Australia - The Country and Its People

"Australia is like an open door with the blue beyond. You just walk out of the world and into Australia."
--D. H. Lawrence

For more than 50,000 years the Aboriginal people lived in harmony with the land on this continent now known as Australia. Their stories of "The Dreamtime" link the spiritual world with the land and are based on cultural, historical and ancestral traditions.

From the southern tip of Tasmania to the northern extremity of Arnhem Land, hundreds of Aboriginal tribes once lived throughout Australia, speaking more than 500 distinct languages. Early rock paintings and carvings appear to show contact with the peoples of Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and early Dutch and European explorers.

British settlement began with the prison colony of Sydney Cove in 1788. Thousands of convicts were sent to Australia to serve out their terms. Many of Australia's historic landmarks were built during this time by convict labor. Australian settlers and convicts found this land harsh and difficult, but they persevered, determined to build a new country and to forge a new way of life. In the course of this struggle, however, the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were dispossessed of their lands and a great deal of their cultural identities.

Over the last two hundred years Australia has become a multicultural melting pot, having been largely populated through migration. American and Chinese gold miners, Italian wine growers, and a vast array of Asians and Europeans have brought their own ways of life to Australia. And in the last thirty years mainstream Australians have made huge strides toward resolving long-standing differences with the land's "aboriginal" peoples, embracing their culture, history, and origins as an integral part of the country.

Australia is blessed with beautiful coastlines of golden sand, lush tropical rainforests, the rugged mountain ranges of the Great Divide, the spectacular splendor of the Great Barrier Reef, and the arid deserts of the Outback. These geographical contrasts - striking as they are - offer only a glimpse into the diversity of this land. Australia's vast array of exotic fauna boasts some of the world's most interesting and bizarre animals: kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, dingos, wombats, bandicoots, and the famous duck-billed platypus.

Though the outback figures prominently in the national consciousness, Australia is actually the world's most urbanized nation. Eighty per cent of the citizens of this leisure-loving country live in cities, almost all of which are on the coast.