Contrasting European Colonization Outcomes in Australia and New Guinea

Key Insight

The European colonization of Australia and New Guinea demonstrated the overwhelming power of superior technology, but the fates of their native populations differed profoundly. Europeans possessed oceangoing ships, writing systems for administration, organized political institutions, and guns, enabling their dominance. However, New Guinea today is largely populated by New Guineans, whereas Australia's Aboriginal population declined by 80 percent, from about 300,000 to a minimum of 60,000 by 1921, and is now an underclass in a society dominated by 20 million non-Aboriginal people, mostly of European descent.

New Guinea largely resisted extensive European settlement primarily due to a formidable disease barrier. Tropical diseases, especially malaria, decimated early European attempts to settle the lowlands, with one French colony failing spectacularly with 930 deaths out of 1,000 colonists in three years. New Guineans also had some built-up resistance to Eurasian germs from 3,500 years of exposure via Austronesian settlers. Furthermore, New Guinea's rugged terrain, combined with the unsuitability of European crops and livestock for the local environment, limited viable settlement areas. By the 1930s, when Europeans reached the densely populated highlands, colonial policies had changed, precluding mass displacement of native peoples.

Australia, conversely, proved highly suitable for European food production and settlement, leading to the displacement and decimation of its Aboriginal inhabitants. Despite Australia's overall harshness, its more productive areas readily supported European temperate-zone staple crops like wheat, barley, and apples, along with introduced livestock such as sheep and cattle. The continent generally lacked the severe tropical diseases that plagued New Guinea, except in the northern tropical regions. Aboriginal populations, often densest in the most fertile lands, were swiftly removed by European guns and devastating Eurasian epidemic diseases (including smallpox, influenza, measles, and typhoid), to which they had no immunity, leading to widespread deaths and the eradication of their independent societies within a century of European arrival in 1788.