Australia

« Australia Australia is in Oceania.

The official language of Australia is English, its capital is Canberra.

Australia is divided into 6 states and several territories. The states are: New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia. The main towns are: Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, Cairns and Brisbane and Hobart. Aborigines arrived in Australia 40,000 years ago, perhaps 60,000, from Asia.There were between 300,000 and 1 million people when the first Europeans arrived in the seventeenth century. In 1770, James Cook arrived at Botany Bay on the east coast, and on Possession Island in the north, where on 23 August of that year he claimed the region on behalf of Britain.

He named it New South Wales.

Australian shores, however, were not fully explored until the nineteenth century.

Matthew Flinders, a naval officer, was the first to circumnavigate the continent from 1801 to 1803.

It was he who asked that the continent should bear the name of Australia and not New Holland. In 1786, the British government announced its intention to establish a penal colony at Botany Bay.

May 13, 1787, Captain Arthur Phillip Royal Navy left England with 759 convicts * and arrived at Botany Bay January 18, 1788. The gold rush of the 1850s led to a sharp increase in the population.

Britons, Americans and Canadians swelled the flood of immigrants from Eastern colonies. " vigorously defended weighed as soon as new threats on the job or the culture of white Australians.

! The exclusion of any non-European settler colonies resulted in a policy of "White Australia The Australian colonies created in 1885, a Federal Council to coordinate their action.

However, New South Wales refused to be part of, the council was reduced to a center of debates without executive powers.

This movement culminated in 1901 on federal creation of the Commonwealth of Australia. World War I, far more than the unification itself, marked the starting point for the transformation of the six Australian colonies federated old into a unified state, conscious of his new identity.

In response to the call of the allied forces, Australia sent more than 330 000 soldiers who took part in the bloodiest fighting.

More than 60,000 of them died and 165,000 were wounded. The opera house was built in 1959 and completed in 1973 by Danish architect Jorn Utzon.

It has a roof shaped sail boats, sea shells, which was based originally on palm leaves.

The latter has four auditoriums and this addition to opera, classical concerts, ballets, plays and films.. »