Australia

From the world's oldest continuous cultures and a British penal colony to a federated, multicultural democracy.

Australia's human history is among the longest on Earth: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived on the continent for at least 65,000 years, sustaining the world's oldest continuous cultures. European contact transformed that world from 1770, when James Cook charted the east coast and claimed it for Britain, and from 1788, when the First Fleet founded a penal colony at Sydney Cove. Over the nineteenth century the colonies expanded across the continent, driven by pastoralism and gold rushes, while frontier violence and disease devastated Aboriginal peoples and dispossessed them of their lands. Six self-governing colonies federated to form the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January 1901, a new nation that soon enshrined a restrictive 'White Australia' immigration policy. The twentieth century brought the trauma of two world wars, mass post-war immigration that reshaped society, and a slow reckoning with the dispossession of, and the removal of children from, Aboriginal families. Modern Australia is a prosperous, multicultural democracy still working toward reconciliation, marked by the 1967 referendum, the Mabo native-title judgment, and the 2008 national apology to the Stolen Generations.