There is no one Aboriginal word that all Aborigines use for Australia; however, today they call Australia, ""Australia"" because that is what it is called today. There are more than 250 aboriginal tribes in Australia. Most of them didn't have a word for ""Australia""; they just named places around them.
After Dutch navigators charted the northern, western and southern coasts of Australia during the 17th Century this newly found continent became known as 'New Holland'. It was the English explorer Matthew Flinders who suggested the name we use today.
Colloquial names for Australia include “Oz” and “the Land Down Under” (usually shortened to just “Down Under”). 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”.
The British colony of New South Wales was established in 1788 as a penal colony.
First Nations and First Peoples
Other pluralised terms such as 'First Nations' or 'First Peoples' are also acceptable language, and respectfully encompass the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and identities.
First Nations Australians are often called Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Australia Day is also referred to as 'Invasion Day' or 'Survival Day' particularly by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. This is because it 'celebrates' a painful part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history.
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
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.
Australia, once known as New South Wales, was originally planned as a penal colony. In October 1786, the British government appointed Arthur Phillip captain of the HMS Sirius, and commissioned him to establish an agricultural work camp there for British convicts.
There are also a number of terms for Australia, such as: Aussie, Oz, Lucky Country, and land of the long weekend.
Australia is colloquially known as "the Land Down Under" (or just "Down Under"), which derives from the country's position in the Southern Hemisphere, at the antipodes of the United Kingdom.
The two most common nicknames that Australians refer to the country as are “Oz” and “Strai'yah”. These nicknames are both due to the pronunciation and accents associated with Australians. However, it is not uncommon to hear folks, generally, non-Australians, refer to Australia as the “Land Down Under”.
Why is Australia called Oz? The word Australia when referred to informally with its first three letters becomes Aus. When Aus or Aussie, the short form for an Australian, is pronounced for fun with a hissing sound at the end, it sounds as though the word being pronounced has the spelling Oz.
Australia is colloquially known as "the Land Down Under" (or just "Down Under"), which derives from the country's position in the Southern Hemisphere, at the antipodes of the United Kingdom.
From Terra Australis to Australia.
Australian English can be described as a new dialect that developed as a result of contact between people who spoke different, mutually intelligible, varieties of English. The very early form of Australian English would have been first spoken by the children of the colonists born into the early colony in Sydney.
Eora is also commonly used for Sydney. For northern Sydney the term Guringai has been used, however, it was originally invented by a researcher in 1892 for this area and there is a Gringai clan in the Barrington River, Glouchester area who are requesting Sydneysiders to stop using their name.
Melbourne had many unofficial names in its first years, including Batmania, Barebrass, Bearport, Dutergalla, Bareheep and most popularly "the Settlement".
It is true that there has been, historically, a small number of claims that there were people in Australia before Australian Aborigines, but these claims have all been refuted and are no longer widely debated.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
Australia is home to the oldest continuing living culture in the entire world. The richness and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures in Australia is something we should all take pride in as a nation.
However, to many Aboriginal people there is little to celebrate and it is a commemoration of a deep loss. Loss of their sovereign rights to their land and the right to practice their culture. Many of them rather call 26th January Invasion Day.
In the 1860s, Victoria became the first state to pass laws authorising Aboriginal children to be removed from their parents. Similar policies were later adopted by other states and territories – and by the federal government when it was established in the 1900s.
James Cook was the first recorded explorer to land on the east coast in 1770.