Australia holds a remarkable but often overlooked economic history. Following the 1850s gold rush and persisting until the depression of the 1890s, Australia boasted the highest per capita income in the world. Around 1850, only the United Kingdom and the Netherlands sat above Australia by roughly 20 per cent, while the United States lingered 9 per cent below. After the gold rushes, Australia surpassed both, and from 1860 to 1890 the gap over the United States ran at 25 to 30 per cent. The gold rushes brought a surge of immigration that transformed the colonies' labour force and productive capacity, underpinning much of this growth.

In the early colonial era, the cost of livestock reflected the extreme isolation of the Australian settlements. A single cow could cost as much as £84 in 1796 — equivalent to several years' wages for an English labourer. Only the government, along with its military and civil officers, owned cattle and horses at that time, as importing livestock was extraordinarily difficult in the first decade of settlement. Animals had to survive the long voyage from South Africa or India. By contrast, an ordinary cow in England would have cost around £10.

Australia also attracted the attention of prominent British intellectuals. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor seriously discussed emigrating to Australia. Mill was an active supporter of the movement that founded South Australia and joined the South Australian Association. South Australia, established in 1836 as a planned free settlement rather than a convict colony, was conceived from the outset as a place to apply principles of religious tolerance and systematic colonisation promoted by thinkers like Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Harriet's younger brother, Arthur Hardy, migrated to South Australia, where he became a pastoralist and politician. Liberals of the era hoped South Australia would serve as a progressive leader in political and social equality. That aspiration bore fruit when South Australia became the first self-governing jurisdiction in the world to grant women the right to vote and stand for parliament, achieving the milestone in 1895.

Australia's 1890s economic depression was, by some measures, more severe than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Real GDP per capita fell by approximately 20 per cent during the 1890s, compared with a decline of only about 10 per cent during the 1930s. Notably, unlike in the United States, Australia's banking system largely remained intact through the 1930s crisis. In part, this resilience stemmed from the fresh memory of the catastrophic banking collapse of the 1890s, which had been fuelled by massive credit growth and lax lending standards, particularly in Victoria. Of the 64 deposit-taking institutions operating in Australia in 1891, 54 had closed by 1893. A severe drought further compounded the difficulty of economic recovery. The economic turmoil and intercolonial cooperation it prompted also helped galvanise momentum for federation of the Australian colonies, which was achieved in 1901.

These are among the highlights from a collection of forty facts compiled by Andrew Kemp, published on his Australia Substack.