The oldest cultures on earth
Aboriginal Australians have lived on the continent for at least 65,000 years, developing hundreds of distinct nations, languages and law systems, and a spiritual understanding of country often called the Dreaming. Torres Strait Islanders, a Melanesian people, live in the islands to the north. These are the longest continuous human cultures known anywhere.
British colonisation began in 1788 with a penal settlement at Sydney. It came without treaty, on the legal fiction of terra nullius — land belonging to no one — and brought dispossession, frontier violence and disease that killed a large part of the Indigenous population. The theft of children from Aboriginal families, the Stolen Generations, continued into the 1970s.
A nation and its reckoning
Six British colonies federated into the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January 1901. The new nation entrenched a White Australia policy restricting non-European immigration, dismantled only in the 1960s and 1970s, after which Australia became one of the most multicultural societies in the world, including growing African communities, many from Sudan, Somalia and the Horn.
The reckoning with Indigenous history has been slow and contested. A 1967 referendum let Aboriginal people be counted and legislated for; the Mabo judgment of 1992 overturned terra nullius and recognised native title; a national apology for the Stolen Generations came in 2008. In 2023 a referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament — an advisory body written into the constitution — was defeated, leaving the question of recognition unresolved.
Mining, cities and the world
Australia is a wealthy economy built heavily on natural resources — iron ore, coal, gas and gold — and its mining giants, BHP and Rio Tinto, are among the largest in the world, with operations across Africa in copper, iron and other minerals. Most Australians live in a handful of coastal cities, chiefly Sydney and Melbourne, on one of the driest inhabited continents.
A constitutional monarchy sharing a head of state with Britain, Australia is closely tied to the United States and increasingly focused on its Asian neighbourhood. It grapples with climate change — drought, bushfire and coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef — and with its place between an Anglo past and a Pacific and Asian future.