Australia (1901- ) is either the largest island or the smallest continent. Or both. It is also a country that was once part of
the British Empire. A place of strong beer and good weather.
Aristotle argued for the existence of Australia: there must be unknown land far to the south to balance out the known land in the north. Ptolemy even put it on his map – not as fact, but as theory. The place came to be called Terra Australis Incognita – the Unknown Land of the South.
The theory turned out to be right. Australia is south-east of India and south of China. It is on the opposite side of the world from America, where it is known as “The Land Down Under.”
Because Australia is a world unto itself, it has strange animals you see almost no where else, like kangaroos, koalas, wombats, platypuses and emus.
Australia is as large as America without Alaska yet it has fewer people than California: it is much drier than America.
The middle of the country is flat and dry – too dry – while the south-east is like Europe. In between is a vast land of grass where sheep live. There are more sheep than men in Australia. The north is wet and warm: it lies in the tropics. Australia has no great rivers.
Most Australians live in one of four cities along the sea: Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in the east and Perth in the west. The seat of government is Canberra, which is more an overgrown suburb than a city.
Australia is an English-speaking, largely Christian country. There are more Protestants than Catholics, but less than half the country is Protestant. It has a parliamentary-style democracy. The Queen is the head of state. Some wanted to make Australia into a republic not too long ago, but most wanted to keep the old girl on.
Australian English comes from the streets of London: it is closer to Cockney than the Queen’s English. Because it left Britain later, it is much closer to British English than American English is.
Australia was kept safe by British warships before the Second World War and by American ones since. Australia has fought with both in wars overseas.
Before the Second World War Australia feared British influence. Now they fear American influence.
You see this in a backward way in their spelling: the Labor Party spells its name in the American fashion: it was so spelled in the early 1900s when British influence was high. But now, with American influence high, everyone writes the word in the British fashion as labour.
Like South Africa, much of Australia’s wealth comes from mining.
The British began to settle Australia in 1788. The first settlement became what is now Sydney. At first Britain sent prisoners. Many were people would could not pay their debts – being sent to a land where gold would later be discovered.
The aborigines came to Australia thousands of years before the British. They still live there, though now only one Australian in 40 is an aborigine. They look like the people of south India, but darker. Their hair is black and almost straight.
– Abagond, 2007.
See also:
- Posts about Australia
- Australia Day – their Settler Colonialism Day
- when I went there in 2007:
- The Tasmanian genocide
- Violence against Indian students in Australia
- Australian Aboriginals according to National Geographic
- Australians
- The Anglo world
- tropics
- Aristotle
- Ptolemy
- parliament
- democracy
- settler colonialism
we are no longer “largely Protestant”. The biggest religious group in the last two censuses is the [Roman] Catholic Church. This change is largely due to immigration from SE Asia.
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Thanks.
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Canberra is not just an overgrown suburb it is a beautiful & flourishing city with a great quality of living standard and a very city-syle culture, especially Civic.
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I’ve always wanted to visit Australia. I keep hearing it’s a beautiful place.
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Come visit me, leigh204!
One thing that you may not know is that Australia had a racially discriminatory immigration policy until the late 1960s. It was not OFFICIAL policy of course, but they had clever ways of making sure that anyone not sufficiently white would fail the test to migrate here. Aborigines were not considered citizens until the 60s either, until there was a referendum that gave them voting rights and citizenship.
Australia’s population was almost completely from the British Isles until after WW2, when other Europeans were allowed in. Significant immigration from Asia and elsewhere only really started in the 1970s. Today around 7% of the population are of Asian background. People of African descent are perhaps 1% of the population.
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@Eurasian Sensation:
That would be awesome! Hopefully, someday. 🙂
Yes, I’ve heard about Australia and its racist policy towards immigrants. You know, ES, I chat with other Aussies (presumably white) on other forums, and you wouldn’t believe the arguments I get with them that they say Australia isn’t racist…especially not as racist as the US. I’ve been to your blog and I’ve seen your posts regarding the treatment of POC. How can these folks have their blinders on?
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^ Well, perspective is an interesting thing. Like any place, it is racist in some ways, and in some ways it is remarkably accepting and brilliant. Generally speaking I don’t think Australia is as racist as the US, but that’s really a hard statement to quantify.
Remember that my blog takes a certain perspective; I write about racism, but I’m not going to write about how wonderful and non-racist everything is. I mostly write about the bad things when it comes to Australian race stuff, so some people might get a skewed picture.
Also regarding perspective: some people rarely if ever experience or observe racism personally, so they assume it doesn’t exist. Or they think racism is only KKK and skinhead kind of stuff, and don’t notice the subtle things.
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DO you know what I would say to any Afro American who considers Australia as a tourist destination?
Come and see!
It’s the country where every African we have here came as a free settler, and the white people came in chains!
The only difference is, that unlike the innocent black slaves, the whites brought here in chains had on the whole actually committed crimes (however minor some may have been).
But one reason we might assume we are less racist than the US is because we don’t have to face up to our issues as often. Yes, we have much better policies for immigration now (except for some inhumanity to asylum seekers) but unlike the US, where many black people are becoming middle class, we have a group of our first Australians, the aborigines, who are totally marginalised, in every sense of the word. Not just excluded from employment, education, health services and a million other facets of middle class existence, they are also geographically isolated in many cases, in remote regional/rural parts of the country, subject to equal or worse disadvantage as that suffered by any Australian in an isolated area outside the cities, but no doubt worse off due to what I know of Aboriginal disadvantage; ie likely to be a victim of racism, denied opprotunity and mistreated by our legal system.
Because of the sharper division between aboriginal and white australia, we don’t have to face up to our past as often or as intimately as those in the US. Also, in country areas, nobody can deny, just as there are more victims, there are more purveyors of racial hatred. Everybody knows the racist political streak runs and prospers through our country areas, and we don’t in the cities want to take responsibility for the plight of aborigines or the bigotry of country whites.
I’m sure there are plenty of immigrants who’d have a thing or two to say about racism here, but it is important that we the whites were the incarcerated imports and nearly all the others migrated freely, including all Africans.
We did have some slaves though, stolen from surrounding islands in the pacific and forced to work on the cane fields. They were called “Kanackas”
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“we don’t in the cities want to take responsibility for the plight of aborigines”
Sorry, but Australian Aborigines are wrapped up in cotton wool.
Everything is done for them by government, which perversely makes many of them do increasingly less for themselves.
They have welfare cash coming out of their eyeballs and nostrils, not to mention literally hundreds (100s) of government agencies devoted exclusively to their needs – at the state and federal levels of Australian government.
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Out of the many accents in the world, Aussie accents are one of my fave.
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Very interesting plea to rethink racism in Australia:
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/25/asia/australia-stan-grant-indigenous-speech/index.html
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