Australia (0)

Australia
Australia is a country and also 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. Australia’s name means ”southland.”It is south of the equator. Sometimes it is also called the island continent because it is an island. There are about twenty million people in Australia.It is 1,800 miles from the mainland of Asia and almost half way round the world from Europe . More than 600 miles of ocean separate it from Americas . Since Australia 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.
States and Territories.
Australia consists of six states, two territories and eight external territories.
The six states are: Western Australia (capital Perth ), South Australia (capital Adelaide), Queenslnd (capital Brisbane), New South Wales (capital Sydney ), Victoria (capital Melbourne) and Tasmania (capital Hobert). The two territories are the Northern territory (capital Darwin) and the Capital territory (capital Canberra ).
Politics
The head of the state is the queen of the United Kingdom. She is represented by governor general. The head of the government is the prime minister. Australia’s parliament consists of the Senate (77 members ) and the House of Representatives(148 members).
Australia’s Flag and Coat of Arms.
Australia’s flag has a Brittish flag, five stars that represent the constellation Southern Cross and a large star for the country’s states and territories.
The coat of arms features a kangaroo and an emu, golden whattle blossoms, a shield with the coats of arms of the six states of Australia and a star for the states and territories.
Landforms
Only 5% of the land is above 600 meters. Most of the land is empty. Most of the people live in the south and in east . 2/3 of Australia is a desert with hills and big saltlakes. The biggest deserts are the Great Sandy Desert, the Gibson Desert, the Simpson Desert, The Great Victoria Desert. The biggest mountain ranges are the Great Divining Range, the Australian Alps, the Blue Mountains and the New England Range.
The outback is flat and hot centre of Australia. The nearest neighbor may be a hundred kilometers away . The nearest city may be more than one thousand kilometers away. Many people in this area live on sheep stations which are enormous farms.
Uluru
One of the most beautiful things in Australia is Uluru (Ayers Rock) in the outback. It is an enormous rock alone in the middle of the desert. It is three kilometers long and 348 metres high. There is another 2000 meters under the ground . Uluru is 600 000 000 years old and it is the largest rock in the world.
The Great Barrier Reef.
One of the natural wonders of the modern world is the Great Barrier Reef. It is located off the northeast coast of Australia. It is the biggest coral reef in the world extending 2000 kilometers along the coast of Queensland. It consists of more than 600 coral islands . Some of them are true coral islands, other are the tops of submerged mountain ranges covered with lush tropical growth . Most of the islands are inhabited and many of them have been developed as tourist resorts.
Scientists estimate that the reef is more than thirty million years old. It had its beginning as a tiny animal known as the polyp. It protects itself by forming an external skeleton of lime . When it dies its shell hardens. It has been growing for thirty million years. There are more than 300 varieties of coral with colours ranging from pale blue to bright yellow. Recently a black coral was found . Tourists visit it because it is beautiful, relaxing and interesting .
Lakes
The big lakes of the desert area are dry most of the time. Enormous Lake Eyre (70km wide , 130km long) was dry for a hundred years until 1950. Lake Eyre is the lowest place in Australia. It is 16 meters below sea level. Other bigger lakes are Lake Disappointment, Lake Mackay, and Lake Carnegie in the western part . Lake Torrens, Lake Gairdner and Lake Eyre in the southern part.
Rivers
The biggest river is the Murray . The other biggest rivers are the Mitchel and the Flinders . Other rivers are short and have water only after rains .
The Climate
Australia stretches from the tropics to the temperature region. It is a hot and dry country. The northern part has a hot tropical climate with heavy rainfall. It has two seasons - wet summer and dry winter. The south and the east of Australia have warm summers and winters. The southeastern coast gets rains all year around . The southwest area has hot, dry summers and mild moist winters. In the west and in the outback the temperature is often 35 degrees in the summer months. The outback receives almost no rainfall. Tasmania is cooler and wetter than the rest of Australia. The only places where snow falls are in the southeast and Tasmania.
History
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. Almost no animals and few people visited Australia before the English colonists.
The first people in Australia were the Aborigines. They came there more than 50,000 years ago. They were the only inhabitants. They were living in the Stone Age. Their only weapons were simple spears and boomerangs. They raised no crops and had no heards of tame animals. For food the hunted, fished and gathered wild fruit and nuts. Their tribes had very well worked – out customs.
Chinese sailors visited Australia 2,500 years ago. Australia remained unknown for Europeans until 400 years ago and no European settled there until 1788. Long before the seventeenth century, people though there was land in the southern ocean, but nobody had seen it. So it was called Terra Australis Incognita - the Unknown South Land.
The first recorded European to see Australia was a Dutch - Captain William Jansz who entered the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1606. Another Dutch - Abel Tasman sailed to the south and discovered Tasmania in 1642.
By the middle of the seventeenth century most of the north , west and south coasts had been charted. But the Dutch were disappointed with their new discoveries.
The first British captain who saw the new continent was William Dampier who visited the north western coast in 1688 and 1689.
In 1770 the British sailor Captain James Cook landed on the east coast at Botany bay, and said Australia now belonged to Britain . Of course nobody asked the Aborigines about this - it was the beginning of a terrible time for them. Narrowly escaping shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef, Cook sailed home to England. He reported a land with abundant fresh water and lush vegetation and very suitable settlers .
Britain soon started to send convicts to the new country. In May 1787 eleven ships left England for Australia carrying about 1,500 people, half of whom were convicts and the other half their guards. They reached Port Jackson - now Sydney - in January 1787. Life was very difficult and the convicts had to work very hard making roads, buildings and farms.
In 1851 gold was found in New South Wales and Victoria. There was a great gold rush . Thousands of people came to Australia to find their fortunes. In ten years the population grew from 400,000 to 1,200,000. Forty years later there was another gold rush. This time gold was discovered in the west. With gold came new roads, railways and growing cities. On 1 January 1901 all the six separate states of Australia united into one country. Many people left Britain for a new life in Australia.
After 1945 people from other European countries, like Italy , Greece, Germany and Holland , began coming to Australia. Since 1945 more than three million people have moved there.
Economy
Australia is extremely rich in mineral resources like coal, iron , copper, nickel , lead, tin, zinc and others . The forests have much good timber . Along the seashores pearl shell and tortoise shell can be gathered.
Australia is one of the biggest producers of diamonds , apals, sapphire, agates. Oil and natural gas have been found in western and southern Australia. Australia has a wide range of industries. Most of them are located in Australia’s largest cities which are also ports. Australia produces chemicals , machinnery, motor vehicles, electronic equiptment, paper , textiles, household appliances and many other things.
Most of the land has proved to be good for wheat . Wheat is grown in the Murray River basin and near Perth. New types of wheat that resist drought have been developed. The land is also good for sugarcane and fruit orchards. Citruses, sugarcane and cotton are grown. In Queensland they grow bananas; furter south, where it is less hot, apples are grown. And in recent years Australia has been making very good wine , too.
In Tasmania there are apple orchards and dairy farms.
Sheep have been important since the earliest days. Most Australian sheep are Spanish merinos, which were first bought there in 1797. Twenty per cent of the world’s sheep live in Australia, mainly in New South Wales and Victoria. Twenty-five per cent of the world’s wool comes from there. Cattle are found mostly in the drier parts of the north and centre and cattle stations cover one- quarter of Australia. The meat from Australian cattle is sold to countries all over the world.
Most of its workers do not work in factories or on farms. Two-thirds of them work in shops, offices, banks or schools .
Animals, birds and plants .
A strange thing happened when ocean blocked off this island continent. Appearently none of the mammals that survived in Australia were of the sort that later changed into the familliar mammals of the rest of the world. The ancestors of cats and tigers , of wolves and dogs , of elephants and sheep just were not there. As a result ,the reptilelike mammals that have died out everywhere else in the world are alive in Australia. The higher groups of mammals that developed in the rest of the world after Australia was cut off had to be brought there millions of years later by the colonists.
Australia is,in fact , a continent- sized museum of ancient animals, modernised along certain lines by their own separate evolution. Two of the strangest animals in the world are the spiny anteater and the platypus. They are reptilelike mammals. They have hair like cats and dogs but they lay shelled eggs like snakes and turtles. Their babies are born from eggs but drink milk from their mothers. The ecidna (spiny anteater) eats ants which it catches with its long fat tongue. The platypus has a wide bill like a duck and a wide flat tail . It swims well but it can only stay under water for a few minutes. First it shuts its ears and eyes .
Another group of Australian mammals, the marsupials, are less like reptiles than the spiny anteater and the platypus, but they are not highly developed mammals either.
The kangaroo is born after seven weeks inside its mother . It is completly blind and only an inch or an inch a half long. It crawls into its mother’s pouch and attaches itself to a nipple there. There it stays almost three months, when it begins to stick its head out. It is six months old before it is big and strong to leave the pouch.
The biggest of the fifty diffrent kinds is the red kangaroo. They have big strong back legs and tails , and an adult can measure 2.4 metres high. They can jump more than four metres and travel at seventy kilometres an hour . Kangaroos eat grass and leaves and live in groups about twelve.
Everyone loves the sleepy gray koalas. Like kangaroos, they have s pouch on their fronts for their babies. After six months there, baby koalas ride on their mother’s back. They live in eucalyptus trees , sleeping for eighteen hours, and eating one kilo of leaves, each day. They drink almost nothing. The word koala means ”no water.”
In the seas and rivers of northern Australia crocodiles can be found. They are five or six metres long. They eat fish , animals, kangaroos - and sometimes people.
There are more than 800 kinds of birds in Australia. The emu, which is two metres tall , is the second largest bird in the world. It cannot fly at all, but it can run at fifty kilometres an hour.
Then there is the kookaburra, whose cry sounds like someone laughing, and the budgerigar, a little blue or yellow bird that people keep in their homes all over the world.
Eucalyptus trees are found everywhere in Australia, and one kind, the great mountain anh, can grow to 120 metres. These strong trees do not die when there are forest fires.
Australia has many other kinds of tree, and thousands of kinds of wild flowers too. Animals, birds and plants - Australia has everything.
Australian cities.
In each of Australia’s six states, there is a large city which is near a river and near the sea. 60% of all Australians live in these six cities. Many others live near to them. In fact, most people live only a few kilometres from the sea.
Sydney is the oldest and biggest city with 3,7 million people. It is a busy, modern city and its high-rise buildings are the centre for much of Australian business. It is also an international city where you can eat food from all over the world, or just visit some of the thirty wonderful beaches .
When we think of Sydney, we think of Sydney Opera House. The roof of this beautiful building looks like sails on Sydney Harbour. It was opened in 1973 for music, theatre and dance . Near the Opera House is one of the longest bridges of the world - the Sydney Harbour Bridge .
Melbourne, the second largest city, was the capital of Australia from 1901 to 1927. It has wide streets, some lovely old buildings, and large parks. Melbourne’s theatres and pubs are famous . It is also an important place for sport . Australians have their own kind of football, called Australian Rules . On the day of the final match, in September each year, everything stops in Melbourne.
Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth are all large modern cities. In Brisbane you can still find stilt houses - wooden houses on tall posts which let cool air underneath the house. Adelaide has a famous festival of music, theatre and film every two years. And in Perth about one-third of the families own a boat .
Hobart is a smaller, quieter city. It began in 1803 with 433 people-281 of them convicts. Now it has about 170,000 people.
Darwin, in the north of Australia, has no tall buildings, only long low ones , because during the summer storms the winds are sometimes very strong. In 1974 a storm killed sixty-seven people and destroyed almost all the buildings in Darwin.
Canberra - an Aboriginal word meaning ” meeting place”- is the newest city of all. It is also different from the other cities because it is 120 kilometres from the sea. It was designed by an American, Walter Burley Griffin, in 1912, and became the capital of Australia on 1927. this beautiful city has thousands of trees, and a big lake in its centre.
Culture
The oldest skeleton found in Australia was at Lake Mungo in New South Wales. Archeologists believe it is 38,00 years old and it carried traces of ceremonial paint.
Aborigines were nomads. Originally, they didn’t have a sense of land ownership, although Aboriginal children were taught from an early age that they belonged to the land and must repect tribal boundaries. Tribes returned to particular places to bury their dead. Some places, like Uluru, were sacred because they were associated with the ”Dreamtime”, the time when the earth was formed and cycles of life and nature were begun .
Aboriginal legends , songs and dances tell of powerful spirits who created the land and peaople durin the Dreamtime. There was no written Aboriginal language . Most of the 600 tribes spoke different dialects and rarely met except on ceremonial occasions. The tradition of Dreamtime united the people. Rock paintings showing this creation period can be found all over the country. Some of the most spetacular and best preserved can be seen at rock galleries in Kakadu National Park and other parts of nortehrn Australia.
The arrival of white people gradually brought an end to the traditional Aboriginal way of life. People began to build and settle on Aborigine tribal lands. Today , most Aborigines live in cities and towns or in isolated settlements near tribal lands. Few continue the old nomadic way of life.
In recent years, white Australians have been more sensitive to the Aborigines’ situation. The result has been an increase in health and educational services, greater recognition of Aboroginal land rights and a growing appreciation of Aboriginal culture. Many museums now display Aboriginl art, musical instruments and artefacts.