HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
Aboriginal Australians settled throughout continental Australia and many nearby islands. The ancestors of today’s ethnically and culturally distinct Torres Strait Islanders arrived from what is now Papua New Guinea around 2,500 years ago, and settled the islands on the northern tip of the Australian landmass.
Dutch explorers first landed in Australia in 1606, and the British began to settle there in 1788. Many settlers were criminals sent to live in Australia as punishment.
Willem Jansz from Amsterdam sailed a boat called the Duyfken from Bantam in the Dutch East Indies trying to find New Guinea. From 1611 some Dutch ships sailing from the Cape of Good Hope to Java accidently went too far east and they ended up finding Australia.
Nuyts explored nearly 1,000 miles of the southern coast from 1626 to 1627, and other Dutchmen added knowledge of the north and west. The work of Abel Tasman who got a lot of respect as a seaman in the Dutch East Indies that in 1642 the General of the Indies (Anthony van Diemen) got him to explore southward. He found the west coast and anchored off the southeast coast (Tasmania) which he called Van Diemen’s Land. He then went through the land of New Zealand before he went back to Batavia in Java.
A second exploration in 1644 contributed to knowledge of Australia’s northern coast, which the Dutch named the new landmass New Holland.
GEOGRAPHY OF AUSTRALIA
Most people that live in Australia live along the eastern and south-eastern coasts. The geography of the continent is really diverse going from snow-capped mountains to large deserts, tropical and temperate forests, grasslands, heathlands and woodlands. Australia is worlds smallest continent but the sixth largest country in the world. The countries that govern nearby regions include Indonesia East Timor, and Papua New Guinea to the north; the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and the French dependency of New Caledonia to the east; and New Zealand to the southeast.