Don Bradman, the cricketer whose Test batting average of 99.94 is considered by some the greatest achievement in any major sport; Cate Blanchett, winner of two Academy Awards; Cathy Freeman, the Olympic 400 metres champion at Sydney 2000; Howard Florey, who turned penicillin into a usable drug and shared the 1945 Nobel Prize; Nellie Melba, the soprano whose stage name came from Melbourne; the outlaw Ned Kelly; and the land-rights campaigner Eddie Mabo are the Australians most often named as the country’s most famous people. Each belongs to a particular chapter of Australian history, from the goldfields frontier of the 1870s to the Sydney Olympics, so the clearest way to meet them is in order, era by era.
Bushrangers and bush ballads, 1850s–1890s: Ned Kelly, Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson
The colonial era’s most famous figure is a criminal. Ned Kelly (1854–1880) was born in rural Victoria, the third of eight children of Irish parents; his father had been transported as a convict for stealing two pigs. The Kellys were poor selectors who saw themselves as persecuted by the police and the big landholders, and after a series of clashes Ned and his gang killed three policemen in 1878. Their last stand came at Glenrowan in 1880, where they held dozens of hostages in a hotel and fought a 12-hour siege wearing home-made armour beaten from plough mouldboards. Kelly was captured, tried for murder and hanged at the Melbourne Gaol on 11 November 1880.
The same bush produced the country’s first national writers. Henry Lawson (1867–1922), born on the Grenfell goldfields of New South Wales to a Norwegian-born miner and the feminist publisher Louisa Lawson, wrote short stories such as “The Drover’s Wife” for The Bulletin magazine, and was the first Australian writer given a state funeral. His rival Banjo Paterson (1864–1941), a Sydney lawyer, wrote “The Man from Snowy River” (1890) and, in 1895, the words of “Waltzing Matilda”, widely treated as the country’s unofficial anthem.
Federation in 1901: Edmund Barton and Nellie Melba
On 1 January 1901 six British colonies became the Commonwealth of Australia. The man most associated with that union is Edmund Barton (1849–1920), born in Glebe, Sydney, who helped draft the constitution and summed up the goal as “a nation for a continent, and a continent for a nation”. He was the first prime minister, from 1901 to 1903, then resigned to become one of the founding justices of the High Court, where he helped interpret the constitution he had written. The compromise that placed the national capital between Sydney and Melbourne is described in our guide to Canberra, the capital of Australia.
The most famous Australian of the Federation years was not a politician but a singer. Nellie Melba (1861–1931), born Helen Porter Mitchell in Richmond, Victoria, took her stage name from her home city. After debuting as Gilda in Rigoletto at La Monnaie in Brussels in 1887, she was the leading lyric soprano at Covent Garden in London from 1888 and later sang at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the first Australian to win international fame as a classical musician. Her face is on the Australian $100 note.
The Western Front, 1916–1918: John Monash
For many Australians the nation’s real founding moment was Gallipoli in 1915 and the Western Front that followed. John Monash (1865–1931), a civil engineer born in West Melbourne to Jewish parents from Prussian Posen, commanded the 4th Brigade at Gallipoli and the 3rd Division in France, and in May 1918 took command of the Australian Corps, then the largest corps on the Western Front. At the Battle of Hamel on 4 July 1918 he planned an attack by the 4th Australian Division backed by British tanks and a detachment of American troops, and won a small but operationally significant victory; the Australian Corps then spearheaded the Battle of Amiens on 8 August. King George V knighted him in the field at Château de Bertangles that August. The historian A. J. P. Taylor called him “the only general of creative originality produced by the First World War”. Monash University in Melbourne is named after him, and he shares the $100 note with Melba.
Between the wars: Kingsford Smith’s Pacific flight and Bradman’s 99.94
Between the wars, two Australians gave the country something to cheer, and both were fêted as national heroes through the Depression. Charles Kingsford Smith (1897–1935), born in Brisbane and a despatch rider at Gallipoli before he joined the Royal Flying Corps, bought a Fokker monoplane from the polar explorer Hubert Wilkins and named it the Southern Cross. On 31 May 1928 he and his three crewmates, the Australian co-pilot Charles Ulm and the Americans James Warner and Harry Lyon, left Oakland, California, and flew in three stages via Hawaii and Fiji to Brisbane, the first flight across the Pacific. He later made the first flight between Australia and New Zealand. In 1935 he disappeared over the Andaman Sea while trying to break the England–Australia speed record.
Don Bradman (1908–2001) was born in Cootamundra, New South Wales, and grew up in Bowral, where he taught himself by hitting a golf ball against the brick stand of a water tank with a cricket stump. In his final Test innings, in England in 1948, his average stood above 100 until the leg-spinner Eric Hollies bowled him second ball for a duck; England then lost by an innings, so he never batted again and finished on 99.94. After the Second World War he captained the 1948 “Invincibles”, who toured England without losing a match. Cricket’s place in Australian life is explained in our guide to the national sport of Australia.
Laboratories, opera houses and swimming pools, 1945–1973: Florey, Burnet, Sutherland, Fraser and White
After 1945 Australians began to win the world’s biggest prizes. Howard Florey (1898–1968), a University of Adelaide graduate who went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, led the Oxford team that turned penicillin into a useful and effective drug, then went to the United States to persuade firms to manufacture it, and shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Alexander Fleming and Ernst Chain. Macfarlane Burnet (1899–1985), a virologist from Traralgon in Victoria, won the 1960 Nobel for predicting acquired immune tolerance and was named the first Australian of the Year that same year.
On stage, Joan Sutherland (1926–2010), born in Sydney to Scottish parents, made her name as Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden in 1959, was nicknamed La Stupenda and became the first Australian to win a Grammy. In the pool, Dawn Fraser (born 1937), from the Sydney suburb of Balmain, won the 100 metres freestyle at three successive Olympics, in 1956, 1960 and 1964, and in 1962 became the first woman to swim the distance in under a minute. In literature, Patrick White (1912–1990), born in London to Australian parents and raised in Sydney, wrote The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957) on a farm on the city’s edge and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, still the only Australian to do so.
Rights and recognition, 1965–1992: Charles Perkins, Evonne Goolagong, Gough Whitlam and Eddie Mabo
The late 20th century was defined by arguments over who counted as fully Australian. Charles Perkins (1936–2000), born at the old Alice Springs Telegraph Station, led the 1965 Freedom Ride, a bus tour of New South Wales country towns such as Moree that exposed the colour bar in places such as the Moree swimming pool, where Aboriginal people had been barred for 40 years, campaigned for a Yes vote in the 1967 referendum and, in 1966, became the first Indigenous man known to graduate from an Australian university. Evonne Goolagong Cawley (born 1951), a Wiradjuri woman raised in Barellan, New South Wales, won Wimbledon in 1971 and again in 1980, the first mother to win the title in 66 years, and seven Grand Slam singles titles in all.
Gough Whitlam (1916–2014) was prime minister from December 1972 to November 1975, when the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, dismissed him, the only Australian prime minister ever removed that way. Eddie Mabo (1936–1992), born on the island of Mer in the Torres Strait, challenged the idea that Australia had been terra nullius, land belonging to no one, before British settlement. He died in January 1992; on 3 June that year the High Court ruled in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) that native title had survived colonisation, which led to the Native Title Act 1993.
Sydney 2000 and after: Cathy Freeman, Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman and Steve Irwin
The defining image of modern Australia is Cathy Freeman (born 1973), from Mackay in Queensland, lighting the Olympic cauldron in Sydney in September 2000 and later in the same Games winning the 400 metres in 49.11 seconds. A decade earlier, at 16, she had become the first female Indigenous Australian to win a Commonwealth Games gold medal.
Two actors have carried Australian cinema abroad. Cate Blanchett (born 1969), from the Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe and a graduate of the National Institute of Dramatic Art, won Oscars for playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator (2004) and for Blue Jasmine (2013). Nicole Kidman (born 1967) was born in Honolulu while her Australian parents were studying there, grew up in Sydney and holds both Australian and American citizenship; she won the Academy Award for Best Actress as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002). In music, Kylie Minogue (born 1968), who first became known on the Melbourne-set soap opera Neighbours, is the highest-selling Australian-born female artist, with more than 80 million records sold.
Steve Irwin (1962–2006), born in the Melbourne suburb of Upper Ferntree Gully, ran Australia Zoo at Beerwah in Queensland, founded by his parents, and became known worldwide through The Crocodile Hunter. He died after a stingray injury while filming on the Great Barrier Reef in 2006. And in science, Elizabeth Blackburn (born 1948), from Hobart, Tasmania, co-discovered the enzyme telomerase in 1984 and in 2009 became the first Australian woman to win a Nobel Prize; she has spent most of her career in the United States and is usually described as Australian–American.