Talk:History of Australia/Archive 1: Difference between revisions

Victoria was first settled in 1835, not 1851

Settled in 1835, yes. It became a seperate state in 1851. Prior to that it was part of NSW.

The post-European history is very weak at present, barely an overview, and needs considerable expansion. Anyone want to take it on? ____

Tannin, check out this diff: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=History_of_Australia&diff=0&oldid=21828

Also this Google search: http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:uktN5pfA_AcJ:www.worldrover.com/history/australia_history.html+The+first+session+of+Parliament+in+that+city+was+opened+by+another+Duke+of+York+(later+%5B%5BKing+George+VI%5D%5D).+Australia+became+officially+autonomous&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

It is very clear that much of the second half of this article still has US government paid for public domain text. At the very least that source should be listed as a normal information reference so I'm putting the cite back in. If you like you can rephrase the cite so that it looks like the CIA and DoS were used a regular references and not as a source for the actual text. --mav 04:26 29 May 2003 (UTC)

Nonsense: a single sentence does not make an article. That CIA attribution is inaccurate and highly offensive, to Australia, and to the Australians who wrote the vast bulk of the entry. This truly is a case of "Yankee go home". Tannin 16:46 29 May 2003 (UTC)

Was not the CIA / DoS information still used? Even rewritten text warrents an attribution. But, I guess, having the attrib on the talk page is enough. --mav

A note for posterity: An earlier version of this article incorporated public domain text from the CIA World Factbook 2000 and the 2003 U.S. Department of State website.

"Advanced" as a description of Aboriginal land management practices is vastly more accurate than "rudimentary" - the term that was use to replace it. The evidence for this is conclusive: since traditional Aboriginal land management practices were brought to an end (by European settlers from 1788 on) there has been a vast wave of land degredation and many species extinctions in Australia. Australia has the worst record in the entire world for mammal extinctions, with 22 species recently wiped out. Aboriginal land management practies were complex and often subtle; their cessation is directly implicated in the extinction of a number of mammal species. The land management practies of Europeans, in stark contrast, have been an unmitigated disaster. There may be a better word than "advanced" to indicate the extraordinary sensitivity that Aboriginal people had to their environment, and their ability to work with it rather than against it. "Rudimentary", however, is certainly not it. Tannin 00:36 30 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Excised text -- Tim Starling 14:28 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)

• much more about early history, including rum rebellion, beginning of free settlers, wool, the French ship that almost claimed us etc.*

Dot points for further discussion

• The Gold Rush, bushrangers
• World War II and the realignment away from Britain and towards US. War in general could do with elaboration, starting with the Boer War, then World War I, World War II, Vietnam War, Korean War, Malayan Emergency. Some mention of ANZACs would be worthwhile also.
• The Stolen Generation and treatment of Kooris more generally.
• Postwar immigration, the beginning of the end of the White Australia Policy.
• WA attempt to succeed from the rest of Australia ~1930.
• Economic expansion and cultural sleepiness of the Menzies years.
• Vietnam war, protests and other clashes.
• Whitlam government and the dismissal.
• Arrival of vietnamese boat people, non-discriminatory migration policy
• Economic deregulation of the 1980s.
• Australian participation in project Echelon and US military bases in general.
• Mabo case and Native Title
• Republic debate, Howard's 1996 win, contemporary events, struggles for future
• Also could do with links to subpages (eg. the aus foreign relations page wasn't linked to directly, bound to be others).
• Environmental degradation and the adaptation to the Southern Oscillation.

My eventual goal for this article is to continue expanding for a while, then split the current material into a number of subsidiary articles, leaving a 2-3 page summary here. -- Tim Starling 12:55, Aug 11, 2003 (UTC)

I agree that the post-settlement section is weak and I might have a go at writing some text when I have time. Most noticeably there is nothing on constitutional development and the growth of democratic institutions, or on the labour movement. A couple of small errors in passing: > Quiros called the islands he discovered Australalia del Espiritu Santo, not Australia del Espiritu Santo. (by the way, what is a Counter-Reformation Catholic and why is it relevant?) > Murrumbidgee River, not Murrimbidgee > The section on Aboriginal mortality is well-balanced, but the reference to poisoned blankets is gratuitous - this persistent myth is based on ONE reported (but not verified) incident. > The section on federation is seriously deficient. The plural of referendum is referendums. > ANZAC Day is not "an annual holiday to remember its [Australia's] military's victories and losses." It is a day to remember Australia's war dead. > A reference to the stolen generation debate without any discusion of Aboriginal affairs in the recent period, such as the 1967 referendum and the land-rights movement, is seriously misleading. > An Australian republic was NOT "a subject of discussion for much of Australia’s history since Federation." It was barely mentioned until the 1970s, and became a serious issue only during the Keating government. Dr Adam Carr Melbourne