Commonwealth of Australia

One note on the map before anything else: the border data begins in 1905, not 1901. That is a sampling artefact — the dataset has no epoch for 1901–04 — and the entry covers federation onwards.

At a glance

How did federation happen?

Through committees and a referendum campaign. The six colonies — New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania — had been self-governing since the 1850s and 1890s, and they federated after a series of conventions, a draft constitution and referendums in each colony. The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act was passed by the British Parliament and came into force on 1 January 1901.

It created a federal government with enumerated powers, a Senate in which each state has equal representation, and a High Court; the states kept everything else. The constitution also assumed that Australia was a white country, and the first parliament made that explicit.

What was the White Australia Policy?

The defining policy of the first half-century. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 excluded non-European migrants, using a fifty-word dictation test in any European language chosen by the officer — a device designed to be arbitrary and to keep out Asians, Africans and Pacific Islanders. It was progressively dismantled after 1949 and formally ended in 1958, and the last racial restrictions were removed in the 1970s.

The policy shaped the country's demography, its labour movement and its sense of itself. It also shaped its foreign policy: a nation that excluded Asia had to be defended by a great power, first Britain and then the United States.

What did the wars do?

They made Australia a nation and then turned it towards America. In the First World War, 416,809 Australians enlisted and some 60,000 died; the landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 — 26,111 casualties, 8,141 dead — became the country's founding myth. Two conscription referendums were defeated, in 1916 and 1917, splitting the Labor Party.

In the Second World War, the fall of Singapore in February 1942 and the bombing of Darwin shattered the assumption that Britain could protect Australia. John Curtin's statement of 27 December 1941 — that Australia looked to America, "free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom" — marked the shift. Australian forces fought in New Guinea, North Africa and the Pacific, and the country became an American ally for the rest of the century. It also administered the territory that became Papua New Guinea until 1975, and it has led the regional missions in Solomon Islands.

When did Australia become fully independent?

Gradually. The Statute of Westminster 1931 ended the British Parliament's power to legislate for the dominions, but Australia did not adopt it until 1942, backdated to 3 September 1939, so that the declaration of war would be its own. Appeals to the Privy Council were abolished in stages, ending in 1986; the Australia Acts of that year severed the remaining constitutional links; and the Constitution Act 1986 gave the states their own independent status.

The monarch remained head of state, and the 1999 referendum on a republic was defeated, 54.87 per cent to 45.13. The constitutional question is therefore unresolved rather than settled.

What changed after the war?

Immigration, and the end of the racial exclusion. The postwar programme brought millions of Europeans — British, then Italian, Greek, Dutch, German, Yugoslav — and transformed the cities; the end of the White Australia Policy in 1958 and the arrival of Vietnamese refugees after 1975 made the country Asian as well as European.

The 1967 referendum removed the constitutional provisions that excluded Aboriginal people from the census and allowed the Commonwealth to legislate for them; it passed with 90.77 per cent support. It did not give Aboriginal people the vote — they already had it — which is one of the most persistent myths about the referendum.

What about Indigenous Australia?

Dispossession, then a slow and contested recognition. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were dispossessed of their land by pastoral expansion, killed in frontier violence, and subjected to protection and assimilation policies that removed children from their families. The Mabo decision of 1992 overturned the doctrine of terra nullius, and the Native Title Act of 1993 created a legal process for claiming land.

The 2008 apology by Kevin Rudd acknowledged the Stolen Generations; the Uluru Statement from the Heart of 2017 asked for a Voice to Parliament, and the referendum of October 2023 was defeated, 60.06 per cent to 39.94. The gap in health, incarceration and life expectancy remains the country's most serious domestic failure.

What is Australia now?

A resource economy with a services sector, a middle power allied to the United States, and a society of 26 million people in which a third were born overseas or have a parent who was. Its politics turn on climate, housing, the cost of living and the unresolved question of Indigenous recognition.

Common myths about Australia

Timeline of Australia

What the map shows next

At 1965 on the map Australia is a postwar immigration society, and New Zealand is its closest ally.

At 2024 on the map the Voice has been defeated, and the Solomon Islands looks to Canberra again.