Australia has been home to people for at least 50,000 and perhaps 65,000 years. The first arrivals crossed the sea to Sahul, the Ice Age continent that joined Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania, and their descendants spread across every landscape, from the tropical north to the deserts and the cold south. By 1788 hundreds of Aboriginal nations and the Torres Strait Islanders spoke more than 250 languages, each people with its own Country, law and stories.

Dutch ships charted "New Holland" from 1606 and Makassan fishermen visited the north each year, but it was Britain that claimed the east coast in 1770 and founded a penal colony at Sydney Cove in 1788. Over the next century six colonies spread across the continent, convicts, free settlers and gold-seekers arrived in their hundreds of thousands, and the First Peoples were dispossessed in frontier wars and by disease.

The colonies became early democracies, with the secret ballot, manhood suffrage and, in South Australia, votes for women, and on 1 January 1901 they federated as the Commonwealth of Australia. The young nation was shaped by White Australia, by Gallipoli and the Western Front, by the Depression and by the Pacific war of 1942, and after 1945 by millions of migrants from Europe and later from Asia.

Since the 1960s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians have won the vote, land rights and native title, and the nation has apologised to the Stolen Generations, though the Voice referendum failed in 2023. Explore the ten ages below through selected events from the timeline.