James Cook did not sail to Australia's east coast until one hundred and fifty years later, in 1770, and immediately declared it English. Here was created a royal "penal colony" for criminal offenders, and later - for exiled members of the chartist movement in England.
Arriving in 1788 with the "first fleet" to the shores of Australia, the British authorities founded the city of Sydney, which was later proclaimed the administrative center of the British colony of New South Wales, established in 1824.
With the arrival of the "second fleet" and the first free immigrants appeared. The development, or rather the capture of the mainland, began, accompanied by the most brutal extermination of the indigenous population. Aborigines were hunted, and bonuses were given for the killed. Often the colonists organized real raids on indigenous Australians, killing them without distinction of sex and age, scattered poisoned food, after which people died in terrible agony. Not surprisingly, one hundred years later, the majority of the indigenous population was exterminated. The remaining Aboriginal people had been driven from their ancestral lands and pushed into the interior desert areas. In 1827, England declared its sovereignty over the entire continent.
The end of the 18th century and the entire 19th century was a time of discovery for Australia. In 1797, a talented English hydrographer, M. Flinders, began to explore the continent's shores, whose work is estimated by Australian geographers to be as high as Cook's discoveries.
He confirmed the existence of the Strait of Bass, explored the shores of Tasmania and South Australia, the entire eastern and northern coasts of the continent, and mapped the Great Barrier Reef. Flinders, on the other hand, proposed to give the continent the name "Australia", replacing the previous designation on the maps of New Holland, which was finally superseded in 1824.
By the 19th century, the contours of the mainland were mostly mapped, but the interior was still a "white spot". The first attempt to penetrate Australia was made in 1813 by an expedition of British colonists, who discovered a passage through the Blue Mountains and discovered magnificent pastures west of the Great Dividing Range. The "land fever" began, with a flood of free settlers in Australia taking over large areas of land where they set up sheep farms of thousands of people. This land grabbing was called "squattering".
Prospector parties moved further west, south and north, crossing the Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers. In 1840 P. Strzelecki in the Australian Alps opened the highest peak of the continent, which he named Kosciuszko mountain in honor of the national hero of Poland.
At the very beginning of the 19th century, a penal colony was founded in Tasmania, and free settlers appeared on the island later, only in the 1920s, and at the same time, destructive campaigns against the Tasmanians began.
The period of discovery in Tasmania lasted until 1843. By this time, not only the coastline, but also the central areas were explored, work began on a continuous large-scale survey of the territory, and in the 70's on the island found large deposits of tin, gold and rare metals.
The first settlers to arrive in Australia did not find anything similar to the landscapes of England. They did not perceive the beauty of malga (acacia bushes), nor the splendor of eucalyptus forests. The colonists did their best to make the landscapes they entered look as similar as possible to England's parks and pastures.
Until the middle of the 19th century, the development of Australia's territories was slow. The puppies, who arrived with the first ships, brought with them seeds and seedlings of plants, which began to grow on poor sandy soils around the first settlement on the site of modern Sydney. Agriculture was slash-and-burn, and no organic fertilizer was used because there was no cattle. During the year, two crops were harvested - wheat and corn - when the crops fell, the plot was thrown over.
From 1850 to 1914, Australian farmers developed the best lands on the continent. The most fertile soils were almost entirely occupied by wheat, and sugar cane was cultivated to the north, on alluvial plains near the tropic of Capricorn.
At the same time, pastoralism began to advance into the hinterland of Australia.
An important frontier in the development of the country was the middle of the last century, when gold was found in several places at once - first in the states of Victoria and New Wales, and then in Western Australia. At this time, the Australian land is being flooded with settlers, mainly British and Irish.
Golden fever and the spread of extensive sheep farming over large areas of land have led to rapid economic growth, population growth and the establishment of colonies.
Between 1873 and 1883, the colonies negotiated the establishment of a federation, which by 1889 had culminated in the drafting of a constitution.
to be continued in the next part https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d6435c91e8e3f00adf4ec97/australia-part-3-5d91300ee6cb9b00ad469a00