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People
Cultural Roots
Australia's first inhabitants came to the island-continent over 40,000 years ago. Though their exact origins are yet unknown, most experts believe that they came from a variety of lands including Indonesia, Southeast Asia and some Pacific islands. Now referred to as Aborigines, the first people of Australia were largely a hunting-gathering people and did not live in permanent settlements, preferring instead to move around the massive continent, in hunt for food. Their first settlements are believed to have taken roots near the present day Sydney.
Unfortunately, much of the written history of the native Australians does not exist today, putting a cloud of uncertainty about their times, culture and lifestyles. Their technical culture depended on wood, bone and stone tools and weapons, as was the case of many hunting-gathering peoples, and their spiritual and social life was highly complex.
Most spoke several languages, and confederacies sometimes linked widely scattered tribal groups. Aboriginal population density ranged from one person per square mile along the coasts to one person per 35 square miles in the arid interior. Food procurement was usually a matter for the entire family and was very demanding, since there was not much large game and they had no agriculture.
Though the Aborigines did have trading links with their neighbors, their contacts with the distant lands remained few and far between. This helped in the evolution and protection of a distinct culture of the first Australians.
Towards the end of the 18th century, however, this isolation was to end and not very smoothly either. The British settlers, many of them convicts exiled from their homeland, began reaching the Australian shores by 1788 in the common era (C.E.). They settled in and around the big metros of today - Sydney, Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne. And the flow of immigrants has continued unabated since. Yet, despite its proximity to Asia, almost none of the immigrants till the third quarter of the 20th century were from Asia.
Until the 1970s, a very large majority of immigrants continued to be from Europe - British, Irish, Italians, Greeks and Portuguese. This was the "White Australian Policy" aimed at keeping Australia almost entirely European in composition, by carefully filtering the immigrants. Successive governments followed this policy without any let up and any fear of criticism. Till as late as 1960, over 92 percent of immigrants into Australia were either British or European citizens, while Asians contributed a mere two percent to the total.
The situation began changing towards the mid 1960s with the emergence of independent countries in Southeast Asia and especially after the two wars in Korea and Vietnam. The exit of European colonial powers from the region made it more difficult for the Australian government to ignore the Asian continent. The extreme poverty of several newly independent nations in the region also increased the flow of Asian immigrants into Australia. By the end of the 1970s, the proportion of Asians had jumped to over 30 percent while the Europeans still accounted for a majority of immigrants.
The mix of immigrants was also directly linked to the party that governed Australia. The election of the Labor Party government in the 1983 elections saw a huge jump of Asian proportion in the immigrants. While in 1982, Asians accounted for 29 percent of the total immigrants, in 1983 this figure jumped to 43 percent, making it the first time ever that Europeans accounted for less than half or were not the largest group of immigrants.
The Asian proportion continued to boom under the Labor government and peaked in 1991 when Asians were 57 percent of the total immigration. The figure has been on the decline since the election of the conservative Liberal Party coalition government in 1996. The total number of immigrants being allowed is also linked to the economic well being of the country and the tightening of the economy in the early 1990s led to a decline in overall numbers of immigrants.
From 1945 through 1996, nearly 5.5 million immigrants settled in Australia, and about 80 percent have remained; nearly one of every four Australians is foreign-born. Britain and Ireland have been the largest sources of post-war immigrants, followed by Italy, Greece, New Zealand and the former Yugoslavia. The heavy European mix of the immigrants meant that they supplanted a culture and society very similar to that in Europe and also to the one developing almost at the same time halfway across the world in the United States.
Cultural Demography
Today, Australia is a diverse society made up of predominantly of people of European ancestry, with a significant minority of Asians, as well as the remaining aboriginal population. There are also other ethnic groups represented in Australia. In terms of language, English is the dominant language. However, indigenous languages are spoken, in addition to Chinese, Italian and other various languages among immigrant communities. In terms of religion, most Australians are adherents of Christianity -- a group that is subdivided among Catholics, Anglicans and other Christian denominations. Other religions represented in Australia include, but are not limited to, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism.
Health and Welfare
The population of Australia is over 20 million. Although Australia has scarcely more than two people per square kilometer, it is one of the world's most urbanized countries. Less than 15 percent of the population lives in rural areas. The population of Australia has a life expectancy at birth of 81.72 years (79.33 for males, and 84.25 for females) and an infant mortality rate of 4.67 deaths/ per 1,000 live births. Literacy is nearly universal (99 percent) among the population age 15 and over.
About 4.5 percent of GDP is spent in this country on educational expenditures. About 8.5 percent of GDP is spend on health expenditures. Access to sanitation, water, and health care is considered to be excellent.
Human Development
One notable measure used to determine a country's quality of life is the Human Development Index (HDI), which has been compiled annually since 1990 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The HDI is a composite of several indicators, which measure a country's achievements in three main arenas of human development: longevity, knowledge and education, as well as economic standard of living. In a recent ranking of 169 countries, the HDI placed Australia near the very top of its ranking -- in the very high human development category, at 2nd place.
Although the concept of human development is complicated and cannot be properly captured by values and indices, the HDI, which is calculated and updated annually, offers a wide-ranging assessment of human development in certain countries, not based solely upon traditional economic and financial indicators.
Written by Dr. Denise Youngblood Coleman, Editor in Chief, www.countrywatch.com; see Bibliography for list research sources.
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