Settlement
Between 1788, when Great Britain established a colony in Port Jackson, and the Federation of the Australian colonies in 1901, settlers brought multiple languages to Australia. Even before that time, French, Dutch and others were mapping out and describing the continent and its region. Some of the languages of the early colonial settlers — Irish- or Scots-Gaelic — survive in very few written records. Others who came to the colonies included enslaved people from Mauritius, French-speaking political convicts, members of the Chinese mining communities, Italian and German farmers and gold miners. These people left accounts of their lives and experiences in multiple forms, from shop-keepers ledgers to letters home, to newspapers, to official appeals to government. The multilingual nature of settlement intensified through subsequent waves of migration in the twentieth century.
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