It is referring to English colonisation of Australia a few hundred years ago. The English did not learn the indigenous languages there, and they brought English law with them. It also refers to the fact that a lot of convicts were sent to Australia.
Joke: An Englishman gets off the plane, and immigration asks him if he has any criminal convictions. He replies “I didn’t know you still needed one”.
It's just Americans thinking they're being funny about Australia, which is ironic given their modern-day extremely high levels of incarceration. Even the 'penal colonies' weren't just penal colonies - there were a hell of a lot of free settlers as well. Then the gold rushes hit and that's when things really took off.
Besides, in the same period we were a 'penal colony', the Americans were 'slavers' - so much for not casting the first stone...
“The problem with Australians is not that so many of them are descended from convicts, but that so many of them are descended from prison officers.”
- Clive James
It's a common thing to say that we Australians are descendants of criminals (Australia was originally populated by British prisoners). It's interesting to see that it is now one of the friendliest countries in the world, coming from a country filled with criminals 200 years ago.
In the end, we have all descended from a criminal in one form or the other :)
I've seen the opinion that most of the world imagines Australians all descended from criminals, while in fact an influential portion was descended from wardens. Bit of a parallel there I imagine.
I sometimes joke that we (the British) sent all our criminals to Australia and all our puritans to America, and of course there's some amount of historical truth to this. So if the Americans remain fervently religious, why isn't Australia really a nation of criminals today?
Actually, speaking of Australia - as 20% of Australians are apparently descended from convicts shipped there from the UK shouldn't Austrialia be suffering from terrible levels of crime?
The last convict ship to Australia sailed 10 years before the US Civil War, and even then it'd been tailing off for decades. White Americans are closer to being slavers than white Australians are to being convicts.
Besides, if you want to see who is more criminal-ey in the modern era, the US wins there with a 5x rate of incarceration...
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