Australian gold rushes in the context of "Australians"

Chinese Australians (simplified Chinese: 华裔澳大利亚人; traditional Chinese: 華裔澳洲人; pinyin: Huáyì àodàlìyàrén or Huáyì àozhōurén) are Australians of Chinese origin. Chinese Australians are one of the largest groups within the global Chinese diaspora, and are the largest Asian Australian community. Per capita, Australia has more people of Chinese ancestry than any country outside Asia. As a whole, Australian residents identifying themselves as having Chinese ancestry made up 5.5% of Australia's population at the 2021 census.

The very early history of Chinese Australians involved significant immigration from villages of the Pearl River Delta in South China, with most such immigrants speaking dialects within the Yue dialect group. The Gold rushes lured many Chinese to the Australian colonies in the 19th century. As with many overseas Chinese groups the world over, early Chinese immigrants to Australia established several Chinatowns in major cities, such as Adelaide (Chinatown, Adelaide), Brisbane (Chinatown, Brisbane), Melbourne (Chinatown, Melbourne), Perth (Chinatown, Perth), and Sydney (Chinatown, Sydney). In the Australian external territory of Christmas Island, Australians of full or partial Chinese origin form the plurality of the population.

The History of Australia (1851–1900) refers to the history of the people of the Australian continent during the 50-year period which preceded the foundation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901.

The gold rushes of the 1850s led to high immigration and a booming economy. Increasing prosperity and the growing number of free settlers and locally born people led to popular demands for the end of penal transportation and the introduction of colonial self-government. Transportation of convicts to the colonies was phased out from 1840 to 1868. In 1855 and 1856, Britain granted self-government to New South Wales, the new colony of Victoria, Van Diemen's Land (renamed Tasmania) and South Australia. Queensland became a separate self-governing colony in 1859 and Western Australia was granted self-government in 1890. The colonies introduced universal male suffrage from 1856 to 1900. Women won the vote in South Australia in 1895 and in Western Australia in 1899. Some colonies, however, denied voting rights to most Aboriginal people, Asians and Africans.

The White Australia policy was a set of racial policies that aimed to forbid people of non-European ethnic origins – Asians (primarily Chinese) and Pacific Islanders – from immigrating to Australia, in order to create a "White/British" ideal focused on Anglo-Celtic peoples, but not exclusively. Pre-Federation, the Australian colonies passed many anti-Chinese immigration laws mainly using Poll Taxes. With Federation in 1901 came discrimination based on the Dictation Test, which effectively gave power to immigration officials to racially discriminate without mentioning race. The policy also affected immigrants from Germany, Italy, and other European countries, especially in wartime. Governments progressively dismantled such policies between 1949 and 1973, when the Whitlam government removed the last racial elements of Australia's immigration laws.

Competition in the gold fields between European and Chinese miners, and labour union opposition to the importation of Pacific Islanders (primarily South Sea Islanders) into the sugar plantations of Queensland, reinforced demands to eliminate or minimize low-wage immigration from Asia and the Pacific Islands. From the 1850s colonial governments imposed restrictions on Chinese arrivals, including poll taxes and tonnage restrictions. The colonial authorities levied a special tax on Chinese immigrants which other immigrants did not have to pay. Towards the end of the 19th century, labour unions pushed to stop Chinese immigrants from working in the furniture and market garden industries. Some laws were passed regarding the labelling of Chinese made furniture in Victoria and Western Australia but not in New South Wales. Chinese people dominated market gardening until their numbers declined as departures were not replaced.

Bushrangers were armed robbers and outlaws who resided in the Australian bush between the 1780s and the early 20th century. The original use of the term dates back to the early years of the British colonisation of Australia, and applied to transported convicts who had escaped into the bush to hide from the authorities. By the 1820s, the term had evolved to refer to those who took up "robbery under arms" as a way of life, using the bush as their base.

Bushranging thrived during the mid-19th century gold rushes, with many bushrangers roaming the goldfields and country districts of New South Wales and Victoria, and to a lesser extent Queensland. As the outbreak worsened in the mid-1860s, colonial governments outlawed many of the most notorious bushrangers, including the Gardiner–Hall gang, Dan Morgan, and the Clarke gang. These "Wild Colonial Boys", mostly Australian-born sons of convicts, were roughly analogous to British highwaymen and outlaws of the American Old West, and their crimes included robbing small-town banks, bailing up coach services and raiding stations (pastoral estates). They also engaged in many shootouts with the police.