What if Australia was founded before the Americas were

Found by Europeans I presume? It could be done, Pero da Colivha and Afonso de Paiva used 'public transport' to visit India and Ethipoia in the 1480s. This method of exploration could be used earlier and more extensively to get a reasonable idea of the location of Australia.

However the only parts worth getting prior to the industrial Revolution were the south west corner to WA and the South East corner of the continent, behind the so called 'Brisbane Line'. If that isn't explored then the whole idea is a dud.
 
Found by Europeans I presume? It could be done, Pero da Colivha and Afonso de Paiva used 'public transport' to visit India and Ethipoia in the 1480s. This method of exploration could be used earlier and more extensively to get a reasonable idea of the location of Australia.

However the only parts worth getting prior to the industrial Revolution were the south west corner to WA and the South East corner of the continent, behind the so called 'Brisbane Line'. If that isn't explored then the whole idea is a dud.

Yes by the Europeans,
I see if they did manage to do this, would coulumbus and others still go west and find the Americas? Or would they all try and colonize Australia?
 
Yes by the Europeans,
I see if they did manage to do this, would coulumbus and others still go west and find the Americas? Or would they all try and colonize Australia?

I doubt that there would be much interest in colonising Australia in that era. Colonisation then was about profits, and the profits which were easily identifiable in Australia were... nothing, really. The Dutch, in particular, knew about Australia for a very long time but never really tried to colonise the continent.

Nothing about discovering Australia "aka that far away, big, empty southern island" will deter people like Columbus. And once the Americas are known, they are much more attractive to Europeans in every way that matters.

At most, you might get somebody like the Portuguese planting a couple of missions to convert the locals.

Otherwise, you'd need to either change something big about the nature of the Australia which the Europeans find, or stop the Americas from being discovered, ever. And even the latter doesn't guarantee that Europeans will have any interest in colonising the place.
 
I'm trying to find a good gold map of Australia, but considering its gold rushes this could be a good start...

Australia is discovered sooner and missions are set up, the discovery of the Americas is delayed, Portuguese missionaries discover gold and send word to Portugal, the news gets out and becomes public knowledge and there's a Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, English, and possibly Ottoman scramble for Australia with each country colonizing a chunk.

Eventually, the gold finds will run out, the Americas would be discovered, and the respective nations would slowly abandon or decrease colonization down under, but not before seeding the continent with a lot of genetic admixture, culture, and perhaps most interestingly, languages.

I'd be interested in a TL in which all of the above nations have a piece of Australia (with a good map included) and seeing how the different regions develop. With Spanish Conquistadors marrying Aborigines and setting up caste systems while French trappers in the west are content to trade and the English are content to push natives out for white (and eventually, surely, penal) settlement.

Just off the top of my head, I can see:

1. A Portuguese controlled northeastern "horn" colonized like Brazil

2. The western half divided into a large French colony and a smaller Ottoman one maybe in the northwest quarter...

3. A Medium sized Dutch colony in the north-central region.

4. An English colony in the east-central region where people fleeing for religious reasons join opportunistic miners and later convicts.

5. The rest of the small southern reaches not yet colonized and all of the southeast not English would be Spanish and treated like New Spain in OTL. Tasmania is also Spanish.

Once the gold dries up and the Americas are discovered all of the above becomes nebulous, but I can see the English and later British eventually having all or most of the continent as in OTL, though ruling over a dramatically different population with varying languages. Australian independence movements are more likely ttl, as not everyone identifies as an English subject, an Anglo, or even European. Many Hispanophone mestizos in the south and descendants of Ottoman settlers in the northwest certainly won't and a special policy will have to be developed to either integrate these populations or eliminate,subjugate, or undermine them. Unfortunately,given otl it seems the latter three are the most likely, but it's a troublesome concept for the English to put down so many rebellions and they may pull a Quebec Act type solution - which would be ideal.

Australian culture long term ttl will be even more fiercely independent and fascinating.

Maybe New Zealand gets a different colonization as well, with North Island being British and the South Island an Austrolasian Cuba, ruled by the Spanish.

Another thing to consider is that with such a delay in the discovery of the Americas both the Mexica and the Incas may have a better shot at repelling the first wave of Spanish colonization. This makes Australia a solidified destination for resources for a time, and what would have become the population of British NA and the 13 Colonies goes to Sydney* while North America becomes the destination for prison ships and penal colonies effectively switching the Australian and American populations, though not their territorial reach. Ditto for New Spain in Australia, obviously.

Camels, Turks, and Arabs coexisting with alt-Québécois trappers and fur traders in the Great Western Desert under close watch by outposts of Redcoats? Revolutionaries descended from puritans joining with Spanish speaking Aboriginal mestizos and displaced Muslims to throw off the King's yoke? An Anglo-German speaking population and their Portuguese speaking neighbors entering into the British slavocracy that dominates the north, subjugating a proud mixed population of African and Aboriginal slaves who will one day earn their freedom and civil rights after a legendary struggle between good and the evil that oppresses them? A significant Hispanophone "Latino Australian" population surviving in Tasmania and the South Island?

The cultural or military history alone is worth at least a TLIAM.

Thoughts?
 
Thoughts?

Unfortunately, there's a great many problems with this, though they require some familiarity with Australia's history and geography to know why most of this is not feasible.

To start with, while there is a lot of gold in Australia (even today it's the world's second largest gold producer), the gold that's there is not suitable for an early, convenient discovery by any wandering Europeans. Viz, it's mostly a fair way inland and by no means obvious. It took almost 65 years after European colonisation of Australia before gold was discovered. While it's probably possible to shave a few decades off that, it's not likely that any random Europeans visiting Australia will discover gold and find it as a motivation for settlement.

For where the colonies are located, well, if I may quote myself based on what I wrote about Australia in the wiki many years ago... "Many ATL nations are carved out of parts of Australia which could realistically support only a population of 315 kangaroos and one lonely camel."

The parts of Australia which are colonisable in terms of early European colonists are, basically, the south-western corner, a couple of bits of South Australia (the Eyre Peninsula and a strip along the coast from Port Augusta to the Victorian border), Victoria - in the few good ports (particularly Port Phillip Bay, coastal New South Wales, and a few bits of Queensland's east coast - but the northern portions of that aren't much use except for sugar cane, and even then it really needs fertiliser to do well.

So for the "Portuguese horn" - I'm not sure whether you mean Cape York or Arnhem Land, but either way, not realistically happening. Cape York is cyclone alley and not useful in this era for much more than sugar cane and bananas (even with fertiliser). Arnhem Land is really hard to grow European crops on - it was tried and failed, several times, even those times when the fledging colonies weren't flattened by passing cyclones.

The northwestern coast seems promising, until you realise that the "average rainfall" figures on rainfall maps are misleading - sometimes that's 2 or 3 years worth of rainfall happening at once, and then nothing for 2-3 years. Even apart from that, the soil's extremely poor.

Realistically, whichever country gets to a place first and grabs the ports controls the place. It's easy to get Western Australia separate from the east, but given how far people have to sail, and the sailing routes (which require you to go south around the continent, and then north up the east coast) suggest 2 or 3 powers at most. Western Australia (southwest corner, not the Kimberley further north), a vaguely "southern coast" power, and possibly a separate east coast one.

Fur trappers? Perhaps, in a couple of places, but basically you've just wiped out the koala and the platypus. :mad: Not so much over most of the rest of the continent.

For Aborigines as slaves, that would work about as well as the idea of using Native Americans as slaves worked in North America (not Mexico, but the east coast), i.e. forget about it. They were far too vulnerable to diseases for one thing, and for another were very familiar with surviving off the land, so could run away very easily.

In terms of Australia replacing the Americas for settlement... not going to happen once the Americas are known. The Americas are much, much closer for sailing time. Even in 1788, the First Fleet took over nine months. In comparison, North America is just a hop, skip and a jump across the Atlantic. Much quicker, much cheaper, and the settlers are much less likely to die en route.
 
There is a theory that the Portuguese sailed around Victoria in 1523 but didn't make it back. If this is true and they did make it to somewhere to spread the word then perhaps Australia might get colonised earlier, but as Jared says there are a lot of reasons why the Americas was settles and exploited first.
 
So nothing much would change then?

Yes, in the short term, nothing much is likely to change. Assuming that the discovery itself doesn't butterfly away Columbus, then the Americas will still be discovered, etc, etc.

Knowledge of Australia is probably going to change a few things in the longer term, but these are more imponderable. Especially if someone charts much of the more fertile parts of the coast - in OTL, Cook was the first European (that we know of) to chart the east coast. But any colonial enterprises will be small-scale in comparison to those of the Americas.
 
Would it ever be possible for some nutty oppressed religious group to head to Australia? Knowledge of a land literally on the other side of the world might be of interest to some of the more insane religious groups trying to escape the impurity of whatever society they're currently bugging.
 
Would it ever be possible for some nutty oppressed religious group to head to Australia? Knowledge of a land literally on the other side of the world might be of interest to some of the more insane religious groups trying to escape the impurity of whatever society they're currently bugging.

My scenario would have included religious groups being essentially exiled there rather than choose their destination. However, it seems my scenario was borderline ASB so I don't even...
 
Yours was mostly too ambitious, and dismissive of the Americas. There's nothing which physically says Europeans couldn't colonise some small part of the australian continent in the 16th century, finding the reason why anyone would go is the tough bit. Which is why I'm wondering if a bunch of lunatics who otherwise went off to the Americas might come here instead, reducing logic as a factor.
 
I went to the West for the first time 3 weeks ago, Exmouth to be exact.

What a shithole!!

Don't get me wrong, Ningaloo Reef was awesome and Exmouth was a nice and interesting town, but the surrounding countryside was just a heap shit; dusty and rocky with no decent soil to speak of, the only domestic animals were a few semi-feral sheep which were orange due to the dust. There is only one permanent fresh water creek in the whole North West Cape, and even it couldn't force much growth on the banks because the land is so shit.
 
Fur trapping in Australia? Not very practical considering how far the fur will have to travel.
IMO any earlier than OTL relatively prosperous Australian colony will be a)south (whalers) or south-east/Tasmania (lumberjacks) - yarra tree can be pretty good for shipbuilding. My first "really big" TL (not here, but visitors to fai.org.ru are familiar with it) used a subplot of Dutch being really successful in mapping Eastern Australia compared to OTL and by dawn of 18th century timber industry in Tasmania/NSW of OTL is kinda big, as yarra eucalypti became substitute for great pine trees not existing in Southern Hemisphere for VOC navy (which had quite more of mammoth double-purpose ships than OTL). Some curiosities such as black swan and kangaroos ("Antipode rabbits") are sent to Europe to be displayed at Royal menageries, and in 1710 some Dutch expedition that went inland stumbles upon gold (the timber settlements TTL exist since 1670ies).
 
In terms of gold all you need is a settlement in Port Phillip and it'll be a very short time till it's found. It only took as long as it did because the HMAS Calcutta was a very lazy ship and didn't find the very easy to find yarra river. 16 years of settlement IOTL was what it took to find central Victorian gold, and once it's found settlement will boom. It was no accident that Victoria dominated Australia in the 19th century. If you want a highly settled Australia as early as possible then settle Port Phillip. How early settlement occurs at all though is another question.
 
In terms of gold all you need is a settlement in Port Phillip and it'll be a very short time till it's found. It only took as long as it did because the HMAS Calcutta was a very lazy ship and didn't find the very easy to find yarra river. 16 years of settlement IOTL was what it took to find central Victorian gold, and once it's found settlement will boom. It was no accident that Victoria dominated Australia in the 19th century. If you want a highly settled Australia as early as possible then settle Port Phillip. How early settlement occurs at all though is another question.

True, the worlds richest goldfields are so close to Port Phillip Bay that it isn't funny. Indeed the world biggest nugget ever found was sticking out of the ground, tangled in tree roots at Mt Moliagul, a full 70+ kilos.
 
In terms of gold all you need is a settlement in Port Phillip and it'll be a very short time till it's found. It only took as long as it did because the HMAS Calcutta was a very lazy ship and didn't find the very easy to find yarra river. 16 years of settlement IOTL was what it took to find central Victorian gold, and once it's found settlement will boom. It was no accident that Victoria dominated Australia in the 19th century. If you want a highly settled Australia as early as possible then settle Port Phillip. How early settlement occurs at all though is another question.

Well... kinda, sorta. The history of the discovery of gold in Australia is more complex. I'd forgotten the details, but after a bit of digging around (no pun intended), there turns out to be more going on.

Gold was discovered several times in Australia before the gold rushes started in 1851. It's just that none of those discoveries led to gold rushes.

The first officially recognised discovery of gold was in Bathurst in 1823, by a surveyor there, less than a decade after Europeans first made it there. But the discovery was not followed up, either through lack of interest or official policy (not wanting to encourage a gold rush in a convict outpost).

There were more discoveries of gold over the next few decades, a lot in New South Wales, some in Victoria, and some elsewhere (Tasmania, South Australia). Despite some of them being substantial, none of them led to gold rushes. Sometimes the discoverers kept the location to themselves, sometimes they were suspected as hoaxes or swindles, and sometimes people were discouraged to report them. Sometimes the reason for the lack of follow-up just aren't known.

What changed in the 1850s was good ol' California. The California Gold Rush in 1848 was known across the world, and plenty of Australians went over there to look for gold. When they came back, they started prospecting all over the place, and so started to find gold everywhere in Australia. (The first was in Bathurst, again).

This time, the discovery of gold led to gold rushes because, well, people were looking to start gold rushes. The word was out all over the world, really. People couldn't hide discoveries of gold, because too many people were looking.

The question that leaves is whether the California Gold Rush was necessary to turn a discovery of gold into a gold rush. Gold had been discovered plenty of times before (both in Australia and in other parts of the world), but it was California which turned things into a massive gold rush. There had been gold rushes before California (e.g. in Georgia and North Carolina), but it was California which really got things going.

So in an ATL where Europeans are sniffing around Australia for whatever reason, they will probably find (some) gold within a decade or two of getting to the right area. (Bathurst, Bendigo, Ballarat, wherever). It's a long way from finding gold to a gold rush, though.
 
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