It was the English explorer Matthew Flinders who suggested the name we use today. He was the first to circumnavigate the continent in 1803, and used the name 'Australia' to describe the continent on a hand drawn map in 1804.
The name Australia (pronounced /əˈstreɪliə/ in Australian English) is derived from the Latin Terra Australis (“southern land”), a name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times.
The name Australia was specifically applied to the continent for the first time in 1794, with the botanists George Shaw and Sir James Smith writing of "the vast island, or rather continent, of Australia, Australasia or New Holland" in their 1793 Zoology and Botany of New Holland, and James Wilson including it on a 1799 ...
The first known landing in Australia by Europeans was in 1606 by Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon on Australia's northern coast.
The British colony of New South Wales was established in 1788 as a penal colony.
Most of them didn't have a word for ""Australia""; they just named places around them. In America, different tribes of Native Americans had different languages but no name for the continent of North America. The same is true in Australia.
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.
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.
Prior to British settlement, more than 500 First Nations groups inhabited the continent we now call Australia, approximately 750,000 people in total. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures developed over 60,000 years, making First Nations Peoples the custodians of the world's oldest living culture.
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.
Finally, in 1824, the British Admiralty agreed that the continent should be officially called Australia. The official name for the country of Australia is the Commonwealth of Australia. The original names for Australia Australia included Terra Australis, New South Wales and New Holland.
Most of the explorers of this period concluded that the apparent lack of water and fertile soil made the region unsuitable for colonisation.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: Australia's First Peoples.
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.
Lieutenant James Cook, captain of HMB Endeavour, claimed the eastern portion of the Australian continent for the British Crown in 1770, naming it New South Wales.
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.
Aboriginal people are known to have occupied mainland Australia for at least 65,000 years. It is widely accepted that this predates the modern human settlement of Europe and the Americas.
Although the building blocks of Australia are the oldest, those of other continents are not much younger. Australia is "older" because much of it is little changed from the early days of the Earth.
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.
Between 11,000 and 14,000 Aboriginal people died, compared with only 399 to 440 colonisers. The tallies of the dead are not the only measure of what took place, according to Dr Bill Pascoe, a digital humanities specialist and key researcher on the project. “We are always using conservative estimates,” Pascoe said.
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.
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.
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.
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.