All wars, however modest their impact, produce flight from the battlefields by civilians. All revolutions, however well intentioned, also produce flight from internal struggles and frequently involve suppression of dissent. The medieval tendency to massacre inhabitants of resisting cities gradually died out in Europe. It continued into modern times in the Ottoman empire and by warring Arabic forces, despite Islamic injunctions against it. This made it imperative that citizens who could escape would move away from battlegrounds and besieged cities and seek a new life elsewhere. Many regions were so devastated by warfare that movement away became unavoidable. The mass movement from Syria through Europe in 2015 was an unexpected recent example, of which Australia had no previous experience.

Such refugee experiences did not directly affect Australia. Effective military control was established over the whole continent by the 1840s, and the Indigenous resistance was soon conquered or driven away from the settled districts. Nor were immigrants from the British Isles fleeing from military conquest. The whole United Kingdom was effectively pacified before 1788, except in marginal areas of Ireland. Those emigrating were predominantly British subjects, with access to countries closer than Australia, such as Canada or the United States, which raised no barriers against them. Australia could draw on these fugitives from rural poverty by organized migration based on funds provided from the new colonies. Unlike migration to the United States, non-British were ineligible for these inducements and assistance. Nor were many British fleeing from political or religious persecution. This kind of flight was largely absent by 1780 and confined to Jacobites moving to France, or a few radicals moving to the United States.

Thus, the concept of the refugee, which had first been developed in response to the French Revolution of 1789, had no legal status in British law or financial status in British immigration policy. Refugees were, by definition, escaping from warfare, political and religious persecution in foreign, mainly European, states that had recently experienced all of these. The nearest approximation was among the Irish, fleeing from starvation during the potato famine of the 1840s or from the restrictions on their ownership of land and their practice of Catholicism. The great majority preferred the United States. As British subjects they were entitled to apply for support and funds within the United Kingdom migration schemes to Australia and other British colonies.