Australia Geography

Geography

Australia is an island continent in the Southern Hemisphere, lying between Antarctica and Asia. It is surrounded by the Indian Ocean to the west; the Timor, Arafura, and Coral Seas to the north; the Pacific Ocean to the east; and the Tasman Sea and Southern Ocean to the south. Much of the continent is low, flat, and dry. The area of the continent is 2.97 million square miles (7.69 million square kilometers).

Australia has six states, which are Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales, and Queensland. Also has two territories, which are the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory. The capital cities are Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Hobart, Sydney, Brisbane, Darwin, and Canberra respectively. The majority of the population lives in urban areas around the coast.

History

Australia’s Aboriginal people have the oldest continuous culture on Earth. They are believed to have arrived here by boat at least 50,000 years ago. At the time of European settlement there were up to one million Aboriginal people living across the continent as hunters and gatherers. They were scattered in 500 different clans, or ‘nations’, speaking about 700 languages.

Australian began as a British penal colony in the eighteenth century, and its national character has formed mainly through the immigration and race relations. The colonization of Australia had a devastating impact on the Aboriginal people, with dispossession of their land, illness and death from introduced diseases and huge disruption of their traditional lifestyles and practices.

Australia’s six states became a nation under a single constitution on 1 January 1901. Today people from more than 200 countries make up the Australian community, and more than 300 languages are spoken in Australian homes.

After the first and second world wars, Australia’s economy flourished throughout the 1950s with major nation-building projects such as the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme and the Sydney Opera House. International demand grew for Australia’s major exports of metals, wools, meat and wheat and suburban Australia also prospered. The rate of home ownership rose dramatically from barely 40 per cent in 1947 to more than 70 per cent by the 1960s.

Other factors that have shaped the national culture include the early small female population relative to that of men, which is said to have laid the foundations for a widespread ideology of mateship. The involvement of Australian and New Zealand (Anzac) troops in World War I has been characterized as the symbolic birth of the nation.

A further impetus for the formation of a national culture was the myth of the rural bushman, which developed around early phases of the historical establishment of pastoral and agricultural industries.