists did not begin arriving in Australia until 1788, when Captain Arthur Phillip established a colony of about 1,000 people near what would ultimately become Sydney. The initial colonization efforts were not very successful, and carried a very high death rate (the Second Fleet was particularly ill-fated and became known as the "Death Fleet"). As a result, England's government decided that Australia was unsuitable for conventional colonization and instead made New South Wales a penal colony---that is, a gigantic prison for incorrigible criminals.

Meanwhile, New Zealand was claimed in 1779, and mainly colonized by hunters of whales and seals as well as missionaries hoping to convert the Maori to Christianity.

New South Wales remained a penal colony until 1823, and thus its initial population mainly was comprised of convicts and soldiers and their families. Then at last it became a free colony of the British Empire.


New Zealand did not become officially a British colony until 1840 with the Treaty of Waitangi, after which British colonists became much more plentiful and conflicts with the Maori that had previously been relatively minor became much more violent.

In 1854, New Zealand became a Commonwealth of the British Empire. Today it is widely regarded as an independent country, though there is no clear date at which this occurred. New Zealand's Parliament was simply ceded more and more power over governance of the country, so that under common law it is now regarded as an independent nation.

Australia took a bit longer to assemble. Western Australia was established in 1827, followed by South Australia in 1836, Victoria in 1851, and Queensland in 1859. Australia officially became its own Commonwealth in 1901 and has been largely independent ever since, though it remains officially under the British Crown.

Being almost diametrically opposite the UK on the globe, Australia and New Zealand were a major part of why the sun never set on the British Empire.

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