The History of Australia

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

-Paul Theroux

            There are some out there who would tell you that a man who goes to a fancy gala, only to get drunk, loud, and abusive to those around him (both verbally and physically), could never be consider ‘of class.’ They will tell you that there is no possible way that such a loathsome boar could ever be in a position of respect, and should be disregarded completely, if one wishes to preserve their own esteemed social status. These people are idiots. They fail to realize that the man described IS classy, he is simply out of his natural element- and that element is Australia. I say this because there are some of you who are familiar with The Great Down Under, and therefore may be a bit perplexed as to why I’ve come to the conclusion that it is indeed, extremely classy. Don’t get me wrong, Australia is populated by the offspring of criminals, its wildlife seem to have been designed by God for the sole purpose of murder, and if there is a reason that all the continents split apart, it’s probably because all the continents were scared shitless of Australia, and wanted to get the fuck away from it as soon as possible. But think about it: there are those who try to be, ‘that guy,’ and then there are those who are just born to be ‘that guy,’ and whatever complaints you may have about them, you have to admit, nobody could do it quite like them.

John Belushi, Ladies and Gentlemen

My friends, of all the world, Australia is most certainly, ‘that guy,’ and, well, that’s pretty fuckin’ classy in my book. In the hopes that you agree, allow me to finally put this all behind us, and move onto the REAL reason you’re reading this: to find out the story of Australia, the world’s manly, obnoxious, kangaroo-infested testicles. Much like the Americas, before it was colonized, Australia was home to a whole bunch of different  Aborigines, tribes of ‘uncivilized’ people, who lived off of the land, and first settled in the continent approximately 50,000 years ago from South East Asia. The Aboriginal people were very separated, however, as they spoke numerous different languages, with about 250 different recorded tongues by the time the British populated Sydney Cove. This can be attributed, however, to the world the people were living in- it was every man for himself in early Australia, you couldn’t trust anyone or anything. One second you could be resting your head on an oddly shaped rock, next second you could be fighting a vicious rock-shaped armadillo-spider that shot poison from it eyes. Surviving day to day in Australia was a lot like waking up each morning to fist-fight nature, and the fact that so many survived using simple technologies like spears and rocks (real rocks, not the poisonous kind), is a testament to how impossibly bad-ass and hardcore the Aboriginal people were. That is, until, Europe showed up.

"Hmmm... spacious, fertile, pre-inhabited... alright, I'll take it! Now get out."

Australia was first discovered by a famous Dutchman, Willem Janszoon, in 1606, who came to the land on his rather sissily named boat, the Duyfken, or, in regular people speak, the Little Dove. Proving that you can’t judge a book by it’s dainty, pink colored cover, Janszoon proved to be hard enough to actually meet with the Aboriginal people, the first person in the world to achieve such a feat. Still, Janszoon, and the few other explorers of Australia, only managed to chart small sections of the continent; it wasn't until Abel Tasman showed up that any real shit got done. Another Dutchman, Tasman made his first journey down under in 1644, and quickly came to the (rather obvious) conclusion that Australia was made up of fours coasts, a North, a South, an East, and a West, a discovery that made him so famous that the Australian state of Tasmania was named after him. Despite the fact that the Dutch had basically done all the work discovering it, and along with the Spanish and Portuguese, had done all the settling there for about 100 years, when the Brits showed up in 1770, they claimed the whole continent for themselves, calling it New South Wales, because as history has taught us, not only does England love to just claim other's work for their own, they're really just evil geniuses at thinking up creative names- think about it (New South Wales- NSW). I imagine there was a little fuss about the whole thing by the Dutch, but whatever arguments they had probs sucked anyway, seeing as how all the British were really doing was stealing the land that the Dutch were stealing from the Aborigines, which is like a bully complaining to a bigger bully about how the bigger bully was taking the lunch money from the kid the smaller bully usually beat up for lunch money. Either way, the Aborigines didn't really have a say in the manner, since they were 'uncivilized,' and therefore not considered people by Europe, all their kick-ass survival instincts rendered useless by the fact that they didn't wear silly powdered wigs.

Could YOU tell the difference?

The worst part is that the Brits didn't even really want the place, when Captain Cook (he was British, as if the name didn’t give it away) first landed on Australia (or South Narwhale or whatever silly name they gave it), he immediately realized that the land of Australia was like natures minefield, and sending civilized people there was akin to sending people to their deaths- Britain was caught in a conundrum. They couldn't colonize their new land with wimpy settlers, because they'd probs be mauled to death in a week, they couldn't sell the land to the Dutch, because the Dutch would probs rename it something really dumb, and silly, and there was no way in hell they could give it back to the Aborigines (because fuck half a million people who didn't do anything wrong). So in 1788, England set up a penal colony in Port Jackson, and sent all their criminals to Australia, where they'd either be tough enough to survive the place, or just kill each other off over time, hopefully taking a few hundred or so Aboriginal people with them while they were at it.

I swear, I've heard a plan just like this somewhere else...

Either way, that was two problems solved with one move, and England could get back to wearing silly hats, and dealing with those silly upstart rebels in America. On January 26, 1788, the first 1500 British settlers, about half of them convicts, landed on the coast, and created the first Australian colony, as well as what is now known as Australia Day, basically like American Thanksgiving and Fourth of July rolled into one, which is pretty sweet. An interesting side-note, however, it is generally agreed by all historians that the whole event would have been a lot more epic if halfway through their long-ass voyage, the prisoners had pulled a con-air, which, for all the colonists involved, would probs have been a better alternative than actually making it to Australia, where their very presence immediately fucked up the entire ecosystem. You see, because Britain and Australia are a good kajillion miles apart from each other or so, the Aussies had never suffered the same sicknesses and colds that so many Europeans suffered for centuries, so when the British arrived, nice and ill from their stuffy, unhealthy, sea voyage, they weren’t exactly in the best of shape to begin with. Soon, the germs started to spread, and when it reached the Aborigines, who had no immune system to the stuff, the people started to drop like flies the second they got the sniffles.

A light cough you say? I'm afraid we'll have to put you down.

Still, hundreds of settlers would ship in all the time, boat by boat, fleet by fleet, forming six different colonies in the process. It is important to note the reason they came though, it would have to be something pretty special after all, if they were willing to endure living with hundreds of prisoners, the deadliest plants and animals ever known to man, as well as the growing number of Aboriginal corpses struck by the common cold- gold. Due to the fact that the Aborigines had been too busy spending their years in Australia trying not to be punched to death by kangaroos, the vast surplus of precious minerals present in the land had remained relatively untouched, inciting thousands of Europeans to throw their entire lives away to go jones-in’ for some gold. In between being reckless greedy lunatics, however, the people managed to find the time to start rebelling against the crown, like the Americans, creating several different new states, such as Victoria, Queensland (oh the irony), Tasmania, as well as Western and South Australia. It was around this time, 1860, that England finally stopped sending convicts over, more than likely not for the reasons you would suspect (such as the fact that the idea of creating an entire continent of criminals is INSANE), but because the costs of shipping were getting too high, and they didn’t need to populate the place anymore than it already was- by 1860 approximately 160,000 convicts had been sailed to Australia. Also the convicts they had been sending ended up doing crazy shit like this. Settlers would also stop coming to Australia around this time, as the gold was beginning to dry up, and living next to a motherfucking army of convicted felons just isn’t worth it sometimes. As the money dried up, so did the trade, and soon a harsh depression struck the land.

He's part of the 99%- The 99% who haven't been mauled by a dingo, that is.

It went on for several more years until all the Australian states finally just threw up their hands and said “Fuck it, let’s work together.” And so, in 1901, the Federal Commonwealth of Australia was formed to pool together profits, keep stricter control over the economic market, enforce their silly accent, and try to keep track of the population, which was looking pretty grim at the time. There were about 4 million non-indigenous living in Australia in 1901, the indigenous population being somewhere around only 93,000- compare that to 100 years earlier when the population of Aborigines was 300,000, and you begin to see why it was also in the 20th century that the Aussies finally decided to lend a helping hand to the guys who’d been saving their spots in the continent since 500,000 BC. The only problem was that their idea of a ‘helping hand,’ was like Hitler trying to help the world by eradicating the Jews- okay not exactly that bad, but still pretty shitty. Believing that all the Aborigine people wanted was to be civilized, the Australian gov’t tried to help keep them healthy by segregating them from regular Aussies, and later assimilate them by taking away all their rights as people in return for property that they didn’t ask for, and when you think about it, the gov’t had no right to give away.

Here, have some dirt. Now don't go spending it all in one place you scamp!

And while all this was going on, the World Wars were starting, with many young Australian men jumping into the action, expecting the war not to be any harder than the daily dingo wrestling match, believing that they’d be home by Christmas. In a way they were right, fighting war is like wrestling a dingo- if the dingo was armed with a gun and mustard gas. Of the 400,000 that signed up for war in 1914, a good 60,000 were killed in action, another good portion left crippled and wounded. Still, the bravery the Aussies showed in war was a great pride point to them, so much so that there is actually a day in Australia known as Anzac day, when the surviving soldiers from the first World War would gather together and reminisce about the most devastating war of their youth. The Aussies fought with the Allies in the second World War as well, with the bonus that the war was used as a chance by the gov’t to make political connections with other countries, so they could maybe add more friends to their Facebook page, like the US, and China. After the wars, Australia enjoyed many years of prosperity and progress- the Aborigine were finally respected as actual human beings (that really shouldn't have to be an achievement), they managed to channel all their violence into football (not football as in soccer, I mean football as in motherfucking FOOTBALL [or as they would call it, Grid Iron, which really should be the international name for the game anyway, much less confusing, also a bit more hard as balls]) international trade bolstered the Australian market, and helped attribute to their growing culture, funding such projects as the Sydney Opera House, which, while it is absolutely brilliant, was like building a jewelery store in the middle of a battlefield.

By day it is an opera house, by night- IT. IS. THUNDERDOME.

Australian culture was especially relevant to American Hollywood, where a period grew during the 60's and 70's of filmmakers and screenwriters buying Australian films and scripts, to sell to the American audience. This system did have it's flaws however, like when a large US film company, who shall remain nameless, bought the home videos of an Australian police officer named Mel Gibson, who's name they also misspelled, calling the series of 'movies,' he starred in, 'Mad Max.' In fact, it was because of this mistake that Mel Gibson decided to become an actor in the first place, despite suffering from a serious mental disease, known as being an insane little bigoty cunt-face. Many other Australians have reached world wide fame as well, such as Steve Irwin's accent, which was taken from us too soon, when Irwin, a crocodile hunter, attempted to hunt or play with (or whatever he actually did to animals to get him called ‘hunter’ when he in fact laid to rest not one living creature, not even an alligator) a poison-filled killer sting ray, and, well, you can see where I’m going with that. But to get back on topic, we must remember the true power of Australia: those testicle-shitting badasses we know to day as Australians? Before they reached the continent down under- they were Europeans. EUROPEANS.

Not manly? Moi?!

The same people who brought you fancy dresses and tampons, somehow became the people who actually have a stereotype off pulling out their obnoxiously large knives in public drinking spots, and then comparing them (okay so they’re a little insecure, but like I said, EUROPEAN). This effectively makes Australia like one of those “Pray the Gay Away” Christian camps, except for pussies, and as exemplified by the local fauna and flora, GOD HAS NO PLACE IN AUSTRALIA. So, to wrap up, the next time you see an Outback Steakhouse commercial, or something else along those lines, just remember this video, which by the way, is not a video of bunch of Australians fighting, this is a video of a bunch of Australians fucking PLAYING.

Reference:

http://www.dfat.gov.au/aib/history.html

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0107296.html

http://www.australianexplorer.com/australian_history.htm