Geology and Landforms

Australia is the least mountainous and most level of the world's continents. Two thirds of its surface forms a plateau only 1,000 to 2,000 feet (300 to 600 meters) in elevation. The few peaks that exceed 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) would be considered foothills in any other continent. One may drive to the summit of Mount Kosciusko, at 7,310 feet (2,228 meters) the continent's highest point. Unlike North America and Europe, where spectacular tectonic and glacial activity created most landforms within the last 20,000 years, Australia's geological history dates back to the Precambrian, the oldest era of all, over 600 million years ago. The dominant geological processes have been sedimentation in shallow seas that once inundated parts of the present continent, interspersed with long periods of erosion.

Australian fossils are among the oldest on Earth, revealing some algae and soft-bodied invertebrates dating from 3 billion years ago. These indicate that Australia was once joined to South America, Africa, India, and Antarctica to form the southern part of a supercontinent called Gondwanaland. This great landmass began to split and drift apart some 85 to 100 million years ago. The plate carrying Australia is still drifting northward by about 2³/₄ inches (7 centimeters) per year, having shifted the continent from subpolar latitudes where rain forest was almost universal to tropical and arid latitudes where dry eucalyptus forests and Asian vegetation, better adapted to the changing climate, could invade and displace much of the rain forest.

The Australian continent has remained separate for the past 40 million years, during which its distinctive flora and fauna evolved in isolation. Fossils of mammals are scarce but reveal giant wombats; goannas, a type of lizard; kangaroos; and mihirungs, flightless birds standing 10 feet (3 meters) high, the largest that ever lived on Earth. Rich sources of Australian fossils include the Gogo formation of Western Australia, where the internal anatomy of ancient fish can be studied; and the Riversleigh deposit in North Queensland, where giant pythons, carniverous kangaroos, and horned turtles have been discovered.

Parts of the Central Lowlands drain sluggishly into the ocean along the Murray River and its tributaries. Most of the water dissipates and evaporates in such dry saline depressions as Lakes Eyre, Torrens, and Gairdner. Underlying these lowlands are the largest artesian basins in the world, from which bore water is pumped to sustain grazing animals in the arid zone. Representative caves include the intricate dripstone at Jenolan, New South Wales; the fossil bones at Mammoth Cave, Western Australia; and the flint quarrying and aboriginal rock paintings, 20,000 years old, at Koonalda Cave, 250 feet (75 meters) below the Nullarbor Plain. The highest waterfall in Australia is Wollomombi, at 1,100 feet (335 meters), in northern New South Wales.

The Australian coastline extends for 22,826 miles (36,734 kilometers), including Tasmania, which has 1,990 miles (3,200 kilometers) of coastline. Warm, shallow tropical seas connect the northern coasts with Indonesia. More typical of the southern coasts are drowned river valleys (where rising sea levels followed the melting of polar ice) and alternations of cliffed headlands and sandy beaches. Huge sea stacks—jagged rocks—called the Twelve Apostles line the Victoria coast near Port Campbell.

The Great Barrier Reef is a spectacular ribbon of reefs and islands extending for 1,240 miles (2,000 kilometers) along the Queensland coast. Its pools, lagoons, and grottoes display the most complex diversity of marine life in the world. It teems with 10,000 species of sponge, 350 species of coral, 4,000 species of mollusk, and 1,200 species of fish. The reef originated about 18 million years ago when coral polyps began to colonize the subsiding continental shelf. As the lowermost polyps die, their skeletons fuse into a massive limestone foundation on which new coral grows. Coral survives only in shallow, moving water where sunlight can reach the algae on which it feeds, in seas never colder than 64°F (18° C). As the sea level rose, so did the coral reefs, until there were 2,100 reefs forming the outer barrier. Another 540 continental islands (fragments of the coast) have their own fringing reefs. Only four shipping passages connect the mainland to the Coral Sea. The Hydrographers Passage alone is navigable by large vessels. Near Cairns, the reef has been degenerating since the 1960s, when the voracious crown of thorns starfish destroyed as much as 80 percent of the living coral. Since 1976, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has had responsibility for reef management. (See also Great Barrier Reef.)

Climate

For so large an area, Australia experiences a relatively small variation in climate. The landmass extends over only 33° of latitude, one third of which lies within the tropics. Its generally low, flat topography lacks the mountain ranges that diversify climatic regimes elsewhere. Summer temperatures hover around 84° F (29° C) in the north and 64° F (18° C) in the south, compared with winter temperatures of 75° F (24° C) and 50° F (10° C). Cloncurry, Queensland, claims the highest temperature ever recorded, 127° F (52.7° C) in 1889, but Marble Bar, Western Australia, set the heat wave record by surpassing 100° F (37.8° C) on 170 consecutive days in 1923–24. The lowest temperature, –3° F (–23° C) was recorded at Charlotte Pass near Mount Kosciusko.

As an island continent, Australia displays major contrasts between its interior continental climates (with large temperature ranges and erratic rainfall) and its coastal maritime climates (with small temperature ranges and more reliable rainfall). Of all the continents, only Antarctica receives less precipitation than Australia—an annual average of 16¹/₂ inches (42 centimeters). Periodic droughts, flooding, heat, and aridity are constant threats. Dry conditions create the potential for disastrous fires, such as those that charred thousands of acres and destroyed many homes in the vicinity of Sydney early in 1994. Almost all of northern Australia endures heat discomfort for over 150 days a year. The tropical seas along the coast offer little relief from the heat.

Very different wind belts cross northern, central, and southern Australia. Humid easterlies blow off the Pacific Ocean across the tropical north, making the coastal rain forests of Tully, Queensland, the wettest place in Australia; they receive an average of 159 inches (405 centimeters) per year. These summer winds are augmented by monsoonal westerlies which blow out of Indonesia into Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, and the Kimberleys, Western Australia, and by destructive tropical cyclones (or hurricanes) off the Coral Sea and Gulf of Carpentaria. Northern Australians refer to summer as “the wet” and to winter as “the dry.”

Across the center of Australia move the subtropical anticyclones, from west to east. These cells of high pressure bring clear skies, summer heat, and almost no rain to the desert core of the continent. Southern Australia extends into the belt of westerlies that encircle the Earth around 40° S. latitude: the “roaring forties.” These bring cloudy cold fronts (cyclones) twice weekly to Tasmania and Victoria during the winter, when rainfall is concentrated. Perth enjoys a classic mild Mediterranean-like climate, with its cool, moist winter and warm, rainless summer. Australia's erratic weather has been attributed to the El Niño Southern Oscillation effect. Because of this effect, when unusually warm water gathers off the Pacific coast of South America, it disrupts the usual climatic rhythms of atmospheric pressure on the opposite side of the Pacific. Thus, every five years or so, rainfall due in Australia falls instead in the central Pacific, to be followed a few years later by an equally perturbing inundation of usually dry areas.

Climate does change. The last Ice Age ended only 10,000 years ago. Today, despite scientific skepticism, many Australians are concerned that rapid global warming caused by the ‘greenhouse effect' may ruin agriculture and flood coastal cities (see Greenhouse Effect).

Conservationists advocate the reintroduction of trees and deep-rooted perennials, the preservation of bushland, the use of more native predators instead of pesticides (and biological control by fungi and insects rather than herbicides), the diversification and scaling down of the farming-forestry system, and a more self-sufficient, less urban population.

Plant Life

Although only a dozen plant families are unique to Australia, there are 530 unique genera and many unique species within these genera. As the Australian fragment of prehistoric Gondwanaland drifted north, its ancient flora became the basis for the present plant systems. Increasing aridity modified this vegetation, giving much of it hardened, pointed leaves of reduced size—a condition called scleromorphy.

Australia's native vegetation is divisible into seven types. The first type of vegetation consists of remnants of Gondwanan rain forests, with primitive flowering plants, palms, and laurels. These occur where high rainfall and high temperatures coincide with fertile, often volcanic soils, mainly in coastal north Queensland. In climax rain forests, three layers of trees appear, entangled with shrubs, lianas, and epiphytes. Closest to original Gondwanan conditions are the temperate rain forests of Tasmania, dominated by the myrtle beech and swathed in tree-ferns and mosses—called moss forests.

The second type of vegetation, communities dominated by the tall, straggly eucalyptus trees, is the most ubiquitous, forming a wide, concentric band around the desert core. Of the 500 species, two or three typically form a mosaic in one locality and intermingle with other plant associations. Eucalyptus trees are classified according to their bark types—hence the names stringybark, ironbark, bloodwood, and smoothbark (the gums that shed their outer bark annually). The most widespread is the river red gum. Mallee eucalypts survive in semiarid regions by growing multiple stems (lignotubers) from a common rootstock. The world's tallest flowering plant is a southern eucalyptus, the mountain ash. Its height can exceed 325 feet (100 meters). Building timbers are obtained in Victoria from alpine ash and mountain ash, in New South Wales and Queensland from blackbutt, spotted gum, bluegum, and ironbark, and in Western Australia from jarrah and karri, another type of eucalypt.

A third type of plant community is dominated by wattles (the genus Acacia of the Mimosa family) and advances beyond the last eucalyptus trees into the desert. Although more than 900 species are known, vast regions are dominated by just a few, including brigalow, mulga, and gidgee. Their tannin-rich bark is used in tanning leather. One of the less attractive of the varieties of acacia is the mulga. This small tree grows on thousands of square miles of arid inland Australia. The slang term “out in the mulga” refers to the distant outback areas. Aborigines had a number of uses for this tree. Its wood provided a slow-burning fuel for cooking fires, and it was also used to make spear blades.

The golden wattle is the acacia most familiar to natives. It is the floral symbol of Australia. There is even a Wattle Day, which may be celebrated on August 1 or September 1. Eucalyptus or acacia trees are dominant over 75 percent of the continent.

Three other types of vegetation are found over smaller areas. Communities dominated by casuarinas (and Allocasuarina species, including she-oaks) occupy semiarid niches between eucalyptus and acacia woodlands. Native conifers command no large areas as they do in the Northern Hemisphere, although white cypress pine grows widely on infertile soils. Pioneer builders were gratified to discover that it withstands drought, fire, and termites. Salt-tolerant shrublands devoid of trees are found mainly along the southern edges of the arid core. Mallee, saltbush, and bluebush are common, and Banksia and Grevillea are of local importance. Finally, grasslands occur where rainfall is insufficient for larger plants. Summer-growing species tend to be more northerly and winter-growing species more southerly. Hummock grasslands (including spinifex) spread across the dunes, sandy plains, and rocky ranges of the Western Plateau.

Minor coastal plant communities include salt marsh, seagrass, and mangroves. Alpine herb fields, often flattened by the wind, are dotted with sphagnum moss bogs. Weeds introduced from outside Australia, such as wild turnip and hoary cress, compete with crops. Lantana, blackberries, bracken fern, and Paterson's curse overrun pastures. Cape tulip and Saint-John's-wort can poison livestock or taint food. Algae block drainage and smother plants. Only 5.3 percent of Australia's 2,966,200 square miles (7,682,300 square kilometers) is covered in forest. Of that, 75 percent is in public domain. Forest plantations account for another 3,759 square miles (9,737 square kilometers), 69 percent of them under California radiata pine. Fine specimens of Australian flora can be seen in the National Botanic Gardens in Canberra, the Royal Botanic Gardens of Sydney and Melbourne, and Kings Park in Perth.

Animal Life

Native to Australia are 250 species of mammals (half of them pouched marsupials); 750 species of birds; more than 500 species of reptiles and amphibians, including 150 species of snakes; 22,000 species of fish, but only 150 of them freshwater; 65,000 known insect species; and 1,500 species of spiders. The continent is world-famous for these zoological curiosities. It became a veritable Noah's ark for monotremes, which include the platypus, and marsupials, saved from competition with carnivores and herbivores and free to evolve uniquely, when Australia split from Gondwanaland between 45 and 70 million years ago. By contrast, other animals drifted free with South America and Africa but became extinct when those continents encountered Northern Hemisphere landmasses that were home to predators.

When Australia drifted closer to Asia 20 million years ago, Asian animal immigrants reached northern Australia across shallow continental shelves. Bats and rodents island-hopped. The dingo, a type of wild dog, came with migrating aborigines or Asian fishermen 5,000 years ago. Other creatures used the broad land bridges which surfaced when the expansion of the ice caps resulted in lowered sea levels, linking the Australian mainland with New Guinea and Tasmania. Marine animals dispersed easily across the entire tropical and subtropical Indian and Pacific oceans. Wallace's line, drawn in 1868 between the Indonesian islands of Bali and Lombok, marked the proximal separation of Australasian and Oriental faunas.

The present Australian fauna thus contains three main elements—those uniquely Australian (like the monotremes and lyrebirds), those of Gondwanan origin with affinities to other continents (some marsupials, the emu and cassawary, geckos, side-necked tortoises, most frogs, lungfish, and barramundis), and those which flew or floated on drifting vegetation from Asia within the last 30 million years (rodents, lizards, insects, birds, bats, and snakes), still comfortably acclimatized in tropical northern Australia.

The monotremes, an egg-laying order of mammals, include only the platypus and two species of echidnas, or spiny anteaters. Platypuses are found nowhere else in the world, not even in fossil form. Echidnas are found also in New Guinea. The platypus uses its webbed feet and broad, sensitive bill to nuzzle food from the bottoms of coastal creeks from northern Queensland to South Australia. The bill has a unique sensing device that detects changes in electrical fields. The platypus is a skilled swimmer and can remain underwater for up to five minutes at a time. It spends only a few hours of each day in the water. The males have a poisonous spur on each hind leg. Although the poison is not fatal to humans, it can cause agonizing pain.

The shy echidna uses its snout to probe for termites and insects, which adhere to the saliva on its tongue. It settles into the ground, spikes erect, when disturbed. The heavily armored echidna has small spines on the back of its head and long spines on the upper surface and sides of its body. Its clawed limbs are short and powerful. The male has a retractable spur on each hind limb that releases a weak poison. It is from this that the animal gets its name—echidna is derived from a Greek word for viper. The echidna is toothless but has a tongue up to 12 inches (30 centimeters) long, the sticky surface of which is used for catching ants.

For a study in sheer animal cunning it would be difficult to surpass the dingo, also known by the aboriginal name warrigal. It is an animal very similar in appearance to the domestic dog. It probably arrived from mainland Asia about 5,000 years ago, along with an immigration of aborigines. The dingo is a fairly large canine, growing to about 4 feet (1.2 meters) long, including its 12-inch tail. The dingo has long been the killer of the outback. It hunts kangaroos, wallabies, rabbits, and ground birds—with a special fondness for the echidna. It also runs down and kills sheep and cattle. Like wolves, these animals hunt alone or in packs. Its ferocity resulted in the elimination of the Tasmanian devil and the Tasmanian wolf from mainland Australia. The dingo carries a bounty on its head, and Queensland once erected a 3,000-mile (4,800-kilometer) fence to keep the animal out.

Environmental Concerns

Australian aborigines lived for millennia in respectful harmony with the land. Only during the time of European settlement have mechanized farming, deforestation, and the dispersal of exotic species of flora and fauna created environmental degradation. Extinction has been the fate of 18 species of native birds and mammals. Among them are the Tasmanian tiger, certain bandicoots and wallabies, and the hopping mouse.

At least 97 vascular plant species have disappeared. Another 3,300 species (17 percent of the total) are considered rare or threatened, and another 1,000 are considered endangered or vulnerable.

Sixty percent of all soils now require treatment for erosion, compaction, acidification, or salinity. The Australian Conservation Foundation, created in 1966, became a powerful lobby by bringing nature conservation into the public arena. During the 1970s, called the decade of the environment, the federal government began requiring environmental effects statements before resource exploitation could be approved. The government passed the Australian Heritage Commission Act in 1975. This created a register of the National Estate for the protection of both the natural and cultural heritage.

Previously conservation in Australia was a matter left mostly to the states. Belated federal involvement had to fall back on constitutional prerogatives in external affairs, mainly by nominating crucial environments for World heritage designation by UNESCO.

Migrants and Population

Throughout the 19th century, North America was the main destination for migrants from Europe. Luring them to Australia required strong incentives and financial assistance.

Immigration policy was aimed at occupying—and then defending—a seemingly empty continent and developing its resources, preferably through family migration. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a British official who spearheaded colonization of the continent, realized that sole reliance on the transportation of convicts could not produce a stable, civil society. He tried using the proceeds of land sales to finance the migration of free settlers, notably in the founding of South Australia in 1836. The Australian colonies eventually paid the fares of some 700,000 British migrants between 1831 and 1900. Since then, federal programs have controlled the types, numbers, and skills of subsidized migrants, as economic conditions permitted.

The continuous influx of largely male immigrants during the past two centuries has distorted the Australian population. The ratio of males to females stood at 121 to 100 in 1881 and remained at 102 to 100 during the 1950s and 1960s, while postwar immigration policies were in full force. Before 1870, the majority of residents were British-born; since 1870, the majority have been Australian-born. Average life expectancy now stands at 80 years for females and 74 years for males. For aborigines, it is 64 for females and 56 years for males.

Seventy-two percent of all Australian householders now own or are purchasing their own dwellings, compared with 40 percent in 1947. Three fourths of all homes are separate houses. Entrenched government policies favoring home ownership have kept welfare, or public, housing at 5 percent of the total. During the 1980s, new policies to encourage urban consolidation saw many inner-city single-family residences replaced by townhouses and row houses.

To exclude cheap Asian labor and to avert racial conflict, the “white Australia” policy was embodied officially in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. It applied until 1973. Immigration in Australia today is no longer restricted by race or nationality, but only by employability and skills. The only refugees who have received financial assistance since 1947 have been Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany, Eastern Europeans and Asians fleeing from Communist regimes, and persons displaced by war. During the 1950s and 1960s, migration from Britain was eclipsed by migration from Southern Europe, especially from Italy, Greece, Croatia, and Malta. During the 1970s and 1980s, migrants from Asia, notably Chinese and Vietnamese, accounted for up to 35 percent of the total. The restriction of government assistance to only British migrants ended in the 1950s. Australians abandoned the old ideal of perpetuating an exclusively British heritage by establishing a federal Office of Multicultural Affairs in 1987. Social cohesion was to be attained, not through the previous policy of assimilation, but by tolerating ethnic differences within an accepted legal code. Now only New Zealanders are granted unrestricted entry.

Of the 17.5 million Australians, four million identify themselves in some way with an ethnic group, though the other 75 percent of the population do not. Two million were born in a non-English-speaking country and speak its language. Official sources no longer categorize people by race or ethnicity, but refer simply to NESB, or non-English-speaking background, Australians. These form 100 distinctive groups with 4,000 ethnic organizations.

Despite the background diversity of five million postwar immigrants, surprisingly few social conflicts have erupted on the continent. Only the Jewish and Greek Orthodox communities have established their own school systems. Such government initiatives as a telephone interpreting service (operating since 1973) and the multilingual Special Broadcasting Service (since 1977) made migrants welcome in Australia. Public debate continues on the issues of Asian migration, sustainable levels of development, and zero population growth.

Aborigines

Of the 250,000 indigenous people, only a fourth are pure aborigines still pursuing the traditional seminomadic life of hunter-gatherers and following a seasonal, cyclical calendar. Another fourth live in big cities. The remainder live in rural areas. Many are still devoted to notions of kinship and walkabout—the desire to revisit the sacred sites.

Aborigines hold inalienable freehold title to 34 percent of the Northern Territory, including the great Arnhem Land Reserve created in 1931. They comprise 22 percent of the Northern Territory population. Other aboriginal concentrations are found in the Kimberleys in Western Australia and Cape York Peninsula in Queensland. Since 1988, when the European bicentenary of Australia was celebrated, many aborigines have rejected the anthropological term aborigine. Instead, they refer to themselves in their own languages: Koorie (Our People) in the southern and eastern states, Yolngu in Northern Territory, Arangu in central Australia, Nyunga in Western Australia, and Nungga in South Australia.

Aboriginal oral history traces their origins to ancestral beings such as the Rainbow Serpent. These spirits moved across the land before the Pleistocene ice ages, two million years ago, leaving “dreaming tracks” along which nomads still travel to distant ceremonial gatherings. By contrast, scientists using radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating techniques believe that the aborigines canoed to Australia in successive waves from Southeast Asia some 30,000 to 50,000 years before the present, when sea levels were lower and when Homo sapiens was replacing the Neanderthals in Europe. A female skull, 30,000 years old, was found in Lake Mungo, New South Wales.

Aboriginal religion is deeply involved with the land, the mother of all living things to which the spirit returns for rebirth following death. Aborigines do not own the land: it owns them. They are its custodians, believing that the ancestral beings of the Dreamtime, or Dreaming, created plants, animals, people, and places. Some of these are sacred to men, others sacred to women—who have religious autonomy in aboriginal society—still others sacred to both. The exact place of birth determines a person's position within a clan or kinship group and provides a secret personal name.

Traditionally, aboriginal education required separate ceremonies, or rites of passage, at each stage of the life cycle for males and females. A group's history was passed on through song cycles recounting the creation myths and the cautionary tales. At the physically painful initiation into adulthood, sacred secrets were passed down. Only initiates could inherit land, sing certain songs, or paint certain images. Group territorial boundaries were known and respected without recourse to fences or permanent housing. Wars over property were therefore unnecessary. There were 230 distinct aboriginal languages and 500 dialects, half of them now extinct.

Nomads had few material possessions and built temporary shelters from bark and brush (gunyahs or mia mias). They wore little clothing in hot areas but used marsupial-skin cloaks in colder areas. In thick forests, their hunting weapons were killer sticks and specialized spears. On the open plains, they hunted with woomeras (hooked spear-throwers) and boomerangs, firing the grasslands to drive game animals in their direction. Fishing required string nets, stone traps, and tined spears. When game was scarce during droughts, tribal aborigines depended on the women's work with digging sticks to supply yams, witchetty grubs, and honey ants. Edible native plants included epacrids (a family of small trees and shrubs), geebungs, and lillypilly. Traditional aborigines may have had a sparse material culture, but they gloried in a richly imaginative spiritual life. Their art, their dances—including the festive corroboree—and their music were intimately linked with this spiritual life and the land which embodied it. “Songlines” of communication carried ideas and images across the continent. Their art was both symbolic and educational, from tree-bark paintings of animals and fish—with depictions of the placement of vital organs to illustrate spear targets—to rock engravings, hard sand sculptures, and petroglyphs (rock paintings) of Mimi, a clan of spirit beings. The oldest petroglyphs in the world were created 43,000 years ago in the Olary region of South Australia.

European contact with the aborigines, until quite recently, has been a painful and tragic tale of incomprehension and rapacity. The earliest British settlers did not recognize aboriginal rights to the land, but regarded it as a terra nullius—a land unoccupied and unclaimed by prior inhabitants. They saw aborigines as uncivilized relics of the Stone Age, lacking agriculture, permanent habitations, written languages, or the use of metal. Many groups were physically or culturally exterminated, uprooted from land which held for them sacred, ceremonial, or hunting significance. Massacres, food poisoning, rape, and punitive expeditions were employed.

By 1930, only 67,000 aborigines remained in Australia, and there was fear of complete genocide. Christian missions were largely unsuccessful except in furthering segregation. Protection acts were passed in all states between 1860 and 1911, and many reserves were set aside for the “use and benefit” of aborigines, typically in remote, isolated, arid areas. Aborigines were eventually granted Australian citizenship by the government in 1967, and they were granted the right to vote in 1984.

In 1976, the Aboriginal Land Rights Act of the Northern Territory gave ownership of its reserves to the aborigines, and permitted them, as traditional owners, to claim other vacant public land—up to 30 percent of the entire territory. Aboriginal groups or communities now own 11 percent of Australia's land, despite fierce opposition from the governments of Queensland and Western Australia, and from the mining companies.

Women

Australian society was long characterized by the concerns of dominant patriarchy, and the rights of women were often subject to discrimination. Feminist reforms have almost as long a history as this discrimination. In 1902, Australia granted women the right to vote in national elections and the right to stand for Parliament—just a decade after New Zealand passed similar legislation and 18 years before women in the United States could vote. Women could vote in all state elections by 1909. One setback was depression-era legislation that resulted in the dismissal of 220 married female teachers in New South Wales in 1932. The law was repealed in 1947.

The Country Women's Association, founded in 1922 as a nonsectarian, nonpolitical organization to alleviate the hardships of rural life for women and children, brought rest rooms, rest homes, and baby health centers to hundreds of country towns. Equal-opportunity legislation was promoted by two parliamentary watchdog groups, the Australian Federation of Women Voters, from 1921, and the Women's Electoral Lobby, from 1972. Equal pay for women was legislated in 1974, but immigrant women who spoke no English remained an exploited group. The 1975 Family Law Act resulted in raising the divorce rate to one in every three marriages.

Welfare

Australia has 40,000 welfare organizations which complement the government's formal provision of social services. They include the Red Cross Society, the Smith Family (established in Sydney in 1922 for the needy), the Salvation Army (1881), the St. Vincent de Paul Society (Roman Catholic), and the Brotherhood of St. Lawrence (Anglican). Underprivileged children have enjoyed free seaside holidays with Barnardo Australia since 1921. St. John Ambulance teaches first aid and provides voluntary paramedic services at sporting and other public events. LifeLine is a telephone emergency service, founded in Sydney in 1963. It is now international in scope. Another 3,000 organizations provide social, recreational, and spiritual programs for the youth of Australia. In 1908, just one year after Robert Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts in England, they were established in Australia. Of the international networks, the largest are the YMCA, the YWCA, and the Youth Hostels Association, with some 100 hostels throughout the nation and no age limit on membership.

Architecture and Urban Design

Apart from some striking late 20th-century structures, Australian architecture is largely derivative. It makes use of diverse styles, copied mainly from Europe and North America. Since there have been no powerful patrons and few specifically designed city plans, large-scale civic precincts and housing projects are the exception. Most building has been small-scale and private. Canberra, the exhaustively planned national capital, is the only monumental garden city in Australia. Its designer, the Chicago architect Walter Burley Griffin, introduced Frank Lloyd Wright's design precepts to Australia.

A colonial Georgian style was imported from Britain before 1840. It produced simple buildings of fine proportions to which shady eaves, shutters, and verandas were added in deference to the dry Australian heat. Georgian was superseded by about 1850 by ornate, exuberant Victorian styles. These monuments to the British Empire and the ostentatious new wealth from gold and sheep ranching included Gothic churches, extravaganzas like the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney, and dignified public buildings.

A more picturesque, domestically comfortable Federation style, from the 1890s, incorporated elements of the English Arts and Crafts Movement and the California bungalow, which set the sprawling suburban fashion of large lots and single-story cottages. Perhaps the most distinctively Australian structure to emerge was the Queensland high-set house (or Queensland elevated), a bungalow homestead raised on stilts or stumps for tropical ventilation. By 1950, Australian architecture was afflicted with what Robin Boyd dubbed Austerica, meaning a shoddy amalgam of “Australia, America, austerity, and hysteria.”

After 1970, a more humane architecture emerged, more conservative of energy and the cultural heritage. The Builders' Labourers Federation, led by Jack Mundy, staged “green bans” to stop the demolition of important structures or encroachment on unique environments. Office, industrial, apartment, and institutional buildings followed international trends, usually a few years behind the wave. One Australian building did capture the world's imagination—Jørn Utzon's soaring Sydney Opera House, designed and built from 1957 to 1973.

Military surveyors laid out Australia's first town plans in conventional grid patterns. Melbourne, Perth, and Adelaide are the chief examples. William Light's parkland towns in South Australia, designed in 1836–38, were early experiments with an encircling greenbelt. Urban development thrived in an unregulated environment until the coordination of land uses and public works was eventually attempted by state governments after World War II. These statutory land-use plans imitated British precedents but borrowed zoning procedures from the United States. Federal government involvement was limited by the constitution until 1945, when an agreement between the Commonwealth and the states on funding public housing projects required metropolis-wide planning schemes. Sydney's was the first, in 1947, and Brisbane's the last, in 1964. Since 1980, urban planning has stressed community participation, with planning appeals and negotiated incentives directed to a state minister.

Literature

In the beginning, Australia's colonial writers simply recorded their impressions of a strange continent for the benefit of a curious British public. Watkin Tench published his journal of the First Fleet and the first European settlement at Sydney. James Hardy Vaux recorded convict slang in his memoirs of the penal days. The first Australian ballads were convict songs and stories, often based on Irish originals. They have survived in the folksong repertories played by bush bands. Stylish travel accounts were also published by such inland explorers as Charles Sturt, who sailed down the Murray River; Edward John Eyre, who crossed the Nullarbor Plain; and Ernest Giles, the first nonnative to behold Ayers Rock.

The first works of fiction were guidebook novels, some romantic, others realistic, mainly intended to lure immigrants to Australia. The lyrics of Charles Harpur, praising the landscape in the manner of William Wordsworth, were the first important Australian poems, soon followed by those of Henry Kendall. The first major work of fiction was Henry Kingsley's ‘The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn' (1859), one of many tales of pioneering life. Another was Rolf Boldrewood's ‘Robbery Under Arms' (1888), extolling the bushranger (highwayman) and the gold miner. Marcus Clarke's ‘His Natural Life' (1874) best conveyed the convict life. Outback comedy was Steele Rudd's speciality in ‘On Our Selection' (1899). Much of this writing was antiauthoritarian or expressed a stoic acceptance of fate.

During the last decades of the 19th century, Australian writers began to shed the British heritage. They espoused a nationalism that led to political independence and federation in 1901. Their catalyst was The Bulletin, a radical, racist, influential, widely read Sydney journal of politics and literature. It was founded in 1880 by John Haynes. J.F. Archibald, its editor, encouraged his authors to seek their inspiration in the bush, unsettled or only sparsely settled country districts. Such authors included Henry Lawson, the leading bush balladist and the first writer depicted on an Australian banknote; A.B. (Banjo) Paterson, author of ‘The Man from Snowy River' (1895) and the words for “Waltzing Matilda” (about 1895); Joseph Furphy, who wrote ‘Such is Life' (1903); Miles Franklin, author of ‘My Brilliant Career' (1901), a very popular film version of which was made in 1978; Christopher Brennan; Shaw Neilson; Bernard O'Dowd; and Mary Gilmore. Poems memorized by generations of Australian schoolchildren date from this period, including Dorothea Mackellar's patriotic ‘My Country' (1908).

Between the two world wars, Australian writing saw an increasing output of novels. Some were historical sagas of pioneering, but others tackled more contemporary concerns—the 1930s Depression, urban life, and black-white sexual relations. A hedonistic Sydney circle around Norman Lindsay produced many exotic works, including Lindsay's ‘The Magic Pudding' (1918), Australia's outstanding children's classic. Individualists who enlarged Lindsay's scope included the poets Kenneth Slessor, James McAuley, and Robert FitzGerald. Some writers left Australia for Europe and Great Britain. Among them were Christina Stead, Martin Boyd, and Henry Handel Richardson (the pen name of Ethel Florence Robertson).

After World War II there was an upsurge of modernism, exemplified in the poetry of A.D. Hope, Judith Wright, and Les Murray. Patrick White returned from exile in Britain to become the first Australian to win the Nobel prize for Literature, in 1973. His novels include ‘The Tree of Man' (1955), ‘Voss' (1957), and ‘The Eye of the Storm' (1973).

The 1950s and 1960s so hastened the emigration of creative artists and scientists that A.A. Phillips called Australia's deference to foreign achievement its “cultural cringe.” Yet a less self-righteously parochial writing emerged from the quest for national identity. Aboriginal authors, including the poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and the novelist Mudrooroo Narogin, began contributing to a less prejudiced, less guilt-laden literature of race relations.

The British Booker Prize was won by novelists Thomas Keneally (1982) and Peter Cary (1988). Distinguished histories of Australia were written by Manning Clark and Robert Hughes. Very Australian autobiographies came from Hal Porter, Bernard Smith, Jack Lindsay, Patrick White, Clive James, and Jill Ker Conway.

Foreign authors came to envy the government's support for writers, through the Commonwealth Literary Fund from 1908, and by its successor, the Literature Board of the Arts Council, from 1973. A public lending-rights scheme was introduced in 1975, whereby libraries paid 80 cents to the author and 20 cents to the publisher for the use of their books. The main literary journals are Southerly, founded in 1939, Meanjin (1940), Overland (1954), Quadrant (1956), and Scripsi (1981).

Graphic Arts

Initially, taste and style in the graphic arts were largely imported from Europe, then from the United States after World War II. Australia's unique environment and cultural experience found their artistic expression only gradually, as green, nostalgic, pseudo-English landscapes were replaced with the harsh, brown reality of deserts and eucalyptus forests. S.T. Gill's watercolors of the gold rushes of the 1850s opened the eyes of settlers to the authentic Australian landscape, and made Melbourne the leading art center. There the Heidelberg School of impressionists was founded in the 1880s by Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton, and Charles Condor. This was the first truly Australian school of painting. Its masterpieces make the Victorian National Gallery Australia's finest.

Twentieth-century Australian painting has contributed to every avant-garde movement. Distinctively Australian idioms have been created by Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, John Olsen, and Brett Whitely. Outside the mainstream were William Dobell; Russell Drysdale, of the empty red landscapes and lonely, surreal figures; and Fred Williams. Important stimuli for the art world were several well-endowed prizes—the Archibald Prize for portraiture, the Wynne Prize for landscape painting, the Blake Prize for religious art, the Sulman Prize, and the Moet Chandon Art Fellowship. The Australian National Gallery opened in Canberra in 1982, and Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art in 1991.

Australia's finest sculpture adorns its war memorials, most notably Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance and Sydney's Anzac Memorial. One sculptor, Clement Meadmore, gained his reputation as an expatriate. Making his headquarters in New York City in 1963, he readily found world markets for his enormous steel fabrications.

Early works in Australian sculpture date from the 1830s and include some very fine work on a famous bridge in Tasmania. Most of the early artists expressed themselves in statues of notables from early local history. Thomas Woolner's statue of Capt. James Cook, still standing in Sydney's Hyde Park, is an example. William Stanford received a pardon from a jail sentence in 1870 and carved the bluestone fountain in Melbourne.

During the period from the 1890s to 1930, Sir Bertram MacKennal became the first major name in sculpture. The Cenotaph and the Shakespeare Memorial in Sydney are his best-known pieces. MacKennal brought sculpture to the public's attention and helped pave the way for Rayner Hoff, who won the international Prix de Rome in 1922. Hoff designed and carved the figures, some of them 16 feet (5 meters) high, on the Anzac War Memorial in Sydney and the South Australian War Memorial in Adelaide.

Among the moderns, Lyndon Dadswell and Thomas Bass probably have more public sculptures than any other native artists. Women have been among Australia's leading sculptors, including Norma Redpath, Margel Hinder, and Margaret Priest. Gerald Lewis, Robert Klippel, and Lenton Parr are also notable.

Australia has also produced a host of inimitable, irreverent, sardonic political cartoonists. Phil May, Norman Lindsay, and David Low worked for The Bulletin and Stan Cross and George Finey for Smith's Weekly. The newspaper editorial pages employed the idiosyncratic George Molnar, Bruce Petty, Michael Leunig, and Pat Oliphant, a Pulitzer prizewinning American cartoonist who emigrated from Australia in 1964.

Music

In colonial times, the customary domestic musical entertainments were choral singing, instrumental ensembles, and harmonizing with the drawing-room piano. Outings took people to amateur concerts in public halls and to hear military bands in the parks. University courses for professional musicians were first offered in Adelaide in 1885 and in Melbourne in 1891. Music societies lasted until recorded music universalized passive listening.

The Victoria Orchestra was Australia's first, performing during 1888–91. An amateur Melbourne Symphony Orchestra was assembled in 1906 and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 1915. Also in 1915, a Belgian immigrant named Henri Verbrugghen arrived in Sydney to become founding director of the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music. This was a significant step by a state government in providing official help to the arts. State orchestras were established in the 1920s, with the Australian Broadcasting Commission as impresario, a role only relinquished in the last years of the 20th century. In 1946, Musica Viva began sponsoring chamber-music concerts. Like Percy Grainger and Peggy Glanville-Hicks, many Australian composers became expatriates, leaving their homeland for Europe and North America.

Contemporary classical composers who express Australian themes while experimenting with Asian imagery are Peter Sculthorpe and Richard Meale. The Australian Opera was established in 1970, with the government providing 25 percent of its budget. Australia has produced a surprising number of world-class operatic and concert-hall performers, among them Nellie Melba, Florence Austral, and Joan Sutherland, as well as the operatic conductors Charles Mackerras and Richard Bonynge.

Traditional folk music is favored in cities, whereas rural areas prefer American-style country music. Rock and pop music, introduced in the 1950s, monopolize the local scene. Australian exports have included Men at Work, Air Supply, Midnight Oil, and Olivia Newton-John. Classical ballet, with 2,500 schools, is the most widely appreciated dance form in Australia. The Australian Ballet was formed in 1962.

Theater

The first play performed in Australia, with a convict cast in 1789, was George Farquhar's ‘The Recruiting Officer'. Six years after this performance, a convict named Robert Sidaway opened Australia's first licensed theater. He had been transported to the colony from England for stealing, but in 1794 he was granted an absolute pardon. In 1796 he built a playhouse in Bell Row, now Bligh Street, in the heart of Sydney's business district. After about two years he was ordered to close it because Sydney's underclass routinely robbed the homes of those in the audience while they were at the theater. A second attempt at operating a theater was tried in 1800, but it soon met the same fate as the first.

Gold miners, pastoralists, and city workers found simple pleasure and relief from drudgery in vaudeville, burlesque, pantomime, domestic farce, and melodrama. Stock actors played bushrangers, diggers, sensible heroines, and credulous English “new chums,” or recent immigrants.

By the late 1820s theater was in the air again. Onto the scene came the prodigious Barnett Levey. He built a commercial complex including a large warehouse, a mill, the Royal Hotel, and eventually Sydney's first true commercial theater. Named the Theatre Royal, it opened on Oct. 5, 1833. Through this effort, theater became permanently established and respected in Australia.

Within a decade, full-time professional theaters were built in the main population centers. By 1840 actors and actresses were freely playing roles and doing management chores on the Sydney-Hobart-Adelaide circuit. The number of plays presented in a single season was remarkable. Sydney's Theatre Royal staged 50 works during 1835. London hits made their appearance on Australian stages as soon as they had played a hundred nights at the Surrey or Drury Lane theaters in London.

Local performers of more than adequate talent never seemed to be lacking in number. Eliza Winstanley O'Flaherty became the first native Australian actress to make a world reputation for herself and play in London and New York. Another major figure in the life of the theater was George Seth Coppin, an English actor who arrived in Sydney in 1843. There he acted in the Victoria Theatre's productions. This was a very attractive theater building that seated 1,900 people. It had a stage 100 feet (30 meters) deep and 47 feet (14 meters) wide. Coppin lived in Australia for 47 years. He made and lost several fortunes, built six theaters, and was the first local producer to import some of the world's great talents from overseas.

The nationwide expansion of theater came with the discovery of gold. The Australian gold-rush days began in 1851–52, bringing a massive increase in population and a great explosion of wealth, especially in the growing young cities. Of all the arts, theater shared most in the new wealth and in the excitement of the times. In Victorian towns such as Geelong, fine theaters were built to cater to the miners going to and from the goldfields. Miners showered popular players with gold nuggets. Serious drama seemed to take the fancy of the gold-seekers as much as circuses and other light entertainments did.

Visiting entrepreneurs and theatrical stars quickly became aware that there was money to be made in Australia. Good theater buildings were constructed in the major population centers, and productions of world standing became the rule rather than the exception. Many entrepreneurs, actors, and producers arrived for extended tours. Some settled permanently. This collection of new talent raised the standards of local theater considerably.

The already-famous Coppin backed the visit, in 1874, of the American actor James Cassius Williamson and his wife, actress Maggie Moore. With a comedy-drama of their own called ‘Struck Oil', the couple made a fortune in Australia and took the play on tour to other countries. Williamson's future became tied to Australia. In 1879, after seeing the special genius of Gilbert and Sullivan musicals, he negotiated the rights to perform these works in Australia. (See also Gilbert and Sullivan.)

The immediate and enormous success of Gilbert and Sullivan convinced Williamson of a fact so far unnoticed about the Australian population: a vast appetite for opera. He toured such world-class artists as Nellie Melba, Ada Crossley, Madame Albani, and Sarah Bernhardt in opera and drama. Grand opera, light opera, and comic opera became a regular staple right up to World War II. The Australian theater became very much a part of the world stage circuits.

In addition to Coppin and Williamson, other management talents came to the fore in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among them were Bland Holt, Harry Rikards (with his great chain of Tivoli vaudeville), and the Tait brothers, John and Nevin. After the death of Williamson in 1913, the Taits became the leading theatrical producers in Australia. They maintained a dominant position until the 1950s.

Ireland's nationalist Abbey Theatre in the early 20th century inspired the hope that an equally national Australian drama might emerge not long after federation. Louis Essen's Pioneer Players in Melbourne (192226) pursued that dream. So did Doris Fitton's Independent Theatre in Sydney (1930–77), where Sumner Locke Elliott's allegedly blasphemous ‘Rusty Bugles' premiered in 1948. Ray Lawler's ‘Summer of the Seventeenth Doll' (1955), a vernacular portrayal of aging cane-cutters shedding their illusions, brought local drama to maturity. It was staged by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, established in 1954 during the euphoria that followed the first visit to Australia by a reigning British monarch.

By the 1970s, a self-confident national drama had diversified into a score of radical, groundbreaking little theaters, well represented by women dramatists and black theater, including ‘The First Born' by aboriginal playwright Jack Davis of Perth. The most celebrated and popular contemporary Australian dramatist is David Williamson. His plays include ‘Don's Party' (1973), ‘Travelling North' (1980), and ‘Emerald City' (1987). His defection from Melbourne to Sydney unsettled many admirers, since Melbourne had long and legitimately claimed to be Australia's cultural trendsetter. Music-hall satirical comedy survived brilliantly in Roy Rene (as Mo McCackie) and Barry Humphries (as Dame Edna Everidge, the housewife megastar from Moonee Ponds). Humphries, as Dame Edna, played on stage in London, England, and appeared on television in the United States.

Motion Pictures

Australian filmmaking dates back to 1896, when two Frenchmen filmed the running of the Melbourne Cup, Australia's most prestigious horse race. Between 1903 and 1914, about 50 feature films had been made in Australia, and the film industry was firmly established.

In the 1920s overseas interests, mainly from the United States, gained control of the distribution of movies in Australia. The distributors of American films became the most potent force in the industry. Without access to a world market, the Australian film producer needed protection for survival. Until 1970, overseas groups controlled film distribution and cinema management. They screened American and British productions almost exclusively. A golden age dawned in 1970 to break this stranglehold: the federal government established the Australian Film Development Corporation—reconstituted in 1975 as the Australian Film Commission, championed and later chaired by Phillip Adams—to make its own documentaries and fund local features.

In 1973, the Australian Film and Television School was founded in Sydney. Its graduates include such directors as Peter Weir (‘Picnic at Hanging Rock', 1975; ‘Gallipoli', 1981); Fred Schepisi (‘The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith', 1978); Gillian Armstrong (‘My Brilliant Career', 1978, with Judy Davis); and Bruce Beresford (‘Breaker Morant', 1980). Worldwide box-office successes were scored by George Miller's ‘Mad Max' series (beginning with ‘Road Warrior', 1981, with Mel Gibson) and by Peter Faiman's ‘Crocodile Dundee' (1986, with Paul Hogan).

Sports

Recreation has been central to Australian culture ever since European migrants found no harsh winters to curtail year-long outdoor games. They had good reason to build their cities alongside coastal beaches. Water temperatures suitable for swimming last about seven months a year. Learn to Swim organizations are widespread, and most children can swim by the time they are 7 or 8. Australians introduced the crawl and the butterfly stroke in competitive swimming, and the continent has produced many world-class swimmers.

The surf, stretching 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) from just north of Brisbane on the east coast around the south to Perth on the west coast, broken only by the cliffs of the Nullarbor plateau. This has spawned a huge number of surfers. But sailing, boating, skin diving, and water skiing are nearly as popular. The Sydney-Hobart Yacht Race, held on Boxing Day—December 26—has become a blue-water classic attracting many international entries.

During the 19th century, intercolonial cricket and football matches helped evoke the sense of becoming a nation. Sporting successes put Australia on the world map, most notably during the 1950s, when the 1956 Olympics were held in Melbourne and Australia began scoring victories in Davis Cup tennis. To redress dismal failures in the 1976 Olympics, the Australian Institute of Sport was established in Canberra in 1981. Its goal is to nurture sporting excellence and promote fitness for everyone. The Summer Olympics were again held in Australia, in Sydney, in the year 2000.

Milestones in recreational development include the inauguration of Australian Rules Football in Melbourne in 1858, codified to exclude the violence of Rugby football; the popularization of the Australian crawl stroke in swimming (in about 1900); the 1983 capture of the America's Cup for yachting, beating an American crew for the first time since the race series began in 1851; and the introduction of surf life-saving at Sydney's Bondi and Manly beaches. World-champion Australian athletes, arguably the best ever in their sports, include cricketer Don Bradman, runner Herb Elliott, swimmer Dawn Fraser, and tennis player Rod Laver.

Sciences

Australian science began with amateur naturalists collecting, describing, and classifying the unique flora and fauna that so amazed the earliest European explorers. Capt. James Cook's first landfall in 1770 was named Botany Bay to celebrate the large number of new plants discovered there. Initial efforts to acclimatize useful plants and animals, including the familiar flowers and birds of Britain, were followed by efforts to eradicate pests and weeds from pioneer farmlands.

Key figures in agricultural research were William Farrer, whose development of rust-resistant strains of wheat helped launch a major export industry, and Hugh McKay, who designed a harvester that stripped, threshed, and winnowed grain. The focused research thrust of World War II saw major advances in biotechnology, information technology, radio astronomy, pharmacology, and medical research. Since then, commercial applications of scientific discoveries have lagged in the private sector, where overseas suppliers win contracts because local markets and investment are too small. To encourage scientific literacy for a postindustrial age, the Australian Research Council was established in 1988. Nobel prizewinners include Howard Florey, Macfarlane Burnet, and John Eccles, all in physiology or medicine.

Most scientific research is conducted by the universities, specialized agencies such as Telecom Australia, multinational corporations, and government departments. New technology parks have been established jointly by state governments and universities. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), begun in 1926 as the federal government's research agency, gradually enlarged its scope from the primary to the secondary industries. Its discovery of processes that made woolen textiles shrink-proof, mothproof, and permanently pressed saved the wool industry from the onslaught of artificial fibers after 1950. Its aeronautical, chemical, and standards laboratories underwrote Australian industry. CSIRO pioneered land-systems research in Northern Australia. Australia is one of the world's key astronomical centers, thanks to its political stability, clear dry air, and clear wide view of the southern skies. The ingenious Mills Cross radio telescopes originated in Australia. The CSIRO's radiophysics laboratory pioneered the use of the interferometer in 1946, while the 210-foot (64-meter) dish at Parkes, New South Wales, identified the first known quasars in 1960. One of the world's largest ensembles of mobile radio telescopes, the Australia Telescope, opened at Culgoora, New South Wales, in 1988. Optical astronomy is pursued at Mount Stromlo, near Canberra.

The Flying-Doctor Service

Australia's vast distances have always presented a problem to settlers. In the early years, one of the biggest worries of people in the outback was becoming ill. It was not until the appearance of a clergyman named John Flynn—Flynn of the Inland, as he was called—that some form of medical service became available to people in remote areas of the country.

In 1912 the Presbyterian church set up the Australian Inland Mission, of which Flynn spent most of his adult life as superintendent. He gave spiritual solace to inland settlers, but he soon realized that medical aid was also desperately needed. Settlers often died because they were too far from a doctor or medical assistance.

This was made clear to Flynn most forcefully when a ranch hand with a spear embedded in his chest was carried in a hammock slung between horses to Oodnadatta, 400 miles (640 kilometers) away. There he waited two weeks for a train to take him 600 miles (970 kilometers) to a hospital in Adelaide.

In 1928 Alfred Traeger invented the pedal-driven radio transmitter and receiver, which most homesteads could afford. He and Flynn traveled the country installing the two-way radios and showing settlers how to use them to call mission headquarters. In the same year the Australian Inland Mission established its first flying-doctor base at Cloncurry, Queensland. The first flying doctor was K. St. Vincent Welch.

Religion

Between the censuses of 1976 and 1986, the proportion of the Australian population professing Christianity fell from 79 percent to 73 percent. One fourth of the population had no religion or did not state a religion. The largest non-Christian groups, comprising another two percent of the total population, adhere to Islam (100,000), Buddhism (80,400), and Judaism (69,000). For the first 50 years of European settlement, the Church of England (Anglicans) had the hallmarks of an established church for the richer, ruling class. This included a monopoly of education.

The Roman Catholic church served poorer, often Irish communities. It supported the working class and later its political wing, the Australian Labor party. Both denominations now minister to all classes, but the Anglicans are in decline, claiming 24 percent of the Australian population. The Catholics, with 26 percent, are now more Italian than Irish. The international trend toward ecumenism has ended some feuds. The Australian Council of Churches was established in 1946, and many of the Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists coalesced into the Uniting Church in Australia in 1977.

Christian religious practice began in Australia on the first Sunday of February 1788, when the Reverend Richard Johnson, chaplain to the colony of New South Wales, conducted a service at what is now the intersection of Bligh and Hunter streets. Johnson also built the first church in the colony. The first service was held there on Aug. 25, 1793. The little building was destroyed by fire five years later.

Education

Australian children are required to attend school between the ages of 6 and 15 or 16. Ninety percent of them attend government-operated primary schools, but 30 percent attend nongovernment secondary schools. Government schools are usually coeducational, whereas the custom in private school has been single-sex. About 60 percent of all pupils complete high school. But this figure is somewhat misleading since it includes a range from 50 percent for boys in government schools to 80 percent for girls in nongovernment schools.

The states have had primary responsibility for schooling since the mid-19th century, when the School Acts created centralized education authorities. This legislation still mandates predetermined curricula in primary schools as well as teacher assignments. However, a common national curriculum was adopted for tenth grade in 1989 to simplify transfers among school systems. The earlier dual system of government and denominational schools caused such bickering that an attempt to unite them through a “common Christianity” was attempted, but it failed. As a result, the public schools have been free, compulsory, and secular since the 1870s. Remote areas of the country are reached by correspondence education or the School of the Air.

Since the seasons in Australia are the opposite of those in the Northern Hemisphere, the school year begins at the end of January or early in February, and it ends in mid-December. A vacation of about six weeks is taken over the summer months, December to February. There are two shorter vacations that divide the school year into three terms.

Matriculation in secondary education depends on continuous school-based assessments of a student's aptitude and competence or by a combination of school-based assessment and public examinations. Since the 1970s, Australian authorities have expressed concern about the small number of students taking science and mathematics courses, the high school dropout rate, broadening the curriculum for girls, and integrating children with physical and mental disabilities into local schools. The federal government was long reluctant to take on responsibilities delegated to the states, but it has taken upon itself responsibility for schooling in the Capital Territory (the area around Canberra) and for the education of immigrants and aborigines. Since one fifth of the population in the early 1990s had a non-English-speaking background, federal funds were provided for teaching English as a second language. Aborigines can pursue a bilingual education at mission stations, with bridging courses to ease access to further schooling. Relatively few actually seize these opportunities.

Federal contributions to school libraries, science facilities, and teacher training were increased after 1974 by direct per capita grants to religious and independent schools, ranging from 20 to 75 percent of the fees charged. These grants carried no obligation on the part of the recipient schools to offer free access to qualified students, as is the case in the United Kingdom and other countries.

Post–high school education is available in over 1,000 TAFE (technical-and-further-education) colleges, operated as part of state-wide systems since 1974. There are also about two dozen self-governing universities. About 1.5 million students were enrolled in TAFE colleges in the early 1990s. Another 485,000 students attend universities, 62 percent of them full-time, 27 percent part-time, and 11 percent as correspondence students. Women comprise 52 percent of university students.

The first Australian university was founded in Sydney in 1850. In later years universities were built in Melbourne (1853), Adelaide (1874), Tasmania (1890), Queensland (1909), and Western Australia (1911). Except in Western Australia, tuition fees were charged until 1974, when a Labor government abolished them to encourage lifelong learning. Tuition was reinstated in 1988, but at only 20 percent of actual cost. Australia's first private university was established in 1989.

Libraries and museums augment Australia's formal educational institutions. Sydney was the first city to get a private library, in 1821, and it had the first public library and reading room by 1827. With the opening of the State Library of Victoria in 1853, state libraries remained the main source of books until community libraries became widespread in the mid-20th century.

The Mitchell Library and the Dixson Galleries in Sydney retain the nation's preeminent collections of Australiana. The National Library of Australia, founded in 1901 as the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library, launched the computerized Australian Information Network—called Ausinet—in 1977 and the Australian Bibliographic Network in 1981. Its holdings are now the largest of any Australian library. Sydney University's Fisher Library ranks second.

The Australian Museum was established in Sydney in 1827. It contains a fine collection of aboriginal artifacts. The structure itself epitomizes the imposing architectural styles that so fascinated people during the Victorian era. The Australian War Memorial, in Canberra, and the National Gallery of Victoria contain other notable national collections. Portraits of prominent Australians are displayed at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra. There are a number of open-air museums, including Sovereign Hill, a reconstructed gold mining town in Ballarat, Victoria; and Old Sydney Town, where the days of convict immigrants are recalled.

During the 20th century there has been a proliferation of regional, local, and natural history museums. Official Commonwealth records are now held by the Australian National Archives, established in 1961. Major museums started during the national bicentennial celebration of 1988 include the Australian National Maritime Museum and the Sydney Aquarium.

Primary Industries

Australian prosperity has long depended on the agricultural industries, which still attract 35 to 40 percent of the nation's export earnings. Nevertheless, their 30 percent of the Gross National Product in 1950 shrank to less than 5 percent by the 1990s. Many European farming methods initially proved ill adapted to the dry and unfamiliar Australian environment. Scientific research and the insights gained by pioneer settlers helped overcome water deficiencies, salinity, infertile soils, and natural hazards. Advances included the stripper-harvester in 1843, the stump-jump plow in 1876, applications of superphosphate fertilizer to pastures beginning in the 1890s, the selective breeding of animals and crops, and the extension of irrigation, from 1914.

Securing government support for rural Australia became the political mission of the Country Party—formed in 1920, then reorganized as the National Party in 1975—and the National Farmers' Federation. Agricultural exports were hurt when Britain joined the European Economic Community (EEC; now the European Union, or EU) in 1973. There was also, for a time, more restricted access to Japanese and American markets. The decline in exports to Europe has now been offset by a reorientation of sales to Japan, the Middle East, the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, and Southeast Asia.

Water Resources

Crucial to the modern agricultural economy are the available water resources and their impoundment behind dams and reservoirs. On this driest of the settled continents, two thirds of the area depends on surface-water conservation and irrigation, the other third on subterranean water. Following the drought of 1877–81, large irrigation projects were constructed along the Murray River and its tributaries, where evaporation and transpiration already reduce the effective rainfall by 50 percent. Even high rainfall regions present problems. Half of Australia's total surface runoff enters the sea in northeastern Queensland. There, low-lying terrain confounded plans to construct big storages for monsoonal rains until the Burdekin Falls dam was built in the late 1980s.

Groundwater is brought to the surface either from shallow, uncompacted sediments or, in greater volume, from deeper-lying sedimentary aquifers. The Great Artesian Basin of Queensland is the largest concentration of subterranean water in the world, but its extraction for stock watering has so greatly exceeded natural replenishment that many bores have run dry or require pumping. Australia has more than 320 large dams, the largest of them at Dartmouth in Victoria. In western Tasmania, dam construction for hydroelectric power dates from the 1930s but from the 1970s was opposed by environmental activists, who succeeded in stopping the controversial Franklin gorge project in a scenic wilderness later awarded World Heritage status.

Water quality is impaired by pollution, notably from the use of farm fertilizers. Runoff from fertilizers finds its way into the waterways. Overgrazing hastens soil erosion, and the remains of salt deposits also deplete usefulness of the soil.

Compared with its effects in the Northern Hemisphere, acid rain has caused only minor damage. Severe and almost universal water deficits encourage Australians to establish tree plantations in strategic parts of watersheds, to install drip or trickle appliances in their gardens, and to replace suburban lawns with native shrubberies.

Mining and Mineral Industries

Between the primary, or farming, industries and the secondary, or manufacturing, industries lies the mining industry, now the prime source of Australia's export income and a recurring catalyst to economic development. Now practically self-sufficient in minerals, Australia is a leading world exporter of coal, bauxite, alumina, copper, gold, iron ore, silver, lead, zinc, nickel, mineral sands (rutile, ilmenite, zircon, and monazite), diamonds, and uranium. A prodigious array of lesser minerals is also present, from sapphires and manganese to the world's largest concentration of opals. By 1980, mineral exports surpassed those from agriculture and pastoralism.

Sandstone quarrying began by using convict labor, but the 19th century could ultimately rejoice in the gold rushes of the 1850s—concentrated in Victoria—and the 1890s—around Kalgoorlie in Western Australia; the first production of pig iron (1848); and, in 1885, the founding of Broken Hill, the “Silver City” built on the world's richest lode of lead and zinc. Its labor unionists created the militant Barrier Industrial Council. Its members walked out on strike for 18 months in 191920, an industrial trauma that resulted in more conciliatory employee relations nationally.

The steel industry at Lithgow ushered in the 20th century but took deeper root at Newcastle in 1915, when Broken Hill Propriety Ltd. diversified its activities. BHP is now Australia's largest production company—the outgrowth of mining enterprises at Broken Hill. It operates in 40 countries and accounts for 10 percent of Australia's export receipts. BHP has branched into engineering and transportation, joined with Esso in developing the Bass Strait oil and gas field, and is now exploiting the same fuels in the Timor Sea. Queensland's Mount Isa began its rivalry with Broken Hill when the mining of silver, lead, zinc, and copper began in 1923. Heavy sand mining commenced in 1934 and the processing of uranium in 1947.

Mineral exploration peaked in the 1970s, but it has resumed using such new tools as satellite scanning and geochemical searches. Exports no longer go primarily to Europe and the United Kingdom, but to Asia. Japan remains the primary destination, with South Korea, China, and India increasingly significant. Prospects for the mining industry are encouraging, even if the exploitation of Aboriginal lands is restricted. There are, however, concerns over environmental degradation and the incidence of such diseases as silicosis and mesothelioma among miners.

Coal was discovered at Newcastle in 1793 and has been exported since 1800, though production barely met domestic consumption until 1965. While not the world's biggest producer, Australia has exported more coal than any other nation since 1985, at times almost half of those shipments going to Japan. Steaming and coking coal are also exported. The richest deposits of black, or bituminous, coal are found in the Sydney Basin, where both underground and open-pit mines operate, and in the Bowen Basin of Queensland, where open-pit mines predominate. Both locations are efficiently close to coastal ports. Less volatile brown coal, or lignite, is cut only in Victoria, where the State Electricity Commission operates on-site generating stations which supply 80 percent of the state's power. BHP burns 15 percent of Australia's black coal in its own iron and steel plants.

Before 1965, isolated Australia was strategically vulnerable in the matter of energy resources, depending almost entirely on imports of crude oil and petroleum products. Estimates now suggest that it is 70 to 90 percent self-sufficient in petroleum and completely self-sufficient in natural gas. Its first commercial oil field at Moonie in Queensland began operating only in 1961. Drilling began as late as 1964 in the offshore Bass Strait field, which now pumps 78 percent of the nation's production. More recent commercial prospects are being exploited off the coast of Western Australia at Barrow Island, and at Jabiru in the Timor Sea, where direct exports began in 1986.

Natural gas flows by long pipelines to all mainland capital cities. The first to benefit were Adelaide and Melbourne in 1969, with supplies from remote inland or offshore wells.

The systematic search for uranium began only in 1944, but reserves are now estimated at 28 percent of the western world's. Four fifths of the known deposits are in the Alligator Rivers area of the Northern Territory, with earlier finds at Rum Jungle, Mary Kathleen, and Radium Hill. Uranium oxide, sometimes called yellow cake, is exported only to countries with which Australia has concluded a nuclear safeguards agreement, since uranium is used in nuclear weapons.

Australia is the world's largest producer of bauxite and its derivative, alumina. Primary aluminum output ranks fourth. Following ore discoveries in 1952, Alcoa began mining in 1963 at Jarrahdale, just east of Perth. Richer mines were soon established at Gove and Weipa on the Gulf of Carpentaria, on or alongside aboriginal lands. Built near the electric generating station which meets 60 percent of Queensland's demand, the alumina refinery at Gladstone is the world's largest. Two thirds of production is exported.

Forests and Lumbering

Forests suitable for timber amount to only 50,000 square miles (129,500 square kilometers), a fairly small area considering the size of the continent. The forests are found in areas of high and regular rainfall in the Eastern Highlands, in Tasmania, and in the southwest. Dense tropical forests grow on the moist Queensland slopes. Elsewhere trees are too scattered for logging to make economic sense, and much of the desert is treeless. The country produces only about 80 percent of its timber requirements. About four fifths of the timber is hardwood—mainly from the various kinds of eucalyptus. The trees that are softwoods grow in parts of Queensland and Tasmania. Pine plantations have been established in New South Wales, South Australia, Victoria, and Western Australia.

Manufacturing

In the 19th century, Australia's manufacturing industries were initially restrained by the British mercantilist policy of regarding its colonies as exclusively markets for British goods. Later, nurturing industrial growth relied on high tariff barriers aimed at excluding foreign manufactures. The tariffs were set after 1921 by the federal Tariff Board and its successors, the Industries Assistance Commission from 1974 and the Industry Commission from 1990.

By World War II, major Australian industries included iron and steel, building products, engineering, electrical goods, clothing, printing, and motor assembly. A twenty-year post-war boom saw 28 percent of the workforce in manufacturing by 1960-61, contributing 29 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). Those proportions have now shrunk to 17 percent of both GDP and labor force participation. Mining, which employs only one percent of the workforce, accounts for 5 percent of GDP.

The older industries were also beset by competition from the newly industrializing nations of nearby Asia. During the 1980s, Australia followed the international trend toward lower tariffs.

After tentative beginnings in the 19th century, Australia's iron and steel industry took firm root in 1913, when BHP inaugurated its steelworks at Newcastle. In 1935, BHP absorbed the rival Australian Iron & Steel plant at Port Kembla. This plant now supplies more than half the nation's output. BHP then rode a wartime boom and confirmed its monopoly by establishing its own blast furnace at Whyalla in 1940. Between 1915 and 1970, all three coastal locations shipped in most of their iron ore from the Middleback Ranges of South Australia. A Western Australian steel facility operated at Kwina