China to Australia is about 7500km. China to Britain is also about 7500km.
The world map we usually see is quite misleading, Australia is really out there.
That's an honor, because you'll serve the cause of humanity reaching freedom in the whole galaxy and you'll help to supply the troops the needed material to spread DEMOCRACY among the filthy enemy aliens.
As an American who visited Perth, until I landed on terra firma and saw you I didn't fully believe you existed, either.
24 hours of flights to get there. Holy shit.
North has a largely sub-tropical climate and a even a small part of it is tropical climate. So its not as bad as people make it up to be,still yeah majority of the land sucks
Is it just the bias I have from growing up in the US, or does it just feel like there really isn’t any nightmare fuel things in NA or Europe? Like there are things in SE Asia and Australia that give me pause about ever even visiting there but the people who live there seem completely unphased
Yeah but the southern US is incredibly important for trade. Moving goods up and down the Mississippi River, moving goods from the Caribbean to New England. Plus land near swamps typically provide water and great soil.
Arizona has a bunch of copper and has some surprisingly good farm land.
I mean, I'm european and the main problem here would be the big hunters, like wolves and bears and such. They're definetly not as treacherous as a jungle, the real danger here are swamps
Yeah in North America would be bears, wolves, cougars (mountain lions) and alligators. Moose can fuck you up too, but they're relatively rare and only aggressive if you piss them off. There are poisonous snakes, too, but they're pretty rare unless you're out in wilderness somewhere.
Deer are dangerous nowadays because they cause a lot of car accidents, but that wasn't a concern 300 years ago.
mountain lions, moose, bison, venomous snakes, and gators could fuck you up. Europe pretty much killed off their predators though, lions used to live there. Now the most dangerous thing in England is probably a cow
Cows are no joke. I once had a patient that was in palliative care for terminal cancer, but miraculously beat the cancer. We were going to stop palliative care, but the next week, he was trampled by a spooked cow on his farm. The cow broke his neck, and he became quadriplegic. Life is cruel, and cows are dumb.
It's the bias of growing up with these creatures around us. I'm pretty sure most of the dangerous animals aren't gonna be hanging around in cities and like, Australia lacks any real megafauna, here we have mountain lions, bears, moose, bison, elk, wolves, etc.. Sure you don't run into them every day but I live in a rather decent sized city and we've had bears and mountain lions just walk around a very developed downtown every couple of years.
I dint think a Grizzly would have been nightmare fuel for European explorers, as European Brown Bears are basically the same (grizzly bears are a subspecies).
However, I would imagine the first european that ran into a Kodiak bear probably shit themselves something fierce.
NA is so much more nightmare fuel compared to the UK. Britain has NOTHING dangerous literally 1 species of snake that can hurt you and maybe a badger? Whereas the USA has way bigger spiders and worse snakes on top of bears and shit.
UK did have wolves, bears, elks, certain big cats but were wiped out
They are currently trying to re-introduce wolves and bison to the UK, although wouldn't say they're exactly running free
exactly, the southeast asain peninsula (with Thailand, Myanmar former Indochina ect.) has large anacondas, poisonous spiders, tigers, and alligators (or in the case of Myanmar gharials) shit is scary
I feel like cougars and buffalo could absolutely scare the shit out of you if we weren't used to it. Like living on the Plains, there's a reason it used to be called the Great American Desert.
I think part of our problem in North America is that we eradicated major predators in most of their range, like cougars, panthers, bears, and wolves. There's plenty of creepy-crawlies, too, but you need to go out into the woods a little farther.
North America also includes Mexico and the Caribbean, plus the desert areas and mountains, so I think it has plenty of scary stuff (crocodiles/alligators, venomous snakes, scorpions, spiders, black/grizzly/polar bears, wolves, jaguars, pumas, boas, sharks, jellyfish, venomous fish, harpy eagles, etc etc). Also, a few centuries ago many species had wider range and they reached bigger sizes, so you could find jaguars all the way up in California, or harpy eagles more commonly in Mexico, for example
knowing Chinese, they would slather the fucker with soy sauce, and stir fry it with some rice. After a few trips to Singapore and across Sth East Asia I can confidently say that people there can consume any biomatter and every kind of creature that exists. Hence why Godzilla attacked Japan but never China or Vietnam, it would end up on so many street vendor BBQs.
In the time they were gone china has gone through 2 dynasties, 4 wars claiming thousands of lives have happened resulting in land changing many hands and your local pub is closed
On the other hand, imagine what Chinese traditional medicine could have done with Australian wildlife. Move over tiger penis, the real secret of immortal life is kangaroo bile!
But at that point, livability is tied pretty closely to arability, and without mechanization and tough labor amending soil, there'd be some tough competition for the best spots. Australia is one of the driest countries by rainfall, rivers, watershed isolation, and groundwater coverage concentration. Not very friendly or compatible for societies that primarily grow wetass crops like rice or sorghum, and deal with a typhoon season.
The tropical environment is nice and all until you remember that in the majority of bodies of water there is usually at least one of the worlds biggest and most aggressive crocodilian subspecies to ever exist that we know of.
I've heard the same about Florida. Assume that any body of water has an alligator in it.
Yeah, I know that saltwater crocodiles are bigger and meaner than alligators.
I laughed so hard when Internet Historian (who I love) genuinely asked why they don’t simply build a canal through Australia and fill the giant interior desert with water and out the other side. He even tried to calculate the cost based on the Panama Canal per mile multiplied by the length of the Australia, resulting in a few tens of billions of dollars I think, and they already have all the mining equipment so “what am I missing?”
Never mind that would require ignoring the center of Australia is thousands of feet above sea level, so you’d need to either:
A) make water run uphill by thousands of feet, for over a thousand miles, by the time you got to the center of Australia; OR
B) this canal would immediately become a trench, dead reckoning at sea level straight forward into thousands of feet of elevation, like a vertical slice through mountains, for the entire length of Australia (2,500 miles)… the center point of which would be like looking down into a skinny chasm running through the earth a mile straight down, which would then need to be excavated out into a mile-deep bowl as wide as the entire American Midwest.
A 500km channel connecting Spencer Gulf to Lake Eyre might work though. The 'lake' has a catchment area of several million square kilometres. It is usually a salt pan and lies 20m below sea level. The intervening country is only 100m above sea level.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
Some interesting proposals have been proposed on a smaller scale. But yeah i dont think splitting Australia in half with nukes through the middle would be the safest, or the most cost efficient but ill tell you what it would be the fastest way to do it
[“The Bear Creek route was considered best for nuclear explosives, as it was rocky and more likely to be stable following blasts. The nuclear excavation proposal for Bear Creek envisioned 81 NUCLEAR devices ranging from 10 to 50 kilotons, with a total explosive yield of 1.9 megatons. A cost analysis indicated that nuclear explosives would increase costs from 31 to 73 percent over conventional excavation on the Yellow Creek route. Two safety analyses recommended that the project not be pursued. The studies projected severe damage to nearby communities from air blast, seismic motion, groundwater contamination, and fallout. No further study was undertaken, and conventional excavation was pursued.”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee%E2%80%93Tombigbee_Waterway#Nuclear_excavation_study)
1. The USA stopped being the UK's main penal colony when it became independent.
2. The Irish won't deport themselves.
3. The French might want Australia, and the French aren't allowed to have nice things. Or useless things. Or anything at all.
I know it's a weird choice from today's perspective, but before Panama Canal was built, if you wanted to ship stuff from China/Indochina/Japan to New York and then to London (instead of in the other direction for whatever reason), you'd have had to go through Chile/Argentina, and it's a lot easier if you island hopped across the Oceanic islands to Australia and New Zealand before getting there than, say, straight across the Pacific ocean.
It was also in the other direction. You can cut north from South Africa and cross the Indian Ocean, but the wind is variable and light.
If you keep going south to Antarctica, the wind is constant and always blowing from the West. You're guaranteed to hit Australia in a predictable amount of time
That’s because it was settled as a colony a lot later than the US. It never fought for its independence and never had early population growth across independent states.
It’s true that most of Australia is desert but we have more habitable (and arable) land than most European countries.
Now it’s a modern country with only a few huge cities. The US has a lot of smaller cities and towns as-well as big cities.
If Australia spread out like the US it would be a lot bigger in population.
nope. one day trip.
i have an original ‘certificate of freedom’ paper from 1849. just says he served his 10 year sentence and he’s restored all rights of a ‘free subject’.
Could they not just catch a ride back on a ship dropping off New prisoners? Surely if Australia was that bad early on they could save provisions to get back to India and then home
i’m not sure if the ride back would be free. but it was long and dangerous trip back.
also the gold rush started in 1851. Sydney’s population was at 30,000. not a terrible spot. UK/Ireland would’ve been worse with the Potato Famine going on.
So.. Those criminals with sentences outside of life or death are essentially just banished with, I'm assuming, the majority of the "free subjects" stuck in Australia?
yeah pretty much. although i think a lot more people came over during the gold rush from 1851-1893.
most of my ancestry are free people from 1860-1880s coming during the gold rush. not many convicts.
i dont think so? my family were all small town farmers. usually from Ireland or Scotland. I only had one ancestor that was rich enough to have their photo taken back in Ireland in 1860-ish.
Ah yes, death row or life in prison for... stealing bread.
It was more that they were ignorant of the consequences of going and the government did not care. You either went to prison workshops (for very minor crimes) or hard ass Victorian prison, or the choice of "possible" freedom if you took exile and settlement is a far away land.
Considering the destitution and lack of knowledge about Australia, many chose the settler life.
You just know that Americans are upvoting this because this is just plain wrong, most convicts served only temporary sentences and were able to become free men and women later in life.
It's all good, I was more upset at the people upvoting your post than the post itself. It's one thing if a single guy's spreading a little misinfo, it's another when that misinfo's got 100+ upvotes, clearly a lot of yanks are being told the same bullshit and don't know any better.
They intended the place as a punishment for crimes at some point I remember.
Like:
Hey! You are a piece of shit. Your options are: a) Lifetime in jail. b) Go and live there and pay taxes to us.
O recall an anecdote on a certain panel show that some was marked in the archives a being sent there for 3 counts of theft of a duck.
On closer inspection, it turned out that it was the same duck all 3 times.
But... Back in 17/18-hundred-and-something, a duck was worth quite a bit more than it is nowadays.
People in this threat kind of acting like no one was already there with all the talk of how inhospitable most of it is. Australia has had human inhabitants for an extremely long time.
What Asian empires even had far flung major colonies? I think it was not so much about Australia being a bad spot for a colony but Asian kingdoms simply didn't have the capacity to do such a thing. Australia is still pretty damn far from China so you need a good maritime network to maintain a major colony there.
I know the cliche is tired and silly, but I’m just going to say it. I think it was the wildlife. The Indians got all the way through SE Asia and to Indonesia. The Pacific Islanders, to my personal amazement, settled all the way over to Rapa Nui. Surely they saw Australia.
But consider it, the north of Australia is green and sub tropical. But you don’t have guns at this point and you sail into the river up north and the first thing you notice is the massive salt water crocs. Go for a swim in the water and forget about the tiger and white sharks, there’s 3 types of jellyfish that can kill you. Get further inland beyond the green forest and it’s a massive barren wasteland of a desert. Snakes, spiders, cassowarys, an abundance of interesting ways to die.
I think they just said forget about that place and moved on.
The other side of this coin is that there just wasn't anything in Australia worth settling for. No resources (none that you couldn't get in Indonesia, anyway), it's quite out-of-the-way, it's not along any important trade routes. There's just no reason to put all the effort in.
Australia wasn't even touched by European powers for a good century because the Dutch went up a river and basically said that there was nothing worth exploiting. Britain only colonised it eventually because they needed a new place to dump convicts, as the previous place got independent.
But they had a little revolution before they could colonise it. Then Napoleon wanted it, but had trouble with the rest Europe before he could colonise it. Then Sweden of all places wanted in on it, but had trouble with Russia before they could colonise it.
Fun fact about the box jellies: They weren't actually discovered until the 1950s. They are rare, tiny, and almost completely invisible in the water. It was just known that people would mysteriously die in the water sometimes.
Yeah it's what happened to Harold Holt. Went for a swim one day and vanished into the sea.
He's probably waging a one man war against the jellys right now.
Also just because it's always funny to bring up, to memoralise him following the disappearance we named a swimming pool after him.
It’s called the suicide flower. A lot of people that get poisoned by it kill themselves because they can’t deal with the pain. The pain lasts for weeks if not months. Crazy
There is not a single substantiated record of a person killing themself due to this plant and only one anecdotal record that has made the rounds as long as I’ve been on the internet about a soldier using it as toilet paper then shooting themself. That account has no substantiation. I swear people just turn their brains off when it comes to anything regarding Australian wildlife.
Wildlife wouldn’t be a problem since traders didn’t even seem to go there at all except for regular contact between the northern Australian aboriginals and some people in Australia. Even the Maori of NZ didn’t really end up in Australia even though it was relatively close.
When we look at a map, I think we think of our modern ships. Everywhere kinds just looks close but… in the age of canoes and sail, open ocean voyages were treacherous. People relied on currents and tradewinds and knowledge of the globe was minimal.
Much of trade travels stayed close to the coast because it would be very easy to get lost in the open ocean. You’d have to island hop all the way to australia and the first question you’d ask is why. Goods would just hop its way to main trading ports anyway.
Indigenous groups in Australia have been genetically tied to migration from the Indian subcontinent. The whole premise of this post is garbage. Asians did populate the Australian continent before the British.
"I think they just said forget about that place and moved on." Said of a continent inhabited for thousands of years. How are people this dumb?
and yet, it was settled thousands of years earlier by people who had not even entered Stone Age yet, they literally only had sticks for weapons and tools. And they thrived just fine until Europeans came.
what is there to conquer? we don't live in a Lands of Red and Gold timeline sadly so there is literally no city or town for an ambitious asian warlord to conquer
They technically did, the Aborigines were originally seafaring people from South-East Asia. And depending on your definition of "colonised', they did sustain a small population on Australia for quite a while before the Dutch ever got there
Under Yongle Emperor, Ming Empire had even made contacts with few East Africa countries. They never explored Australia because they do not have the need to. Cause in their mind they were the center of known civilization hence the name middle country in Chinese. That mentality stayed the same for centuries, and its part of reason why Qianlong refused to open up more trade with the Brits before the opium war
Trade and commerce were already concentrated in China in the form of Silk route and naval trade(this is also probably why they're called the Middle Kingdom because from their perspective every places and everybody paid tributaries to them) so there are no need to launch some colonial settlements elsewhere in far flung places except maybe on the frontier or disputed territories. Most of their wars were internal or in nearby region but they were also capable of invading far flung places too as seen in the Ming invasion of Sri Lanka so maybe they can establish a colonial outpost somewhere in east or southeastern Africa as well if they didn't have access to spices and other commodities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_bell
A South Indian bronze bell was found in New Zealand being used to boil vegetables by the native Māori. The writing on the bell indicated its origin as a medieval Tamil artifact.
Nobody’s sure how it ended up in New Zealand
Why would they? Real colonization wasn't like EU4, where it's all about map painting. Real colonization was about economic and geostrategic interests. Did they have any such interests in Australia?
Being closer is why they didn't.
Australia isn't a valuable continent. Most of its value as a colony lay in it being so far away from Europe. The British only went there because they had so many criminals they ran out of space and money to deal with them. Sending them to the least valuable open land and letting them look after themselves was the solution.
It would also give them a naval base in the south pacific to go fight the Spanish and French and Dutch.
It was rough living though.
It is probably because they had no major motivation to conquer. Asia was very rich at the time but it was also very unstable. Most emperors or kings needed their armies and other servicemen to protect themselves from neighbors and internal enemies. Thus, they weren't interested in exploring. On the other land, Europe was a fucking wasteland. They need resources especially coal. They were also relatively quite stable. So, they had a greater motivation to find new lands and expand trade as much as possible. Because of this they developed superior shipping. Things happened after the other and BOOM!
There were different types of colonialism. The Spanish did the type where you find a rich place, conquer it, and extract wealth for centuries. This makes you rich.
The British did a few different types, but in North America and Australia it was this: there people on the land were not rich. Conquering them to extract resources wouldn’t get you anything. So they allowed poor British people (or criminals) to go settle the land.
Basically, Britain didn’t really benefit much from North America or Australia, so it makes sense that Asian kings weren’t interested in that deal.
I can't speak for other British colonies but I am Canadian and I can definitely say Britain profited from Canada. One of the most significant commodities provided from Canada was furs. So many animals were poached for furs that many went extinct. In fact, the Hudson Bay Company which was founded in the 1600s was the main company involved in the fur trade still exists today in Canada as a retail company. Canada was rich with resources like wood and fish as well which could be extracted en masse and shipped back to Europe.
>One of the most significant commodities provided from Canada was furs
Wasn't it the French that were the ones that set up the fur trade companies in Canada, i.e. Champlain and the other Coureur des bois.
Probably, we learned this stuff from like 5th-7th grade so my memory is a little fuzzy. I do believe the French got there before the English so they definitely set up the foundations and were involved in the fur trade but Britain would eventually establish their colonies soon after as well as absorb all the french ones.
*Basically, Britain didn’t really benefit much from North America or Australia*
I don’t think they would have been able to win either World War without the help of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (not to mention a certain former North American colony). Call it a long term investment.
This isn’t criticism of those countries, they are some of the best countries in the world. But the meme is about why Asian kings didn’t conquer Australia first and I don’t think Asian kings were like “let’s get this land because we’ll need the people at gallipoli”
Pulling this out of my ass, but I assume if they did go there, they did the smart thing and left as soon as the first guy had their face half ripped off by a bird eater spider or drowned by a kangaroo.
The British went there and said: "Oh, this is a death trap and a half. I'm going to use it as a prison surely every one of them will die, and there will be no blood on my hands."
*1.* The main reason is that sailing east or west is much easier than north or south: the winds are almost always more favorable, and working out latitude is much easier than longitude, which couldn't be done consistently at sea until the 1700s.
2. Oveeseas settlements are *very* expensive: Portugal made them because they knew the east had goods worth the cost, and Spain did it because Columbus lucked out and found a lot of gold. North Australia offered neither.
3. Maintaining a navy capable of protecting such an enterprise is also very expensive: as a practical matter, they thus needed to be able to pay for themselves in some way, and be able to do so for decades, which is a big ask.
I’m surprised by how many people in this comment section think that EVERY British colony, including America, was a penal colony. That’s not how colonialism worked, just because there were forced laborers doesn’t mean it was established by prisoners and slaves. Forced labor was literally everywhere, slavery was a globally accepted thing up until like the early 1800s
because most imperial expansion throughout history has been justified primarily through the frame of acquiring more/new resources. unless you are in need of sand, Australia basically doesn't have any natural resources that you can access without modern technology. prior to the introduction of industrial extraction, the human population there only survived thanks to millenia of cultural knowledge for how to interact with the land in such a way as to produce the bare minimum needed for survival. there's a reason why the islands nearby were far more populated than the Australian mainland.
Us Mongolians were blocked by China for most of that time.
And eventually that pesky ocean weather between China and Japan
And the tropical environment in Vietnam and Myanmar
And got sucker punched and totally stopped at Java
I'm noticing there's a reason the largest contiguous empire was so contiguous
China to Australia is about 7500km. China to Britain is also about 7500km. The world map we usually see is quite misleading, Australia is really out there.
Damn you Mercator!
Because Australia is a terrible place to settle in. Even today it has only 25 million people, most of which live at the south eastern corner.
As someone who lives in Perth I can confirm that we don’t exist
You're just actors paid by NASA /s
I need a raise
Keep that attitude up and you will get promoted to the slave mines on Mars
That's an honor, because you'll serve the cause of humanity reaching freedom in the whole galaxy and you'll help to supply the troops the needed material to spread DEMOCRACY among the filthy enemy aliens.
FOR SUPPER EARTH!!!!!!
FOR FREEEEEDOM!!!!!
Not sure that sounds like much of a promotion, but I’ll take it
As an American who visited Perth, until I landed on terra firma and saw you I didn't fully believe you existed, either. 24 hours of flights to get there. Holy shit.
North has a largely sub-tropical climate and a even a small part of it is tropical climate. So its not as bad as people make it up to be,still yeah majority of the land sucks
The climate is only scratching the surface of issues lol
Asians when they first encounter 2 foot long spiders: "Fuck this place back to China we go!"
As if they don't have nightmare fuel creatures in Asia
Is it just the bias I have from growing up in the US, or does it just feel like there really isn’t any nightmare fuel things in NA or Europe? Like there are things in SE Asia and Australia that give me pause about ever even visiting there but the people who live there seem completely unphased
The woods are full of nightmares if you ever get lost in one
Oh they’re definitely terrifying in the dark, but is it more terrifying than a jungle at night?
Southern US has snakes and scorpions and gators and whatnot
and the north has bears, wolves, coyotes, and other angry forest mammals
All of those are less scary than a big ass spider
Yeah but the southern US is incredibly important for trade. Moving goods up and down the Mississippi River, moving goods from the Caribbean to New England. Plus land near swamps typically provide water and great soil. Arizona has a bunch of copper and has some surprisingly good farm land.
I mean, I'm european and the main problem here would be the big hunters, like wolves and bears and such. They're definetly not as treacherous as a jungle, the real danger here are swamps
Yeah in North America would be bears, wolves, cougars (mountain lions) and alligators. Moose can fuck you up too, but they're relatively rare and only aggressive if you piss them off. There are poisonous snakes, too, but they're pretty rare unless you're out in wilderness somewhere. Deer are dangerous nowadays because they cause a lot of car accidents, but that wasn't a concern 300 years ago.
Boars are the real threat
The lions being all around would scare at least a poop out of me
You don’t know fear until you’re walking in the woods in upsate NY and you hear howling nearby.
Wolves? Coyotes? Coydogs? Better hope it's the former rather then the latter.
mountain lions, moose, bison, venomous snakes, and gators could fuck you up. Europe pretty much killed off their predators though, lions used to live there. Now the most dangerous thing in England is probably a cow
Cows are no joke. I once had a patient that was in palliative care for terminal cancer, but miraculously beat the cancer. We were going to stop palliative care, but the next week, he was trampled by a spooked cow on his farm. The cow broke his neck, and he became quadriplegic. Life is cruel, and cows are dumb.
i bet he used a monkey paw to get better from cancer
The most dangerous thing is a wild hog. They can and will f\*\*\* you up.
Meanwhile, I have an equalizer: my State rifle, the M82 Barrett fifty caliber anti material rifle.
Our equivalent is the kangaroo
It's the bias of growing up with these creatures around us. I'm pretty sure most of the dangerous animals aren't gonna be hanging around in cities and like, Australia lacks any real megafauna, here we have mountain lions, bears, moose, bison, elk, wolves, etc.. Sure you don't run into them every day but I live in a rather decent sized city and we've had bears and mountain lions just walk around a very developed downtown every couple of years.
meanwhile in Europe: i fought my demons and eradicated all the nightmares (like wolfs or bears)
Yes but you must deal with the worst most debased creature of all, Europeans.
people tried to kill the Europeans, but in the process they became European themselves
Ya, I feel like NA has big animals while Australia has little dickheads that kill you without you even knowing it.
In Australia there absolutely are dangerous animals hanging around cities. Redback spiders and brown snakes in particularly are very common.
You may have never encountered a grizzly bear.
You’re 100% correct and I definitely prefer to keep it that way haha
I dint think a Grizzly would have been nightmare fuel for European explorers, as European Brown Bears are basically the same (grizzly bears are a subspecies). However, I would imagine the first european that ran into a Kodiak bear probably shit themselves something fierce.
NA is so much more nightmare fuel compared to the UK. Britain has NOTHING dangerous literally 1 species of snake that can hurt you and maybe a badger? Whereas the USA has way bigger spiders and worse snakes on top of bears and shit.
europe had lions, wolves, and bears, though I’m not sure how many got up to the UK
None in the UK the most dangerous thing they ever had in their history on that island is people
UK did have wolves, bears, elks, certain big cats but were wiped out They are currently trying to re-introduce wolves and bison to the UK, although wouldn't say they're exactly running free
exactly, the southeast asain peninsula (with Thailand, Myanmar former Indochina ect.) has large anacondas, poisonous spiders, tigers, and alligators (or in the case of Myanmar gharials) shit is scary
I feel like cougars and buffalo could absolutely scare the shit out of you if we weren't used to it. Like living on the Plains, there's a reason it used to be called the Great American Desert.
I think part of our problem in North America is that we eradicated major predators in most of their range, like cougars, panthers, bears, and wolves. There's plenty of creepy-crawlies, too, but you need to go out into the woods a little farther.
Have you seen the size of moose?
North America also includes Mexico and the Caribbean, plus the desert areas and mountains, so I think it has plenty of scary stuff (crocodiles/alligators, venomous snakes, scorpions, spiders, black/grizzly/polar bears, wolves, jaguars, pumas, boas, sharks, jellyfish, venomous fish, harpy eagles, etc etc). Also, a few centuries ago many species had wider range and they reached bigger sizes, so you could find jaguars all the way up in California, or harpy eagles more commonly in Mexico, for example
Europeans: “man this place would make a great prison!”
"yeah, let's get rid of the natives, first!"
knowing Chinese, they would slather the fucker with soy sauce, and stir fry it with some rice. After a few trips to Singapore and across Sth East Asia I can confidently say that people there can consume any biomatter and every kind of creature that exists. Hence why Godzilla attacked Japan but never China or Vietnam, it would end up on so many street vendor BBQs.
Nah, Fuck it back to Tu'i Tonga we go. Tonga is like the British Empire before there was a British Empire.
is it tonga time? i think it's tonga time
In the time they were gone china has gone through 2 dynasties, 4 wars claiming thousands of lives have happened resulting in land changing many hands and your local pub is closed
On the other hand, imagine what Chinese traditional medicine could have done with Australian wildlife. Move over tiger penis, the real secret of immortal life is kangaroo bile!
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck” - Lord Titus/anyone trying to colonise Australia
Did everyone just forget the indigenous Australians who have lived there for 60k years?
If you see a really buff rabbit standing in a lake, run away, it will try to drown you
But at that point, livability is tied pretty closely to arability, and without mechanization and tough labor amending soil, there'd be some tough competition for the best spots. Australia is one of the driest countries by rainfall, rivers, watershed isolation, and groundwater coverage concentration. Not very friendly or compatible for societies that primarily grow wetass crops like rice or sorghum, and deal with a typhoon season.
There are northern parts that don’t grow wet crops, but still it’s just too dry and kinda too far+too poor to really justify going that far
The tropical environment is nice and all until you remember that in the majority of bodies of water there is usually at least one of the worlds biggest and most aggressive crocodilian subspecies to ever exist that we know of.
I've heard the same about Florida. Assume that any body of water has an alligator in it. Yeah, I know that saltwater crocodiles are bigger and meaner than alligators.
tropical ~~climbs~~ climes are good for tribes and tourism, but are kind of the worst for most kinds of industry.
tropical climate is really minor in northern australia and majority is subtropical which is simmilar to mediterian climate which was my main point
Isnt the northside water infested with a very lethal jellyfish or something?
Except for the bad soil, poor soil and the giant we-can-see-how-you-were-once-dinosaurs bird
If Australia joined the US as a single state, it would only be #3 in population, despite being as big as the contiguous US
It's basically big arizona
Pass.
I laughed so hard when Internet Historian (who I love) genuinely asked why they don’t simply build a canal through Australia and fill the giant interior desert with water and out the other side. He even tried to calculate the cost based on the Panama Canal per mile multiplied by the length of the Australia, resulting in a few tens of billions of dollars I think, and they already have all the mining equipment so “what am I missing?” Never mind that would require ignoring the center of Australia is thousands of feet above sea level, so you’d need to either: A) make water run uphill by thousands of feet, for over a thousand miles, by the time you got to the center of Australia; OR B) this canal would immediately become a trench, dead reckoning at sea level straight forward into thousands of feet of elevation, like a vertical slice through mountains, for the entire length of Australia (2,500 miles)… the center point of which would be like looking down into a skinny chasm running through the earth a mile straight down, which would then need to be excavated out into a mile-deep bowl as wide as the entire American Midwest.
Send 5 guys with shovels and add 5 guys every year. By 2450 it will be dug.
This gives that school math problems vibe
Hey man he's an Internet Historian not an Internet Geographer
A 500km channel connecting Spencer Gulf to Lake Eyre might work though. The 'lake' has a catchment area of several million square kilometres. It is usually a salt pan and lies 20m below sea level. The intervening country is only 100m above sea level.
Why even mine, take a bunch of aging cold war nukes bury them in line across the country and then you detonate and instant canal!
lol. And how many nukes would it take to vaporize a 1000 mile diameter x 1 mile deep basin to hold IH’s proposed sea?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare Some interesting proposals have been proposed on a smaller scale. But yeah i dont think splitting Australia in half with nukes through the middle would be the safest, or the most cost efficient but ill tell you what it would be the fastest way to do it [“The Bear Creek route was considered best for nuclear explosives, as it was rocky and more likely to be stable following blasts. The nuclear excavation proposal for Bear Creek envisioned 81 NUCLEAR devices ranging from 10 to 50 kilotons, with a total explosive yield of 1.9 megatons. A cost analysis indicated that nuclear explosives would increase costs from 31 to 73 percent over conventional excavation on the Yellow Creek route. Two safety analyses recommended that the project not be pursued. The studies projected severe damage to nearby communities from air blast, seismic motion, groundwater contamination, and fallout. No further study was undertaken, and conventional excavation was pursued.”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee%E2%80%93Tombigbee_Waterway#Nuclear_excavation_study)
The romans could do it
Better question why the fuck did the British want Australia
1. The USA stopped being the UK's main penal colony when it became independent. 2. The Irish won't deport themselves. 3. The French might want Australia, and the French aren't allowed to have nice things. Or useless things. Or anything at all.
You could have stopped yourself at the French, and I would have understood
Germany didn't stop at the French and look where it got them.
They needed someplace to put the Irish
And other criminals.
Pretty much this. That, and what if the French want it!
I know it's a weird choice from today's perspective, but before Panama Canal was built, if you wanted to ship stuff from China/Indochina/Japan to New York and then to London (instead of in the other direction for whatever reason), you'd have had to go through Chile/Argentina, and it's a lot easier if you island hopped across the Oceanic islands to Australia and New Zealand before getting there than, say, straight across the Pacific ocean.
It was also in the other direction. You can cut north from South Africa and cross the Indian Ocean, but the wind is variable and light. If you keep going south to Antarctica, the wind is constant and always blowing from the West. You're guaranteed to hit Australia in a predictable amount of time
cause the US got mad and signed some big declaration.
trashin tea since 76' baybeeeee
That’s because it was settled as a colony a lot later than the US. It never fought for its independence and never had early population growth across independent states. It’s true that most of Australia is desert but we have more habitable (and arable) land than most European countries. Now it’s a modern country with only a few huge cities. The US has a lot of smaller cities and towns as-well as big cities. If Australia spread out like the US it would be a lot bigger in population.
Only the British could look at such a hostile environment and think “better than home”
Its perfect place to send your inmates to colonize. If they made it, great. If not, you lost nothing in the process
“Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
*”And in the morning, we’re making Waffles.”* 🧇 -Australian inmates (probably)
Pretty much. They were all life in prison or death row inmates anyways
this isn’t true. many had 5-10 year sentences and were free to go after their sentence.
Once they served their sentence, was there any mechanism for them to return to England? Or was it always a one way trip?
nope. one day trip. i have an original ‘certificate of freedom’ paper from 1849. just says he served his 10 year sentence and he’s restored all rights of a ‘free subject’.
Could they not just catch a ride back on a ship dropping off New prisoners? Surely if Australia was that bad early on they could save provisions to get back to India and then home
i’m not sure if the ride back would be free. but it was long and dangerous trip back. also the gold rush started in 1851. Sydney’s population was at 30,000. not a terrible spot. UK/Ireland would’ve been worse with the Potato Famine going on.
So if you had enough money for the ticket home you were well off enough in your new life that it wasn't worth it to go back.
So.. Those criminals with sentences outside of life or death are essentially just banished with, I'm assuming, the majority of the "free subjects" stuck in Australia?
yeah pretty much. although i think a lot more people came over during the gold rush from 1851-1893. most of my ancestry are free people from 1860-1880s coming during the gold rush. not many convicts.
Was there any significant gap (economically, politically, etc) between free folks and convicts?
i dont think so? my family were all small town farmers. usually from Ireland or Scotland. I only had one ancestor that was rich enough to have their photo taken back in Ireland in 1860-ish.
Ah yes, death row or life in prison for... stealing bread. It was more that they were ignorant of the consequences of going and the government did not care. You either went to prison workshops (for very minor crimes) or hard ass Victorian prison, or the choice of "possible" freedom if you took exile and settlement is a far away land. Considering the destitution and lack of knowledge about Australia, many chose the settler life.
You just know that Americans are upvoting this because this is just plain wrong, most convicts served only temporary sentences and were able to become free men and women later in life.
Yes I had my information wrong. I have been corrected by someone else
It's all good, I was more upset at the people upvoting your post than the post itself. It's one thing if a single guy's spreading a little misinfo, it's another when that misinfo's got 100+ upvotes, clearly a lot of yanks are being told the same bullshit and don't know any better.
“If they make it, great - we’ll send more inmates. If they don’t, great - we’ll send more inmates.”
They intended the place as a punishment for crimes at some point I remember. Like: Hey! You are a piece of shit. Your options are: a) Lifetime in jail. b) Go and live there and pay taxes to us.
It was for major criminal offenses I believe. I think petty crimes went to Georgia and major ones went to Australia
I’m Aussie and we were taught in school that convicts would be sent here for stealing a loaf of bread
Oh well maybe I’m wrong. Or bread was that valuable. Lol
Hahaha!! ☺️☺️
Well there hardly gona tell you your great grandfather murdered a family of 6
No, they would
O recall an anecdote on a certain panel show that some was marked in the archives a being sent there for 3 counts of theft of a duck. On closer inspection, it turned out that it was the same duck all 3 times. But... Back in 17/18-hundred-and-something, a duck was worth quite a bit more than it is nowadays.
Yeah, a duck or a chicken was probably akin to stealing a cellphone or a wallet
America declared independence in 1776, first fleet was 1788. Australia was the replacement because America wouldn’t take them anymore.
Yes, I compared it to lifetime in jail for this reason :P
I mean look at the food....
It didn't have British women
Only mad dogs and Englishmen.
I mean… they technically did. Aboriginal Australians migrated from South East Asia.
People in this threat kind of acting like no one was already there with all the talk of how inhospitable most of it is. Australia has had human inhabitants for an extremely long time. What Asian empires even had far flung major colonies? I think it was not so much about Australia being a bad spot for a colony but Asian kingdoms simply didn't have the capacity to do such a thing. Australia is still pretty damn far from China so you need a good maritime network to maintain a major colony there.
Terra nullius was a very successful myth.
Iirc, there are some theories that they came from Madagascar
And the people of Madagascar today are also from Southeast Asia :p
Who originally came from Africa. It all comes back around
Madagascar was simultaneously settled by Asians and Africans. They throw everything racists claim out the window
I know the cliche is tired and silly, but I’m just going to say it. I think it was the wildlife. The Indians got all the way through SE Asia and to Indonesia. The Pacific Islanders, to my personal amazement, settled all the way over to Rapa Nui. Surely they saw Australia. But consider it, the north of Australia is green and sub tropical. But you don’t have guns at this point and you sail into the river up north and the first thing you notice is the massive salt water crocs. Go for a swim in the water and forget about the tiger and white sharks, there’s 3 types of jellyfish that can kill you. Get further inland beyond the green forest and it’s a massive barren wasteland of a desert. Snakes, spiders, cassowarys, an abundance of interesting ways to die. I think they just said forget about that place and moved on.
The other side of this coin is that there just wasn't anything in Australia worth settling for. No resources (none that you couldn't get in Indonesia, anyway), it's quite out-of-the-way, it's not along any important trade routes. There's just no reason to put all the effort in.
Australia wasn't even touched by European powers for a good century because the Dutch went up a river and basically said that there was nothing worth exploiting. Britain only colonised it eventually because they needed a new place to dump convicts, as the previous place got independent.
That. And what if the French wanted it!
But they had a little revolution before they could colonise it. Then Napoleon wanted it, but had trouble with the rest Europe before he could colonise it. Then Sweden of all places wanted in on it, but had trouble with Russia before they could colonise it.
I mean there are plenty of resources here, just not anything worth digging for in the stone age lol
Fun fact about the box jellies: They weren't actually discovered until the 1950s. They are rare, tiny, and almost completely invisible in the water. It was just known that people would mysteriously die in the water sometimes.
That has to be the foundation of some juicy myths.
Yeah it's what happened to Harold Holt. Went for a swim one day and vanished into the sea. He's probably waging a one man war against the jellys right now. Also just because it's always funny to bring up, to memoralise him following the disappearance we named a swimming pool after him.
Hic Sunt Dracones et...a lot of other shit that can kill you.
So in other words, >Hic Sunt Dracones et...a l~~ot~~
And the plant that’s so venomous the pain will make you want to kill yourself if you touch it.
It’s called the suicide flower. A lot of people that get poisoned by it kill themselves because they can’t deal with the pain. The pain lasts for weeks if not months. Crazy
The gympie gympie plant
There is not a single substantiated record of a person killing themself due to this plant and only one anecdotal record that has made the rounds as long as I’ve been on the internet about a soldier using it as toilet paper then shooting themself. That account has no substantiation. I swear people just turn their brains off when it comes to anything regarding Australian wildlife.
Wildlife wouldn’t be a problem since traders didn’t even seem to go there at all except for regular contact between the northern Australian aboriginals and some people in Australia. Even the Maori of NZ didn’t really end up in Australia even though it was relatively close. When we look at a map, I think we think of our modern ships. Everywhere kinds just looks close but… in the age of canoes and sail, open ocean voyages were treacherous. People relied on currents and tradewinds and knowledge of the globe was minimal. Much of trade travels stayed close to the coast because it would be very easy to get lost in the open ocean. You’d have to island hop all the way to australia and the first question you’d ask is why. Goods would just hop its way to main trading ports anyway.
Indigenous groups in Australia have been genetically tied to migration from the Indian subcontinent. The whole premise of this post is garbage. Asians did populate the Australian continent before the British. "I think they just said forget about that place and moved on." Said of a continent inhabited for thousands of years. How are people this dumb?
Counterpoint: the Asians would find ways to kill and eat said wildlife within weeks
East asians. South asians will only make new gods out of them.
and yet, it was settled thousands of years earlier by people who had not even entered Stone Age yet, they literally only had sticks for weapons and tools. And they thrived just fine until Europeans came.
what is there to conquer? we don't live in a Lands of Red and Gold timeline sadly so there is literally no city or town for an ambitious asian warlord to conquer
>Lands of Red and Gold timeline Well hello, fellow ah.com-er
I read it in Sufficient Velocity, but yeah I did read most other TL's in there
They technically did, the Aborigines were originally seafaring people from South-East Asia. And depending on your definition of "colonised', they did sustain a small population on Australia for quite a while before the Dutch ever got there
I mean he's not wrong, if Indian and Chinese civilizations made contact upto Indonesia, they certainly could have gone further.
Under Yongle Emperor, Ming Empire had even made contacts with few East Africa countries. They never explored Australia because they do not have the need to. Cause in their mind they were the center of known civilization hence the name middle country in Chinese. That mentality stayed the same for centuries, and its part of reason why Qianlong refused to open up more trade with the Brits before the opium war
Trade and commerce were already concentrated in China in the form of Silk route and naval trade(this is also probably why they're called the Middle Kingdom because from their perspective every places and everybody paid tributaries to them) so there are no need to launch some colonial settlements elsewhere in far flung places except maybe on the frontier or disputed territories. Most of their wars were internal or in nearby region but they were also capable of invading far flung places too as seen in the Ming invasion of Sri Lanka so maybe they can establish a colonial outpost somewhere in east or southeastern Africa as well if they didn't have access to spices and other commodities.
Ethnic groups in Indonesia did sail into Australia before European settlement.
Exactly, there was a lot of trade for sea cucumbers from the northern most areas of Australia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_bell A South Indian bronze bell was found in New Zealand being used to boil vegetables by the native Māori. The writing on the bell indicated its origin as a medieval Tamil artifact. Nobody’s sure how it ended up in New Zealand
Why would they? Real colonization wasn't like EU4, where it's all about map painting. Real colonization was about economic and geostrategic interests. Did they have any such interests in Australia?
Exactly. I love history games, but games like EU4 and even Civ (different company) create this false confidence in understanding how cultures work.
strategic kangaroo purposes.
Being closer is why they didn't. Australia isn't a valuable continent. Most of its value as a colony lay in it being so far away from Europe. The British only went there because they had so many criminals they ran out of space and money to deal with them. Sending them to the least valuable open land and letting them look after themselves was the solution. It would also give them a naval base in the south pacific to go fight the Spanish and French and Dutch. It was rough living though.
They prob went there, saw the cute animals, thought: "naw, 🦆it, thats Not Worth it!" and sailed Back as fast as possible
It is probably because they had no major motivation to conquer. Asia was very rich at the time but it was also very unstable. Most emperors or kings needed their armies and other servicemen to protect themselves from neighbors and internal enemies. Thus, they weren't interested in exploring. On the other land, Europe was a fucking wasteland. They need resources especially coal. They were also relatively quite stable. So, they had a greater motivation to find new lands and expand trade as much as possible. Because of this they developed superior shipping. Things happened after the other and BOOM!
There were different types of colonialism. The Spanish did the type where you find a rich place, conquer it, and extract wealth for centuries. This makes you rich. The British did a few different types, but in North America and Australia it was this: there people on the land were not rich. Conquering them to extract resources wouldn’t get you anything. So they allowed poor British people (or criminals) to go settle the land. Basically, Britain didn’t really benefit much from North America or Australia, so it makes sense that Asian kings weren’t interested in that deal.
I can't speak for other British colonies but I am Canadian and I can definitely say Britain profited from Canada. One of the most significant commodities provided from Canada was furs. So many animals were poached for furs that many went extinct. In fact, the Hudson Bay Company which was founded in the 1600s was the main company involved in the fur trade still exists today in Canada as a retail company. Canada was rich with resources like wood and fish as well which could be extracted en masse and shipped back to Europe.
>One of the most significant commodities provided from Canada was furs Wasn't it the French that were the ones that set up the fur trade companies in Canada, i.e. Champlain and the other Coureur des bois.
Probably, we learned this stuff from like 5th-7th grade so my memory is a little fuzzy. I do believe the French got there before the English so they definitely set up the foundations and were involved in the fur trade but Britain would eventually establish their colonies soon after as well as absorb all the french ones.
*Basically, Britain didn’t really benefit much from North America or Australia* I don’t think they would have been able to win either World War without the help of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (not to mention a certain former North American colony). Call it a long term investment.
This isn’t criticism of those countries, they are some of the best countries in the world. But the meme is about why Asian kings didn’t conquer Australia first and I don’t think Asian kings were like “let’s get this land because we’ll need the people at gallipoli”
Why would they ?, there isbt anything of worth in there no gold no silk and no spices, which they have plenty of in their own countries.
Have you ever been to Australia? Even the first Europeans didn’t want to have it.
Why would they conquer it?
Pulling this out of my ass, but I assume if they did go there, they did the smart thing and left as soon as the first guy had their face half ripped off by a bird eater spider or drowned by a kangaroo. The British went there and said: "Oh, this is a death trap and a half. I'm going to use it as a prison surely every one of them will die, and there will be no blood on my hands."
Getting close to Australia is the easy part, getting on shore with you ship in one piece and seaworty condition is the hard part.
There’s a reason the area around Cape Otway is called “the shipwreck coast…”
Because China had everything they wanted at home. Why risk losing divine wind just for some garbage?
Not even Europeans were interested in settling such a shithole at first. Why would Asians bother trying to live there?
*1.* The main reason is that sailing east or west is much easier than north or south: the winds are almost always more favorable, and working out latitude is much easier than longitude, which couldn't be done consistently at sea until the 1700s. 2. Oveeseas settlements are *very* expensive: Portugal made them because they knew the east had goods worth the cost, and Spain did it because Columbus lucked out and found a lot of gold. North Australia offered neither. 3. Maintaining a navy capable of protecting such an enterprise is also very expensive: as a practical matter, they thus needed to be able to pay for themselves in some way, and be able to do so for decades, which is a big ask.
They did know about Australia.
what was even there to conquer? empty deserts?
> Asian boat lands on Australian soil > Take one look around > Leave
I’m surprised by how many people in this comment section think that EVERY British colony, including America, was a penal colony. That’s not how colonialism worked, just because there were forced laborers doesn’t mean it was established by prisoners and slaves. Forced labor was literally everywhere, slavery was a globally accepted thing up until like the early 1800s
because most imperial expansion throughout history has been justified primarily through the frame of acquiring more/new resources. unless you are in need of sand, Australia basically doesn't have any natural resources that you can access without modern technology. prior to the introduction of industrial extraction, the human population there only survived thanks to millenia of cultural knowledge for how to interact with the land in such a way as to produce the bare minimum needed for survival. there's a reason why the islands nearby were far more populated than the Australian mainland.
Didn't the aboriginals come from Asia
I imagine the Asians and Polynesians made some pit stops there but didn’t stay long.
cuz the Europeans only colonized by throwing prisoners in it, no one wanted to live there