LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
Australia is an island country in the Southern hemisphere and belongs to Oceania/Australia. Australia is surrounded by the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. Australia is the smallest continent of the seven continents and is also the second driest continent in the world after Antarctica. Australia is the largest country in the world, after Russia, Canada, USA, China and Brazil. The country has a federal form of government, with a national government for the Commonwealth of Australia and individual state governments divided (Southern Australia, New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, Victoria and Tasmania) and two self-governing territories: Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory (which is around Canberra, the capital city). Most of the population lives in the eastern and southern parts of the country and along the coastline. Canberra is Australia’s capital city and the only major city of the country and is located about 150km/93 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean coastline and about 280km/ 173 miles to the southwest of Sydney. The biggest cities in Australia are Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane.
Australia has been called “the Oldest Continent”, “the Last of the lands” and “the Last Frontier.” It is called the last of lands only in the sense that it was the last continent, apart from Antarctica, to be explored by the Europeans. At least 60,000 years before European explorers sailed into the South Pacific, the first Aboriginal explorers arrived Asia. When Captain Arthur Phillip of the British Royal Navy landed with the first fleet at Botany Bay in 1788, there may have been between 250,000 and 500,000 Aboriginals. Largely nomadic hunters and gatherers, the Aboriginals had already transformed the primeval landscape by the use of fire, and, centrally to common European perceptions, they had established robust, semi-permanent settlements in well favoured localities.
Australia’s isolation from other continents explains much of the singularity of animal life and its plants. Its unique flora includes a hundred of kinds of Eucalyptus trees and the only egg-lying mammals on earth, the Echidna and Platypus. Other plants and animals associated with Australia are various acacias and dingoes, kangaroos, koalas, and kookaburras. The Great Barrier Reef, off the east coast of Queensland, is the greatest mass of coral in the world and one of the world’s foremost tourist attractions.
IMPACT OF EUROPEAN SETTLEMENT
The first known landing in Australia by Europeans was by a Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon in 1606 after which twenty-nine other Dutch navigators explored the western and southern coast in the 17th century and duped the continent New Holland. Macassan trepangers visited the northern coast after 1720. Other European explorers followed and, in the process, Lieutenant James Cook wrote that he claimed the east coast of Australia for Britain when Possession Island in 1770, without conducting negotiations with the present inhabitants, though before his departure, the President of the Royal Society, wrote that the people of any lands he might discover were ‘the natural, and in the strictest sense of the world the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit. No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent. Conquest over such people can give no just title: because they could never be aggressors.’
The first governor, Arthur Phillip, was instructed explicitly to establish friendship and good relations with the Aborigines, and interactions between the early newcomers and the ancient landowners.
STATES AND TERRITORIES
Australia has 6 states called New South Wales (NSW), South Australia (SA), Victoria (VIC), Western Australia (WA), Tasmania (TAS), and Queensland (QLD). It also has 3 mainland territories called: Australian Capital Territory (ACT), Jervis Bay Territory (JBT), and the Northern Territory (NT).
LANGUAGES
The de facto national language of Australia is English. Australian English differs slightly from other English varieties in spelling and grammar.
