Australia

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived on the continent for at least 65,000 years — among the oldest continuous cultures on Earth — in hundreds of distinct nations, each with its own language, territory, and law, and a detailed oral knowledge of the land expressed through the concept often translated as the Dreaming.

British colonisation began in 1788 with a penal settlement at Sydney Cove. Expansion across the continent brought dispossession, frontier violence, and introduced disease that together devastated Indigenous populations; the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families, the Stolen Generations, continued into the 1970s. Gold rushes from the 1850s drew mass immigration, the six colonies federated into a nation in 1901, and troops at Gallipoli in 1915 furnished a founding national story.

The "White Australia" immigration policy was dismantled by the 1970s, after which large-scale migration from Europe, then Asia, then the wider world made Australia one of the most multicultural societies anywhere, with about three in ten residents born overseas. Recognition of Indigenous rights has come slowly: the 1967 referendum, the 1992 Mabo native-title decision, a 2008 national apology, and a 2023 referendum on an Indigenous advisory body that was defeated.

Australian social life is informal and self-consciously egalitarian. First names, casual dress, and understatement are the norm; overt status-seeking is mocked as "cutting down tall poppies," and "mateship" — loyalty and a fair go — is a national ideal, if an imperfectly realised one.

Sport and the outdoors are central. Cricket in summer, three or four codes of football in winter (rugby league and union in the north and east, Australian rules in the south and west), plus swimming, netball, and surfing all command huge followings. Weekends revolve around the beach, the backyard barbecue, bush walks, and watching or playing sport.

Coffee culture is taken seriously — the flat white is an Australian export — and sun safety is drilled from childhood, the country having among the world's highest rates of skin cancer. Indigenous art, music, and storytelling are an increasingly visible part of national culture after long being pushed to the margins.

Most Australians live in a narrow coastal band in the southeast and southwest, in and around Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide, in low-density suburbs of detached houses. The purpose-built capital, Canberra, was a compromise between the two largest cities. Beyond the cities are farming and mining regions, coastal towns, and a sparsely populated interior.

The economy runs on mineral and gas exports, services, agriculture, education, and tourism. Wages and living costs are both high; housing affordability in the big cities is a chronic political issue. School holidays, four times a year, drive the rhythm of domestic travel and the price of everything.

Climate is an increasingly present part of daily life: extreme heat, the catastrophic bushfire season of 2019–20, drought, and flooding have all pushed adaptation and energy policy to the centre of public debate.

There is no single national cuisine so much as a layering of them. Modern Australian cooking draws on British foundations, heavy Mediterranean and East and Southeast Asian influence, and a growing use of native ingredients — kangaroo, barramundi, macadamia, finger lime, wattleseed, saltbush. The backyard barbecue, the meat pie, the sausage roll, and fish and chips are the everyday staples.

Café brunch is close to a cultural institution, and the country argues good-naturedly with New Zealand over the invention of the pavlova and the lamington. Vegemite, Tim Tams, and Anzac biscuits are the childhood flavours.

Australia also produces excellent wine — from the Barossa, Hunter, Margaret River, Yarra, and Tasmania — along with craft beer, and world-class seafood: Sydney rock oysters, Moreton Bay bugs, mud crab, and prawns, the last a fixture of the Christmas table in midsummer.

Sydney is the usual starting point, for the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, the harbour itself, and the beaches from Bondi to Manly. North from Cairns lies the Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef system on Earth and a World Heritage Site now under stress from warming seas, reached from the Whitsunday Islands and the Queensland coast.

In the Red Centre, Uluru and the domes of Kata Tjuta rise from the desert in Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, with Kings Canyon nearby; all are of deep significance to their Aboriginal custodians. The tropical Top End holds Kakadu, with its rock art and wetlands, and the remote Kimberley further west. In the south, Victoria's Great Ocean Road passes the limestone stacks of the Twelve Apostles.

Tasmania offers wilderness on a walkable scale — Cradle Mountain, Freycinet, and the art museum MONA in Hobart. Other draws include the Daintree Rainforest, Kangaroo Island, the wine regions of South Australia, Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia for swimming with whale sharks, and Melbourne itself for its laneways, coffee, and sport.