Going to Australia Trivia Quiz

Answer: 40,000-75,000 years ago

The exact date that the ancestors of the aboriginal people arrived in Australia is not known but there is a consensus that it was somewhere between 40-75,000 years ago when sea levels were lower and there was a land bridge between New Guinea and Australia.

There is further evidence that the Aborigines reached southern Western Australia and Tasmania (also connected by land bridge to the Australian mainland) at least 30,000 years ago. Whilst there were distinct aboriginal nations within the Australian land mass, Aborigines did not have a name for Australia.

They referred to the land and "Country" but no name. Today when visitors come to Australia they will be greeted with "Welcome to Country". This is out of respect for the first owners of Australia, and further, it is now customary to start any public meeting with an acknowledgement of the name of the aboriginal nation that occupied the land the meeting is held on and pay respects to the Aboriginal group and its past present and future elders. Note the Maori first inhabited what was to become New Zealand between 1250 and 1300, much later than the Aboriginal habitation of Australia.

Answer: 18 years

Captain James Cook discovered the east coast of Australia in 1770 and proclaimed New Holland for Great Britain. Up until 1782, Great Britain sent its many convicts to the USA but as the American War of Independence was coming to a close, America refused to accept any more convicts so Britain had to find another destination. Transportation to the recently discovered New Holland was the solution.

In 1788, 11 ships carrying a mixture of convicts and military personnel totalling around 1,500 arrived at Port Jackson (now Sydney) to start a new penal settlement.

It was a harsh time. There were between 315,000 and one million aborigines living on the continent at the time.

Answer: Adelaide and Melbourne

Whilst Sydney Cove was the initial penal colony, others were established which included Hobart Town (1803) and Moreton Bay (1824), which was to become Brisbane, in 1824. Perth was founded in 1829 in Western Australia by free settlers, but was not sustainable so asked for convicts.

New (free) settlers from about 1815 arrived in Sydney from Britain and Ireland and new lands were developed for farming. It took an eight month voyage to get there but this did not deter settlers who were attracted by the prospect of making a new life from almost free land. Some settlers occupied land without authority and became known as 'squatters' who eventually became the basis of an influential landowning class.

Adelaide in 1836 and Melbourne in 1839 were only settled by free settlers, Adelaide people in particular will remind you that they are not descended from convicts whereas people who in live in Brisbane and Sydney will just as proudly boast that they were descended from convicts. Convict transportation stopped altogether in 1868, though it had been slowed for several years before. When it stopped, approximately 165,000 people had entered Australia as convicts.

Answer: Gold was discovered in New South Wales and Victoria

The discovery of gold at Bathurst in NSW and Bendigo and Ballarat in Victoria in 1851 pre-empted an Australian Gold Rush. (Actually gold was discovered before this time but the NSW colonial government kept it quiet. When they saw what happened in California two years before, where many people emigrated from Australia to try their luck in California, the government reversed its position and actually offered rewards for finding gold) An estimated two per cent of Great Britain emigrated to New South Wales and the newly formed colony of Victoria during the 1850s. As well there were also a significant number of Europeans, North Americans and Chinese. When it became a colony in 1851 Victoria had 77,300 people. Within 10 years that figure had reached 538 000 making it the biggest colony.

Queensland formed a new colony in 1859. Gold was discovered there near Gympie in 1867 and saved a bankrupt government. Gold was found in Coolgardie in 1892 and Kalgoorlie in 1893; both contributed significantly to the Western Australia economy.

As well as the 'uncontrolled' immigration of people to the gold fields, several colonies funded the immigration of skilled immigrants from Europe. This was how South Australia's wine-making industry started with the importation of Prussian immigrants. Colonial governments were finding that they needed to offer financial incentives as the passage to Australian was much more expensive than to the US, Canada or Argentina.

Answer: The White Australia Policy

In the new colony there was a great deal of resistance to the large Chinese presence in Australia due to the gold rush and also to the indentured workers from New Caledonia imported to provide labour for the Queensland sugar industry. This policy (though never officially known by its common moniker), included the exclusion of all non-European people from immigrating into Australia.

This remained the official policy of all Australian governments and all major political parties in Australia from the 1890s to the 1950s.

It started to be dismantled after WWII but it was not totally revoked until legislation was brought in to repeal it in 1973.

Answer: Darwin and Broome were bombed

During WWII the Japanese advanced down the Malay Peninsula and captured Singapore. This caused Australia to believe that the Japanese were going to invade Australia. Both Broome and Darwin in the far north of the country were bombed. However the Japanese were not going to Australia as they had no plans to invade Australia but to isolate Australia from the US by capturing New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Samoa and New Caledonia.

Mr Curtin stated in a speech soon after his election in October in December 1941 "that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom". In February 1942 the US and British Governments agreed that Australia align with the US and would "become a strategic responsibility of the United States". The American involvement in the Battle of the Coral Sea thwarted the Japanese plan and Australia has been a strong ally ever since. The invasion scare left 7.5 million Australians with a sense of vulnerability of threatened invasion from the populous north. This led to a series of policies under the popular saying of "Populate or perish". Australia was about to undertake a huge immigration influx.

Answer: Greeks and Italians

In 1948, the Australian parliament legislated to create Australian citizenship. Previously all Australians were British subjects. Australia still sought British migrants in preference to other nationalities. The assisted passage scheme (known as the "Ten Pound Pom" (the cost to the migrant for their ticket)) commenced in the late 1940s and ran for 25 years. Australian attitudes undertook a significant change to migration.

This was the start of multiculturalism. A national poll taken in 1943 determined nearly 40 per cent of Australians supported "unlimited immigration".

This was due partly to a critical labour shortage. Australia took 12,000 migrants from Poland and the three Baltic States as war refugees so the White Australia policy was partially dismantled to allow other European immigration including the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Spain and West Germany. Notably, people from behind the Iron Curtain were not permitted to emigrate.

The largest national groups of arrivals after the British were the Italians and Greeks.

This lasted until the early 70s. In this 25 year period Australia had double digit population growth increasing the population from 7.5 million to 12 million in 1971. Massive infrastructure projects like the Snowy Mountains scheme were implemented to provide jobs for migrants.

Answer: Racial discrimination was made illegal

While the Harold Holt government had started to dismantle the White Australia Policy in 1966, the incoming Whitlam government killed it off entirely with two pieces of legislation: in 1973, Mr Whitlam's government changed the law to allow all migrants "regardless of race or ethnicity to apply for Australian citizenship after three years of residence"; and in 1975 racial discrimination was made illegal. Immigration saw a swing towards Humanitarian intakes, initially from Mediterranean countries undergoing civil war: Lebanon and Cyprus.

This was followed by 80,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian migrants trying to escape civil wars in their respective homeland. Over 2,000 of these landed by boats on Australian shores but the majority of the 80,000 came by air after they were 'processed' by Australian immigration officials mostly at refugee camps in Malaysia and Thailand.

Answer: Many asylum seekers arrived by boats run by "People smugglers"

Towards the turn of the century, increased numbers of asylum seekers fled conflict in the Middle East and Sri Lanka and arrived in Australia by boat. These journeys were 'unauthorised' and nearly always organised by people smugglers who took these people often on unseaworthy boats and 'dropped them off' in Australia. Australia's government came down on what it called "unauthorised" arrivals.

It created offshore detention programs to deter asylum seekers. These policies were criticised by the United Nations and other human rights groups, but the "stop the boats" policy has always had strong bipartisan support.

The numbers involved in this activity are small but news coverage tens to overshadow the larger 'legitimate' immigration programs.

Answer: 6.5 million

Less newsworthy but in greater number are 'routine' immigration policies that facilitate 150,000 to 250,000 permanent new arrivals every year. These numbers tend to include skilled and professional people or people capable of creating business opportunities. Most immigrants tend to come from Asian countries. Additionally the humanitarian intake has been approximately 11-14,000 a year since the mid-1980s including a special intake of 12,000 Syrians in 2015 due to the internal war there. Those 6.5 million post-WWII migrants came from over 190 countries.

It appears that everyone is 'Going to Australia'.