Australia’s Unique Animals

Australia’s isolation from the rest of the world over millions of years has led to the evolution of forms of life found nowhere else. Probably the strangest of all is the platypus. This monotreme (egg-laying marsupial) has webbed feet, a ducklike bill, and a tail like a beaver’s. It lays eggs, and the young suckle from their mother. When a specimen was first brought back to Europe, skeptical scientists insisted it was a fake —a concoction of several different animals sewn together. Then there’s the koala. This fluffy marsupial eats virtually indigestible gum (eucalyptus) leaves and sleeps about 20 hours a day.
There’s only one koala species, although those found in Victoria are much larger than their brethren in more northern climes. Australia is also famous for kangaroos. There are 45 different kinds of kangaroos and wallabies, ranging from small rat-size kangaroos to the man-size red kangaroos. The animal you’re most likely to come across in your trip is the possum, named by Captain James Cook after the North American “opossum,” which he thought they resembled. (They actually aren’t related at all.) The brush-tailed possum is commonly found in suburban gardens, including those in Sydney. Then there’s the wombat. There are four species of this bulky burrower in Australia, but the common wombat is most frequently found. You may come across the smaller hairy-nosed wombat in South Australia and Western Australia.

Landscape of Australia

People wonder why such a huge country has a population of just 20 million people. The truth is, Australia can barely support that many. About 90 percent of those people live on only 2.6 percent of the continent. Climatic and physical land conditions ensure that the only decent rainfall occurs along a thin strip of land around Australia’s coast. It’s been even tougher of late: Australia is in the grip of the worst drought in a century. The vast majority of Australia is harsh Outback. People survive where they can in this great arid land because of one thing: the Great Artesian Basin. This saucer-shaped geological formation stretches over much of inland New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, and the Northern Territory. Beneath it are underground water supplies stored some 66 million to 208 million years ago, when the area was much like the Amazon basin is today. Bore holes bring water to the surface and allow sheep, cattle, and humans a respite from the dryness. Just off the Queensland coast, The Great Barrier Reef stretches some 2,000km (1,240 miles) from off Gladstone, to the Gulf of Papua, near New Guinea. It’s not more than 8,000 years old, although many fear that rising seawater, caused by global warming, will cause its demise. As it is, the nonnative Crown of Thorns starfish and a bleaching process believed to be the result of excessive nutrients flowing into the sea from Australia’s farming land, is causing significant damage.

Australia in 20th century

On January 1, 1901, the six states that made up Australia proclaimed themselves to be part of one nation, and the Commonwealth of Australia was formed. In 1914, Australia joined the mother country in war. In April the following year, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) formed a beachhead on the peninsula of Gallipoli in Turkey. The Turkish troops had been warned, and eight months of fighting ended with 8,587 Australian dead and more than 19,000 wounded. Australians fought in World War II in North Africa, Greece, and the Middle East. In March 1942, Japanese aircraft bombed Broome in Western Australia and Darwin in the Northern Territory. In May 1942, Japanese midget submarines entered Sydney Harbour and torpedoed a ferry before being destroyed.
Later that year, Australian volunteers fought an incredibly brave retreat through the jungles of Papua New Guinea on the Kokoda Track against much larger Japanese forces. Australian troops fought alongside Americans in subsequent wars in Korea and Vietnam and sent military support to the Persian Gulf conflicts. Following World War II, mass immigration to Australia, primarily from Europe, boosted the population. In 1974 the left-of-center Whitlam government put an end to the White Australia policy that had largely restricted black and Asian immigration since 1901. In 1986, the Australian Constitution was separated from that of England. In 1992, the High Court handed down the “Mabo” decision that ruled that Aborigines had a right to claim government-owned land if they could prove a continued connection with it. The 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney put medal-winning Australian athletes Cathy Freeman and Ian Thorpe in the spotlight, and spurred a new wave of interest and tourism in the Land Down Under. Australia is a modern nation coming to terms with its identity. The umbilical cord with Mother England has been cut, and the nation is still trying to find its position within Asia.
One thing Australia realized early on was the importance of tourism to its economy. Millions flock here every year. Factor in the landscape, the native Australian culture, the sunshine, the animals, and some of the world’s best cities, and you’ve got a fascinating, accessible destination full of amazing diversity and variety.

British Arrival in Australia

Captain James Cook turned up in 1770 and charted the east coast in his ship H.M.S. Endeavour. He claimed the land for Britain and named it New South Wales, probably as a favor to Thomas Pennant, a Welsh patriot and botanist. Cook landed at Botany Bay, which he named after the discovery of scores of plants hitherto unknown to science. Turning northward, Cook passed an entrance to a possible harbor, which appeared to offer safe anchorage, and named it Port Jackson after the secretary to the admiralty, George Jackson. Back in Britain, King George III viewed Australia as a potential colony and repository of Britain’s overflowing prison population, which could no longer be transported to the United States of America following the War of Independence. The First Fleet left England in May 1787, made up of 11 store and transport ships (none of them bigger than the passenger ferries that ply modern-day Sydney Harbour) led by Arthur Phillip. Aboard were 1,480 people, including 759 convicts. Phillip’s flagship, The Supply, reached Botany Bay in January 1788, but Phillip decided the soil was poor and the surroundings too swampy. On January 26, now celebrated as Australia Day, he settled on Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) instead. The convicts were immediately put to work clearing land, planting crops, and constructing buildings. The early food harvests were failures, and by early 1790, the fledgling colony was facing starvation. Phillip decided to give some convicts pardons for good behavior and service, and grant small land parcels to those who were industrious. In 1795, coal was discovered; in 1810, Governor Macquarie began city building projects; and, in 1813, the explorers Blaxland, Wentworth, and Lawson forged a passage over the Blue Mountains to the fertile plains beyond.
When gold was discovered in Victoria in 1852, and in Western Australia 12 years later, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Europe, America, and China flooded into the country. By 1860, over a million non-Aboriginal people were living in Australia. The last 10,000 convicts were transported to Western Australia between 1850 and 1868, bringing the total shipped to Australia to 168,000.

From Dreamtime to the Dutchmen

In the beginning, there was the Dreamtime — at least according to the Aborigines of Australia. Between then and now, perhaps, the supercontinent referred to as Pangaea split into two huge continents called Laurasia and Gondwanaland. Over millions of years, continental drift carried the landmasses apart. Gondwanaland divided into South America, Africa, India, Australia and New Guinea, and Antarctica. Giant marsupials evolved to roam the continent of Australia: Among them were a plant-eating animal that looked like a wombat the size of a rhinoceros; a giant squashed-face kangaroo standing 3m (10 ft.) high; and a flightless bird the same size as an emu, but four times heavier. The last of these giant marsupials is thought to have died out 40,000 years ago, possibly helped toward extinction by Aborigines.
The existence of Australia had been in the minds of Europeans since the Greek astronomer Ptolemy drew a map of the world in about A.D. 150 there to balance out the land in the Northern Hemisphere. He called it Terra Australia Incognita — the unknown southland. Evidence suggests that Portuguese ships reached Australia as early as 1536 and even charted part of its coastline. In 1606, William Jansz was sent by the Dutch East India Company to open up a new route to the Spice Islands, and to find New Guinea, which was supposed to be rich in gold. Between 1616 and 1640, many more Dutch ships made contact with Australia as they hugged the west coast of “New Holland.” In 1642, the Dutch East India Company, through the governor general of the Indies, Anthony Van Diemen, sent Abel Tasman to find and map the southland. Over two voyages, he charted the northern Australian coastline and discovered Tasmania, which he named Van Diemen’s Land.