Hi Mixael,
That's correct; when England couldn't send its petty criminals to America following the Revolution, they had to find somewhere else. The first convict ships landed in Australia about a decade later (in 1788), and believe it or not, on the 26th of January each year we still celebrate that anniversary as our national founding. It's variously known as "Australia day" and "invasion day", depending on whether you're a blind patriot or not. The surviving indigenous population prefers the latter term, obviously.
Anyway, the practice of convict transportation was pretty unpopular with the "free" migrants, and the process was largely stopped within 50 years. My city, Melbourne, was a free settlement (originally sheep farmers), so it never received convicts from England. My state, Victoria, received something like 1750 convicts (2nd-hand from the state of Tasmania), but nation-wide the total was around 160k. Anyhoo, if you're worried about descendants of convicts running a country; fear not. The majority of Australians descend from much more recent arrivals. The rather popular
Premier of the State of Victoria, recently re-elected, descends from Lebanese migrants from the 1890's. I'm not sure about the current Prime Minister of Australia, though, since he certainly behaves like a criminal (POLITICS WARNING!).
Anyway, ripping off a
government immigration site:
In Australia today...43 per cent of all Australians were born overseas or have at least one parent who was born overseas...
At the end of WWII, when Australia was (arguably) nearly invaded by Japan, the gov't started a policy of "populate or perish". The population at the time was 7M, and in the 60-odd years since, about 6.5M migrants have arrived, originally from Europe (devastated by WWII), and later from South-east Asia and the Middle East (devastated by other wars). The total population is ~20M now. So, basically, just about everyone's ancestors around here hopped off a boat quite recently, unless you're Aboriginal, in which case the boat trip was a bit less recent (like, 30-50k years ago.) In my case, my father's family left Ireland during the potato famine (originally O'Tarpaigh, or something like that), and my mother's family left Holland following WWII.
Anyway, there's a brief-ish rundown of Australian history and society. Would you believe that when I went through school, they didn't teach this stuff? (more world history, since we had a socialist-ish government at the time, or at least by today’s standards they were.) Now, with conservative loons in control, they like to teach things like the glorious
Battle of Gallipoli, where a bunch of Empire and Allied troops (inc. Australians), under the command of some incompetent English generals (it's true, don't anyone argue), went off to invade Turkey in WWI, for no apparent reason. They got bogged down in trench warfare, and then after a general massacre of both sides (and much heroism on both sides, I might add), they retreated, with no advantage gained. The anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli is celebrated here as a national day also, though I always wonder how Turkey feels about us celebrating the day we invaded their country and massacred their young men. Britain doesn't still celebrate burning the U.S. Whitehouse in 1812, do they? Does the US celebrate the invasion of Mexico? How about Japan and the invasions of China and Korea? Nope, it's just us. We like celebrating invasions, successful or otherwise. Then again, we named a swimming pool after a
Prime Minister who drowned whilst swimming (often compared to a "JFK rifle range"), so we're a bit weird about the way we commemorate events.
Anyway, that's enough of a rant for today. Let this post serve as a warning to anyone else who asks about Australian history
Cheerio,
Aaron.