Countries of the World - Australia

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As promised, here is Australia. It's a fascinating country, so it's quite long. I left out military, war, and political history. AUSTRALIA People identify Australia with kangaroos, koala bears, eucalyptus trees, and the Australian bush/outback. It is much more than that. My interest in Australia began at an early age with a television show about a boy and his kangaroo. Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. It was a fun program. So, where is Australia? Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is part of Oceania in the South Pacific, one of seven continents of the world with North America, South America, Asia, Antarctica, Europe, and Africa. It is the largest country in Oceania. Australia is also the sixth largest country in the world. It is also the oldest, flattest, and driest inhabited country, with the least fertile soil. When you look at a world map or globe, it looks like it’s at the bottom of the world and is known as the country Down Under. It has a diverse landscape with deserts, tropical rainforests, tropical savannas, and mountain ranges. It would make going on their famous walk-about interesting. Australia is a sovereign country comprising the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and several smaller islands. Its government is a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy whose head is King Charles III. The Governor General is David Hurley, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Ancestors of the Aboriginal Australians arrived during the last glacial period. They settled the continent and had formed 250 different dialects before the first European settlers arrived. They maintained the longest artistic and religious traditions in the world before the Dutch arrived in 1606. Australia’s written history started with European maritime exploration. British colonization began in 1788 when they made a penal colony in what is now New South Wales. By the mid-nineteenth century European settlers had explored the continent and established five more British colonies, each gaining self-government by 1890. The colonies formed the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. This continued the process of increasing autonomy with the United Kingdom, highlighted by the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act of 1942 and culminating in the Australian Acts of 1986. The current federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy comprises of six states and ten territories: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia, Australian Capital Territory, and Northern Territory. Of the nearly 27 million people, the population resides mostly on the eastern seaboard in highly urbanized cities and communities. Canberra is the nation’s capital. The most populous cities are Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, and Adelaide. Australian governments have promoted multiculturalism since the 1970s. Being culturally diverse they have the highest foreign-born populations in the world. Crucial to Australia’s economy are their natural resources and well-developed international trade relations. Its income comes from banking, real estate, and international education and mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. It ranks high in quality of life, health, education, economic freedom, civil liberties, and political rights. Australia has a highly developed market economy and one of the highest per capita incomes globally. It is a middle power and the world’s thirteenth highest military expenditure. It is a member of international groups including the United Nations; G20; OECD; World Trade Organization; Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation; Pacific Islands Forum; Pacific Community; Commonwealth of Nations; and the defense and security organizations ANZUS, AUKUS, and the Five Eyes. It is a major non-NATO ally with the United States. Until the early 19th century Australia was known as New Holland, applied by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1644. Explorer Matthew Flinders popularized the name Australia and officially used in 1817 when Governor Lachlan Macquarie acknowledged the receipt of Flinders’ charts of Australia from Lord Bathurst. In 1824 the Admiralty agreed the continent should be called Australia. Its first published use was in the publication in 1830 called The Australia Directory by the Hydrographic Office. Other than Down Under, other names for Australia include Oz, Straya, the Great Southern Land, the Lucky Country, the Sunburnt Country, and the Wide Brown Land. The latter two came from Dorothea Mackellar’s 1908 poem My Country. Australian Aborigine culture is among the oldest continuous cultures on Earth. Before the British settlement, the Aboriginal population was estimated between 300,000 to one million. Aboriginal Australians have an oral culture with spiritual values based on reverence for the land and a belief in Dreamtime. The Dutch were the first Europeans to sight and make landfall on the Australian mainland. The first ship and crew to chart the coast and meet the Aboriginal people was the Duyfken, captained by Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon. He sighted Cape York Peninsula in 1606 and made landfall in February 1606 at the Pennefather River. No attempts were made to settle the mainland, though shipwrecks left men either stranded or in the case of the Batavia in 1629, marooned for mutiny and murder became the first Europeans to inhabit the continent. Captain James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast and named New South Wales for Great Britain. With the loss of its American Colonies in 1783, the British government sent a fleet of ships to establish a 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, a date that became Australia’s National Day. General Characteristics Australia is surrounded by the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is separated from Asia by the Arafura and Timor Seas with the Coral Reef lying off the Queensland coast, and the Tasman Sea lying between Australia and New Zealand. Australia has 32, 218 km (21,262 mi) of coastline, excluding offshore islands. It claims an extensive Exclusive Economic Zone of 8,148,250 square kilometers (3,146,060 square miles), excluding the Australian Antarctic Territory. Australia boasts a wide variety of landscapes with tropical rainforests in the northeast, mountain ranges in the southeast, southwest, and east, and desert in the center. The desert is commonly known as the Outback and makes up the largest portion of the land. As the driest inhabited land, its annual rainfall averaged over continental area is less than 500 mm. The population density exceeds 19,500 in central Melbourne. In 2021 Australia had 10% of the global permanent meadows and pastureland. The world’s largest coral reef, the Great Barrier Reef, lies off the northeast coast and extends over 2000 kilometers. Western Australia claims the largest monolith, Mount Augustus. The highest mountain on the Australian mainland is Mount Kosciuszko. Taller are the Mawson Peak on the remote Australian external territory of Heard Island, and Mount McClintock and Mount Menzies in the Australian Antarctic Territory. The Great Dividing Range runs parallel to the coast of Queensland, New South Wales, and much of Victoria on Eastern Australia. Between the coast and the mountains lies the coastal uplands and a belt of Bigalow grasslands, while inland of the dividing range are large areas of grassland and shrubland. These include the western plains of New South Wales, Mitchell Grass Downs, and Mulga Lands of inland Queensland. Tropical Cape North Peninsula is at the northernmost point of the mainland. Forest, woodland, wetland, grassland, rainforest, and desert landscapes are part of the Top End and Gulf Country. The northwest corner of the continent are sandstone cliffs and gorges of the Kimberley. Below that the Pilbara. Victoria Plains tropical savanna lies south of the Kimberley and Arnhem Land savannas and form a transition between the coastal savannas and interior deserts. The heart of the country are the uplands of central Australia. The famous sandstone monolith, Uluru is a prominent feature of the center and south along with Simpson, Tirari and Sturt Stony, Gibson, Great Sandy, Tanami, and Great Victoria deserts with famous Nullarbor Plain on the southern coast. Western Australia mulga shrublands lie between the interior deserts and Mediterranean climate of Southwest Australia. Geology Lying on Indo-Australian Plate, mainland Australia is the lowest and most primordial landmass on Earth with a stable geological history. The landmass includes all known rock types from all the geological time periods. The Pilbara Craton is one of only two pristine Archaean crusts identified on Earth. Climate Australia’s climate is influenced by ocean currents, including the Indian Ocean Dipole and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, correlated with periodic drought and the seasonal tropical low-pressure system that produces cyclones in Northern Australia. These factors cause rainfall to vary from year to year. Much of the northern part of the country has tropical, predominantly summer rainfall, monsoons. The southwest corner of the country has a Mediterranean climate. The southeast ranges from oceanic (Tasmania and coastal Victoria) to humid sub-tropical (upper half of New South Wales). The highlands feature alpine and sub-polar oceanic climates. The interior is arid and semi-arid. Biodiversity Australia includes a diverse range of habitats from alpine heaths to tropical rainforests. Much of Australia’s biota is unique. About 85% of flowering plants, 84% of mammals, more than 45% of birds, and 89% of in-shore, temperate zone fish are endemic. Australia has 755 species of reptile, more than any other country in the world. Besides Antarctica, Australia is the only continent that developed without feline species. Feral cats may have been introduced by Dutch shipwrecks in the 17th century and later by European settlers in the 18th century. They are now considered a major factor in the decline and extinction of many vulnerable and endangered native species. It is believed that seafaring immigrants from Asia brought the dingo sometime after the end of the last ice age. The Aboriginal people help disperse them across the continent as pets, contributing to the demise of thylacines on the mainland. Australia is one of seventeen megadiverse countries. Australian forests are made up of evergreen species, particularly the eucalyptus trees in less arid regions; wattles replace them as the dominant species in drier regions and deserts. Among well-known animals are the platypus and echidna; a host of marsupials, including the kangaroo, koala, and wombat, and birds such as the emu and kookaburra. Australia is home to the most dangerous animals including the most venomous snakes in the world. Many animal and plant species became extinct soon after human settlement, including Australian megafauna. Many of Australia’s ecoregions, and the species within those regions are threatened by human activities and introduced animal, chromistan, fungal and plant species. These factors led Australia as having the highest mammal extinction rate of any country in the world. The federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act of 1999 is the legal framework for the protection of threatened species. Numerous protected areas were created under the National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia’s Biological Diversity to protect and preserve unique ecosystems; wetlands are listed under the Ramsar Convention, and sixteen natural World Heritage Sites were established. Australia was ranked 21st out of 178 countries in the world on the 2018 Environmental Performance Index. More than 1800 animals and plants are on Australia’s threatened species list, including more than 500 animals. Paleontologists discovered a fossil site of a prehistoric rainforest in McGath’s Flat, in South Australia, presenting evidence that this now arid desert and dry shrubland/grassland was once home to an abundance of life. Sports and Recreation Cricket and football are the predominant sports in Australia. Cricket is looked at as the national sport. Rugby is another popular sport. The Australian National Cricket team competed against England in the first Test match in 1877 and the first One Day International in 1971, and against New Zealand in the first Twenty20 International (2004), winning all three games. It has participated in every edition of the Cricket World Cup, winning the tournament a record six times. Australia is one of five nations to have participated in every Summer Olympics in the modern era and hosted the Games twice, 1956 in Melbourne, and 2000 in Sydney. Brisbane will host the 2032 Games. Australia also participated in every Commonwealth Games, hosting the event in 1938, 1962, 1982, 2006, and 2018. They are a regular FIFA World Cup participant. Australia has won the OFC Nations Cup four times, and the AFC Asian Cup once. They are the only country to win championships in two different FIFA confederations. Other major international events include Australian Open tennis grand slam tournament, Formula One Australian Grand Prix, the annual Melbourne Cup horse race, and the Sydney to Hobart yacht race. Australia is also notable for swimming and surfing. The surf lifesaving movement originated in Australia. The volunteer lifesaver is one of their icons. Snow sports take place in the Australian Alps and Tasmania.