The History of Australia refers to the history of the area and people of

the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding Indigenous and colonial

societies. Aboriginal Australians arrived on the Australian mainland by sea
from Maritime Southeast Asia between 40,000 and 70,000 years ago.
The artistic, musical and spiritual traditions they established are among the
longest surviving such traditions in human history.
The first known landing in Australia by Europeans was by Dutch
navigator Willem Janszoon in 1606. Twenty-nine other Dutch navigators
explored the western and southern coasts in the 17th century, and dubbed
the continent New Holland. Macassan trepangers visited Australia's
northern coasts after 1720, possibly earlier. Other European explorers
followed until, in 1770, Lieutenant James Cook charted the east coast
of Australiafor Great Britain and returned with accounts favouring
colonisation at Botany Bay (now in Sydney), New South Wales.
A First Fleet of British ships arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788 to
establish a penal colony, the first colony on the Australian mainland. In the
century that followed, the British established other colonies on the
continent, and European explorers ventured into its interior. Indigenous
Australians were greatly weakened and their numbers diminished by
introduced diseases and conflict with the colonists during this period.
Gold rushes and agricultural industries brought prosperity.
Autonomous parliamentary democracies began to be established
throughout the six British colonies from the mid-19th century. The colonies
voted by referendum to unite in a federation in 1901, and modern Australia
came into being. Australia fought on the side of Britain in the two world
wars and became a long-standing ally of the United States when
threatened by Imperial Japan during World War II. Trade with Asia
increased and a post-war immigration program received more than 6.5
million migrants from every continent. Supported by immigration of people
from more than 200 countries since the end of World War II, the population
increased to more than 23 million by 2014, and sustains the world's 12th
largest national economy.
Long before the ancient civilisations in the Middle East, Europe and the
Americas flourished, and more than 50,000 years before European,
Asian or Middle Eastern navigators recorded visits to the shores of  “the
Great South Land”, Australian Aborigines occupied this continent. Living
in harmony with the land, they developed a culture rich and complex in
its customs, religions and lifestyles, which was abruptly interrupted by
the arrival of the British in 1788 – the First Fleet, with a cargo of convicts.

Gold was discovered in the 1850s and a sudden influx of immigrants set
out to make their fortune. A similar boom of outlaws set out to relieve
them of it. Then, in 1901, the six quarrelling colonies became a nation.
Loyalty to the British Empire was tested in two world wars.

The history of Australia since World War II has been an up-and-down

saga – a rise to undreamed-of affluence in the 1950s and ’60s when the
wool prices boomed, followed by unexpected cracks in the great
suburban dream. Today the image of the country as a conservative,
Anglo-Saxon society somehow finding itself lost in Asia has been com-
pletely recast. But the road towards a cosmopolitan, liberal, middle-class
Australia has been tortuous. For a small country – population-wise – of
which it was said “nothing ever happens”, there has been a succession
of booms, recessions, political crises, wars, culture shocks and social
changes.