What event caused Australia’s population to increase nearly 200%?
Two events caused big increases in Australia’s population. 1. Discovery of gold in 1851 and later caused a big gold rush. Many Chinese arrived, also people from all over Europe and North America. This was probably the biggest proportional increase over a few years. 2. Immigration after WW2. At first most of this was mostly from western European countries like Holland and the UK, but within a few years from other European counties like Italy, Greece and Malta. Australia also took many stateless people in the period after the war, many of them were from Baltic countries like Lithuania. In the mid fifties some people came from Hungary and later Czechoslovakia. The “White Australia Policy” had little to do with it. It was first enforced in 1902 and it was a Labor initiative to prevent the entry of Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Pacific Islanders. It was straight racism which was a characteristic of the entire world from at least the 1880s until about 1950 or later. Also fear that wages woul
I have no idea. Australia had its sharpest population growth rate during the 1950’s. The growth rate at that time was 2.3%, the highest in Australia’s history. Australia experienced consistently high rates of growth, with an average annual increase of 2.3% from 1950 to 1959. The official numbers for the historical population statistics of Australia can be found at the website of the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The figures take into account the time period of 1788 up to 2002.
