Australia is an island continent in the southern hemisphere. Australia (formerly called New Holland) is the largest island, and the smallest continent in the world. Australia is divided unequally by the Tropic of Capricorn, and consequenttly belongs partly to the South temperate zone and partly to the Torrid zone.
It is divided into five provinces (formerly British colonies): New South Wales, Victoria (formerly Port Philip), South Australia, West Australia (formerly Swan River), and Queensland. The discovery of Australia by Europeans is a matter of some controversy. The French claimed to have discovered it first in 1531; the Portugese in 1601 and the Dutch in 1606. The Dutch were the first to survey the coast, the north being surveyed in 1618 by Zeachen; the west by Edels in 1619; the south by Nuyts in 1627 and the north again by Tasman in 1627. In 1665 the land of Western Australia, then known as terra Australia, was named New Holland by order of the State-General of Holland. In 1770, the British Captain Cook and others landed at Botany Bay and named the land New South Wales. In 1901 the six formerly separate British subject states were unified as the Commonwealth of Australia, and in 1909 the Northern Territory joined. Australia was originally inhabited by hundreds of tribes of aboriginal peoples, by the end of the 20th century these tribes had been forcibly assimilated - rather than integrated -into White Australian society with the loss of hundreds of languages and much of their customs. Research Australia
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Gazetteer
Research Australia