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Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the world's smallest continent, the major island of Tasmania and a number of other islands in the Southern, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. Neighbouring countries include Indonesia, East Timor and Papua New Guinea to the north, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the French dependency of New Caledonia to the northeast, and New Zealand to the southeast.
The mainland of Australia has been inhabited for more than 42,000 years by Indigenous Australians. After sporadic visits by fishermen from the north and by European explorers and merchants starting in the seventeenth century, the eastern half of the mainland was claimed by the British in 1770 and officially settled through penal transportation as the colony of New South Wales on 26 January 1788. As the population grew and new areas were explored, another five largely self-governing Crown Colonies were successively established over the course of the 19th century.
On 1 January 1901, the six colonies became a Federation, and the Commonwealth of Australia was formed. Since federation, Australia has maintained a stable liberal democratic political system and remains a Commonwealth Realm. The capital city is Canberra, located in the Australian Capital Territory. The current national population is approximately 20.8 million people, and is concentrated mainly in the large coastal cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.
Etymology
View of Port Jackson, the site where Sydney was established, taken from the South Head. (From A Voyage to Terra Australis.)The name "Australia" is derived from the Latin Australis, meaning of the South. Legends of an "unknown land of the south" (terra australis incognita) dating back to Roman times were commonplace in medieval geography, but they were not based on any actual knowledge of the continent. The first use of the word "Australia" in the English language was in 1625 with the words "A note of Australia del Espiritu Santo, written by Master Hakluyt" which were published by Samuel Purchas in Hakluytus Posthumus. The Dutch adjectival form Australische was used by Dutch officials in Batavia to refer to the newly discovered land to the south in 1638. The word "Australia" was used in a 1693 translation of Les Aventures de Jacques Sadeur dans la Découverte et le Voyage de la Terre Australe, a 1692 French novel by Gabriel de Foigny under the pen name Jacques Sadeur. Alexander Dalrymple then used it in An Historical Collection of Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean (1771), to refer to the entire South Pacific region. In 1793, George Shaw and Sir James Smith published Zoology and Botany of New Holland, in which they wrote of "the vast island, or rather continent, of Australia, Australasia or New Holland."
The name "Australia" was popularised by the 1814 work A Voyage to Terra Australis by the navigator Matthew Flinders, who was the first recorded person to circumnavigate Australia. Despite its title, which reflected the view of the British Admiralty, Flinders used the word "Australia" in the book, which was widely read and gave the term general currency. Governor Lachlan Macquarie of New South Wales subsequently used the word in his dispatches to England. In 1817, he recommended that it be officially adopted. In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially as "Australia".
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