Australia

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of

Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the
mainland of the Australian continent, the island of
Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. With an
area of 7,617,930 square kilometres, Australia is
the largest country by area in Oceania and the
world's sixth-largest country

 Capital: Canberra  Population: 25.69 million (2020) 

 Currency: Australian dollar  Dialing code: +61

Tourism
Tourism in Australia is an important part of
the Australian economy, and comprises Major Australian icons for tourists to visit
domestic and international visitors. In the include:
financial year 2018/19, tourism was
Australia's fourth-largest export and over  Great Barrier Reef
the previous decade was growing faster  Red Centre
than national GDP growth. At the time it  Great Ocean Road
represented 3.1% of  Barossa Valley
Australia's GDP contributing A$60.8 billion  Kakadu
to the national economy. Popular Australian  The Kimberley
destinations include the coastal cities  Kangaroo Island
of Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, as  Tasmanian Wilderness
well as other high-profile destinations  Australian Alps
including regional Queensland, the Gold  Ningaloo
Coast and the Great Barrier Reef, the  Flinders Ranges
world's largest reef.  Uluru and  Fraser Island
 Sydney Harbour Bridge
the Australian outback are other popular
 Freycinet
locations, as is the Tasmanian wilderness. 
 Gippsland
 Uluru
 History
The history of Australia is the story of the land and peoples of the continent of Australia.
People first arrived on the Australian mainland by sea from Maritime Southeast Asia between 50,000 and
65,000 years ago, and penetrated to all parts of the continent, from the rainforests in the north, the
deserts of the centre, and the sub-Antarctic islands of Tasmania and Bass Strait.
The artistic, musical and spiritual traditions they established are among the longest surviving such
traditions in human history.
The first Torres Strait Islanders – ethnically and culturally distinct from the Aboriginal people – arrived
from what is now Papua New Guinea around 2,500 years ago, and settled in the islands of the Torres
Strait and the Cape York Peninsula forming the northern tip of the Australian landmass.
Humans are believed to have arrived in Australia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago. [2][3] As hunter-gatherers, they
established enduring spiritual and artistic traditions and used a range of implements adapted to their
environments. Recent estimates of the population at the time of British settlement range from 500,000 to
one million.
There is considerable archaeological discussion as to the route taken by the first population. People appear
to have arrived by sea during a period of glaciation, when New Guinea and Tasmania were joined to
the continent; however, the journey still required sea travel, making them among the world's earliest

Food
mariners.  Scott Cane wrote in 2013 that the first wave may have been prompted by the eruption of Lake
Toba. 

1.Fantales:A favorite Australian food, the delectable bite-sized treat is made up of

chewy caramel coated in milk chocolate. It's renowned for yellow and blue wrapping
scribed with movie trivia, a marketing move that has endeared the treat to DVD
groupies and movie goers.
2. Crab sticks:They're called crab sticks, but do they contain any crab? Crab
sticks are an indispensable part of the culture, a dish in which processed,
pulverized white fish flesh is shaped and cured to resemble crab leg meat. And
that's still more crab-like than the deep-fried version from the local chippie.

3. Barramundi: Perhaps the most Australian of all fish varieties, Barramundi

gets its name from the Aboriginal language meaning "large-scaled river fish. " It's
served in restaurants across the country. Best pan-fried or seared skin-side first (rarely
battered or deep fried), it's often dished up as a fish steak with a herbed oil.
 Animals
Among the endemic animal species - species that can only be found in Australia - are
the monotremes, which are mammals that lay eggs! The platypus and two species of
echidna are the world's only egg-laying mammals, so called monotremes. 

Australia has almost 400 mammal species and about 140 species of marsupials. A
marsupial is an animal that carries the young in her pouch.

Half of the birds that live in Australia, can only be found there. Among the typical
Australian bird species are the kookaburra, the emu and the rainbow lorikeet, an
especially colourful parrot which has a red beak and a multicolour plumage.

Kangaroo 
There are about 50 million kangaroos living in Australia, that means there are many
more kangaroos than people living in Australia! There are 55 different species of
kangaroos. Wallabies are usually smaller than kangaroos but kangaroos come in all
sizes. Some weigh only little and are tiny, others weigh up to 90 kg/ 198 lbs. In many
rural areas, kangaroos roam in the bushland. One of the best places to experience
kangaroos is Pebbly Beach, a four-hour-drive south of Sydney . 
 Platypus
The platypus is one of the monotremes. The egg-lying animal lives along the river
banks in burrows. The platypus has a brown furry body and webbed feet. With a bill
like a duck as well as a tail like a beaver it looks truly unique. A platypus can grow up
to 60 cm/ 2 ft in length. Platypus are very shy animals and quickly hide underwater if
approached. If they are attacked and cannot flee, however, they inject poison through
spurs in their hind legs. The poison is so strong it can kill a dog!

Tasmanian Devil
The Tasmanian devil is an endangered animal and can only be encountered in the wild
on the island of Tasmania off the southern coast of Australia. The Tasmanian devil is a
marsupial and carries its young in its pouch.

Tasmanian devils are marsupials and carry up to four young. The young live in the
pouch for up to four month. The black coated animal is as tall as a small dog, but very
shy and the Tasmanian devil is nocturnal. Nocturnal means the animal is active during
the night. Tasmanian devils are the largest carnivorous marsupials and have powerful
jaws and teeth.

Ca
ss ow
ar y
The

cassowary is the heaviest flightless bird in Australia. A cassowary has black feathers
on the body, but the neck and face is colourful. Cassowaries have a very low
frequency call which almost cannot be heard by humans. The cassowary has a
casque, a sponge-like helmet which is covered with keratin. Keratin is the material our
fingernails are made of. The cassowary is the most dangerous bird in the world as it
has the most powerful kick. The foot has three toes with a dagger-like claw. The
cassowary can run and swim very fast, so it easily can escape any dangerous
situations. 

Sydney Funnel-Web Spider

Animals in Australia: The Sydney funnel-web spider is the world’s deadliest spider.
The funnel-web spider injects a deadly poison whenever it bites and death occurs
within an hour. However, an anti-venom has been developed and for more than 30
years there has been no fatality.

Australians are very aware of the danger of being bitten by a funnel-web spider, so
they take precautions when hiking in the bushland or working in the garden. The big
black spiders are hairless and the spider web looks like a massive funnel - therefore it
is hard to miss! The webs can be spotted between logs and rocks along the Sydney
coastline. 

Isolation is also a pronounced characteristic of much of the social landscape beyond

the large coastal cities. But an equally significant feature of modern Australian society
is the representation of a broad spectrum of cultures drawn from many lands, a
development stemming from immigration that is transforming the strong Anglo-Celtic
orientation of Australian culture. Assimilation, of course, is seldom a quick and easy
process, and minority rights, multiculturalism, and race-related issues have played a
large part in contemporary Australian politics. In the late 1990s these issues sparked
a conservative backlash.

Australia has a federal form of government, with a national government for the
Commonwealth of Australia and individual state governments (those of New South
Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania).
Each state has a constitution, and its government exercises a
limited degree of sovereignty. There are also two internal territories: Northern Territory,
established as a self-governing territory in 1978, and the Australian Capital
Territory (including the city of Canberra), which attained self-governing status in 1988.
The federal authorities govern the external territories of Norfolk Island, the Cocos
(Keeling) Islands, Christmas Island, Ashmore and Cartier islands, the Coral Sea
Islands, and Heard Island and McDonald Islands and claim the Australian Antarctic
Territory, an area larger than Australia itself. Papua New Guinea, formerly an
Australian external territory, gained its independence in 1975.

Geologic history
The earliest known manifestations of the geologic record of the
Australian continent are 4.4-billion-year-old detrital grains of zircon in metasedimentary
rocks that were deposited from 3.7 to 3.3 billion years ago. Based on that and other
findings, the Precambrian rocks in Australia have been determined to range in age
from about 3.7 billion to 541 million years (i.e., to the end of Precambrian time). They
are succeeded by rocks of the Paleozoic Era, which extended to about 252 million
years ago; of the Mesozoic Era, which lasted until about 66 million years ago; and of
the Cenozoic Era, the past 66 million years. For millions of years Australia was part of
the supercontinent of Pangaea and subsequently its southern
segment, Gondwanaland (or Gondwana). Its separate existence was finally assured by
the severing of the last connection between Tasmania and Antarctica, but it has been
drifting toward the Southeast Asian landmass. As a continent, Australia
thus encompasses two extremes: on the one hand, it contains the oldest known earth
material while, on the other, it has stood as a free continent only since about 35 million
years ago and is in the process—in terms of geologic time—of merging with Asia, so
that its life span as a continent will be of relatively short duration. (See also geologic
history of Earth.)

Chronological summary
The geologic development may be summarized as follows. Archean rocks (those more
than 2.5 billion years old) crop out within the two-thirds of Australia that lies west of the
Tasman Line. Individual blocks of Archean rocks
became embedded in Proterozoic fold belts (those from about 2.5 billion to 541 million
years old) to form a mosaic. The lines of weakness within the mosaic later guided
stresses that pulled the blocks apart or pushed them together. The Proterozoic fold
belts that bounded the western and southern sides of the Archean Yilgarn block, for
example, became the sites of the continental margin during seafloor spreading in the
Mesozoic, and the fold belts of the Amadeus Transverse Zone in central Australia
guided the overthrusting of blocks in the north over those in the south during the late
Paleozoic.Proterozoic Australia was part of the supercontinent of Gondwanaland,
comprising India and the other southern continents, from about 750 million years ago.
At the beginning of the Paleozoic, some 541 million years ago, pieces began to flake
off the Australian portion of Gondwanaland when ocean basins opened around
its periphery. Off the northwest, an ancient forebear of the Indian Ocean, called
the Tethys, transferred continental terranes (fault-bounded fragments of the crust) from
Gondwanaland to Asia; later generations of that ocean rifted material northward,
including the biggest and latest terrane of India. Off the east, an ancient  Pacific
Ocean opened and closed in the first of a series of back-arc basins or marginal seas
that persists to the present.

The human impact

In the context of such extraordinary environmental time frames, neither the Aboriginal
peoples nor the European settlers can be described as long-term residents, yet in their
brief time they have already modified the landscape considerably and in most ways
deleteriously. The Europeans in particular have been responsible for initially minor, but
later significant and widespread, changes, notably considerable soil
erosion. Clearing vegetation for agricultural purposes, overgrazing, introducing exotic
plants and animals, making tracks and roads, even clearing stones from paddocks—all
have rendered the land surface more susceptible to soil erosion. Humans have set in
train their own great cycle of erosion, similar to that which beset many parts of western
Europe in the 18th century and which has assailed many parts of the American West
since the late 19th century.