Aborigines had lived in most areas of WA for thousands of years by the time the seventeenth-century traders of the Dutch East India Company , and possibly the Portuguese before them, began bumping into the west coast on their way to the East Indies. A Dutch mariner, Dirk Hartog , was among the first of these when, in 1616, he left an inscribed pewter plate on the island off Shark Bay which now bears his name. Recent evidence was also found hereabouts to suggest that the French claimed the whole continent just a few years before Cook. For the next two hundred years, however, impressions of WA's barren and waterless fringes remained - commercially at least - uninspiring to European colonists.

 

France's subsequent interest in Australia's southwest corner at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which left a legacy of attractively named coastal features, led the British hastily to claim the unknown western part of the continent in 1826. Fredrickstown (Albany) was established on the south coast in that year and the Swan River Colony, today's Perth, two years later. The new colony , initially rejecting convict labour and so struggling desperately in its early years, had the familiar effect on an Aboriginal population that was at best misunderstood and at worst annihilated. Aborigines and their lands were cleared for agriculture: these days black faces are not seen as regularly south of Perth as in the north.

Economic problems continued until stalwart explorers in the mid-nineteenth century opened up the country's interior, leading to the goldrushes of the 1890s which propelled the colony into autonomous statehood in less than a decade. This autonomy , and growing antipathy towards the eastern states, led to a move to secede from the Federation in the depressed 1930s, when WA felt the rest of the country was dragging it down. But following World War II the whole of white Australia, and especially WA, began to thrive, making money from wool and, later, from huge mineral discoveries that to this day form the basis of the state's wealth. In fact, so prosperous is the state that at present its wealth accounts for a quarter of the nation's economy. Meanwhile, many of WA's forty thousand Aborigines continue to live in comparatively squalid and remote communities, as if in another country, though in the wake of the Mabo and Wik rulings, lawyers supposedly representing them have put vast areas of the state under land claim, creating a situation destined to stagnate in the courts for years to come.