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.
There are also a number of terms for Australia, such as: Aussie, Oz, Lucky Country, and land of the long weekend.
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”.
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.
Aboriginal people call it 'Invasion Day', 'Day of Mourning', 'Survival Day' or, since 2006, 'Aboriginal Sovereignty Day'.
What's Australia Day and why do we celebrate it? Australia Day (January 26) is our national day, which marks the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet in Australia. In 1770, while Lieutenant James Cook was on his voyage to observe the Transit of Venus, he was ordered to find new land for the British Crown.
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.
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.
The terms pommy, pommie, and pom used in Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand usually denote a British person.
Oz is a masculine name of Hebrew origin, meaning “strength” and “courage.” It is primarily a nickname derived from Hebrew names such as Ozni and Ozias.
The word ounce ultimately comes from the Latin word uncia, meaning "one-twelfth." (This is also where we get the word inch.) In Italian, this became onzo, which is where we get both the word ounce and its abbreviation,oz.
The name means "where the devil urinates" in the regional Pitjantjatjara language and was recorded during a field trip organised by an unspecified state government agency in May 1989. It was gazetted on 4 November 2010 by the Government of South Australia as "Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya" without the word "hill".
Tasmania. Tasmania was named the 'bogan capital of Australia' with Taswegians earning four spots in the final. On the island of Tasmania, half the population has literacy and/or numeracy difficulties, and the unemployment rate is higher than it is in mainland Australia.
Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya is a hill in the Aussie Outback. It is the longest official place name in Australia, with 26 letters. The name means "where the devil urinates" in the local Pitjantjatjara language.
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.
The first recorded use of the word Australia was by the Portuguese explorer Pedro Fernandes de Queirós in 1606. The Dutch seafarer Abel Tasman charted the coast in 1644 and called the place New Holland. The name New Holland was in common usage for the southern land until the mid-1850s.
The first settlement, at Sydney, consisted of about 850 convicts and their Marine guards and officers, led by Governor Arthur Phillip. They arrived at Botany Bay in the "First Fleet" of 9 transport ships accompanied by 2 small warships, in January, 1788.
At 9:30am on 13 February 2008, Rudd presented the apology to Indigenous Australians as a motion to be voted on by the house. It has since been referred to as the National Apology, or simply The Apology.
National Sorry Day is an annual event in Australia on 26 May. It commemorates the "Stolen Generations" — the Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander children who were forcibly separated from their families in an attempt to assimilate them into white Australian culture during the 20th century.
Official records state at least 40 men, women and children were killed, but other historians suggest hundreds of Aboriginal people died that day. Today, the site of the killings bears no obvious evidence of the murders.
In 1901, Australia became a nation, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. One year later, Australia became one of the first countries in the world to give women the right to vote. In 1945, Australia became a founding member of the United Nations.
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.
On January 26, 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip guides a fleet of 11 British ships carrying convicts to the colony of New South Wales, effectively founding Australia.
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.