Australia as it appears in 6 interactive history atlases, from 1806 to 1991: Australia. Each era below lists who ruled the land and when control changed, linked to the dated map that shows it.
WW2 is free in full, and chapter 1 of every atlas is free. A free account opens 3 more chapters a day. Starter, at $9 a month, opens all 21 with no daily limit — see the plans.
What was Australia before it was Australia? The sections below follow this
land through every era covered by the Maps of History atlases: who ruled it, what it was
called, and when control changed. Each line links to the dated map. Modern borders serve
as an approximation, as each atlas says on the map itself.
From a population of under five million, Australia sent 416,000 volunteers. Two referendums refused conscription. Australians regarded the Gallipoli landing on 25 April as their coming of age (Ch. 6), and in 1918 Monash’s Australian Corps helped develop the modern combined-arms method at Amiens (Ch. 12). One in five who embarked never returned.
Entente-aligned & imperial territories — the opening position
Australia fought in the Mediterranean, but the fall of Singapore and the bombing of Darwin changed its view of security. It turned from Britain toward America for protection, a permanent strategic reorientation. In New Guinea, the Kokoda Track became Australia’s Thermopylae.
Australia resettled people from both crises. After 1947 it took about 182,000 DPs, who were bound to two years of work wherever the government sent them. From 1975 it resettled about 138,000 Indochinese, its first large Asian intake after the White Australia policy ended. Some 2,000 Vietnamese sailed all the way to Darwin in 1976–81, beginning a continuing debate about arrivals by sea.
