Australia

Overview

Australia is a land of contrasts - topographical, cultural, physical, meterological and visual. About 40,000 years ago, the Aborigines were the first to settle. They lived as hunters and gatherers with a profound understanding for nature. Their way of living developed into a complex culture based on oral tradition and intricate social bounds, which was almost destroyed by the second wave of settlers.

In 1770, Captain James Cook landed in Botany Bay, which today is part of Sydney . (in fact Sydney Airport juts out into Botany Bay) This commenced with the landing of the First Fleet in Sydney Cove (now Sydney Harbour, near Circular Quay railway station) on 26th January 1788. The British government decided to use convicts to tame the newly discovered continent and did not care a lot for the people that were already there. Deportation to Australia lasted for about eighty years. After this all immigrants went more or less voluntarily.

Australia became an independent nation on 1 January 1901. The British Parliament passed legislation allowing the six Australian colonies to govern in their own right as part of the Commonwealth of Australia. In 1986 history was made again when parliament passed legislation that ended the power for the Britsh Partliament to legislate for Australia.

Today a growing proportion of Australians were born overseas. Their combined cultural heritage makes the Australian culture a real global one. Australia has also discovered the value of the Aboriginal culture and is proud of it.

While Australia is a nation in its own right,...more

History

The continent of Australia was apparently first settled more than 40,000 years ago with successive waves of immigration of Aboriginal peoples from south and south-east Asia. With rising sea levels after the last Ice Age, Australia became largely isolated from the rest of the world and the Aboriginal tribes developed a variety of cultures, based on a close (spiritual) relationship with the land and nature, and extended kinship. Australian aborigines maintained a hunter/gatherer culture successfully for thousands of years in association with a primitive artistic and cultural life - including a very rich 'story-telling' tradition. While the 'modern impression' of Australian Aborigines is largely built around an image of the 'desert people' who have adapted to some of the harshest conditions on the planet (equivalent to the bushmen of the Kalahari), Australia provided a 'comfortable living' for the bulk of aborigines amongst the bountiful flora and fauna on the Australian coast - until the arrival of Europeans. Although a lucrative Chinese market for shells and beche de mere had encouraged Indonesian fishermen to visit Northern Australia for centuries it was unknown to Europeans until the 1600's, when Dutch traders to Asia began to 'bump' into the Western Coast. Early Dutch impressions of this extremely harsh, dry country were unfavourable, and Australia remained for them something simply a road sign pointing north to the much richer (and lucrative) East Indies (modern Indonesia). Deliberate exploration of the Australian coast was then largely taken over by the French and...more