I came across this article and thought it described Australians and our ancestors very well.

A HISTORY OF OUR FOREFATHERS IN AUSTRALIA

ADVANCE AUSTRALIA FAIR

Australians all let us rejoice,

For we are young and free.

We've golden soil and wealth for toil,

Our home is girt by sea.

Our land abounds in nature's gifts

Of beauty rich and rare,

In history's page, let every stage

Advance Australia fair.

Beneath our radiant Southern Cross

We'll toil with hearts and hands,

To make this Commonwealth of ours

Renowned of all the lands,

For those who've come across the seas

We've boundless plains to share

With courage let us all combine

To advance Australia fair.

In joyful strains then let us sing,

Advance Australia fair.

A HISTORY OF OUR FOREFATHERS IN AUSTRALIA

 

The London lights are far abeam

Behind a bank of cloud,

Along the shore the gaslights gleam

The gale is piping loud.

And down the Channel, groping blind,

We drive her through the haze.

Away 0 land, we leave behind,

The good old land of "never mind",

For new Australian ways.

Andrew Barton Paterson

The history of Australia began 40,000 years ago, according to recent archaeological discoveries. Very little, however, is understood about the people who became the first immigrants to the continent "down under". Their descendants were completely unknown to Western Europeans until the late 15th century, at the very earliest.

When it came to be generally assumed that the earth was a globe spinning in space, geographers believed that to keep this whirling mass in an upright position, a large body of land had to exist somewhere south of the equator. The search for this imagined continent led to the recorded discovery of the "Terra Australis Incognita" in 1606.

The quest had begun as early as the 1490s, when Portuguese navigators began a series of daring voyages that initiated a great wave of European migration into the New Worlds. Attempting to find a route to the spice islands, Columbus unwittingly encountered America in 1492. Within six years Vasco da Garma had rounded the Cape of Good Hope in the same effort, he opened the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia to European exploration.

Luis Vaez de Torres passed through the strait between New Guinea and Australia, which now bears his name. In 1602, the Dutch East India Company was established with headquarters in Java. Four years later, exploring southward from Java, Willem Jansz charted 200 miles of the north West Australian coast. His map is the earliest confirmed evidence of European discovery of a land the Dutch chose to call New Holland.

Many captains of East Indiamen contributed to the fairly thorough mapping of the coast of New Holland during the 17th Century. Abel Tasman made two great voyages in 1642 and 1644, but Australia's eastern coastline remained unknown.

The immediate hinterland of New Holland, it was soon agreed, appeared to be little more than a desert wasteland. No valuable spices or precious metals were to be found; and the Dutch decided that this territory was not worth claiming.

It would take an Englishman to sense the hidden value of Australia. This was the famous seaman and explorer, Captain James Cook.

Cook had trained for the sea in the Yorkshire collieries before joining the Royal Navy. His skills as a navigator and cartographer were revealed in the wars against France in Canada. The English Admiralty quickly decided that Cook's surveys and command of the pilotage of the St. Lawrence River marked him as a man of "genius and capacity, well qualified for a greater undertaking of the same kind."

In 1768, he was given that "great undertaking" being placed in command of the Endeavour for the exploration of the South Pacific. Accordingly, Cook travelled to the newly discovered island of Tahiti. From there he sailed southward and completed a circumnavigation of New Zealand, producing a chart which stood unchanged for eighty years. Sailing westwards, Cook then sighted land - the east coast of Australia, and on April 29th, 1770, he dropped anchor in a natural harbour that would be called Botany Bay because of its exceptionally rich flora. This region was eagerly studied by the young Joseph Banks, a wealthy and very politically powerful man who accompanied Cook.

Cook sailed north along the east coast and mapped it. He proceeded to take formal possession of the new land in the name of King George Ill. The British were now rulers of New South Wales.

Thanks to the intrepid James Cook, the once-mythical Great Southern Land had become a reality on the map of the world. Cook's three voyages to the South Pacific brought him great fame, and on the occasion of his violent death in the Sandwich Islands nine years later, George Ill was reported to have wept uncontrollably.

Soon after Cook's discovery, the English government made plans for the settlement of Australia. The motives were mixed but included an eye for the commercial possibilities of New South Wales and the South Pacific and the pressing need to remove convicts from Britain, now that they were no longer sent to North America. So it was that this still mysterious and unknown land would become a penal colony, beginning in 1788, with the arrival of the first convict ships at Sydney Cove. Thus began the history of Australia.

Much has been made of the "criminal antecedents" of the Australian people, but what kind of men and women were these transported convicts? Were they Villains? Killers? Rapists?

Hardly! England enjoyed a reputation as an "enlightened" country in the 18th Century, yet possessed a savage penal code that prescribed death for no fewer than 200 crimes. As "criminals" who did not merit the executioner's block, the initial European settlers of Australia were not at all the hardened criminals they were once thought to be.

Many of the convicts were petty thieves ' who had attempted to steal small quantities of merchandise, but the English criminal code was very severe. Even so, most convicts had former offences against their name, but it would be true to say that a great number of the capital offences were rarely, if ever, intended to be used.

It should be noted that the economic conditions of England were such that normally honest people may have been forced into stealing in order to keep themselves and their families from starvation. In the 1780s, and again in the ten years after the defeat of Napoleon, unemployment in England was very serious, and the government took remedial measures that benefited only the rich landowners and the magnates. Consequently, many of the original settlers of Australia may have been nothing more than latter-day Robin Hoods who had made only one mistake - they were caught.

Our research demonstrates that the unhappy and unenthusiastic Australian pioneers who were transported to the Southern Pacific against their will possessed two noteworthy human qualities. First, they almost universally managed to handle their destiny with composure. Rather than bellyache or bemoan a perhaps undeserved fate, they tried to make light of it - as did the celebrated pickpocket, George Barrington, who reputedly recited a prologue to the opening of the Sydney Theatre in 1796:

From distant climes o'er wide-spread seas we come,

Though not with much eclat or beat of drum,

True patriots all; for be it understood,

We left our country for our country's good;

No private views disgrac'd our generous zeal,

What urg'd our travels was our country's weal;

And none will doubt but that our emigration

Has prov'd most useful to the British nations.
 

The second important characteristic of Australia's first families was their durability. Only the strongest-willed and most determined people could have survived the horrors of the transoceanic voyages of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. All too frequently in the first few years of the settlement of Australia were the convict ships overcrowded, under-provisioned and filthy. Their absolutely wretched conditions, combined with the pathetic level of available medical services, made these transport vessels assume the aspect of floating morgues. But conditions rapidly improved and it must be said that most of the convicts came out to Australia in comparatively good condition, with the overall death rate en route being less than two percent.

But all voyages of that time were unpleasant and worse. Passengers who survived the trauma of great human suffering, aborted mutinies and horrifying shipwrecks, while fighting and conquering disease at sea, have given the world one of the richest dramas of human endeavour. Once only a disoriented crowd of bewildered prisoners, those who made the long voyage to the Southern Cross proved to be men and women of destiny and history.

It is therefore clear that the forefathers of all Australians had the rare capacity to rise above their lot in life and make the best of a bad situation, one which they would eventually convert into good. Furthermore, the early Australians consistently demonstrated that they were of the stock and spirit of which a great nation could be built.

By the mid 19th Century, the new arrivals had made an auspicious start at forging a new nation. They built coastal settlements, constructed roads, fashioned a whaling industry, created a wool economy and even discovered gold. By the 1850s it could hardly go unnoticed that a sense of optimism and dreams of a new society of free men and women within the British Empire had given birth to a real Australian identity.

As the power and influence of the British Empire began to reach its height, a brilliant star had initiated its ascent over Australia. During the second half of the 19th Century, Australia would grow rich and move towards the creation of a federation of great promise and performance. In 1901, the hard work, vitality and dynamism of all Australians bore fruit in the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia. Australia remains British in heritage and especially so in terms of government and cultural institutions; it will remain so with all Australian families continuing to embody the strength, vitality and ingenuity of 200 years of Australian greatness.

As the poet had written:  
When you see the Southern Cross for the first time,

You understand then why you came this way.

For the pain you left behind you now is so small,

As you live the hope and promise of a new and greater day.

However, when Australia launched herself into the 20th Century, she would not forget her European heritage.

When the Great War started in 1914, Australia raised a wholly volunteer army of 417,000 to fight for England and the Empire and keep the world safe for democracy. From the very first year of the conflict the "Diggers", as the Australian infantry came to be called, manifested a courage and daring nonchalance in battle that has since become legendary.

Nor were they afraid to pay the price of victory. By 1918, about 60,000 brave Australians had perished on the battlefields and 166,000 were wounded in combat. Casualties totalled 69 per cent as the little country, farthest removed from the war in geographical terms but very close culturally, actually lost as many men as did the United States. The valour that the Anzacs exhibited throughout the Great War so impressed English Poet Laureate, John Masefield, that he referred to them as "the finest body of young men ever brought together in modern times."

During the war of 1939-45, the Australian people rose once again in defence of their freedom and values they had inherited from Britain. On this occasion, however, the war came very close to home. The diggers would have to fight the Imperial Japanese armed forces, as well as the European Axis powers. Furthermore, in this conflict the Australian mainland was bombed and shelled and the 8th division taken prisoner by the Japanese when Singapore and the East Indies (now Indonesia) fell to the irresistible Japanese onslaught that began with simultaneous attacks on the Asian mainland and on the American forces at Pearl Harbour.

As in the case of the Great War, the men from "down under" gave an excellent account of themselves. They fought heroically in the skies over Europe, in North Africa and the Pacific. Were it not for their heroism, the war might even have ended differently.

Yet the price was tragically high. From a total population of fewer than eight million, the war of 1945 took the lives of 27,000 Australians and wounded 203,400. Added to those greater casualties of the Great War, these new ones meant that Australia had sacrificed the flower of two generations of young men.

Australia emerged victorious from the war of 1939-1945, but it needed to increase the size of its population. Shortly after 1945, a decision was made to promote immigration from areas outside the United Kingdom, Australia's traditional source of population since 1788.

This led to an influx of settlers from all European countries whose impact on Australia has been compared to the influence of small percentages of different metals in an alloy. The base metal was still the same, but new ingredients, though small in quantity, have significantly altered the properties of the metal.

The new colonists, however, overcame the early years of hunger and privation and were active in taming the land, coming to terms with the difficulty of making their way in a raw penal colony where violence of man to man was the order of the day.

Accordingly, as soon as they arrived in Australia, the heroic qualities of the new Australian families became apparent virtually immediately.- Like future generations, these early settlers were strong, freedom-loving people, who were not going to be hampered by restrictions with which they did not agree. They quickly earned a reputation that would mark Australians through the following generations. They would be proud, the few and the free!

Nor are their heroics the only ways in which these families embodied the greatness of Australia. The men have always been noted for their nationalism and sportsmanship. "No other country is the match of Australia, and Australia has produced many of the world's greatest athletes." In addition to being good patriots and good sports, male Australians over the years have been reputed for their "mateship".

As much as any other great nation, the ancestors of today's Australians exhibited a valour on the battlefields of Europe, Asia and Africa that has become legendary. The Australian is the epitome of the fighting soldier. Notwithstanding the battlefield prowess of these magnificent fighters, in civilian life Australians have seldom been known to resort to violence as a method of resolving disagreements. Rather, they are like their mates, "jovial, family men", who rarely engage in confrontations that lead to fisticuffs.

It is this type of co-operation that has allowed the country to prosper at all levels. The Australian political system has seen to it that the country's riches are distributed probably more equally than those of other nations in the free world.

Loyal, honest, courageous and compassionate, the families that founded Australia have assured the proud destiny of the nation. Their amazing story is that of their country - a history of success wrested from an unforgiving and capricious climate, achieved by a tiny, heroic population that has dared to flourish in the midst of a big, empty continent, most of which is desert.

Australia today represents one of the world's greatest success stories. In saluting her conquest of every adversity, we formally recognise the centuries of service of each and every Australian family ... "She'll be right, mate!"