Australia
Commonwealth of Australia | |
|---|---|
| Anthem: "Advance Australia Fair"[N 1] | |
 Commonwealth of Australia
| |
| Capital | Canberra 35°18′29″S 149°07′28″E / 35.30806°S 149.12444°E |
| Largest city | Sydney (metropolitan) Melbourne (urban)[N 2] |
| National language | English (de facto) |
| Religion |
|
| Demonym(s) |
|
| Government | Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy |
• Monarch | Charles III |
| David Hurley | |
| Anthony Albanese | |
| Legislature | Parliament |
| Senate | |
| House of Representatives | |
| Independence from the United Kingdom | |
• Federation and Constitution | 1 January 1901 |
| 15 November 1926 | |
| 9 October 1942 | |
| 3 March 1986 | |
| Area | |
• Total | 7,688,287[7] km2 (2,968,464 sq mi) (6th) |
• Water (%) | 1.79 (2015)[8] |
| Population | |
• 2024 estimate |  27,164,500[9] (53rd) |
• 2021 census | 25,890,773[10] |
• Density | 3.5/km2 (9.1/sq mi) (192nd) |
| GDP (PPP) | 2024 estimate |
• Total |  $1.791 trillion[11] (20th) |
• Per capita | $66,627[11] (23rd) |
| GDP (nominal) | 2024 estimate |
• Total | $1.790 trillion[11] (14th) |
• Per capita | $66,589[11] (10th) |
| Gini (2020) |  32.4[12]medium |
| HDI (2022) |  0.946[13]very high (10th) |
| Currency | Australian dollar ($) (AUD) |
| Time zone | UTC+8; +9.5; +10 (AWST, ACST, AEST[N 4]) |
• Summer (DST) | UTC+10.5; +11 (ACDT, AEDT[N 4]) |
| DST not observed in Qld, WA and NT | |
| Date format | dd/mm/yyyy[14] |
| Driving side | left |
| Calling code | +61 |
| ISO 3166 code | AU |
| Internet TLD | .au |
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia,[15] is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands.[b] Australia is the largest country by area in Oceania and the world's sixth-largest country. Australia is the oldest,[16] flattest,[17] and driest inhabited continent,[18][19] with the least fertile soils.[20][21] It is a megadiverse country, and its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes and climates, with deserts in the centre, tropical rainforests in the north-east, tropical savannas in the north, and mountain ranges in the south-east.
The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from south-east Asia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, during the last glacial period.[22][23][24] They settled the continent and had formed approximately 250 distinct language groups by the time of European settlement, maintaining some of the longest known continuing artistic and religious traditions in the world.[25] Australia's written history commenced with European maritime exploration. The Dutch were the first known Europeans to reach Australia, in 1606. British colonisation began in 1788 with the establishment of the penal colony of New South Wales. By the mid-19th century, most of the continent had been explored by European settlers and five additional self-governing British colonies were established, each gaining responsible government by 1890. The colonies federated in 1901, forming the Commonwealth of Australia.[26] This continued a process of increasing autonomy from the United Kingdom, highlighted by the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942, and culminating in the Australia Acts of 1986.[26]
Australia is a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy comprising six states and ten territories: the states of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia; the major mainland Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory; and other minor or external territories. Its population of nearly 27 million[9] is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard.[27] Canberra is the nation's capital, while its most populous cities are Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.[28] Australian governments have promoted multiculturalism since the 1970s.[29] Australia is culturally diverse and has one of the highest foreign-born populations in the world.[30][31] Its abundant natural resources and well-developed international trade relations are crucial to the country's economy, which generates its income from various sources: predominantly services (including banking, real estate and international education) as well as mining, manufacturing and agriculture.[32][33] It ranks highly for quality of life, health, education, economic freedom, civil liberties and political rights.[34]
Australia has a highly developed market economy and one of the highest per capita incomes globally.[35][36][37] It is a middle power, and has the world's thirteenth-highest military expenditure.[38][39] It is a member of international groups including the United Nations; the G20; the OECD; the World Trade Organization; Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation; the Pacific Islands Forum; the Pacific Community; the Commonwealth of Nations; and the defence and security organisations ANZUS, AUKUS, and the Five Eyes. It is also a major non-NATO ally of the United States.[40]
Etymology
The name Australia (pronounced /əˈstreɪliə/ in Australian English[41]) is derived from the Latin Terra Australis ("southern land"), a name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times.[42] Several sixteenth century cartographers used the word Australia on maps, but not to identify modern Australia.[43] When Europeans began visiting and mapping Australia in the 17th century, the name Terra Australis was applied to the new territories.[N 5]
Until the early 19th century, Australia was best known as New Holland, a name first applied by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1644 (as Nieuw-Holland) and subsequently anglicised. Terra Australis still saw occasional usage, such as in scientific texts.[N 6] The name Australia was popularised by the explorer Matthew Flinders, who said it was "more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the Earth".[49] The first time that Australia appears to have been officially used was in April 1817, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie acknowledged the receipt of Flinders' charts of Australia from Lord Bathurst.[50] In December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted.[51] In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially by that name.[52] The first official published use of the new name came with the publication in 1830 of The Australia Directory by the Hydrographic Office.[53]
Colloquial names for Australia include "Oz", "Straya" and "Down Under".[54] Other epithets include "the Great Southern Land", "the Lucky Country", "the Sunburnt Country", and "the Wide Brown Land". The latter two both derive from Dorothea Mackellar's 1908 poem "My Country".[55]
History
Indigenous prehistory
Indigenous Australians comprise two broad groups: the Aboriginal peoples of the Australian mainland (and surrounding islands including Tasmania), and the Torres Strait Islanders, who are a distinct Melanesian people. Human habitation of the Australian continent is estimated to have begun 50,000 to 65,000 years ago,[22][56][57][23] with the migration of people by land bridges and short sea crossings from what is now Southeast Asia.[58] It is uncertain how many waves of immigration may have contributed to these ancestors of modern Aboriginal Australians.[59][60] The Madjedbebe rock shelter in Arnhem Land is recognised as the oldest site showing the presence of humans in Australia.[61] The oldest human remains found are the Lake Mungo remains, which have been dated to around 41,000 years ago.[62][63]
Aboriginal Australian culture is one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth.[25][64][65][66] At the time of first European contact, Aboriginal Australians were complex hunter-gatherers with diverse economies and societies, and spread across at least 250 different language groups.[67][68] Estimates of the Aboriginal population before British settlement range from 300,000 to one million.[69][70] Aboriginal Australians have an oral culture with spiritual values based on reverence for the land and a belief in the Dreamtime.[71] Certain groups engaged in fire-stick farming,[72][73] fish farming,[74][75] and built semi-permanent shelters.[76][77] The extent to which some groups engaged in agriculture is controversial.[78][79][80]
The Torres Strait Islander people first settled their islands around 4,000 years ago.[81] Culturally and linguistically distinct from mainland Aboriginal peoples, they were seafarers and obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas.[82] Agriculture also developed on some islands and villages appeared by the 1300s.[83]
By the mid-18th century in northern Australia, contact, trade and cross-cultural engagement had been established between local Aboriginal groups and Makassan trepangers, visiting from present-day Indonesia.[84][85][86]
European exploration and colonisation
The Dutch are the first Europeans that recorded sighting and making landfall on the Australian mainland.[87] The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken, captained by Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon.[88] He sighted the coast of Cape York Peninsula in early 1606, and made landfall on 26 February 1606 at the Pennefather River near the modern town of Weipa on Cape York.[89] Later that year, Spanish explorer Luís Vaz de Torres sailed through and navigated the Torres Strait Islands.[90] The Dutch charted the whole of the western and northern coastlines and named the island continent "New Holland" during the 17th century, and although no attempt at settlement was made,[89] a number of shipwrecks left men either stranded or, as in the case of the Batavia in 1629, marooned for mutiny and murder, thus becoming the first Europeans to permanently inhabit the continent.[91] In 1770, Captain James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast, which he named "New South Wales" and claimed for Great Britain.[92]
Following the loss of its American colonies in 1783, the British Government sent a fleet of ships, the First Fleet, under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, to establish a new penal colony in New South Wales. A camp was set up and the Union Flag raised at Sydney Cove, Port Jackson, on 26 January 1788,[93][94] a date which later became Australia's national day.
Most early settlers were convicts, transported for petty crimes and assigned as labourers or servants to "free settlers" (willing immigrants). Once emancipated, convicts tended to integrate into colonial society. Martial law was declared to suppress convict rebellions and uprisings,[95] and lasted for two years following the 1808 Rum Rebellion, the only successful armed takeover of government in Australia.[96] Over the next two decades, social and economic reforms, together with the establishment of a Legislative Council and Supreme Court, saw New South Wales transition from a penal colony to a civil society.[97][98][99][page needed]
The indigenous population declined for 150 years following European settlement, mainly due to infectious disease.[100][101] British colonial authorities did not sign any treaties with Aboriginal groups.[101][102] As settlement expanded, thousands of Indigenous people died in frontier conflicts while others were dispossessed of their traditional lands.[103]
Colonial expansion
In 1803, a settlement was established in Van Diemen's Land (present-day Tasmania),[104] and in 1813, Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth crossed the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, opening the interior to European settlement.[105] The British claim extended to the whole Australian continent in 1827 when Major Edmund Lockyer established a settlement on King George Sound (modern-day Albany).[106] The Swan River Colony (present-day Perth) was established in 1829, evolving into the largest Australian colony by area, Western Australia.[107] In accordance with population growth, separate colonies were carved from New South Wales: Tasmania in 1825, South Australia in 1836, New Zealand in 1841, Victoria in 1851, and Queensland in 1859.[108] South Australia was founded as a free colony—it never accepted transported convicts.[109] Growing opposition to the convict system culminated in its abolition in the eastern colonies by the 1850s. Initially a free colony, Western Australia practised penal transportation from 1850 to 1868.[110]
The six colonies individually gained responsible government between 1855 and 1890, thus becoming elective democracies managing most of their own affairs while remaining part of the British Empire.[111] The Colonial Office in London retained control of some matters, notably foreign affairs.[112]
In the mid-19th century, explorers such as Burke and Wills charted Australia's interior.[113] A series of gold rushes beginning in the early 1850s led to an influx of new migrants from China, North America and continental Europe,[114] as well as outbreaks of bushranging and civil unrest; the latter peaked in 1854 when Ballarat miners launched the Eureka Rebellion against gold license fees.[115] The 1860s saw a surge in blackbirding, where Pacific Islanders were forced into indentured labour, mainly in Queensland.[116][117]
From 1886, Australian colonial governments began introducing policies resulting in the removal of many Aboriginal children from their families and communities.[118] The Second Boer War (1899–1902) marked the largest overseas deployment of Australia's colonial forces.[119][120]
Federation to the World Wars
On 1 January 1901, federation of the colonies was achieved after a decade of planning, constitutional conventions and referendums, resulting in the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia as a nation under the new Australian Constitution.[121]
After the 1907 Imperial Conference, Australia and several other self-governing British settler colonies were given the status of self-governing dominions within the British Empire.[122] Australia was one of the founding members of the League of Nations in 1920,[123] and subsequently of the United Nations in 1945.[124] The Statute of Westminster 1931 formally ended the ability of the UK to pass laws with effect at the Commonwealth level in Australia without the country's consent. Australia adopted it in 1942, but it was backdated to 1939 to confirm the validity of legislation passed by the Australian Parliament during World War II.[125][126][127]
The Australian Capital Territory was formed in 1911 as the location for the future federal capital of Canberra.[128] While it was being constructed, Melbourne served as the temporary capital from 1901 to 1927.[129] The Northern Territory was transferred from the control of the South Australian government to the federal parliament in 1911.[130] Australia became the colonial ruler of the Territory of Papua (which had initially been annexed by Queensland in 1883) in 1902 and of the Territory of New Guinea (formerly German New Guinea) in 1920.[131][132] The two were unified as the Territory of Papua and New Guinea in 1949 and gained independence from Australia in 1975.[131][133]
.footer {
position: fixed;
left: 0;
bottom: 0;
width: 100%;
background-color: white;
color: black;
text-align: center;
}