Squatting in Australia

In 19th century Australian history, a squatter was a settler who occupied a large tract of Aboriginal land in order to graze livestock.

As in England and Wales and also the United States, adverse possession exists in Australian law, although it is rarely used by squatters.

[1] In the 19th century, the British government claimed to own all of Australia and tried to control land ownership, ignoring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

In the 1840s squatters traveled along the Murrumbidgee route, which had been documented by the explorers Thomas Mitchell and Charles Sturt, in search for suitable lands.

[5] Following World War II, various individuals and families squatted for housing in Hobart, Melbourne, Port Kembla and Sydney in 1946.

It became a squat later that year in the eyes of the law when the Australian government criminalised the occupation by amending the Trespass on Commonwealth Lands Ordinance.

The South Vietnamese embassy at 39 National Circuit and 14 Hobart Avenue had been empty since 1975 and was occupied after a demonstration in March 1984.

[13] In Sydney, streets of terraced houses in areas such as the Rocks and Potts Point were squatted to prevent their demolition in the 1970s.

[20] Also during the 1970s and 1980s, extensive parts of Woolloomooloo and Darlinghurst were also squatted, along corridors of houses bought to make way for new road works.

Punks, political activists, musicians and artists also started squatting in "The Gunnery", a former Navy warehouse and training facility, in Woolloomooloo, during the early-to-mid-1980s.

[14][21] The activists squatting empty buildings on Broadway which were owned by South Sydney City Council were evicted in 2001, a few months after the 2000 Olympics.

[23] When squatted in 2002, it was used as an autonomous social centre, hosting music events, a cafe, a library, a free internet space and a Food Not Bombs kitchen.

[25] A five-year-old squat was peacefully evicted in March 2008, when an office block in Balmain was demolished to make way for a park.

[27] The protesters demanded affordable housing and in 2017 agreed to leave when a deal was made to build 62 homes for Aboriginal people for the sum of $70 million.