Australia was once part of a much larger land mass called Gondwana, which included the modern continents of Africa, South America, Antarctica and India.
The breakup of Gondwana occurred in stages. Some 180 million years ago, in the Jurassic Period, the western half of Gondwana (Africa and South America) separated from the eastern half (Madagascar, India, Australia, and Antarctica).
About 140 million years ago, at the start of the Cretaceous period, Africa/South America split from Australasia/India/Antarctica.
Australia completely separated from Antarctica about 30 million years ago.
Proterozoic Australia was part of the supercontinent of Gondwanaland, comprising India and the other southern continents, from about 750 million years ago.
Australia was once part of a much larger land mass called Gondwana, which included the modern continents of Africa, South America, Antarctica and India.
Australia, once known as New South Wales, was originally planned as a penal colony. In October 1786, the British government appointed Arthur Phillip captain of the HMS Sirius, and commissioned him to establish an agricultural work camp there for British convicts.
One of those orogenic belts, the Mozambique Belt, formed 800 to 650 Ma and was originally interpreted as the suture between East (India, Madagascar, Antarctica, and Australia) and West Gondwana (Africa and South America).
It is known as forgotten land also. It is the only continent on Earth where human beings do not live permanently. Scientists and researchers come to this continent to explore as this is made up of 99%ice.
The Indian Ocean lies between Australia and Africa.
Aboriginal origins
Humans are thought to have migrated to Northern Australia from Asia using primitive boats. A current theory holds that those early migrants themselves came out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, which would make Aboriginal Australians the oldest population of humans living outside Africa.
Though Ned Kelly is Australia's most infamous bushranger, one of the African arrivals on the First Fleet was Australia's first: the lesser known John Caesar, also known as Black Caesar.
While Indigenous Australians have inhabited the continent for tens of thousands of years, and traded with nearby islanders, the first documented landing on Australia by a European was in 1606. The Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon landed on the western side of Cape York Peninsula and charted about 300 km of coastline.
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
Aboriginal people are known to have occupied mainland Australia for at least 65,000 years. It is widely accepted that this predates the modern human settlement of Europe and the Americas.
There is no one Aboriginal word that all Aborigines use for Australia; however, today they call Australia, ""Australia"" because that is what it is called today. There are more than 250 aboriginal tribes in Australia. Most of them didn't have a word for ""Australia""; they just named places around them.
The scientists found that roughly 50 million years ago, Balkanatolia existed as an island continent, separate from its neighbors. The landmass had its own unique fauna, different from the animals that inhabited Europe and Asia.
To put it simply, Antarctica used to be called Australia. Then, in 1824, today's Australia took the name, leaving the icy continent essentially without a 'proper' name until the 1890s.
To help resolve the confusion as to why Greenland the world's largest island but Australia gets to be the smallest continent. The main reason is all about the continental shelf and not the coastline–Greenland is connected to North America to the continental shelf while Australia has its own shelf.
African people migrate to Australia for many reasons, including job-seeking and civil wars caused by race, religion, nationality, and membership in particular social or political groups. In the 2020 census, over 400,000 people living in Australia recorded they were of African origin.
Australia is linked to East Africa through the Indian Ocean, and the blue economy also offers significant opportunities.
South African Culture
Larger numbers of the English-speaking white South African community moved to Australia during the 1960's when social tensions increased surrounding the policy of segregation in South Africa ( Apartheid ).
Australia is home to the oldest continuing living culture in the entire world. The richness and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures in Australia is something we should all take pride in as a nation.
Indigenous people have lived in Australia more than 65,000 years ago, according to scientific evidence of human occupation1. To put this in perspective, this is ten times older than the ancient Egyptian pyramids.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.