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.
After British colonisation, the name New Holland was retained for several decades and the south polar continent continued to be called Terra Australis, sometimes shortened to Australia.
The official name for Australia is the Commonwealth of Australia . This country is made up of six states and two territories that occupy the continent of Australia. While the country is often referred to as Australia, there was no country by that name.
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.
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.
After Janszoon many Dutch explorers sailed along the northern, western and southern coastline. James Cook was the first recorded explorer to land on the east coast in 1770. He had with him maps showing the north, west and south coasts based on the earlier Dutch exploration.
Australia and much of Gondwana was in the grip of a major ice age, that took hold in the Late Carboniferous and extended well into the Permian as ice sheets advanced and retreated several times across the great southern landmass.
Australia completely separated from Antarctica about 30 million years ago.
Eleven babies have been born in Antarctica, and none of them died as infants. Antarctica therefore has the lowest infant mortality rate of any continent: 0%.
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 anglicized. Terra Australia still saw occasional usage, such as in scientific texts.
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.
Named for Anthony van Diemen, governor general of the Dutch East Indies, the island was first encountered by Europeans in 1642 and named by Abel J. Tasman, a celebrated navigator under van Diemen's command. The first British settlers in the early 19th century retained the name.
“Why didn't the Dutch colonise Australia?” Sailing back to the Netherlands with a shipload of spices paid the costs of the journey many times over. There was nothing that the Dutch could see in Australia that was remotely close to the value of the spices they could acquire in the Indies.
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.
Australia is "older" because much of it is little changed from the early days of the Earth. In places, later sediments were deposited only to be eroded away again, once again exposing the ancient land surfaces, which are again subjected to erosion.
On 1 July 1841 the islands of New Zealand were separated from the Colony of New South Wales and made a colony in their own right.
Two hundred years ago, almost to the day, on 27 February 1818, Mak Sai Ying arrived in Port Jackson, on the ship Laurel. Mak was the first known Chinese immigrant to arrive in the colony of New South Wales.
A NEW STUDY HAS revealed how indigenous Australians coped with the last Ice Age, roughly 20,000 years ago. Researchers say that when the climate cooled dramatically, Aboriginal groups sought refuge in well-watered areas, such as along rivers, and populations were condensed into small habitable areas.
Australia would gain a large inland sea. River estuaries would become much larger and they and the paths of their rivers would expand significantly inland drowning floodplains and many riverbank communities. Billions of people, up to 40% of the world population would be displaced and have to move to higher ground.
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.
A coastal town located on the east bank of the mouth of the Tamar River, George Town is Australia's third oldest European settlement and Australia's oldest town.
There are varying estimates for how long Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived on this continent, however, upwards of 60,000 years is what current research reveals.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The original inhabitants, who have descendants to this day, are known as aborigines. In the eighteenth century, the aboriginal population was about 300,000.