Australia

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Australia

Australia is a country in the Southern Hemisphere, lying between the Indian and Pacific oceans. The only country to occupy an entire continent, Australia is about the same size as the United States, not including Alaska. Australia is relatively flat and, with the exception of outlying tropical and temperate regions, has a dry climate. The capital is Canberra and the largest cities are Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Australia includes the large island of Tasmania as well as smaller offshore territories such as the Coral Sea Islands, Norfolk Island, Macquarie Island, Christmas Island, and the Cocos Islands; it also claims part of Antarctica. Australia is rich in mineral wealth and is ranked among the world's top five producers of such minerals as bauxite, lead, zinc, gold, iron, cobalt, uranium, coal, copper, nickel, and silver. The country's agricultural sector is also considerable, with wheat, wool, and beef cattle especially important.

Australia's indigenous inhabitants are known as Aboriginal people (the preferred term) and also as Aborigines. Aboriginal people settled in Australia at least forty thousand years ago and possibly as early as seventy thousand years ago; they settled the entire continent, as well as Tasmania, and developed hunting, fishing, and gathering cultures appropriate to various environments. About six hundred different Aboriginal societies, or tribes, most with their own distinctive languages, flourished in Australia prior to European arrival. Though their technology was relatively simple, Aboriginal people developed complex religions and legal systems and were able to survive and prosper in extremely harsh environments.

The first European to visit Australia was the Dutch explorer Willem Jansz, who sighted the northern coast in 1606 and named it New Holland; some scholars, however, believe that Spanish and Portuguese explorers may have made earlier sightings. Later Dutch and British expeditions provided Europeans with greater knowledge of this "new" continent. In 1770 Captain James Cook landed at Botany Bay, near present-day Sydney, and explored the eastern coast of Australia, claiming it for Great Britain and naming it New South Wales. By the beginning of the nineteenth century Australia had been circumnavigated and its coastline mapped; much of the interior, however, remained unknown to Europeans until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

British settlement in Australia began in 1788 with the founding of Sydney (then known as Port Jackson) as a penal colony. Prisoners from Great Britain, many of them charged with minor offenses, were settled in the Sydney area. The British believed that transporting convicts to Australia would help reduce prison overcrowding in England, would remove "undesirable" people from the mother country, and would help populate Australia. Penal colonies were also established elsewhere, notably in Tasmania and in Western Australia. About 160,000 convicts were sent to Australia between the 1780s and the 1860s. Convict life varied, but punishments for infractions could be severe, and included beatings, solitary confinement, and even death. When freed, convicts were often given land.

Australia remained something of an economic backwater until the discovery of gold north of Melbourne in 1851. As in California, the Australian gold rush resulted in many new settlers and the further exploration of the continent's interior. The gold rush stimulated other economic sectors, such as agriculture, and Australia in the 1860s was transformed from a penal colony into six flourishing colonies of free settlers. At intercolonial conferences beginning in 1863 the separate colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia debated joining together. They did so in 1901, forming the Commonwealth of Australia, with a federal system consisting of a national government and state governments.

Until the 1960s, Australia's economy was closely tied to Great Britain through a system of imperial preference that gave trade advantages to British dominions. When Britain joined the forerunner of the European Union, Australia's trade began to shift to Asia and the United States. Though Australia is independent, the British monarch remains the country's formal head of state. An antimonarchy movement is gaining influence, but a referendum on creating a republic was defeated in 1999.

Australia sent troops to support the British in both World Wars. Australia's participation in the failed campaign to win the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey in 1915 and its loss of over eight thousand soldiers created a strong sense of Australian, as opposed to British, national identity. In the 1940s, when Japan posed a threat to the country's northern coast, Australia requested assistance from the United States, which led to a strong new alliance and a shift in the country's military ties away from Britain.

From federation in 1901 until 1973, Australia had a restrictive immigration policy, known as the "White Australia" policy, which limited immigration mainly to emigrants from the British Isles, though some exceptions were made for southern and eastern Europeans, especially after World War II. In the 1970s the country began to admit Asian immigrants and today Australia has a large Asian and Pacific Islander community.

Australia became a colonial power in its own right when it acquired formerly British as well as formerly German territories in New Guinea; Australia administered these as colonies from the end of World War I until the independence of Papua New Guinea in 1975. Australia also acquired the phosphate-rich Pacific island of Nauru after World War I and administered it until Nauruan independence in 1968. Australia is still involved in the economic and political affairs of these countries.

Australia has increasingly come to terms with its Aboriginal population and the consequences of colonialism. Aboriginal people were finally granted Australian citizenship and the right to vote in 1967. In 1992 the country's High Court, in the Mabo case, overturned the legal doctrine of terra nullius, which had stated that Australia was "unoccupied" at the time of British settlement and that therefore Aboriginal people had no legal title to lands. The Mabo decision, along with subsequent court cases, initiated a process of land claims, in which Aboriginal communities that could demonstrate continued association with their traditional lands would receive land titles as well as compensation. Australians at the start of the twenty-first century are also addressing the historical treatment of Aboriginal people, as the process of reconciliation continues.