These incredible archive images take us back to the earliest days of Australian life at home, following the evolution of domesticity from Aboriginal humpies and European-style cottages to mid-century modern builds.

Click or scroll on to discover what life really looked like in the Australian outback throughout history. To enjoy these pictures on a desktop computer FULL SCREEN, click on the icon at the top right of the image...

Some of the earliest available images of Australian settlements take us back to the late 1800s, almost a century after the first English convict colony was established in 1788.

While Indigenous peoples had long inhabited the island, England claimed it in 1770, leading to an influx of English settlers. These were mostly convicted criminals who were exported to penal colonies.

However, by the late 19th century, Australia had developed into a much more recognisably Western society, with a university, railway and stock exchange. Neighbourhoods were crowded with clapboard-clad, single-family homes like the one pictured here.

Australian homes were often constructed to mimic the country cottages back in England, like this one with its thatched roof and large chimney.

However, without the cobblestones of the Cotswolds, Australians had to supplement timber beams, whitewashed to ward off the hot Australian sun.

English settlers needed to build shelters quickly, particularly those who lived further from established settlements in the harsher environs of 'the bush', the term used to describe the sparsely inhabited region of the Australian Outback.

In this 1887 photograph, a man sits stroking a cat outside his version of a bush wigwam, typically constructed of a forked post and central pole overlayed with branches, leaves and bark.

Tools including a saw, washboard and frying pan hang outside the home.

The Aboriginal peoples had long been living in humpy or wigwam shelters. These dwellings originated in the more arid regions of Australia and were designed to provide quick shelter from the scorching sun.

The size differed depending on the family and community. Some could hold up to 10 or 12 people.

Wigwams could also be used as houses of worship or for community meeting places. In these cases, wigwams were larger and could fit about 25 occupants.

The home pictured in this 1890 snapshot was a prototypical example of the Western Australian settlements of the period, which made use of sturdier materials designed to withstand the region’s more severe weather.

The simple, Victorian-style timbered home features an iron roof and a brick chimney.

Australia, a land rich with materials like ochre, high-quality stone, coal, copper and lead, was mined by the Aboriginals for tens of thousands of years.

However, when English settlers found the first gold deposits in the 1850s, the country’s mineral wealth was finally placed on the world stage, setting off a period of feverish gold rushes. They dramatically shaped the nation's financial and industrial development.

As the century drew to a close, settlers poured in from around the world, setting up rudimentary campsites like the one pictured here and enduring brutal heat and primitive conditions in the hopes of striking it rich.

As Australia continued to develop and grow in affluence and population, its architectural resemblance to the United Kingdom increased.

This snapshot of the jetty in Glenelg, a suburb of Adelaide on Holdfast Bay in Gulf St Vincent and the oldest European settlement on mainland South Australia, could easily have been taken in any English coastal town around the turn of the 20th century.

Established in 1836, Glenelg boasted all the staples of a Victorian seaside community with its prominent hotel and local shops.

As Australia entered the 20th century, homesteads developed their distinctive shape. Most homes were encircled by a wide veranda, designed to reduce sun glare in the summer heat.

Other characteristic features included galvanised, corrugated iron roofs and locally sourced limestone roughly hewn and cemented into walls. Floors were made from either timber logs or densely packed earth.

While wealthier homeowners could afford glass windowpanes like those pictured here, poorer homes had to rely on stretched calico or linen to prevent dust and insects from entering the home.

When Britain entered the First World War, Australians shipped out to fight alongside the rest of the empire. By the end of the conflict, 60,000 had died in combat. For those who returned, efforts were made to reward service in conjunction with wider government aims of populating the Australian inland with the soldier settlement scheme.

The project's goal was to split up large pastoral estates into smaller farms, granting this land to returning soldiers and their families to create communities based around the romanticised yeoman farmer ideal.

However, the scheme ultimately failed, as the land proved inhospitable for cultivation.

For some Australian rural communities, life remained largely unchanged throughout the 1920s. This snapshot of a villager's hut on Badu Island, Queensland in the late 1920s illustrates a more peaceful lifestyle, devoid of government schemes and modern technologies.

However, the 1920s saw the founding of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA), which recognised the encroaching threat of the British Empire on Aboriginal land and lifestyle.

AAPA campaigned for Indigenous rights to land ownership, citizenship and self-determination.

Since the arrival of the first British colonists in 1770, Aboriginal peoples had been dispossessed of their land.

They were relocated to new territories, forced to eke out an existence on the fringes of European settlements and even to surrender their children to state or religious care, where they would be deprived of their cultural identity.

Though the AAPA was largely pressured out of existence by law enforcement agencies by the end of the decade, it was replaced in 1936 by the Australian Aborigines League, whose purpose was to lobby state and federal governments on behalf of the Aboriginal people.

The British monarchy influenced almost every aspect of early Australian settler life. This included architecture.

Pictured here is Government House in Sydney, an imposing Gothic Revival-style mansion completed in 1847 for the governor of New South Wales, the Queen’s representative for the state.

The estate, pictured here in 1938, remains the governor’s residence to this day and is listed on the New South Wales Heritage Register.

One of the most distinctive architectural styles that developed in Australia between roughly the 1840s and the 1930s was the Queenslander home – a direct response to Australia’s extreme climate.

The distinctive style sits on timber stilts, allowing humid air or even flood waters to flow through without damaging the structural integrity of the home.

The homes draw on multiple architectural movements, including Queen Anne, Federation and Interwar styles.

A far cry from a lofty stilt house, this underground army cookhouse was occupied by Australian troops during the Second World War.

The cavernous underground chambers made convenient places to set up headquarters and other bases. They were first used during the advance on Bardia, Libya, the first battle of the Second World War in which an Australian Army formation took part.

Just as during the First World War, hundreds of thousands of Australian citizens shipped out to fight alongside the rest of the British empire, this time forced to do so using conscription, which was instituted for the first time in 1943.

When the war ended, the influx of returning soldiers was met with the State Housing Act of 1945, which provided affordable and secure homes for returning soldiers to combat the post-war housing shortage.

This resulted in the formation of the Queensland Housing Commission (QHC), which began feverishly producing state-run rental properties, converting wartime barracks into housing and importing European prefabricated models made to Queensland designs.

This picture shows a typical interior of the QHC homes.

Completed in 1950, the Rose Seidler House in Sydney was considered one of Australia's finest examples of mid-20th-century modern domestic architecture.

The home was designed by architect Harry Seidler for his parents Rose and Max, and intended to contradict every convention of the suburban house.

With its distinctively boxy silhouette, bold use of primary colours and inverted structure, the home represented a bright future and a new way of living.

By 1959, the Queensland Housing Commission had produced 23,000 homes across the state, establishing entire communities of cookie-cutter-style properties like the Brisbane allotments pictured here in 1954. 

Like their Queenslander predecessors, these homes were predominantly built on stilts to avoid flooding and featured a single-storey with a pitched, shingled roof.

The interiors of these homes were often extremely simplistic, as the QHC was more concerned with constructing as many homes as possible than decorating them.

However, one of these homes' key selling features was that they all boasted 'modern kitchens', like the one pictured here featuring what still appears to be very basic white cabinetry, a small, old-fashioned stove and a chrome dinette set.

This was a substantial improvement on the temporary housing made from calico, canvas or hessian which the QHC estimated thousands of families lived in while the new homes were being built.

For those with the resources to build their own homes, the architectural advice available grew dramatically in the 1950s to meet the increasing demand. This gave rise to collaboration between department stores, architects and home magazines.

One collaboration was established in 1954 between the Sunday Telegraph Newspaper and the Grace Brothers Department Store Home Plans Service. It offered an architectural advisory service, a range of stock plans or the option of specially prepared plans drawn to the client’s requirements.

The couple pictured here in 1959 sit outside their newly completed brick home built to one of this scheme’s set plans.

This home is another from the Grace Bros plan collaboration.

The picture taken in 1959 shows a young family watching while builders work on the new backyard of their red brick home in Turramurra, Sydney.

Large tree stumps were removed by being slowly burnt out of the ground because the machinery to take them out any other way did not yet exist.

Faced with a ‘populate or perish’ problem in the wake of the Second World War, Australia introduced the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme, or ‘Ten Pound Pom’ scheme. A collaboration with the British government, it charged Brits just £10 ($13/AU$20) for migration processing fees to move down under.

The scheme promised balmy weather, instant wealth and easy homeownership. In short, a better life than anything post-war Britain had to offer at the time.

For war-weary British citizens, the scheme proved extremely popular. By 1947 more than 400,000 people had signed up.

Australian homes of the 1960s followed many of the same mid-century modern trends popular in the US and UK.

Geometric patterns, earth tones, light woods and minimalist furniture began to dominate living spaces, which also tended towards open-plan layouts.

Televisions became ubiquitous staples following the first Australian television transmission in 1956, twenty years after its introduction in the UK.

For the thousands who set sail from Britain for a new life, the reality upon arrival in Australia was often bleak.

Most migrants were shuttled into cramped hostels like the ones pictured here (in 1969), or into Nissan huts, a semicircular corrugated iron prefabricated shelter not dissimilar from those being frantically erected to combat the housing shortage back home.

Nevertheless, between 1946 and 1960, 1.2 million people migrated to Australia, accounting for a third of the country’s population growth and dramatically altering the country’s sociocultural landscape. The Assisted Passage Migration Scheme was terminated in 1982.

With the dream of home ownership driving them, many people in the 1950s and 60s had the skill level to construct a basic single-storey brick home using one of the many available construction models.

Consequently, by the 1950s about half of all houses in Australia were owner-built. By 1966 home ownership peaked at 71%.

These homes were designed to withstand harsh Australian climates and elements, including severe dust storms like the one seen here in 1968. It's enveloping a neighbourhood of mid-century self-builds that dominated the housing market of Adelaide, South Australia.

The 1970s in Australia saw the rise of concrete slab technology, which, in conjunction with the persistent need for housing, gave rise to the development of large unit blocks and attached housing.

These developments were considered low-income housing and, over time, stigmas developed around living in a Housing Commission estate.

This 1970s snap from one of these homes displays a poorly equipped kitchen, with cheap cabinets, and no built-in oven or hob to cook on.

Of course, no matter how strategically designed, Australian homes were not always proof against the elements, often falling prey to the brutal storms which batter the large 'island continent'.

Pictured here are the remains of a home in Darwin which was destroyed by cyclone Tracy on Christmas Day in 1974, along with 90% of the rest of Darwin’s buildings.

Mid-century modern design remained a popular and prevailing style in Australia into the 1970s and 80s.

This is the mud brick home belonging to the Australian artist Clifton Pugh, featuring a distinct mid-century silhouette with its curved façade, flat roofline and large windows.

Famous for its opals, the town of Coober Pedy in South Australia took adapting to extreme climate conditions to a whole new level; it’s largely underground. 

Established with the first opal discovery in 1915, its population boomed in the 1970s and 80s, with waves of miners pouring through to seek their fortunes.

Coober Pedy loosely translates from an Indigenous Australian term to mean 'white man in a hole'. Residents created underground dwellings to shelter from the local scorching temperatures, which can reach up to 48°C (118°F) in the summer months.

Around 60% of the Cooper Pedy population inhabits homes built into the iron-rich sandstone and siltstone rock. In some neighbourhoods, the only signs of habitation are ventilation shafts sticking up.

The town’s stable soil facilitates high ceilings and spacious interiors, allowing homeowners to carve out custom designs to suit their needs like the one pictured here. These dugouts and cave homes are still occupied today, some even have swimming pools!

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