Western Australia: living in WA and its history

The first peoples and Dutch visitors

People have lived in what is now Western Australia for a very long time. The first inhabitants of Australia came from the north more than 50,000 years ago, and perhaps as long as 70,000 years ago, spreading across the whole landmass over thousands of years. By the time European explorers arrived in the early 17th century, Indigenous Australians were long established throughout the region.

The first Europeans to reach the coast were the Dutch, led by Dirk Hartog, whose expedition landed on 25 October 1616 at what is now Cape Inscription on Dirk Hartog Island. Other Dutch and British navigators met the same coast for the rest of the 17th century, often by accident, after storms or poor navigation pushed ships off the Brouwer Route, and many were wrecked. In 1644 Abel Tasman gave the land the name New Holland.

British and French sailors began exploring the Western Australian coast in the late 18th century. The Baudin expedition sailed this coast, and the Freycinet Map of 1811 was the first published map to show the whole outline of Australia. People went on using the name New Holland, in popular and semi-official ways, until at least the middle of the 1850s.

King George Sound and the Swan River Colony

The present state's origins begin with a settlement at King George III Sound, supported by convicts from New South Wales and set up by Edmund Lockyer. Lockyer annexed it formally on 21 January 1827, when the Union Jack was raised on his orders and the troops fired a feu de joie. The settlement was founded because of British concern that a French colony might be established on the coast. The settlement passed to the Swan River Colony on 7 March 1831 and was named Albany in 1832.

Captain James Stirling set up a settlement on the Swan River in 1829, the Swan River Colony. Within about three years the settler population had reached roughly 1,500, and on 6 February 1832 the colony's official name changed to Western Australia. The colony's two townsites grew into Fremantle, a port, and Perth, the capital. York, settled on 16 September 1831 and lying 97 kilometres east of Perth, was the first inland settlement in Western Australia, and became a staging point for the explorers who found the rich gold reserves at Kalgoorlie.

Gold, self-government and federation

For decades the colony grew slowly, until significant gold discoveries were made in the 1890s around Kalgoorlie. A new constitution drafted in 1887 gave European Australians the right to govern themselves, and in 1890 the British Parliament passed the act granting the colony self-government. John Forrest became Western Australia's first Premier, and the colony was the last in Australia to become self-governing. After a campaign led by Forrest, the colony's electors chose to join the five other Australian colonies in federation, and Western Australia became a state on 1 January 1901.

After gold was found at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, the Western Australian Parliament agreed in 1896 to borrow money for a pipeline that would carry 23 megalitres of water a day to the growing population on the goldfields. Completed in 1903, the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme runs 530 kilometres from Perth to Kalgoorlie. C. Y. O'Connor, the state's first engineer-in-chief, designed it and oversaw the construction, and historians see it as an important factor in the state's growth.

Mining and the modern economy

Mining drives much of the state's economy. Late in the 20th century came the development of the iron ore industry, the largest in the world, along with mainly offshore petroleum and natural gas. Gold mining keeps a significant presence and many other minerals are mined, with Perth a major centre for the services that support them.

The state contributes an estimated 58 percent of Australia's mineral and energy exports. It is the world's largest producer of iron ore, with 34 percent of the world total, and extracted 66 percent of Australia's gold in 2022. Bauxite is processed into alumina at four refineries, coal from Collie fuels baseload electricity generation in the south-west, and diamonds were mined in the far north Kimberley until 2020.

Primary industry is the other significant contributor, including agriculture in the Wheatbelt and along the temperate southern coast, pastoralism on marginal grassland, forestry in the south-west, and fishing that includes pearling and, historically, whaling. Whaling at Albany ended in 1978. Tourism grew in importance in the 2000s, especially in smaller coastal centres.

Timeline

Living in Western Australia

The state takes in 2,527,013 square kilometres, which makes it Australia's largest state and the second-largest subdivision of any country. Climates vary enormously, from tropical conditions in the Kimberley to desert in the interior, including the Great Sandy, Little Sandy, Gibson and Great Victoria deserts, and a Mediterranean climate in the south-west and along the southern coast.

The middle two-thirds of the state is dry and thinly peopled, and mining is the only significant economic activity there. Snow is uncommon; it usually falls only around the Stirling Range near Albany, and the south-west was once heavily forested with karri, among the tallest trees in the world. The Eyre Highway and the Trans-Australian Railway cross the Nullarbor Plain in the south-east, the main links to the population centres of the eastern states.