The Australia Project - Rulers Of The Last Continent [PoD 3.0.6]

[InvisibleSandwi]

The first update should be up in less than an hour. In the meantime, time to talk with the readers!

And off we go! Great start, now let's see how this turns out.

I'm also interested to see changes my gameplay will create in the world.

Nice work so far! I gotta say, your writing style is very interesting, so I'll surely be following. Plus, you don't see a lot of Australian AARs around here, huh.

It's an interesting challenge to put myself in the head of this book's "author" - he has to be a lot more flippant and upbeat than I would be if I were writing a book about history. Mind you, my primary experience with that (outside AARland) is the essays and thesis papers I did when I was in college, which by necessity were rather more serious in tone.

Nice opening and style, looking good keep it up

Glad to see you like it!

Looks like fun.

Dotted.

I'll endeavor to keep it fun.

You have my attention.

Welcome aboard!

Excellent intro, can't wait for the next update!

You won't have to wait very long.

Very nice! I'm sad I missed the vote... But good luck to you!

With any luck, it won't be long until I start making progress on my gameplay goals.

 

[InvisibleSandwi]

Chapter 1: The Kalgoorlie Gold Rush​

The scene - Australia in 1836. Much of the population has settled on the east coast. British settlement strikes again! However, this is about to change.

The culprit? William IV, the King of England. He fancied himself a reformist, and he used his power as a monarch to reduce his power as a monarch whenever he could. It must've been spite over his lack of heirs - the only other person I can think of in that situation was Dom Pedro II of the short-lived empire of Brazil. Either way, kings who ruin it for their successors are something you need to watch out for.

Look at him! I'm positive he's thinking about enfranchising you at this very minute!
​

Besides being a hardcore liberalizer (and womanizer, too, but let's not go there), Willy also planted a seed of Australian exceptionalism by appointing Richard Bourke as the governor of New South Wales, who as well was rather committed to liberal reform. Add to this a hint of revolutionary fervor in continental Europe as well as some suppression efforts by Klemens von Metternich and his cronies, and escape to Australia begins to sound quite appealing.

One problem arises - in researching this book, I colluded with some historians (see the acknowledgements). Most of them agree that simplifying the story of European flight to Australia the way I did leaves out important parts of the story. Minnie Rohrig, who teaches history at the university of Sydney, wrote to tell me I needed to consider why migrants didn't go to America, Canada, or even settle in the British Isles proper. She went on to inform me that Australian schools were failing to impress this upon younger students, along with a bucket list of historical facts she considered important.

The fact of the matter is that there were many continental European migrants to the United States of America, as well as to the Canadian colonies. In the past, there was this common perception of the colonies as being unpopulated and having enormous amounts of land for the taking (with the marked exception of India); the Americans in particular were able to turn this to their advantage by pushing towards, and then populating the Pacific. In fact, some who attempted the western route would give up around New Orleans and settle with their new American identity.

Immigration to Britain was rather less common, though. The Quota Act of 1837 was passed in an attempt to limit the naturalization of Europeans into British society. Rohrig claims this was due to a wave of anti-foreigner paranoia primarily revolving around unemployment. Personally, I'm more pessimistic - my research indicates British factory owners were worried about losing their industrial scientific secrets to the continent. While they fretted, the free trade of scientific correspondence between the nations of Europe continued unabated. Such is life, and freedom of correspondence may have allowed rather more utopian visions of Australia to reach London, Paris, Vienna, Moscow, and so forth than otherwise.

Either way, immigration to Australia (particularly by route of the 'Tour of Britannia' mentioned in the prologue) was slowly, but steadily increasing throughout the 1820s and early 1830s. Australia's natural resources were little known and undersurveyed, but its potential to host utopian communes and yeoman farmers was rather significant...

---

In a less thorough text, this very paragraph is where you would first read about the Kalgoorlie gold rush itself. But at the beginning of 1836, Australia would first be wracked with mahogany fever. The Wet Tropics of Queensland were home to many desirable timber species that continental craftsmen lusted after. Like any good raw material boom, it was dangerous - disease and dread marsupials abounded in the rainforests. Still, it was considered worthy enough that the ships that brought immigrants to Australia would often take a few tons of it back to cover their operating expenses. Less skilled sailors often had to dip into their stock to keep their ineptly managed ships from sinking, Suffice it to say that before Kalgoorlie, anyone who wanted to strike it rich in Australia had to have a wooden disposition. Even after that opened up the goldfields of Australia to exploitation, it still helped.

OOC: I think the second "Immigrant Attraction" value is only used for internal migration within a country... otherwise every civilized nation would trample the others in an attempt to populate Australia. That doesn't quite happen, although you can still easily get several thousand immigrants a month.
​

Kalgoorlie attracted incredible amounts of people - once the first few thousand gold miners tried to get in on the wealth, some of them began to realize that everyone needed food, shelter, clothing, and they left the mines to start farms. One problem was that Kalgoorlie had the soil from hell - it was almost impossible to farm in the area, so food had to be imported from the satellites it spawned - Perth and Esperance. In fact, Kalgoorlie became known as the "Canned Food City" for the poor diet of its (admittedly wealthy) inhabitants, and the people in the western parts of Australia squandered countless wealth investing in mad schemes to make life in Kalgoorlie more tenable.

The fact that Kalgoorlie could sustain its early peak of 50,000 people (although it would not reach that for some decades) is a testament to the greatest scam in Australian history. Genuine gold and genuine suffering do not mix well.

Meanwhile, the people on the other side of Australia generally went on with their idyllic, pastoral lives, although the gradually rising amount of neighbors did not go unnoticed. Many of the Anglo or Anglo-friendly immigrants ended up in New South Wales, especially around Sydney, particularly before Kalgoorlie started siphoning off people for its own nefarious purposes. Also of note was a rather high birthrate - men told their wives that they needed more help on the farms, and then they tried to crank out a ton of children. This was not fun for anyone, but it did dramatically increase local population.

By then, Sydney was home to tens of thousands of people (in a more sustainable fashion than Kalgoorlie, too!), and they began to organize their own social services. The Australian military has its origins in a local defense militia the Sydneysiders arranged to protect their farms and ranches. Later, they would push the country's fledgling shipyards to build military ships capable of protecting trade and immigration... but that's a different chapter. Compared to the explosive growth of the west, Eastern Australia seemed almost peaceful and pastoral. More of the locals were literate, and they pushed the earliest stirrings of our national identity towards nature, personal strength, and so forth.

This first 'golden age' itself is a tale best told through a census. Major efforts at cataloging the population didn't really begin until the end of the 1830s, but even then, we have some data to help us understand just what was going on.

Australia in the 1830s still had something of an Aborigine majority. Most of the immigrants at this point were from Britain; they would claim to be good Anglicans if anyone asked.

The first reasonably complete census dates to 1840, and it already showcases the indigenous population being swamped in immigration. My country very quickly began to fill with Europeans eager to adopt Australian customs... which at the time were not too different from contemporary British ones. You'll note I'm not a very big fan of Victorian England - it seems to be a time when due to excessive pollution, people could not enjoy the great outdoors without becoming reclusive asthmatics... but I digress.

The trends I find most important are conveniently embodied in Ivan Seversky, the first to hold the short lived position of "Chairman of the Magistrates Council of Australia". First of all, he was part of the massive Central/Eastern European migration to Australia that dominated this period (in order of rough prevalence, Poles, ethnic Russians, Ashenkazi Jews, and Romanians provided the most immigrant stock). Seversky was a former inhabitant of Odessa who ended up participating in the Gold Rush and somehow making his way into the West Australian parliament. The wild west was full of these stories - by virtue of necessity, anyone who displayed a hint of aptitude in administration got quickly inducted into the government.

Seversky, compared to most of the immigrants, was a political genius who ushered disproportionate influence for Western Australian concerns in the 19th century. Beyond merely providing services for the local miners and farmers, Seversky also proposed plans for broad cooperation amongst Australia's colonial governors, with the eventual intent of establishing responsible government.

With the blessing of a sympathetic Queen Victoria (good thing he wrote to the right one, otherwise our nation would've been held back for centuries, and we'd be exporting fish and chips back to the Isles instead of brainpower), the Australian colonies' governments called for two rounds of elections - one to determine who would act as their head of government, and a second to determine which of them would have seniority. In most places, the previous governors were able to hold onto their jobs, but Seversky ousted the last previous governor and won the position of chairman.

This is where migration comes in. Most of the non-British population had ended up in the western and northern parts of Australia, to the point that many of the people there identified as Russian, Eastern Orthodox, or both (since the Poles and Jews that escaped Russia often decided they'd rather be Brits). The Australian Orthodox Church began to emerge as an autonomous spinoff of the main Russian one, and it exerted substantial influence over the locals. One of Seversky's big campaign points was a promise to ensure Orthodox Australians would have the same legal rights as any other sort of Christian, although he also reached out to the Jews in a way that would've been dangerous in pogrom-prone Russia.

Ivan Seversky's supporters formed a rather significant part of what would later become the Nationalist Party of Australia. Ironically, Australia nearly became a satellite of the Russian Empire due to this bloc's Slavophilic tendencies. Without the yoke of serfdom and significant British influence in the political system, the average Russian immigrant formed a disturbingly romantic picture of Czar Nicholas I, and occasionally publicly expressed their desire for, if not Nicholas, one of the Romanov rulers to come to Australia and rule them.

I suppose he's kind of handsome in an old fashioned, aristocratic way.
​

If Chairman Seversky was amongst these people, he hid his feelings behind a mask of republicanism. There is a story (probably apocryphal) claiming that he corresponded with Czar Nicholas and formally invited him to visit Australia. Nicholas apparently rejected this overture, perhaps fearing the local aristocrats would replace him. Either way, his policies did bear at least a tangential resemblance to imperial Russian ones. He pushed for religion to play a major role in Australian life, even if it was freely chosen. Australia also took its earliest steps towards industrial production, although farming and mining continued to form the backbone of the Australian economy for a long time.

Australia, in short, entered the 1840s with massive amounts of gold in its pockets, and the beginnings of a multi-ethnic society. Migration had somewhat split the continent into two nations - a haven for refugee Slavs in the west, and utopian farmhand Brits in the east. Seversky helped them coordinate, but interaction between these halves was limited compared to the future. To be honest, I find it ironic that a Russian would play such a role in forming our country's identity, but I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that he and his buddies were rushin' to get away from Russia.

 

[JanBDim]

Great AAR, and interesting country choice. You weren't kidding when you said ridiculous migration

 

[Sigsmund]

Nice update! Looks like I spy Jews, Polish, Romanians and I'm guessing some Catalans with a mix of Frenchmen. I love the immigration system...

 

[iisbroke]

Yeah wasn't expecting that mix of immigrates going to Australia.

 

[InvisibleSandwi]

Great AAR, and interesting country choice. You weren't kidding when you said ridiculous migration

It's not just for Australia - migration is much heavier for anyone eligible. Most of the time, this means that the Americas are more populated than they would be in vanilla, but even particularly liberal European countries can occasionally get immigration, as can African nations. Part of this is that the "Attract Immigrants" focus actually encourages external immigration, apparently.

Nice update! Looks like I spy Jews, Polish, Romanians and I'm guessing some Catalans with a mix of Frenchmen. I love the immigration system...

There's a few Frenchmen, but they're in the minority. I wouldn't be surprised if there were Catalan culture immigrants, but I didn't see much, if any immigration from Spain. Maybe there'd be more if the Carlists had won?

Yeah wasn't expecting that mix of immigrates going to Australia.

I'd say the main reason we get this mix of immigrants in PDM (compare to real life, where it was probably mostly British people and maybe the occasional prosperous German or Dutchman) is that Central/Eastern Europe has a potent mix of illiteracy, weak industry, and authoritarian politics. However, the Irish famine events are going to kick in soon, which will definitely skew the numbers a bit.

 

[InvisibleSandwi]

Chapter 2: Seversky's Democracy​

It's time to dispel a longstanding rumor - my favorite 'superhero' as a child was actually Batman. Despite my love of all things Australia, I always thought the Kalgoorlie Krusader was a nonsensical and stupid character. I mean, if you have superhuman strength and durability, why would you go running around in a suit of armor made of solid gold?

This book isn't supposed to be a discussion of comics, anyways - in the time period I intend to discuss, the only comics anyone could read were the ones in the newspapers... and the cartoonists of the time were a bunch of buffoons! Australian newspapers in the late 1830s and early 1840s were not known for the quality of their journalism. While there were quite a few literate migrants, there were few who really devoted their life to words, and the earliest publications have an amateurish quality to them, with flaws ranging from self-serving political agendas to a total disregard for journalistic ethics. It makes me sick to think about them; I need a drink.

OOC: I got this event a lot. The second option gives a lot of prestige.
​

...

Ah, that's better. I hope you didn't put the book away while I was freshening up. There's really nothing quite like a good Australian vodka - we have the Russian immigrants to thank for that. Back on 'topic' - in 1840, the most notable Australian authors (Eric Conroy comes to mind) were British immigrants following British literary models - in fact, Conroy's best known work is a set of poems about the Napoleonic Wars! Conroy never fought in the wars, and if his biographers are to be believed, he never even fired a gun in his life; apparently he turned into a hardline pacifist at some point. Either way, he was not very Australian, at least as I understand it.

Visual art was much stronger in early Australia. There's an obvious glut of landscapes; the art of the United States during this period was quite similar, but we also saw portrait upon portrait upon portrait. My theory is that the Brits were enamored with the costumes of immigrants and wanted to record them for posterity, since there's a lot of Russians and Poles represented amongst their number. Either way, Australian culture would later get a nice shot in the arm when the Australian people started building up some colonial infrastructure in Indonesia, but that didn't begin in earnest for some years.

---

Here's a case in point - besides being good at manipulating the Australian political system (often by bringing it into existence where there wasn't much beforehand), Ivan Seversky spent his first term planting the seeds of the Australian military; apparently, he thought a strong military would contribute to the development of national unity. Australia definitely needed national unity to handle its growth - with the population of the country exploding from migration, many areas, like Cooktown, Gladstone, and the infamous Kalgoorlie were not known for being very well integrated communities. A more accurate understanding of West Australia (and what would also later become the Northern Territory) takes into account that despite the political rights of the immigrants, there was a lot of tension between the various boom towns of the goldfields and their peripheries.

These tensions weren't as bad in the early parts of the Australian rushes, but by the mid-1840s, Australia was beginning to diversify even further. As a result of growing political instability, migrants no longer were limited to Britain and Slavic Europe. Australia even saw the beginnings of a Muslim community due to the evolving political situation in the Levant. If you think Russian Orthodox was a difficult background to reach Kalgoorlie from, wait until you hear the stories of Shi'ite Iraqis. Their only consolation prize was that due to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, they didn't have to go all the way around Africa to reach the promised land of Australia.

Estimated population of Australia in 1844. It is my firm belief that the Orthodox population has been underrepresented throughout our country's history.​

It seems to me that with the squabbles of their leaders, many European (and Middle Eastern) peasants were giving up on Europe. The elites of the continent were squabbling again after the gradual breakup of the Congress of Vienna; the most time-relevant example of this being a French attempt to free Bulgaria from Ottoman rule that did little more than devastate the countries of the German Confederation (and block the UK's desire for Belgian neutrality). Bulgarian territory itself saw insignificant fighting, but plenty of Turkish fear and increased repression took its place.

Either way, the increasing 'strangeness' of Australian immigrants compared to the British norm concerned the more xenophobic inhabitants of the country, and within weeks of the first shipload of Syrians (say what you will, but they liked to travel in packs, complete with a complementary imam to lead daily prayers) they suddenly had a far more coherent political platform to assemble around - while it would be very difficult to expel previous immigrants without disrupting the fledgling Australian economy, making life as untenable as possible for foreigners would be relatively easy.

Ivan Seversky then continued his illustrious career by becoming the focal point for the east's isolationist tendencies. His most vocal opponents aligned with the small Protectionist Party and promptly added to their anti-immigrant rhetoric a call for tariffs to protect factories, incorporation of the Sydneysider militias into the British army, and better protection for Australian shipping. Eerily similar to Seversky's policies, if you ask me. The political writings of the time mostly agreed upon a need to rapidly build national infrastructure, at least when they weren't attacking their opponents' positions on immigrants. Still, between an untamed west and a utopian Britannia in the east, it was reasonable to assume that the Australian colonies would not unite any time soon.

Political fragmentation even struck in Nationalist strongholds like Kalgoorlie. In 1843, rising inflation combined with a sudden drop in mine productivity lead to nationwide panic, as income from gold had contributed disproportionately to Australia's income. People feared that without it, the colonies would suffer an economic collapse, and for the first time in at least 20 years, there was significant traffic out of Australia. At least 2,000 immigrants tried to return to their countries of origin, but in the process, many of them were caught up in yet another boom, as settlers began to carve republics out of Southern Africa. Most prominent during the Panic of 1843 was the Boer republic of Natalia, which experienced similar types of social upheaval to Australia due to its location on the Tour of Britannia.

While the gold gradually began to flow from Kalgoorlie again, the Panic did have the effect of pushing workers out of the Goldfields, and into a variety of new fields. My former employers at Bush Steel insist that their firm was founded by two former prospectors who decided to get into the ironworking trade. It's a blatant lie, though - Bush Steel was founded by a second generation Sydneysider (Percy Rothstein) who'd never seen a gold mine in his life. He actually started the company in an attempt to profit from the Cooktown lumber boom. It doesn't really change the historical reality that Australian manufacturing was 'inspired' by the most prominent raw materials.

The beginnings of Australian industry and culture that I've spoken of did not influence the elections of 1844 as much as many other historians seem to believe. Australia was still a country shaped primarily by the weight of its immigration, and it would continue to be so long as new immigrants formed a significant part of the population. While there were definitely more voters, the essential political blocs had not changed.This time around, Henry Fox Young played the role of opposition to the Nationalists. If Seversky represented nationhood through interethnic fraternity, Young represented nationhood through British/Anglican assimilation.

Henry Fox Young looking... if not young, at least foxy.​

Given that they resided in separate halves of Australia, and that communication/travel was difficult even with the trickle of higher quality steamships entering the worlds' navies, it's understandable that there was little in the realm of formal debate between Seversky and Young. Much of what I know about them comes from the letters they wrote to the fledgling newspapers of the country; I am sure those letters are accurate and properly transcribed, even if the commentary on them is insipid. Still, for your entertainment, I present a hypothetical political debate between these two figures.

---

On the Role Of Immigrants And Foreigners In The Australian Colonies​

Seversky: "Greetings! I am the best person to ever live, and I'm originally from Russia."

Young: "Oh yeah? I'm a good little governor who doesn't pester Queen Victoria for more autonomy."

Seversky: "Lay off, dude! With all these immigrants floating in on the tides, I need to make sure we're allowed to build our own boats."

Young: "We shouldn't be building so many boats! We need steam locomotives so that I may pass from Sydney to Cooktown in only two weeks!"

Seversky: "More like pass gas..."

Mediator: "Sirs, you must refrain from using colloquialisms that will not be invented for at least a century. It disrupts the versimilitude of this hypothetical debate."

Seversky: "I don't care. Australia needs more workers, and we're only going to get new ones by treating them with respect."

Young: "With our high birthrate, Australia does not need the refuse of Europe scrambling to tear down its forests and empty its mines."

Seversky: "That's nonsense! Australia attracts the best and brightest of the old continent. For instance, a Pole discovered Neptune on our soil."

Young: "If he hadn't, one of the natives would have."

Seversky: "But Australia is a group of British colonies! You're an immigrant, too!"

Young: "I did not have to leave one empire to reach another, whereas you did. Loser."

Seversky: "Don't talk to me like that! I'll show you what they do to fools in Kiev!"

Mediator: "Mister Seversky, please do not physically assault your opponent in this debate. It will not help your arguments."

Seversky: "Oh, so you're taking his side? You're next!"

Mediator: "Uh oh."

---

Okay, so maybe it would have been a bit more formal and well-read, and maybe it would've actually been a formal debate. Also, I assume they were above physically assaulting each other. But this should impress upon you the substantial differences in each leader's policy.

The less classically liberal types in Australia were better at finding charismatic representatives.
​

Since the electoral campaigns took place against the backdrop of the Kalgoorlie crisis, Young enjoyed much more support than he otherwise would have, but it doesn't seem to have been enough the election. The results indicate that even with his loss of support in Kalgoorlie, Seversky was able to draw enough votes to win the election by a meaningful margin, even beating out a coalition of classical liberals fresh from London hoping to replace the magistrate's council with a full fledged Westminster style parliament. Even Australia's liberals couldn't resist the allure of a nation state.

Ivan Seversky around 1844. He was beginning to look rather snappy.
​

Regardless, Seversky had secured a second term. He would promptly put his rhetoric of national power and unity to the test with a campaign to expand Australian sovereignty past the continent into Indonesia.

 

[AsdfeZxcas]

Oooh. Australia's on the war path!

 

[InvisibleSandwi]

Oooh. Australia's on the war path!

It sure is! There sure are a lot of jingoists in this AAR's version of Australia.

Incidentally, a note to AARland - I'm currently in the process of moving house, and I'm writing this post from a motel. I have access to enough screenshots and gameplay notes from my last play session to take me to 1850, so I've been able to get some work on this done in my downtime. However, my internet access might be a bit spotty in the meantime. I will try to get the update up on Monday as usual, but I may suffer some delays. In that case, the update will be released on an as-soon-as-possible basis, and chapter 4 will come out on the 24th if at all possible.

 

[Sigsmund]

Nice update! Good to see the Australians are deciding to expand their influence into the rest of South Eastern Asia.

 

[InvisibleSandwi]

Nice update! Good to see the Australians are deciding to expand their influence into the rest of South Eastern Asia.

It seemed like a logical step, since Australia did at one point administer some British colonies in the Pacific.

I had to split Chapter 3 into two smaller ones due to acquiring more screenshots and game time than I needed. This one is mostly martial, while the next one is more about domestic policy.

---

Chapter 3: Independence Through War​

When I sent the first draft of this book to my editor, he asked me why I was "obsessed with Ivan Seversky". Maybe I am, but he's a really important figure in Australian history. He got in two terms as a pseudo-prime minister before we had a proper head of government, and he was rather popular to boot. If you want to talk about early Australian history... he's going to be one of the big names, kind of like George Washington is for Americans.

Seversky was no general, but he did order quite a few invasions in his time. It's not surprising, given the rapid growth of the Australian military. In the 1830s, Australian military might was best demonstrated by "call Britain for help in case of foreign aggression", although I don't believe anyone had seriously considered invading Australia at the time. Needless to say, Seversky began his second term with an appreciable Australian army and navy, if a relatively small and rag-tag one, and finished it having made quite good use of them. In the middle of this, though, he had to figure out how to gain the proper authorization to use them.

With increasing levels of British control in India, communication between Australia and the rest of the British empire was on the rise. Because of the slow British push into Southeast Asia (initially focused on Borneo), its volume reached a sweet spot in 1844 where diplomatic communications were plentiful, but idle gossip was crowded out. Productive times ensued. The dramatic growth of Australia did not go unnoticed, and the British crown sought to prevent a repeat of the 'United States' incident. I don't think the Australians of the time realized how much Britain's elites cared about their far off island; most of them were just trying to get rich off the local resources.

I read a paper by Thorsten Anderson (who is totally an awesome writer and a pretty good musician to boot) claiming that if Britain hadn't been under the thrall of the Conservative Party, Australia might've pushed for independence faster, and perhaps revolted from the crown. Ministers like Robert Peel managed to exert enough influence over foreign policy that Australia managed to get gradual, but steady overtures towards autonomy and independence. Anderson places more emphasis on low level diplomats and a relatively content Australian populace, but I've always been something of an advocate for the 'great person' approach to history. It's more charismatic!

Hey guys, can you guess my favorite food? ...It's bananas foster.​

The other great man of the hour (Seversky, dur) was also quite good at managing the transition to Australian self-government, at least because he was willing to concede quite a few things to the British government. Due to his lack of objection, our governmental system remained quite parliamentary, even though Seversky quite prefered presidential systems with strong executive power. Perhaps his inability to secure this was why he gave up on politics by the 1850s, but given the political evolution of the country by then, I'm not sure Australia would've accepted a third term of Seversky.

I seem to digress a lot. The Anglo-Australian Treaty of 1844 gave Australia its own indigenous parliament, allowed it to raise a full fledged army and navy, and gave the government the right to draft and pass certain 'local' laws without the approval from Britain. In return, Australia was expected to furnish a quota of troops and materials for the British military, allow Britain to manage its diplomatic affairs with Europe and the United States, and maintain a perpetual state of free trade with the Isles. This created a great deal of debate about how independent Australia was, but one consequence was that Australia was allowed to start its own program of colonization. A later agreement in 1849 would settle the question of where proper British influence ended and where Australia began, but were it not for how Seversky used the 1844 treaty, that never would have happened.

Other popular historians rather underestimate how much diplomatic effort it took to pull this off. I don't blame them; treaties make dry reading.​

The beginnings of the Australian colonial empire date back to the Kalgoorlie gold rush, when merchants and other businessmen flush with gold began traveling the world, seeking business ventures to sink their teeth in. One of them, a fellow named Ferdinand Ragland, ended up on the island of Bali and started selling various goods to the local chieftains. Eventually, he diversified into weapons. This rather began to backfire upon him when the chieftains banded together to extend their rule to to the rest of Nusa Tenggara (i.e Lombok, Sumba, and Sumbawa). Ragland started selling guns to the other islands, apparently thinking himself a manipulative genius for it. Then, the Balinese caught on and tried to sink his salesboat, so his only real option was to go sniveling back to Kalgoorlie for reinforcements. This probably would've been the end of it, but some poor sap discovered gold in the archipelago, and Australian locals decided they wanted in. Clearly, they didn't learn from Kalgoorlie. To his credit, Ragland managed to scrub together some mercenaries to mount a revenge mission - several hundred of them, in fact.

Armchair generals think Ferdinand could beat other famous commanders like Napoleon or Clausewitz in a bare-knuckle fight.
​

They were poorly trained at best, but they did have significantly more guns per capita. The natives responded by calling up a relatively substantial emergency draft - apparently the whole Ragland incident had convinced the average Balinese person that they needed to band together and treat the islands as their own nation, lest they be devoured by savage Dutchmen, or (even worse) the Atjehnese.

When word reached Ivan Seversky that there were doings a-transpiring a bit to the north... well, I doubt Seversky was very impressed, but I hear that the week before he denounced the Balinese nationalist movement, someone had broken his favorite lamp. Petty anger aside, Seversky now had an excuse to intervene, especially after the local journalists published lurid stories of counter-revolutions on Lombok. With Australia's new-found power to wage its own wars in some locales, everything fell into place, and on March 24th, 1845, Seversky called his magistrate underlings together to vote on whether they should send an expedition to Bali. Only the governor of New South Wales voted against war; the local newspapers responded by accusing him of being a puppet of Henry Young, who'd become the mayor of Sydney after losing the election to Seversky.

The Portuguese had this habit of just sort of... ...existing in Flores.
​

Australian infantrymen were scrambled first to Sumba, where they immediately began assisting Ragland's mercenaries and "liberating" the locals from their chieftains. Most of the local reinforcements/sympathizers, though, came from Sumbawa and Lombok; this swelled the expedition by thousands of poorly trained, underequipped men who for all their enthusiasm, could not match up to either the nationalist chieftains or the Australian army. After a few weeks of muddling around, the two forces finally clashed near a village named Gerung. For a first battle, the Australians made a rather poor showing, essentially rushing in disorganized charges towards the loyalist army and getting decimated in the process. After about 500 deaths and significantly more woundings and disablings, the Australian advance stumbled and turned into a well-intentioned, but incompetent fighting retreat. Admittedly, this managed to deplete the Balinese forces, but it just goes to show that you can't mix partisans in with professional soldiers.

After a few days, the two armies clashed again, and the Australian-lead forces managed to eke out a victory by separating the real army from the wannabes in Lombok.

In the previous battle, most of the casualties were militia/partisan casualties. More soldiers died the second time around. Then again, most of what I know about the Balinese campaign comes from recorded oral sources.​

Ragland managed to pull off a simple encirclement with his army - a task made easier by the slow but steady stream of eager mercenaries that had flocked to Bali as the war broke out.

Not hard to manage a naval blockade when your enemies have no navy to speak of.​

After that, a few weeks of mopping up on Bali proper before the united chieftains of Bali finally surrendered. It was January 4th, 1846.

"Dude! You just got annexed!" - Anthropomorphic personification of Australia to Bali in the 1968 film Fraternity Rush II: Gold Rush
​

Nine months of hardline negotiations ensued - they would have been quicker had the distances involved been shorter. The Austro-Balinese side was simple, and perhaps rather brutish. The chieftains and kingdoms of the island were amalgamated into one colony, with its administrative center centered in Kota Mataram. Ferdinand Ragland was given the governorship for not totally screwing up... some political corruption may have been involved. After all, the goldfields of Kalgoorlie (and now Bali) were still quite profitable, despite pumping out enough money to inflate the world's currencies. Ragland quickly decided all local governance was to be conducted in English in order to exclude the chieftains as effectively as possible from governance. This backfired on him in a rather nasty fashion, as the chieftains (who had now declared themselves the Senate of Bali) sent a request for aid to the Dutch. The Dutch considered sending some nasty threats to the Australians, but then Britain burst into their embassies demanding to be given a say in the issue.

Relations between the Dutch and the English were probably a bit touchy, given that the latter had forced the former to recognize Belgian independence in the 1830s. Without an industrial core in Wallonia, the Netherlands had to rely rather heavily upon their colonial empire to retain any influence in European politics, which only got harder once the British decided they wanted to exploit the potential of Indonesia. So far, they'd taken a foothold in the Malay peninsula and North Borneo, and the few remaining independent sultanates in the area were seen as little more than marketplaces at best.

The British, not being particularly interested in having the Dutch squeeze them out of the plantations and forests of the country, were at least willing to accept Australian administration in the area. The 1847 Amendment to the Anglo-Australian Treaty of 1844 drew a border between the countries' respective spheres of influence - anything south of the straits of Malacca and the South China Sea was fair game for the Australian colonial program, anything north was reserved for proper Europeans (and perhaps the United States of America). The British made sure to reiterate that the (functionally independent) Australian colonies were all subjects of the British Crown, with technically equal standing, but I honestly doubt the average Brit lost much sleep over how the inevitably Australian officials administering Bali and elsewhere did their jobs.

In the end, this venture added almost 1.2 million people to Australian jurisdiction. Some of them might have even been happy with the new state of affairs! Back on the mainland, it became apparent that Bali was full of Hindus and culture influenced by India, and some of our locals decided to imitate parts of their lifestyle. In Cooktown and Perth, I read stories of satay recipes worming their into the cookbooks, and the occasional enthusiastic Hindu convert walking the streets in a dhoti. Some of the food remains these days, but Australia doesn't have much of a Hindu community anymore; I think it's because most of the Balinese stuck to their archipelago. If you like the same models of history as I do, you'd say that Seversky's policies allowed the country to absorb Bali without much trouble, but even I accept that it conceals the depth of diplomatic haggling we had to do in order to start island hopping.

 

[JanBDim]

January 4th, 1846. The start of the Australian colonial empire

I like how you weave narratives to justify Australia acting independently and justifying war on Bali, instead of just boringly saying 'Australia became more independent during these years' and 'diplomats were sent to find a cause for war'. Makes for a much better read.

Anyway, hope Australia's domestic policies are as successful as its foreign ones

 

[Sigsmund]

Nice work so far! Say, at one point, you ought to colonize some of Africa. The Omani colonies in Eastern Africa are a good place to start. (that's what I end up doing in my own Australian game.)

 

[InvisibleSandwi]

January 4th, 1846. The start of the Australian colonial empire

I like how you weave narratives to justify Australia acting independently and justifying war on Bali, instead of just boringly saying 'Australia became more independent during these years' and 'diplomats were sent to find a cause for war'. Makes for a much better read.

Anyway, hope Australia's domestic policies are as successful as its foreign ones

I find that one has to work properly for the other to follow. While I intend to give Australia a large colonial empire, the core territories are probably still going to provide most of my power through immigration -> industry and military manpower.

On the subject of narrative justification - the fact that I'm looking at this AAR through the dual lenses of a historian and a kook who wants to be a historian makes me focus heavily on not only why a country acts in a certain matter, but how their actions are perceived. If you think it makes the AAR better, then I'd count that approach as a success.

Nice work so far! Say, at one point, you ought to colonize some of Africa. The Omani colonies in Eastern Africa are a good place to start. (that's what I end up doing in my own Australian game.)

I might when the Scramble events start popping up. Currently, East Africa perceptually feels more like part of the British sphere of influence; if the story takes me towards allowing Australian control over the area (for instance, if I begin to prey upon Britain), it'd be a good target. Gameplaywise, a lot of what happens in the next 20-30 years is going to depend on relations between the UK and the Netherlands.

 

[InvisibleSandwi]

Chapter 4: Prosperity Through Independence​

After what happened in Bali, I would still hesitate to call Australia a full sovereign nation, but we were definitely on our way, and we didn't even have to fight a war for it!

To be fair, the islands of Bali were little more than an advance naval base after we initially seized it. It did, however, become an important nexus of colonial administration later in the century, but that was only after we'd expanded our holdings further. As such, it was the focal point for our many colonial milestones - the first Western-style university in Indonesia, the first of our colonies to gain its own parliament, an important point on the transoceanic telegraph system... in the end, I don't think the Balinese had much interest in Australian culture, but they sure did like our technology.

Australian technology became a nice buzzword for politicians to play with in the late 1840s, as local scientists and engineers began making significant contributions to the European intellectual climate. Amongst other things, a mixture of workplace accidents and well-read intellectuals were helping to usher in something of an Australian medical revolution, during which our country made major advances in surgery and physical therapy. Other fields of medicine like pathology probably lagged behind, but the rugged lumberjacks and miners of the 1840s would be happy just to not require an amputation so they could get back to work (and back to getting rich).

The colonies of Australia also saw significantly more infrastructural development than they had in the last two decades; it'd become staggeringly necessary due to the soaring population. Prior to 1845 or so, there were a few rail lines scattered through the colonies amounting to about 100 kilometers of track and a few bits of freight, but they were but children's toys compared to what followed. As people began to realize how much railroads shortened travel times between the far-flung cities of Australia, spikes began to drive into metal at an alarming rate. The two most notable lines were the Melbourne to Newcastle line, finished in 1849, and the Kalgoorlie to Perth line, which was finished in 1854. Initially, there weren't a lot of diverging paths on the lines, but Australia still boasted about 1500 kilometers of railways in 1855. It paled in comparison to a country like the United States of America, but I'd say we did quite well for having a fraction of their population and less time to get started.

A railroad network has dramatic effects on a country, but they take time to fully manifest. The locals probably weren't aware of this when Chairman Seversky decided to tour the Melbourne-Newcastle line, but they began to pay attention when Kalgoorlie went through a second boom cycle. The first had petered out due to gold inflation, but the new line from Perth meant that locals no longer had to manufacture the vast majority of their goods at home; it no longer particularly mattered that the city was fairly deep inland.

Kalgoorlie's goldfields remained productive, even if potato fields slowly, but surely began to take precedence.
​

As the postal system developed (in tandem with the rails), it became possible for a citizen of Kalgoorlie to order goods from London and actually have them delivered... which didn't immediately become practical, but again, still an achievement by definition. Alternatively, a Brit could order something from Kalgoorlie and eventually acquire it, but that's not nearly as impressive given that the United Kingdom had already acquired a global empire by 1850.

Looking through our history after the colonies united, I begrudgingly admit that our relative geographical isolation was not without its downsides, primarily because globalization itself was in its infancy. In this part of the century, we were almost certainly more backwards than Europe... maybe not Eastern Europe. The silver lining to these distances was that we could get away with much more than Britain's closer colonies, but we still had to develop a great degree of autarky to thrive in our corner of the world.

Australian production and exports. I don't think our economy grew as much as the map would indicate, but more citizens were getting hooked into the market economy, and therefore needed to use financial resources to handle their transactions.
​

Remember how I mentioned Kalgoorlie's dubious nickname in the first chapter? They called it the "Canned Food City"; if you actually needed me to remind you of that, shame on you. Early in the gold rush, most of these cans were imported from the most convenient location of the day. By 1850, though, local food processors had glutted Kalgoorlie with so much canned food that Australia exported a large surplus to the world. Most of this was normal, boring old world grain and beef, but there was the occasional bushfood 'delicacy'. I use that term lightly - I've tried canned kangaroo, and I would not wish it on anyone. The key here is that Australian manufacturers were generally efficient enough to produce more goods than the population needed - some tried exporting to the rest of the world, others transitioned to selling niche goods, like Russian-style vodka or homespun wool. Suffice it to say that a decade's wait gave Australians a wider variety of goods to use, and eventually a more refined palette once they got used to some of the new stuff. One thing I've noticed is that tea imports from Britain surged during this period. Some industrious fellows in Darjeeling, amongst other places, thought that what was ostensibly still a British colony could use some extra tea, and with time even the European peasant migrants developed a taste (and a wallet) for it. This doesn't account for the rate of consumption on its own, however. After the autonomy treaties were signed, we began importing British citizens at a healthy clip. They'd always been fairly well represented amongst the Australian population (and even immigration), but when a certain crop in Ireland began to fail at an alarming rate, Australia began to look even more tempting than before...

Doctors recommend increased calorie intake for patients afflicted with sketchiness.
​

Enter the Irish potato famine. It was perhaps to be expected that when you tried to run a nation on potatoes (technically, the Irish grew other crops too, but those were forcibly confiscated for English/Scottish consumption), things might get ugly if the potatoes turn out to be a bit crap. When the local British overlords ended up severely mismanaging relief, the Irish apparently decided that their home island was a lost cause, and left in mass droves. To say that many of them ended up in Australia is rather important, but it's important to note that Australia was never their only destination. It seems there was a cycle of utopian immigrations in the 19th century; for instance, when a revolution in Tuscany deposed Leopold II and put the duchy in a loose personal union with the kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, a few vague promises of constitutionalism made Florence the destination of thousands of dissatisfied Europeans. The Irish were among them in such numbers that even today, there's a flourishing Hiberno-Italian community throughout central Italy. Despite this, Australia's Irish community grew large enough that for decades afterwards politicians had to tread very carefully around the Catholic blocs.

This latest addition to immigration only added to Australian expansion throughout the continent; another side effect of the ever growing population (and transportation networks designed to service it) was a redoubled effort to explore the interior of Australia and find new resources to exploit. It would've went faster if it weren't for the fact that most of the early surveyors were incredibly stupid. Charles Sturt is considered a national hero for walking along some rivers and declaring them tributaries. His next mission was to look for an inland sea in the desert.

*facepalm*
​

When he found nothing, it seems he went completely insane - he actually proposed the creation of gigantic artificial lakes in the desert! It gets worse when you realize there was actually some public support for this idea in South Australia. Seawater not good enough for Adelaide? Let's dump the entire South Pacific in the desert. I'm sure there were some proposals for canals and drainage systems, but during the heyday of their proposal, most of them were considered ridiculously difficult feats of engineering for no practical gain. Canals in general were on the road to obsolescence when we started building railroads, anyways. The more sensible expansionists in Australia remained more interested in colonization. Once Bali had been incorporated into the Australian 'state', Seversky decided to push further and take over more of the various islands of Indonesia. One problem - there was not much land left outside the Dutch and British sphere of influence, and further aggression in the area might threaten relations with the home islands. For a moment (or a year; they both look about the same from the vantage point of this century), it must've looked as if the seizure of Bali would be an isolated incident...

In August 1847, horror stories began to flow out of the Sulawesi highlands. There had been a constant, albeit limited presence of Christian missionaries on the island even outside the Dutch stronghold of Makassar. Most of their converts belonged to the emerging Toraja peoples (a classic case of colonial ethnogenesis), but most of the other locals - notably the Bugis - decided that allowing Christianization was a bit of a threat, on the grounds that Islam was preferable. Directly attacking the Dutch was a bit out of the question, since they would definitely respond disproportionately, but the Torajas suffered increasingly violent and religiously motivated attacks, especially after the local Sultanate of Bone decided to enforce Islam. At some point, though, information about this leaked out to Makassar... and therefore, to the world.

Naturally, the average European's reaction to this was "WHAT THE BUSH IS A TORAJA?". Britain and the Netherlands were more concerned due to proximity, and the Portuguese might've been as well except that the missionaries weren't their preferred type of Christianity. On the other hand, the Australian colonies had unprecedented religious freedom, especially after the annexation of Bali necessitated Hindu tolerance. Religious violence in Australia's backyard would not go over well, and Chairman Seversky called upon the sultanates to end the persecution or face international intervention. Bone responded by expelling foreigners. Now, there weren't many Australians in Sulawesi; without the ecstasy of gold, or much access to the Dutch-dominated trade of islands further east, only the truly adventurous wanted to visit.

Like the Balinese war before it, the Sulawesi war was a relatively short campaign followed by months of diplomatic wrangling. While Europe was quick to accept Australian supremacy in the area, they sure weren't happy about it.
​

There were only eleven Australian citizens in Sulawesi when Bone kicked the Europeans out, but the 'Sulawesi Eleven' were apparently enough of a celebrity cause, combined with the Toraja situation, that Seversky ordered another 'intervention' on September 25th, 1847.

Lombok was already proving its military use as a supply station, although there were limits to how much you could get out of the ports.
​

With the lessons learned from Bali, the Australian army was able to mount a swifter, more efficient campaign in Sulawesi, subduing large portions of the island after only two months. However, outside of the grateful Torajans, Sulawesi's population was initially far less sympathetic to Australian government/ideals. Sure, they looked cooperative with guns pointed at their heads, but the moment you look away, they'd probably spit in your soup... and worse. The locals were technically supposed to have autonomy and a voice in local politics once Sulawesi was formally incorporated into the Australian colonies, but like Bali, this lofty ideal was endangered by such things as a Euro-sympathetic governor (Richard Napier), relatively preferential treatment for Torajan highlanders, and the continual guerrilla resistance on the island.

Bendahara is a folk hero in Borneo. They never really liked us there; that was more of a Javanese thing.
​

There was also a rather unpleasant incident where some of the Malay kingdoms on the island of Borneo declared themselves allies of Bone. When none of their small armies showed up on Sulawesi, their overtures of war were laughed off, but the residents of Palmerston soon got a nasty shock when they managed to slip through Australian convoys and start raiding the countryside. The citizens of Palmerston were able to give the Bornean raiders a run for their money due to their traditions of self-defense militias (built from Sydneysider models), but damage to the local railways (along with a general lack of military discipline) kept them from dealing a decisive blow to the raiders. After the war, the northern parts of Australia began to factor quite heavily into our army. I'd do the same if my city was invaded, anyways.

---

Violence flows both ways. Christianized Torajans occasionally did nasty things to the Muslim majority after Australian occupation. This was not tolerated.​

Quibbles about small, relatively ineffectual attacks aside, the local Australian military quickly became aware that the various factions of Sulawesi had rather more access to modern military hardware than expected, pro-Australian or not. Local commanders suspected armsdealing, but they couldn't confirm anything until they captured some Dutchmen who were apparently fighting on the side of the Bugis. The Dutch government denied any involvement in this incident. In retrospect, this may very well have been true - publicly available documents suggest the Netherlands wasn't particularly interested in expanding beyond Makassar, and they did not exercise all that much influence over the East Indies. There's two prevailing interpretations - some people think the Dutch citizens in the area were primarily adventurers seeking personal wealth and fame; but (at least in the 1950s, during the whole Indonesian independence crisis) a lot of Australians believe that the Dutch government was actually trying to pull off a similar intervention by manufacturing some sort of threat to their trading port, but the timing seems off. Were the Dutch really that slow on the uptake?

If you think so, you might be a racist.

 

[JanBDim]

Were the Dutch really that slow on the uptake?

If you think so, you might be a racist.

Don't go there man! Just kidding

That is some serious economic growth. Diversification indeed!

 

[Sigsmund]

Epic update! Indonesia seems to be the perfect spot to start with all the conquest after all. Of course though, the real prize would be in taking the Dutch colony in Java, the jewel of the Dutch Empire.

 

[Jape]

Australia's economy is booming early! This bodes well, add in a pocket empire in the Indies and you're well on your way. Looking forward to more.

 

[DensleyBlair]

Congratulations, InvisibleSandwi! You're the new Best Character Writer of the Week! Be sure to go and greet your adoring fans – and remember to pass on the award next Sunday.

 

[JanBDim]

Congratulations! Well deserved Keep up the good work!