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.
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'.
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.
Summary. On January 1, 1901, six colonies were joined together to create the Commonwealth of Australia, a self-governing Dominion in the British Empire. While the new nation was sovereign when it came to its domestic affairs, the United Kingdom maintained control over its relations with the wider world.
Establishment of the colony: 1788 to 1792. The territory of New South Wales claimed by Britain included all of Australia eastward of the meridian of 135° East.
We used to love Darren (Dazza), Wayne (Wayno), Warren (Wazza), David (Davo), Barry (Bazza), Gary (Gazza), Terry (Tezza), Larry (Lazza), Ian (shout-out to Kirky) and Eric (Ecca).
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. The overwhelming weight of evidence supports the idea that Aboriginal people were the first Australians.
Indigenous people have lived in Australia more than 65,000 years ago, according to scientific evidence of human occupation1. To put this in perspective, this is ten times older than the ancient Egyptian pyramids.
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.
1. The Land Down Under. Our first stop in this linguistic journey across Australia is the ever-popular Australian nickname, “The Land Down Under”.
Prehistory. 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.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
Australian English arose from a dialectal melting pot created by the intermingling of early settlers who were from a variety of dialectal regions of Great Britain and Ireland, though its most significant influences were the dialects of Southeast England.
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. Hence Australia in informal language is referred to as Oz.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: Australia's First Peoples.
Australia's most famous natural landmark has two names – Uluru and Ayers Rock. So which one is correct? The rock was called Uluru a long time before Europeans arrived in Australia. The word is a proper noun from the Pitjantjatjara language and doesn't have an English translation.
George Town - the oldest town in Australia. George Town was founded in 1803 and the George town Watch House was commissioned shortly after. It has been beautifully restored (minus the cell doors) and has become quite a tourist attraction in the town.
The first European Australians came from United Kingdom and Ireland. The First white child born in New South Wales was Rebecca Small (22 September 1789 – 30 January 1883), was born in Port Jackson, the eldest daughter of John Small a boatswain in the First Fleet which arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788.
Most of the explorers of this period concluded that the apparent lack of water and fertile soil made the region unsuitable for colonisation.
A new genomic study has revealed that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest known civilization on Earth, with ancestries stretching back roughly 75,000 years.
Genetic data confirm that ancient Aborigines and Eurasians left Africa in one single, great wave. Australian Aborigines have long been cast as a people apart.
The Australian continent, being a part of the Indo-Australian Plate (more specifically, the Australian Plate), is the lowest, flattest, and oldest landmass on Earth and it has had a relatively stable geological history.
Aboriginal origins
Humans are thought to have migrated to Northern Australia from Asia using primitive boats. A current theory holds that those early migrants themselves came out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, which would make Aboriginal Australians the oldest population of humans living outside Africa.
The earliest conclusively human remains found in Australia are those of Mungo Man LM3 and Mungo Lady, which have been dated to around 50,000 years BP.
Long connection to country
Analysis of maternal genetic lineages revealed that Aboriginal populations moved into Australia around 50,000 years ago. They rapidly swept around the west and east coasts in parallel movements - meeting around the Nullarbor just west of modern-day Adelaide.