Austraalia (0)

Australia
Topic
Koostas:
Aineõpetaja:
Tallinn 2011
Location
Only one country in the world fills a whole continent . That country is Australia. The continent it fills is Australia, too. Australia, then, is both a country and a continent. If someone wants to make clear that he is speaking of the country, he may call it by its full name of Commonwealth of Australia.
Sixty million years ago Australia and its nearby islands were separated from the rest of the world by a great upheaval. They were cut off from Asia by the ocean . Very few people and almost no animals visited Australia before English colonists began to settle there in 1788. During all those 60 million years the native Australian mammals developed by themselves, undisturbed by the animals developing elsewhere.
Australia is the only continent except Antarctica that is all south of the equator. It’s name means “southland“. Since it is south of the equator, its seasons are just the opposite of ours. It has summer while we have winter and the other way round .
Sometimes Australia is called the island continent. There is a good reason why. It is an island.
The Inhabitants
Two hundred years ago there were no white people in Australia. The only inhabitants were dark -skinned people who were still living in a Stone Age. Their only weapons were stone knives, simple spears and boomerangs. They raised no crops and had no herds of tame animals. For food they hunted and fished and gathered wild fruits and nuts. But their tribes had wery well-worked-out customs. A few aborigines still live in the emptier part of the continent and follow the thousands-of-years-old customs of their ancestors.
The Discovery of Australia
Duch sailors stopped at several places on the northern and western coasts in the 1600s. They brought back word that the land was “of very little use“. No wonder they had that idea. The northern shores of Australia are near enough to the equator to be very hot. They get a great deal of rain. The hot, wet climate is one that white people cannot stand well. Much of the western coast is dry and barren. There is a great desert in Australia, and it comes down to the sea on the western and southern coasts.
William Dampier was the first englishman to reach Australia. But captain James Cook ’s explorations on the southeast coast were more important . He was on his way from New Zealand and reached Australia from the southeast. The part of Australia he found was very much different from the country visited by the earlier explorers. He landed in a place of great beauty , rich in plants and flowers, which he named Botany Bay.
From Botany Bay James Cook sailed along the east coast as far as the Cape York , where he put up the British flag. The eastern part of Australia became a British colony.
The Colonization of Australia
The British initially used it as a gigantic prison camp for convicts from Britain . Altogether 160 000 men, women and children were deported from Britain to Australia, where they led a very hard life.
At the beginning of the19th century free settlers began to arrive from Britain in large numbers since it offered many stimulating opportunities. The Aborigines were cruelly suppressed, and it is only recently that white Australians have begun to acknowlege Aborigines’ rights to their sacred lands.
The settlers soon discovered that many of the animals as well as the plants of Australia were unlike those that were found anywhere else. Among te animals were kangaroos and wombats and koalas. They carry their babies in pouches. There were platypuses and spiny anteaters, too – the only mammals in the world that lay eggs . Among the strange birds were emus, lyrebirds, and black swans.
The early settlers on the coast were suht in between the mountains and the sea. For years they couldn’t make their way across the mountains. When they did, they found great streches of grassland.
Some of the early settlers had been sheepmen in Britain. They saw that the grasslands would be a wonderful place for raising sheep . They knew that wool stands shipping well. They knew, too, that it is worth enough to pay for shipping it long distances. Many started sheep farms. Before long Australia became the greatest wool-producing country in the world.
In some cases cattle were raised on the grassland instead of sheep. But beef and butter are not as easy to ship as wool.
The Gold Rush
Gold was discovered in southeastern Australia in 1851. There was a great gold rush. Thousands of people went to the new land to find their fortunes. Gold was dug by hand , without any mining machinery. There was so much of it in the ground that some lucky gold-diggers found twenty to thirty kilograms of gold in an hour.
By 1852 the country was gold-mad. Everybody was leaving for the goldfields, and all normal work stopped. In the countryside the cattle were left to starve and the crops were not harvested. In the towns all shops were shut , no letters were delivered, no newspapers appeared.
Soon it became so difficult to get food that men had to fight for it. They had plenty of gold, but they had nothing to eat. As there was no transport, they could not leave the goldfields area and could not take their gold away from the goldfields. The government was helpless because the police and the troops, too had rushed to the goldfields and were digging gold.
During Australia’s gold rush days the population grew from 405,000 in 1850 to 1,146,000 in 1860.
Forty years later there was another gold rush. This time gold was discovered in the west . The first miners there had a hard time. Water was very scarce. There were no railways to bring in supplies and carry the gold away. There were not even any good roads. But a railway was built . The west was joined with the east. Soon afterward – on Jan. 1, 1901 – all the separate parts of Australia united into one country. In 1903 a water-main was built to supply the goldmining centre of western Australia with water.
Earning a living
Many of the people who came to Australia to find gold stayed on to do other kinds of work. They found that Austraila has other riches, such as coal , copper , iron, lead etc. The forests have much good timber . Along the seashores pearl shell and turtoise shell can be gathered. Some of the land proved to be good for wheat . Other land proved good for sugarcane and fruit orchards.
Of course people were needed to buy and sell what was raised. Others were needed to manufacture such things as butter, cheese , flour, steel , farm machinery, mining tools , shoes and clothing . Cities grew.
Population
Even today the big country is far from crowded. It is about the size of Unitad States , but its some 20 million population is less than four times as big as Chicago ’s. There are about 160,000 aborigines. More than half of all the people in Australia live in its eight biggest cities. Sydney and Melbourne are the two largest. Each one has about 3,000,000 people. Australia is a rich blend of varous ethnic groups, with substantial populations from Italy , Greece , former Yugoslavia, the Far East and Africa .
The Political System
Australia is still closely tied to its mother country. It is an independent nation, but it belongs to the British Commonwealth of Nations. The political system is a federation of six states (Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria). Australia is a parliamentary democracy. Queen Elizabeth II is formally the head of the state, but she is represented in Australia by a Governor General. There are two houses of Parliament : the Senate and the House of Representatives.There is growing Republican feeling in Australia: a desire to break the remaining formal links with Britain and become totally independent. Prince Charles has said that Australians should be able to have a Republic if they want one.
The Language
The people of Australia speak English but some of their words are not found in the English of either Britain or America.
The Capital
The capital of Australia is Canberra in New South Wales. Canberra is a small city. It was built in the early 1900s just to be the capital of the country. When the government of Australia decided to build a new capital, a contest was held for a plan for it. An architect from Chicago won the contest.
Sports
Australians are making a name for themselves in sports. They are especially well known for their swimming and tennis . They are good horsemen and yachtsmen, too.
Export
Aeroplanes have now cut down the travel time to and from Australia. Refrigerator boats make it easy to ship meat, butter, and even fresh fruit to faraway markets . Today Australia’s chief exports to other lands are wool and hides, meat, wheat and sugar .