Australia

Australia is a country made up of the Australian mainland, Tasmania and many smaller islands, between the Indian and Pacific oceans. Its 7,688,287 km2 (2,968,464 sq mi) form the flattest and driest inhabited continent.

Canberra is the capital, while Sydney and Melbourne are the largest cities. English has no legal status but serves in practice as the official and national language. The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians arrived from Southeast Asia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, and by the time of British settlement they spoke more than 250 languages. Willem Janszoon and the crew of the Dutch ship Duyfken made the first recorded European landing in 1606, and in 1770 James Cook mapped the east coast and claimed it for Britain as New South Wales. The First Fleet under Arthur Phillip reached Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788 to found a penal colony. Six self-governing colonies joined in 1901 as the Commonwealth of Australia, and the Australia Act of 1986 crowned a long move to full autonomy from Britain.

The federation of six states and ten territories is a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary democracy, and its constitution has stayed largely unchanged since 1901; the federal parliament has a Senate and a House of Representatives. Iron ore and coal are the largest exports, with education in third place, and wine comes mainly from the cooler south. About 70% of the land is arid or semi-arid, the Great Dividing Range runs along the east, and the Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef on earth, stretches more than 2,300 km (1,400 mi) off the northeast coast.

Long isolation left much of the wildlife unique, from the koala, which feeds on eucalyptus leaves, to the kangaroo and wallaby. Over 100,000 sites of Aboriginal rock art are known, and Emily Kame Kngwarreye carried old designs into modern painting. Banjo Paterson wrote the bush poem Waltzing Matilda in 1895, and the Bee Gees, AC/DC and Kylie Minogue became known abroad. The Story of the Kelly Gang of 1906 was the first feature-length narrative film. Melbourne hosted the Olympics in 1956 and Sydney in 2000, and pavlova, lamingtons and Vegemite are classic foods.