Australia – a world “downunder”
Australia is the
planet's sixth largest country. It is almost as great as the United States of
America. Australia is the lowest, the
flattest and (apart from Antarctica) the driest continent in the world. It is
surrounded by thousands of small islands. The Great Barrier Reef, the largest
living structure on Earth, extends for over 2,000 kilometers near the East
Coast. Nearly 20 per cent of Australia is a desert. Climatic zones and landscapes range from tropical rainforests or
deserts to cold forests and snow-covered mountains.
Australia is one of the most biologically diverse countries on the
planet. It has got more than one million species of plants and animals. They evolved on a
geographically isolated continent, so about 80 per cent of flowering plants, of mammals and
freshwater fish and more than 45 per cent of birds are unique to Australia. Australia is rich with marsupials — there are
more than 140 species. Among the best-known animals are the kangaroo, koala,
echidna, dingo, platypus, wallaby and wombat.
Australian people
Australia has got one of the most ethnically diverse societies in the
world today. Almost one in four Australian residents was born outside of
Australia and many more are first or second generation Australians.
Australian society is a melting pot of cultures. Aboriginal people are the traditional
inhabitants of the land, but there are immigrants
from more than 200 countries and, at home, they speak more than 260 different
languages. Its population today is about 22 million
people. Nearly all the cities are near the coast. It has got the lowest
population density in the world - only two people per square kilometre. Today
migrants arrive from Europe but also from Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Australia
does not discriminate on racial, cultural or religious grounds. There are a lot
of religious beliefs: Buddhist,
Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh.
History
Before the arrival of the British settlers
and their explorer Captain James Cook in 1788, Australia was inhabited by the
Indigenous people - Aborigines.
New
South Wales was the
first colony: it was settled as a penal
colony – a place where Britain could send convicted criminals because British
prisons were overcrowded. Many convicts were very poor and had committed only
minor crimes in Britain. Conditions in the new colony were better than at home,
but there were diseases and malnutrition during the first period of settlement.
Convicts continued to arrive there for 50 years and they were useful to build
the colony.
The first wave of migrants to Australia included rich men attracted by the colony's
agricultural prospects and the possibility to use convict work. Then gold was discovered in the
mid-nineteenth century, so new settlements were born and other migrants arrived.
During the second half of the 19th century
Australian people wanted to become an independent nation under a Federation. The
new nation remained loyal to Britain and part of the British Empire. Australia
took part to World War One to help Great Britain. After World War Two, people
from Italy, Greece, China, Vietnam and Lebanon arrived.
The government
Australia's formal name is the Commonwealth of Australia. Its form of government is a constitutional monarchy –
'constitutional' because the powers and procedures of the Australian Government
are defined by a written constitution, and 'monarchy' because Australia's head
of state is Queen Elizabeth II.
The Commonwealth of Australia was formed in 1901 when six independent British colonies
joined together and became states of a new nation.
Today there are six states in
Australia: New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and
Western Australia. The capital is Canberra;
other important cities are Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide. Powers
are divided between a central government and individual states. The
Governor-General, representing the Crown, has the supreme executive power. He
acts on the advice of the head of the government, the Prime Minister, and other
ministers. They are appointed by him on the advice of the leader of the
political party or coalition which wins free elections.
Indigenous
Australia
Australian Aboriginal culture is the oldest continuous
living culture on the planet.
Aborigines already lived in Australia 40,000 years ago. The hallmark of Aboriginal culture is 'oneness
with nature'. In traditional Aboriginal belief systems, nature is the most important thing. Big rocks, canyons, rivers,
waterfalls, the sun, the moon, visible stars and animals - all have their own
stories of creation and are connected one to the other. To the Aborigines they
are all sacred, like Ayers Rock, the
world’s largest monolith, which they call Uluru.
In the past, Aboriginal people had a nomadic life, following the seasons and
the food. They lived in tribal groups and used few simple tools with incredible
skill. They hunted with their boomerang. They moved to new hunting grounds
before the old ones had no animals left. When at rest, Aborigines lived in open
camps, caves or simple structures made from bark, leaves or other vegetation.
The modern notion of possession was alien to traditional Aboriginal culture. Material
things were shared. The idea that an individual could 'own' land was foreign to
Aboriginal thinking. They believed that they belonged to the land, not that the
land belonged to them.
The "Dreamtime", also called the
“Dreaming” or the “time before time”, the mythological past, was the time of
creation, when spirit ancestors, human or animals like the Giant Snake or the
All-Father travelled through the land, giving it its form, and setting down the
social rules. They believe that every
person essentially exists eternally in the Dreaming. Legends of the 'Dreamtime'
were handed down by word of mouth and by totem from generation to generation. Songs were very important: they told
the history of the world, contained important information about landmarks or
social events. Dances also were
important: they revealed myths or showed the Dreamtime heroes. During their gatherings, the Aborigines
played the didgeridoo.
Art was an integral part of life.
They painted their bodies for ceremonies. They engraved rocks – this was of the
few art forms to survive. Bark painting
is very famous also today, with its natural and bright colours. Paintings told
stories, they kept a record of daily life and religious beliefs, they were used
to draw maps or to report contact with other peoples.
The Aboriginal society also
had problems; droughts, shortages of food, sickness. Supernatural forces were considered the cause for every event, and
magic and rituals were used to correct the situation. The "medicine man" was a powerful man,
and tried to cure many physical ills. He cured the spirit more than the body. They
believed that the spirit was the first cause of illness - evil thoughts act
first on the spirit, and the physical symptoms come later.
When Europeans first began to colonise Australia, they
also began to destroy all this culture.
Contact between new settlers, under imperial British
rule, and Australia's indigenous people, led to the decimation of many Aboriginal groups due to diseases that the
Aborigines didn’t know (pneumonia or smallpox for example), dispossession and also
murder. At first, Aborigines were friendly towards white people, but when they
understood that the settlers weren’t the spirits of their dead ancestors, they
tried to fight back - but without success.
The British Imperial forces said that they didn’t rob
the land from the Aborigines because the Aborigines didn’t possess it. In two
centuries, the continent was
progressively stolen from Aboriginal
people. Even after Australia was declared independent in 1901, Aborigines
continued to be marginal to the new nation and weren’t considered citizens
until 1967.
Racist
attitudes to Australia's indigenous population evolved through
different phases. Settlers were sometimes civilized but they also practiced real
genocide. For a long period, one tenth of Aboriginal babies (called today the “stolen generation”) were removed from
their natural parents and taken into foster care by non-Aboriginal families to
“civilize” them.
Two centuries of dispossession and maltreatment have
left deep scars in surviving Aboriginal communities There are about 60,000
Aborigines today and there were more than 600,000 before the settlers arrived.
In life expectancy and health, Aboriginal Australians are not like the rest of
the Australian population. But there has also been some progress in recent times, as Aborigines start to have their own
national and regional institutions - and political strength.
Videos to see
on youtube:
Great Barrier Reef:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbNeIn3vVKM,
Aborigines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqkgKkW8o6E and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX0jOfxjPQ8,
Australian history:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhY9PBceqYY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cydE-O-CJT8.
QUESTIONNAIRE
a.
What kind of
landscapes and climates are there in Australia?
b.
Where is the
Great Barrier Reef?
c.
Which are the
most famous Australian animals?
d.
Why is the fauna
so different from the rest of the world?
e.
What are the
most important Australian cities and what’s its capital?
f.
How is the
Australian population composed?
g.
Talk about the
languages and religious beliefs today in Australia.
h.
What is the
Australian melting pot?
i.
What’s the
Australian form of government?
j.
Who were the
first human inhabitants of Australia and how did they live?
k.
How was
Australia used at first?
l.
What changed
after the discovery of gold?
m.
What changed
after the independence from Britain?
n.
Who is the
Governor-General?
o.
When did the
Aborigines arrive to Australia?
p.
What does “oneness
with nature” mean?
q.
How did the Aborigines
live before the settlers’ arrival?
r.
What did the
Aborigines think about possession?
s.
What is
Dreamtime?
t.
Where is Ayers
Rock and what is it?
u.
In which way did
the Aboriginal culture express itself?
v.
What did the “medicine
man” do?
w.
How were the
Aborigines decimated?
x.
Which were the
racist attitudes of the settlers?
y.
What was the “stolen
generation”?
z.
How do the
Aborigines live today?
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