geologia: Australia

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It has a land area of 7,688,287 km2 (2,968,464 sq mi), making it the sixth-largest country in the world, and is the world's flattest and driest inhabited continent. It is a megadiverse country, and its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes and climates, including large deserts centrally and tropical rainforests along the coast. The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from Southeast Asia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Period. By the time of British settlement, Aboriginal Australians…

Evidence: 82 • authority: 72

Aboriginal Australians are the various indigenous peoples of the Australian mainland and many of its islands, excluding the ethnically distinct people of the Torres Strait Islands. Humans first migrated to Australia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, and over time formed as many as 500 linguistic and territorial groups. Aboriginal people once lived across large areas of the continental shelf that were later inundated by postglacial sea-level rise at the start of the Holocene inter-glacial period, reshaping coastal landscapes and separating Tasmania from the mainland. Aboriginal people maintained extensive networks within the continent and certain groups maintained relationships with Torres Strait…

Evidence: 54 • authority: 72

Many scholars have argued that the British colonisation of Australia and subsequent actions of various Australian governments and individuals involved acts of genocide against Indigenous Australians. They have used numerous definitions of genocide, including the intentional destruction of Indigenous groups as defined in the 1948 United Nations genocide convention, and broader definitions involving cultural genocide, ethnocide and genocidal massacres. They have frequently described the near-extermination of Aboriginal Tasmanians, mass killings during the frontier wars, forced removals of Indigenous children from their families (now known as the Stolen Generations) and policies of forced assi…

Evidence: 54 • authority: 72

Indigenous Australians are the various Aboriginal Australian peoples of Australia, and the ethnically distinct people of the Torres Strait Islands. The terms Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, First Nations of Australia, First Peoples of Australia, and First Australians are also common. Many Indigenous Australians prefer to identify with their specific cultural group. Estimates from the 2021 Australian census show that there were almost one million Indigenous Australians, representing 3.8% of the Australian population. About 92% of Indigenous Australians identified as Aboriginal, 4% identified as Torres Strait Islander and 4% identified with both groups. About 84% spoke English…

Evidence: 36 • authority: 72

The Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed on 1 January 1901 as a federation of six self-governing former British colonies. The human history of Australia, however, commences with the arrival of the first ancestors of Aboriginal Australians from Maritime Southeast Asia between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago, and continues to the present multicultural democracy. Aboriginal Australians settled throughout continental Australia and many nearby islands. The artistic, musical and spiritual traditions they established are among the longest surviving in human history. The ancestors of today's ethnically and culturally distinct Torres Strait Islanders arrived from what is now Papua New Guinea around…

Evidence: 36 • authority: 72

Aboriginal Tasmanians (palawa kani: Palawa, Pakana) are the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, a large island south of mainland Australia. Aboriginal people lived in Tasmania for tens of thousands of years before European settlement. Around 6000 BCE, rising sea levels flooded the Bass Strait and separated Tasmania from mainland Australia. This left the island's Aboriginal communities geographically isolated from other Aboriginal Australian groups for about 8,000 years. Before British colonisation in 1803, Tasmanian Aboriginal communities maintained distinct languages, cultural traditions, and regional identities across Tasmania, with communities organised through family and clan groups connecte…

Evidence: 21 • authority: 72