British convicts over earlier existing Australian settlement?

How would Australia look if pretty much OTL British convict transportation and associated settlement to Australia occurred over the top of earlier European colonialist efforts?

The PoD would be diffuse, Dutch ships entered Australian waters constantly from 1605 but didn't find anything they valued so never set up trading posts, but they did create this map.


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ITTL they do things a little differently; François Thijssen goes a bit further along the SA coast in 1627, various landings along the WA coast find Australian sandalwood, Tasman find the Torres Strait and northeast Queensland coast, glom onto the Makkasar Trepang trade in the NT. The result being that there are several Dutch settlements dotted around Australia populated with a mixture of Dutch colonists and people transplanted from their Asian colonies, but like other Dutch colonies they don't get a big population transfer from Holland itself.

On top of this, as a result of agreements from various wars in Europe in 1788-91 the first, second and third fleets land 4,400 convicts, military and officials at Sydney then then expand as per OTL.
 
I actually discussed this idea-Netherlands colonies in Australia get taken over by the Brits-with a friend of mine. His belief was that the Brits would snatch Australia pretty easily from the Dutch, and then it's trekking time. So basically the Boers vs. the British as per OTL's South African history, "Only the Boers are EVEN MORE crazy!"

Me, I'm not so sure. Given potential difficulties navigating the Great Barrier Reef and the British desire to control their colony, British colonial settlement as per OTL certainly sees the east coast get snatched. *Maybe* Queensland gets spared if the Dutch have already turned it into a sugarcane colony, but in practice if not de jure I expect Queensland to be a British government over Dutch landlords, at least until such a time as the hordes of Indonesian, Chinese, and Indonesian slaves/indentured workers start getting uppity.

The Northern territory does in fact have gold, and ITTL may have a pseudo-herding economy based on exporting feral water buffaloes or their hide, but there really is not much going on up there. Depending on how things shake out, I could very well see the top end falling under the jurisdiction of a post-colonial Timorese government, whatever form that might take.

In the west, the sandalwood trade is highly valuable but also ecologically delicate. Whether or not its still valuable by the time the British arrived depends on how much feral animals have rampaged across the land and how much the land i still controlled by Aborigines whose practices would, I think, lend themselves a little more to the health of sandalwood groves. If there is hope for English/Dutch coexistence on the same continent, IMO it lies in an East/West split with the west controlled by the Dutch. @metalinvader665 has suggested that bloodroot (a bush tucker spice) could be domesticated and grown for the spice trade in West Australia.

Finally, IOTL the Aborigines were steamrolled by the Europeans in a matter of decades. ITTL, lighter initial European settlement has given them more of a chance to adapt and change. I fully expect that large swathes of semi-arid Australia will be home to mounted horse cultures built out of the fusion of Aborigine peoples, maroon slaves, and white renegades, and would resemble the Native Americans of the plains and pampas, or some of the mestizo cultures of OTL South Africa. While the British will eventually overwhelm these cultures, expect a few Isandlwanas along the way.
 
If the Spanish are capable to strongly resist piracy close to the Americas, Australia can be used as a safe port for a future attack on Spanish America by the Pacific - it's a long distance but the prospects of easily getting South American silver and gold might interest Dutch or British investors. IIRC the Spanish expressed concerns when the British finally started colonizing Australia.
 
The question is how much the British would even care to grab Nieuw Holland. It's a big continent, there's plenty of room to have the British on one side and the Dutch on the other. The British can have their gold and sugarcane, and the Dutch can have their sandalwood. But we'll assume they do, and South Africa probably goes with it too (holding Western Australia without the Cape seems geopolitically questionable).

Dutch Australia might as well be an extension of Indonesia given how few white people will likely settle there. It will probably also have a sizable Chinese community, and maybe they'll bring in some African slaves from the Cape. Combined with the Aboriginals, that's a pretty fascinating cultural mix and will have an interesting effect on the demographics and racial policies of Australia.
 
Maybe a handful of trading posts end up dotting the Australian coast, giving the Aboriginals time to actually organize themselves into an effective group of proto-nation-states?
 
Maybe a handful of trading posts end up dotting the Australian coast, giving the Aboriginals time to actually organize themselves into an effective group of proto-nation-states?

I find this doubtful, Aboriginal population was concentrated most densely in the northeast and the great barrier reef does not lend itself well to trading ports, that's ignoring the tropical disease and tribal warfare endemic to the region.
As per metalinvader665, I can't see the British too interested in the west beyond OTL Darwin due to the inhospitabile nature of the region so you probably end up with a large Dutch or Portugese minority until the mid 1800s at least if the British still claim it.
 
I think the Dutch impact would be relatively light, a few trading posts and some pastoral settlers in southern WA initially with maybe some expansion along the south coast over the course of a century. This will be very different from the British model of filling Sydney Cove, hemmed in by mountains that weren't crossed for 35 years, and dotting other settlements in places like Tasmania. It will be the Dutch, and transplanted Asians, that will bring the virgin field epidemics to Australia but due to their scattered settlement these epidemics could occur over a longer time-frame and allow the Aborigine population to recover somewhat between outbreaks and possibly allow the Eora to not be destroyed in 1791.

Fast forwarding to the Gold Rush, by which time the British had already taken the whole continent from the declining Dutch Empire, Australia will have a much higher population and much more ethnically diverse with Dutch, Indonesia, Aborigine and British populations.
 
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