After Dutch navigators charted the northern, western and southern coasts of Australia during the 17th Century this newly found continent became known as '
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.
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.
The British colony of New South Wales was established in 1788 as a penal colony.
Oceania is a region made up of thousands of islands throughout the Central and South Pacific Ocean. It includes Australia, the smallest continent in terms of total land area.
From Terra Australis to Australia.
There are also a number of terms for Australia, such as: Aussie, Oz, Lucky Country, and land of the long weekend.
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.
On 12 December 1817, Governor Lachlan Macquarie recommended to the British Colonial Office that the "Australia" be adopted as the name of the continent still being referred to as New Holland. Finally, in 1824, the British Admiralty agreed that the continent should be officially called Australia.
While Indigenous Australians have inhabited the continent for tens of thousands of years, and traded with nearby islanders, the first documented landing on Australia by a European was in 1606. The Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon landed on the western side of Cape York Peninsula and charted about 300 km of coastline.
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.
When British explorer James Cook claimed Australia's east coast in 1770, he originally named it New Wales, before renaming it New South Wales. It was Matthew Flinders, the British navigator who officially identified Australia as a continent, who suggested a return to the Latin name.
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.
People have used many terms for Australia's First Peoples. Early terms were utterly racist and remain offensive. Then 'Indigenous' was very popular before the politically more correct 'Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander' replaced it.
It is generally held that Australian Aboriginal peoples originally came from Asia via insular Southeast Asia (now Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, and the Philippines) and have been in Australia for at least 45,000–50,000 years.
Country is the term often used by Aboriginal peoples to describe the lands, waterways and seas to which they are connected. The term contains complex ideas about law, place, custom, language, spiritual belief, cultural practice, material sustenance, family and identity.
To put it simply, Antarctica used to be called Australia. Then, in 1824, today's Australia took the name, leaving the icy continent essentially without a 'proper' name until the 1890s.
Australia in the late 19th century consisted of six self-governing British colonies that were subject to the British Parliament. Each colony had its own – often quite distinct – laws, railway gauge, postage stamps and tariffs.
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.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: Australia's First Peoples.
Aboriginal Australians have lived in the Northern Territory for more than 65,000 years. It is the oldest continuous culture on earth.
As you probably know, “Aussie” is slang for “Australian”.
Australia is known as 'the land Down Under' for its position in the southern hemisphere. The discovery of Australia began when European explorers searched for a land under the continent of Asia. Before Australia was discovered, it was known as Terra Australis Incognita the unknown southern land.