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50 free Australian History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Sixty thousand years of human history, a Dutch ship called the Little Dove, a convict colony founded on 26 January 1788, a rum-fuelled coup, a gold rush, a bushranger in homemade armour and a prime minister who vanished into the surf. Australian history is anything but dull. These 50 questions run from the Duyfken and Abel Tasman to Cook at Botany Bay and Possession Island, the First Fleet and Governor Phillip, Bligh and the Rum Rebellion, Macquarie, Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth, Sturt, Burke and Wills, Hargraves's gold, the Eureka Stockade, the separation of Victoria and Queensland, Ned Kelly, Parkes and Federation, Barton and Hopetoun, Gallipoli, Monash, Hughes and conscription, Phar Lap and Bradman, the Harbour Bridge, Darwin and Kokoda, Curtin and Chifley, Holden, Menzies, Holt, the 1967 referendum, Whitlam and the Dismissal, Hawke, Mabo, Port Arthur, the 1999 republic vote, the Apology and Australia's first female prime minister. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and each explanation adds one more detail. Play it solo or print it for an Australia Day quiz.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Dutch ship made the first documented European landing in Australia in 1606?
Duyfken
Captained by Willem Janszoon, it belonged to the Dutch East India Company; the Dutch called the continent New Holland.
Q 02Which Dutch navigator's 1642 voyage first reached Van Diemen's Land and New Zealand?
Abel Tasman
The same voyage was the first to sight Fiji; Van Diemen's Land was renamed Tasmania in 1856.
Q 03Which English buccaneer landed on the north-west coast of New Holland in 1688 and again in 1699?
William Dampier
His published descriptions of Aboriginal people were widely read in Britain.
Q 04In what year did James Cook chart the east coast and claim it for Britain?
1770
He took formal possession on 21–22 August on Possession Island, off Cape York.
Q 05Where did Cook's Endeavour anchor ten days after reaching the east coast in April 1770?
Botany Bay
Joseph Banks, who sailed with Cook, recommended it as a penal settlement site in 1779.
Q 06On which date in 1788 was the settlement at Sydney Cove established?
26 January
The Australian Natives Association later lobbied successfully to make it the national day.
Q 07Who was the first Governor of New South Wales, arriving with the First Fleet?
Arthur Phillip
In 1788 he also set up a subsidiary settlement on Norfolk Island, hoping for naval timber and flax.
Q 08What killed about half the Aboriginal population of the Sydney region in April 1789?
Smallpox
The source of the outbreak remains controversial, with settlers and Indonesian fishermen both suggested.
Q 09Which governor was deposed in the 1808 Rum Rebellion?
William Bligh
It remains the only successful armed takeover of government in Australian history.
Q 10Which wool pioneer worked closely with the Corps that overthrew Bligh?
John Macarthur
His wife Elizabeth Macarthur was one of the colony's most successful agriculturalists.
Q 11Who served as the last autocratic Governor of New South Wales, from 1810 to 1821?
Lachlan Macquarie
Under him the colony began its transition from penal settlement to civil society.
Q 12Who crossed the Blue Mountains in 1813, opening the way to the Central Tablelands?
Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth
A road across the mountains was completed in 1815, opening the pastures west of the Great Dividing Range.
Q 13Who led the first circumnavigation of Australia in HMS Investigator in 1801–02?
Matthew Flinders
A few years earlier he and Bass had sailed around Tasmania to prove it was an island.
Q 21Van Diemen's Land officially changed its name to Tasmania in which year?
1856
Convict transportation to the island had ended three years earlier.
Q 22Who discovered gold near Bathurst in February 1851, sparking the gold rushes?
Edward Hargraves
The population jumped from 430,000 in 1851 to 1,170,000 in 1861.
Q 23At which goldfield town did miners build the Eureka Stockade in 1854?
Ballarat
The Ballarat Reform League demanded manhood suffrage, licence reform and land for small farms.
Q 24Which colony separated from New South Wales in 1859 and was immediately self-governing?
Q 14Which explorer discovered the Darling River in 1828 and followed the Murrumbidgee into the Murray?
Charles Sturt
His 1828 expedition went along the Macquarie River; the second, in 1829, reached the Murray.
Q 15Which 1860 expedition made the first south–north crossing of the continent to the Gulf of Carpentaria?
Burke and Wills
Both leaders died in 1861 at Coopers Creek, hours after their support party had left.
Q 16In 1824 a penal settlement was founded at Moreton Bay on the site of which modern city?
Brisbane
By 1850 its population had reached 8,000, with pastoralists spreading into the Darling Downs.
Q 17The Swan River colony of 1829, at modern Fremantle and Perth, was notable for being what?
The first convict-free, privately run settlement
Western Australia later accepted convicts and was only granted self-government in 1890.
Q 18The Province of South Australia (1836) was based on whose theory of "systematic colonisation"?
Edward Gibbon Wakefield
It was a privately financed settlement rather than a penal colony.
Q 19In 1835 John Batman negotiated the transfer of 40,000 hectares from which people, at Port Phillip?
The Kulin
The Port Phillip District separated from New South Wales as the colony of Victoria in 1851.
Q 20Approximately how many convicts were transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868?
161,700
They went to New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land and Western Australia; transport to NSW was suspended in 1840.
Queensland
Britain had agreed to the separation in 1857.
Q 25In what year was bushranger Ned Kelly captured and executed for murder?
1880
Several Kelly gang members were the sons of impoverished small farmers, which fed his folk-hero image.
Q 26Which NSW premier's 1889 Tenterfield Oration was pivotal to the federation cause?
Henry Parkes
He spoke in 1890 of "the crimson thread of kinship" running through all Australians.
Q 27Who was sworn in as Australia's first prime minister when the Commonwealth was proclaimed in 1901?
Edmund Barton
Governor-General Lord Hopetoun proclaimed the Commonwealth the same day.
Q 28Which city was the seat of federal government from 1901 to 1927?
Melbourne
The Federal Capital Territory was carved from New South Wales in 1911 for the planned capital.
Q 29In what year did women gain the vote in Commonwealth elections?
1902
The same law excluded most Aboriginal people from the franchise.
Q 30Which act, among the first passed by the new parliament in 1901, underpinned the White Australia policy?
Immigration Restriction Act
Its dictation test was only replaced by an entry-permit system under the Migration Act 1958.