Australia 2010 - 1st post

G’day mates!

Well, I’ve finally arrived in The Great Down Under. After a 38 hour long trip, including changing of planes in both London and Singapore and all the waiting it included, I’m exhausted. However, it’s completely worth it when it’s incredibly 34°C outside and you can’t spot a single cloud on the sky no matter how far you look.

I read a lot about Australia before I came, and now I’m going to give you a short résumé:

Australia is a land in Oceania with approximately 21,3 million habitants and its situated south for Indonesia and Papua New Guinea separated by the Arafura Sea. It’s a huge country covering more than 7,5 millions square kilometers, or almost twenty-four times the area of Norway, which makes it 6^th biggest country in the world in area.

The Great Down Under is also the flattest continent in the world and it has the oldest and least fertile soils. Only the south-east and south-west corner of Australia has a temperate and sub tropic climate, and the major part of the population lives here. The Northern part of Australia has a tropical climate and consists of rainforests, forests, plains, deserts and mangrove sumps.

Let’s go over to the history of this magnificent country in short moves:

After decades of research scientists believes that the first habitants came to Australia from Indonesia for over 50 000 years ago and spread over the whole continent. Thousands of thousands years later the first Europeans started to explore the coasts of Australia. In 1770 the English explorer and navigator James Cook settled in Botany Bay (a bay in what’s Sydney today) and claimed it as a part of Great Britain.

This was the beginning of the colonization that exploded in 1787 when eleven ships full of prisoners left Great Britain heading southwards against Australia. A member of James Cooks crew said that this huge country would’ve been a great place to keep prisoners as the jails in England where crowded. Later on others came to Australia as well, and when they found gold in 1850 it started to flock in with immigrants. In 1868 the transport of prisoners ended and by then more 

than 160 000 criminals and lots of other people had settled down in The Land Down Under.   

Since Australia was so far away from England and it was such a huge country, the habitants wanted their own government. One by one the different colonies (regions) got their own self-government. January the 1^st in 1901 all the colonies became one and Australia was now an own nation. It was still a part of the Commonwealth of Nations but it was now and own independent country with its own self-government.

I’m pretty tired right now so I think I’ll go to bed within a few minutes. Tomorrow, I’m going to spend a day on my own wandering around Sydney. I promise that I’ll post some pictures!