Australia

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, takes up the mainland of its own continent plus Tasmania and many smaller islands, the sixth-largest country in the world and the driest inhabited continent, flat, megadiverse and ringed by desert within and rainforest on the coasts. The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians arrived from Southeast Asia fifty to sixty-five thousand years ago and spoke more than two hundred and fifty languages when the British came, one of the oldest living cultures anywhere. Dutch sailors charted most of the shoreline in the seventeenth century before Britain planted a penal colony at Sydney in 1788. Five more self-governing colonies followed across the nineteenth century, each winning responsible government, and on 1 January 1901 the six federated as the Commonwealth. Independence from London matured through the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act of 1942 to the Australia Act of 1986. A parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy of states and territories, with Canberra as its planned capital, Australia fought in both world wars beside Britain and stood by 1945 as a prosperous Pacific power of some seven million people.