It was the English explorer Matthew Flinders who made the suggestion of the name we use today. He was the first to circumnavigate the continent in 1803, and used the name 'Australia' to describe the continent on a hand drawn map in 1804.
The name Australia (pronounced /əˈstreɪliə/ in Australian English) is derived from the Latin Terra Australis (“southern land”), a name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times.
The official name for the country of Australia is the Commonwealth of Australia. The original names for Australia Australia included Terra Australis, New South Wales and New Holland. These old names were dropped in 1824.
The British colony of New South Wales was established in 1788 as a penal colony.
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.
'Aborigine' is generally perceived as insensitive, because it has racist connotations from Australia's colonial past, and lumps people with diverse backgrounds into a single group.
After Dutch navigators charted the northern, western and southern coasts of Australia during the 17th Century this newly found continent became known as 'New Holland'. It was the English explorer Matthew Flinders who made the suggestion of the name we use today.
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.
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.
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.
Australia Day is also referred to as 'Invasion Day' or 'Survival Day' particularly by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. This is because it 'celebrates' a painful part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history.
There are also a number of terms for Australia, such as: Aussie, Oz, Lucky Country, and land of the long weekend. Names for regions include: dead heart, top end, the mallee, and the mulga.
Australian English can be described as a new dialect that developed as a result of contact between people who spoke different, mutually intelligible, varieties of English. The very early form of Australian English would have been first spoken by the children of the colonists born into the early colony in Sydney.
Colloquial names for Australia include "Oz" and "the Land Down Under" (usually shortened to just "Down Under"). Other epithets include "the Great Southern Land", "the Lucky Country", "the Sunburnt Country", and "the Wide Brown Land". The latter two both derive from Dorothea Mackellar's 1908 poem "My Country".
A new genomic study has revealed that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest known civilization on Earth, with ancestries stretching back roughly 75,000 years.
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 Australian' is a very general term that covers two very distinct cultural groups: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Noun. pom (plural poms) (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, mildly derogatory slang) An Englishman; a Briton; a person of British descent.
In a documentary I saw last week, they said: “the Dutch had been exploring the West Coast of Australia for close to 200 years, landed there a couple of times, but because that part is desert with almost no water, they deemed it unworthy for colonizing and also never claimed it.”
Aboriginal Australians could be the oldest population of humans living outside of Africa, where one theory says they migrated from in boats 70,000 years ago. Australia's first people—known as Aboriginal Australians—have lived on the continent for over 50,000 years.
Genetics. Genetic studies have revealed that Aboriginal Australians largely descended from an Eastern Eurasian population wave, and are most closely related to other Oceanians, such as Melanesians.
Blak or Black or Blackfella or Blackfulla
The provenance of this term goes back to 1994 and Aboriginal artist Destiny Deacon, who urged art curators Hetti Perkins and Claire Williamson to use Blak instead of Black for an exhibition. It ended up being titled Blakness: Blak City Culture.
Prehistory. It is generally held that Australian Aboriginal peoples originally came from Asia via insular Southeast Asia (now Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, and the Philippines) and have been in Australia for at least 45,000–50,000 years.