Top Australia Resources

With a population of approx. 170,000 people in the city proper (known as the "city of Sydney") and a metropolitan area population exceeding 4 million, the Sydney metropolis is the larger of the two main financial, transport, trade and cultural centres of Australia (the other being Melbourne, Sydney's long term rival to the title of pre-eminent Australian city).

Sydney is the capital city of the Australian state of New South Wales and Australia's largest and oldest city, founded in 1788.

Australia's myths originate in the outback, in the drovers and squatters and people of the barren, dusty plains, yet very few Australians live in the outback, or even in the milder countryside that is never more than an hour or two's drive from the cities in which they live. This was true even of the Australia of a century ago - since the gold rush of the 1850s, most Australians have been city-bound. Nevertheless, after a century or more spent absorbing the bush yarns of Henry Lawson and the poetry of Banjo Paterson from the comfort of armchairs in the suburbs, the myths are real.

Politicians in Australia, or "pollies", be they at state or federal level, are universally disliked and distrusted. Ironically, the failure of the 1999 referendum on becoming a republic was arguably more about the prospect of a President chosen by and from the "pollies", than about any vestigial loyalty to the British monarchy.

Australia is home to large and diverse populations of various other types of animal - snakes, lizards, insects, spiders, birds and fish.

The Commonwealth of Australia is governed as a parliamentary constitutional monarchy. It is geographically the sixth-largest country in the world, the only one to occupy an entire continent, and the largest in the region of Australasia/Oceania. Australia includes a number of secondary islands the largest of which is Tasmania, which is an Australian State.

Australians have traditionally had a very strong "underdog" attitude, that is they will support those whom appear to have the lesser hand, so long as Australia is not involved. This can be seen greatly from an occurance during the 2003 Rugby World Cup, where a Georgian Rugby Team arrived in Perth with a crowd of Perth based supporters cheering them on and welcoming them.

Since 1996, the Coalition government, led by Prime Minister John Howard, has continued to implement microeconomic reform policies. Some have claimed that the deregulation of the labour market during this period has resulted in a needed flexibility in the labour force. Others have criticised these deregulations as having a negative impact on worker's wages, safety and health grounds. Legislation introduced during this period sought to reduce union involvement and power, and has preferred to emphasise enterprise bargaining (a tendency towards wage bargaining). Also during this period, the Coalition government deregulated numerous other industries, including the telecommunications sector, and privatised many of the pre-existing natural monopolies.

Australian immigration has a checkered history. Immigration to the continent now called Australia began over 50,000 years ago, when the ancestors of Australian Aborigines arrived via Indonesia and New Guinea. Europeans began landing in the 1600's and 1700's, and the country was colonised by Britain in 1788.

Most of the Australian population descends from 19th and 20th century immigrants, most from the UK and Ireland to begin with, but from other sources in later years. Although the Australian colonies were founded as a penal colonies (except for South Australia and Western Australia - with the latter later receiving convicts), the transportation of British convicts to Australian colonies was gradually phased out between 1840 and 1868. During the "gold rush" of the late 19th century, the convicts and their descendants were rapidly overshadowed by hundreds of thousands of free settlers from many different countries: for example, in the 1850s about two per cent of the combined populations of Britain and Ireland emigrated to New South Wales and Victoria.