Travel to Australia - Australian Tourism Information - Tourism Australia

By the time of British settlement, Aboriginal Australians spoke more than 250 distinct languages and had one of the oldest living cultures in the world. In 2015, 2.15% of the Australian population lived overseas, one of the lowest proportions worldwide. online casino neosurf australia since the Second World War has led to the growth of non-Christian religions, the largest of which are Islam (3.2%), Hinduism (2.7%), Buddhism (2.4%), Sikhism (0.8%), and Judaism (0.4%). The largest religion is Christianity (43.9% of the population) down from 88% in the 1966 census and 96% from the 1911 census. Australia has no official religion; its Constitution prohibits the Commonwealth government, but not the states, from establishing one, or interfering with the freedom of religion.
The federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 is the legal framework for the protection of threatened species. The major threats to endangered species are landscape change, ecosystem disruption, introduced species such as the feral cat and red fox, and climate change. Over the past two centuries, Australia has lost more mammal species than any other continent.
While it was being constructed, Melbourne served as the temporary capital from 1901 to 1927. The Australian Capital Territory was formed in 1911 as the location for the future federal capital of Canberra. The Second Boer War (1899–1902) marked the largest overseas deployment of Australia's colonial forces.
The name "Commonwealth of Australia" for the new federation of the six former colonies was formalised in the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 (UK). Australia is a middle power, and has the world's fourteenth-highest military expenditure. It has a highly developed economy and one of the highest per capita incomes globally. Australia's culture is diverse, and the country has one of the highest foreign-born populations in the world. Canberra is the nation's capital, while its most populous cities are Sydney and Melbourne, each with a population of more than five million.
It ranks highly for quality of life, health, education, economic freedom, civil liberties and political rights. By the mid-19th century, most of the continent had been explored by European settlers and five additional self-governing British colonies were established, each gaining responsible government by 1890. This ratio is much lower than many other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (an intergovernmental organisation with 38 member developed countries). At the time of the 2006 census, 52,000 Indigenous Australians, representing 12% of the Indigenous population, reported that they spoke an Indigenous language at home. Over 250 Indigenous Australian languages are thought to have existed at the time of first European contact, of which fewer than twenty are still in daily use by all age groups. At the 2021 census, the number of ancestry responses categorised within the Asian groups as a proportion of the total population amounted to 17.4% (including 6.5% Southern and Central Asian, 6.4% North-East Asian, and 4.5% South-East Asian).
Some remote Indigenous communities have been described as having "failed state"-like conditions. Eighteen years later, the east coast was occupied by Britain and later the west coast was also settled by Britain. Indians are the youngest average age (34 years) and the fastest growing community both in terms of absolute numbers and percentages in Australia. The very early history of Chinese Australians involved significant immigration from villages of the Pearl River Delta in Southern China. Many Chinese Australians have immigrated from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan as well as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, while many are descendants of such immigrants.
Discover how real Aussie vacations turned into lifelong memories. The population estimates do not include the Aboriginal population before 1961. The current Australian resident population is estimated at 28,652,000 (29 September 2026). According to Australian Aboriginal mythology and the animist framework developed in Aboriginal Australia, the Dreaming is a sacred era in which ancestral totemic spirit beings formed The Creation.
Most of the first Australian settlers came from London, the Midlands and the North of England, and Ireland. This includes English Australians, Irish Australians, Scottish Australians and Welsh Australians. The Australian Bureau of Statistics does not collect data on race, but asks each Australian resident to nominate up to two ancestries each census. The High Court of Australia in Potter v Minahan (1908) stated that "Although there is no Australian nationality as distinguished from British nationality, there is an Australian species of British nationality."