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South Australia was founded as a free-colony, without convicts. The Province of South Australia was established in 1836 as a privately financed settlement based on the theory of "systematic colonisation" developed by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Convict labour was banned in the hope of making the colony more attractive to "respectable" families and ...
Over the next few decades, the colonies of New Zealand, Queensland, South Australia, Van Diemen's Land (later renamed Tasmania), and Victoria were created from New South Wales, as well as an aborted Colony of North Australia. On 1 January 1901, these colonies, excepting New Zealand, became states in the Commonwealth of Australia.
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, [17] is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. [18] Australia has a total area of 7,688,287 km 2 (2,968,464 sq mi), making it the sixth-largest country in the world and the largest in Oceania.
From 1816, penal transportation to Australia increased rapidly and the number of free settlers grew steadily. Van Diemen's Land became a separate colony in 1825, and free settlements were established at the Swan River Colony in Western Australia (1829), the Province of South Australia (1836), and in the Port Philip District (1836). The grazing ...
The history of Australia from 1901 to 1945 begins with the federation of the six colonies to create the Commonwealth of Australia. The young nation joined Britain in the First World War, suffered through the Great Depression in Australia as part of the global Great Depression and again joined Britain in the Second World War against Nazi Germany in 1939.
Between 1870 and 1890 average income per person in Australia was more than 50 per cent higher than that of the United States, giving Australia one of the highest living standards in the world. [ 31 ] The size of the government sector almost doubled from 10 per cent of national expenditure in 1850 to 19 per cent in 1890.
The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from south-east Asia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, during the last glacial period. [1] [2] Arriving by sea, they settled the continent and had formed approximately 250 distinct language groups by the time of European settlement, maintaining some of the longest known continuing artistic and religious traditions in the world.
In an important constitutional case (Sue v Hill (1999) 163 ALR 648), three justices of the High Court of Australia (the ultimate court of appeal) expressed the view that if the British Parliament were to alter the law of succession to the throne, such a change could not have any effect on the monarchy in Australia, because of the Australia Act ...