Australia

A continent settled for at least sixty-five thousand years, claimed by Britain on the legal fiction that nobody owned it. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples maintained the oldest continuous cultures on earth, with several hundred languages and land management by fire that shaped the landscape Europeans found. Britain claimed the east coast in 1770 and landed convicts at Sydney Cove in 1788, and the doctrine of terra nullius - land belonging to no one - underpinned settlement until the High Court overturned it in the Mabo judgment of 1992. Frontier violence, disease and the removal of children from their families continued into the twentieth century, and a national apology was made in 2008. Six colonies federated in 1901, and the new parliament's first substantial act was the White Australia policy, which was not fully dismantled until the 1970s. Gold, wool, and then iron ore and coal built the economy, now oriented towards Asia. Postwar migration made the country one of the most diverse anywhere, with around half the population born abroad or to a parent who was. A 2023 referendum on an Indigenous advisory body was defeated. Canberra is the capital. The country has about twenty-seven million people on 7.7 million square kilometres, the sixth largest by area and among the least densely populated. Sydney and Melbourne are the largest cities. The Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral system on earth and has suffered repeated mass bleaching. Marsupials and monotremes evolved in isolation here. Voting has been compulsory since 1924.

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