黑寡妇和冬兵同人文:谁能用英文介绍英国跟澳大利亚的联系

On May 13, 1787, a fleet（船队）of English ships set sail for Australia with about 750 people. These men and women were no ordinary passengers. There were convicts（罪犯）being sent to Australia as punishment（惩罚）of their crimes（罪行）.

Laws in England during this period were very harsh（苛刻的）, and people were punished severely（严厉地）for even the smallest crimes. A man could be sentenced to death（判死刑）for hunting on another man's property or he could be put to death for chopping（砍） down someone else's tree. For many other crimes, the punishment was "transportation"（流放）. The guilty（有罪的）person was shipped to a distant（远的）land where he was forced to work without pay. Often women and children shipped to another lands, too.

In 1770, Captain Cook had discovered the continent（大陆）of Australia and claimed（要求得到） for England. At first, England found no use for this vast（辽阔的） land on the other side of the world, but then the American Revolution took place. England could no longer ship her convicts to the American colonies（殖民地）. So she turned to Australia as a good place of her prisoners.

A former naval captain（海军上校）was picked to accompany the convicts to the new colony. His job was to help them build a settlement（居留地）which he would govern（统治）. The convicts could learn to live in peace. He felt they would obey the laws in a new country.

In January 1788, the English fleet and its strange cargo（"货物"） landed in Australia. After days of searching, the captain found a fine harbour（海港）. The land nearby had trees and streams. The convict colony made a new beginning here, Australia's history had began.

The explorations of Captain James Cook, 150 years later, opened up the east coast. The British Empire, having just lost her American colonies, was in need of a new prison colony. By 1868, when transportation ended, Britain had sent more than 160,000 convicts to Australia. They were settled around the coast – several of modern Australia’s biggest cities grew from the penal settlements and those set up by freed convicts and other European immigrants – and eventually enabled the British crown to claim the entire continent. The colonisers treated the Kooris with appalling brutality but as long as European settlement was confined to the coast, the majority of tribes were able to live as before.

This ended in 1851, when, following an exodus to the gold fields of California, the administrators sought to stem the tide by offering rewards for the discovery of gold in Australia. The subsequent gold rush prompted the first wave of voluntary migration to the continent in modern times; the population doubled within months of the discovery of gold in Victoria. Around the same time, the interior was charted for the first time, while towns sprang up both there and on the littoral. The Kooris, meanwhile, were massacred, driven into barren areas or into lives of virtual slavery. Most of Australia was granted the right to self-government in the 1850s.

The Commonwealth of Australia, a Federation of States, was set up in 1901, establishing Australia as an independent democracy. Nonetheless, close links with the UK were maintained; Australian troops fought alongside the British during both World Wars. The politics of the country remained under firm British supervision until years after World War II. In the aftermath, Australia assumed some of the trappings of a regional power, taking control of some of Germany’s former territories in the area and developing links with Japan, India and South East Asia. It also joined in a secretive strategic alliance with Britain, the USA, Canada and New Zealand, which remains the country’s principal defence commitment. Until its abandonment in the mid 1960s, a ‘White Australia’ policy was officially adopted with regard to immigration.

Between 1949 and 1972, Australian governments were composed of the Liberal Party in a centre-right coalition with the smaller National Country Party. Sir Robert Menzies was the dominant political figure, serving 16 years as Prime Minister. In 1972, the coalition was finally defeated at the polls as the Labour Party under Gough Whitlam took office with a comparatively radical agenda. There followed one of the most controversial periods of recent Australian history, culminating in the Whitlam government being dismissed by the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, in circumstances still hotly disputed. The immediate beneficiary was the Liberal Party leader, Malcolm Fraser, who won the next elections, which followed in December 1975, within weeks of Whitlam’s dismissal. Fraser remained in office until 1983, when Labour was returned to power under the leadership of the ex-trade-union leader, Bob Hawke. Under Hawke and his acerbic Treasury Minister and eventual successor, Paul Keating, the Labour party won five elections in a row.

Finally, in March 1996, tiring of Labour, the Australian public turned to the Liberal Party led by John Howard. Howard’s centre-right coalition was returned to office for a third term at the 2004 general election. Aboriginal issues continue to affect successive Australian governments who have found considerable difficulty in reconciling Koori peoples’ traditional claims and conceptions of land ownership with, to take but one example, the requirements of mining companies. Since Howard's re-appointment, race riots have already occurred - one of which, in a district of Sydney, was catalysed by the death of an Aboriginal teenager in police custody.

The other dominant political issue of the last few years was Australia’s constitutional future. There were two options: to maintain the existing link with Britain; or to establish Australia as a fully fledged republic. A split in the republican camp produced a surprise victory for the traditionalists in the national referendum on the subject, held in October 1999. Despite that, most Australians now look to links with America and Asia as more important and relevant to their future than those with the ‘Old Country’. The country’s foreign policy (irrespective of the party in power) is now geared to the strengthening of economic and political links with the countries of the Asian Pacific Rim and the affirmation of the existing links with the USA (exemplified by Australia’s participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq).