Waves of Plenty: Immigration and the Making of Australia by Mark Cully is, so far as I am aware, the only migration history to cover the subject’s whole history, from the earliest to the latest arrivals on the Australian continent. It discusses in detail six key decades of change. Recurring themes through the historical chapters are treated more analytically in concluding chapters.

The first migrations

The first migration occurs tens of thousands of years ago, when the ancestors of today’s Indigenous or ‘First Nations’ population arrive on the land that became Australia. As Cully notes, over thousands of years they then migrated across the vast continent. Rising sea levels stopped further overseas migration for millennia.

Once long-distance sea travel became possible, no peoples isolated by ocean were entirely safe from unwelcome arrivals (Cully the economist is alert to how technology and cost affect people movement). To the Indigenous peoples the next wave of arrivals, the British from 1788, were invaders. But the British and then the Australians also worried about invasion, from France, Russia, and later Japan. Fear of future invasion contributed to ‘populate or perish’ migration after WW2.

Coercion was central to the early decades of colonisation. The British took Indigenous land and populated it with transported criminals, the convicts, and their guards.

Continue reading “Waves of Plenty – notes on Mark Cully’s history of migration to Australia” →