So said Dorothea Mackellar, one of Australia’s most famous poets. Her celebrated poem ‘My Country’ captures the essence of this ‘wide brown land’.
Australia is a large island, or a small continent depending on your point of view. Either way there’s so much to see and experience. For perhaps 60,000 years Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have called this land home. Since European settlement thousands of people have come from places around the globe and now call Australia home. It’s a multi-cultural, cosmopolitan country with a backbone of Indigenous culture running through the very essence of the land. Come and say G’day.
The World Fact Book provides the comparison below of Australia’s land area. The population of Australia is 26.5 million – compared to the United States of America with 342 million, and the European Union with 742 million.
The main travel message here is that there’s a lot to sample, but also a lot of area to cover – so think about how much time you have to spend in Australia, choose your priorities and research how you are going to get from destination to destination.
Head to our Sydney/Melbourne, Beyond Sydney/Melbourne, and Uluru/Broome pages to find out more.
Australia has an unresolved history around its treatment of Indigenous people since European settlement. In small steps toward reconciliation there is increasing use of Indigenous place names – for example the national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) uses Indigenous place names alongside recent names in it’s television weather service. If you attend a major event, you may experience a ‘Welcome to Country’ by an Indigenous elder, or an ‘Acknowledgement of Country’ by the event organiser as a mark of respect to the traditional custodians. Often a thought-provoking experience for travellers.
