page_title: Australia
section_title: The Commonwealth of Australia
hierarchical_section_title: Australia / History / The Commonwealth of Australia
caption_attribution_description: Countries of Birth of Australian estimated resident population in 2006
context_page_description: Australia, formally the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country and sovereign state in the southern hemisphere, located in Oceania. Its capital city is Canberra, and its largest city is Sydney.
  Australia is the sixth biggest country in the world by land area, and is part of the Oceanic and Australasian regions. Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea and other islands on the Australian tectonic plate are together called Australasia, which is one of the world's great ecozones. When other Pacific islands are included with Australasia, it is called Oceania.
  25 million people live in Australia, and about 85% of them live near the east coast. The country is divided up into six states and two territories, and more than half of Australia's population lives in and around the cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.
  Australia is known for its mining, its production of wool, and as the world's largest producer of bauxite. Its emblem is a flower called the Golden Wattle.
context_section_description: Until 1901, Australia was not a nation, it was six separate colonies governed by Britain. They voted to join together to form one new country, called the Commonwealth of Australia, in 1901. Australia was still part of the British Empire, and at first wanted only British or Europeans to come to Australia. But soon it had its own money, and its own Army and Navy.
  In Australia at this time, the trade unions were very strong, and they started a political party, the Australian Labor Party. Australia passed many laws to help the workers.
  In 1914, the First World War started in Europe. Australia joined in on the side of Britain against Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. Australian soldiers were sent to Gallipoli, in the Ottoman Empire. They fought bravely, but were beaten by the Turks. Today Australia remembers this battle every year on ANZAC Day. They also fought on the Western Front. More than 60,000 Australians were killed.
  Australia had a really hard time in the Great Depression of the 1930s and joined Britain in a war against Nazi Germany when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. But in 1941 lots of Australian soldiers were captured in the Fall of Singapore by Japan. Then Japan started attacking Australia and people worried about invasion. But with help from the United States Navy, the Japanese were stopped. After the war, Australia became a close friend of the United States.
  When the war ended, Australia felt that it needed many more people to fill the country up and to work. So the government said it would take in people from Europe who had lost their homes in the war. It did things like building the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Over the next 25 years, millions of people came to Australia. They came especially from Italy and Greece, other countries in Europe. Later they also came from countries like Turkey and Lebanon. An important new party, the Liberal Party of Australia was made by Robert Menzies in 1944 and it won lots of elections from 1949 until in 1972, then Gough Whitlam won for the Labor Party. Whitlam made changes, but he made the Senate unhappy and the Governor-General sacked him and forced an election in 1975. Then Malcolm Fraser won a few elections for the Liberal Party.
  In the 1960s many people began coming to Australia from China, Vietnam, Malaysia and other countries in Asia. Australia became more multicultural. In the 1950s and 1960s Australia became one of the richest countries in the world, helped by mining and wool. Australia started trading more with America, than Japan. Australia supported the United States in wars against dictatorships in Korea and Vietnam and later Iraq. Australian soldiers also helped the United Nations in countries like East Timor in 1999.
  In 1973, the famous Sydney Opera House opened. In the 1970s, 80s and 90s lots of Australian movies, actors and singers became famous around the world. In the year 2000, Sydney had the Summer Olympics.
  In the 1980s and 90s, the Labor Party under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, then the Liberal Party under John Howard made lots of changes to the economy. Australia had a bad recession in 1991, but when other Western countries had trouble with their economies in 2008, Australia stayed strong.
  Today Australia is a rich, peaceful and democratic country. But it still has problems. Around 4-5% of Australians could not get a job in 2010. A lot of land in Australia (like Uluru) has been returned to Aboriginal people, but lots of Aborigines are still poorer than everybody else. Every year the government chooses a big number of new people from all around the world to come as immigrants to live in  Australia. These people may come because they want to do business, or to live in a democracy, to join their family, or because they are refugees. Australia took 6.5 million immigrants in the 60 years after World War Two, including around 660,000 refugees.
  Julia Gillard became the first woman Prime Minister of Australia in 2010 when she replaced her colleague Kevin Rudd of the Labor Party.
caption: Countries of birth of Australian estimated resident population, 2006.
  Source:Australian Bureau of Statistics[25]
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