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An Urbanised Nation

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An Archaeology of Australia Since 1788

Part of the book series: Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology ((CGHA))

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Abstract

Australia has long been a nation of city-dwellers. From the earliest colonial period many settlers were unwilling to move beyond the town centres. By 1891, one third of the population lived in cities, with around a million people equally divided between Melbourne and Sydney and another 300,000 spread between Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart and Perth (Cannon 1988:10–14). During the twentieth century this trend accelerated even further, with three-quarters of the population living in cities by 2001 (Hugo 2003:187). Cities are thus an important part of the archaeological record of Australia’s colonial history, containing a wealth of information about the ways in which many nineteenth-century Australians lived, worked and played. At the same time, due to the nature of the heritage industry in which much historical archaeological work is carried out, archaeology in cities has had a high profile within the discipline and in the wider community.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sewerage connection, however, was by no means rapid or uniform. As late as 1960, almost one third of all suburban homes in Sydney still relied on the “nightman” to remove the sewage (Cowan 1998:157).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Archaeology Program, La Trobe University, 3086, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia

    Susan Lawrence & Peter Davies

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  1. Susan Lawrence
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  2. Peter Davies
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Correspondence to Susan Lawrence .

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Lawrence, S., Davies, P. (2011). An Urbanised Nation. In: An Archaeology of Australia Since 1788. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7485-3_10

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