Here are some interesting ‘facts’ about Australia - although perhaps ‘well evidenced propositions’ would be more accurate. I’ve noted the source material for almost all of them, which I’ve largely taken from mainstream secondary literature.
Today I’m learning I know basically nothing about Australian history
Australia was the richest country on earth, per capita, for decades. After the 1850s gold rush, up until the 1890s depression, Australia had the highest per capita income in the world. In 1850, probably only the United Kingdom and the Netherlands sat above Australia, by about 20 per cent, with the United States 9 per cent below. After the gold rushes Australia passed both, and from 1860 to 1890 the gap over the United States ran at 25 or 30 per cent.
Australia didn’t exist until Federation in 1901. There was a lot of boom and bust in the colonies. Melbourne did well out of the gold rush but there was still struggle in other states including a drain of labour to the gold fields.
This sounds really interesting. Do you know if there is anywhere else I could read the article? I am not on any other social media other than this one.
You mean because it’s a substack? Unfortunately I don’t know of anywhere else it’s hosted – I got it from an econ blog that has a short excerpt, but not the full article: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/forty-interesting-facts-about-australia.html
You often can read articles on Substack without needing to sign up or anything. I did get hit with an age-verification wall a few weeks back but it seems to have stopped doing that for me.
But if there are problems for you, you can often access it through archive.org (Wayback Machine) or archive.today.
Here’s a Wayback Machine snapshot of the page: https://web.archive.org/web/20260730214427/https://ozhistoryandpolitics.substack.com/p/40-interesting-facts-about-australian
