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Australasia is a subregion of Oceania, comprising Australia, New Zealand (overlapping with Polynesia), and sometimes including New Guinea and surrounding islands (overlapping with Melanesia). The term is used in a number of different contexts, including geopolitically , physiogeographically , philologically , and ecologically , where the term ...
The name Australia was specifically applied to the continent for the first time in 1794, [5] with the botanists George Shaw and Sir James Smith writing of "the vast island, or rather continent, of Australia, Australasia or New Holland" in their 1793 Zoology and Botany of New Holland, [16] and James Wilson including it on a 1799 chart. [17]
Regarding Australia and the Pacific, Chambers's New Handy Volume American Encyclopædia observed in 1885 that, "the whole region has sometimes been called Oceania, and sometimes Australasia—generally, however, in modern times, to the exclusion of the islands in the [Malay] archipelago, to which certain writers have given the name of Malesia."
Australasia on a map The term Down Under is a colloquialism differently construed to refer to Australia and New Zealand , or the Pacific island countries collectively. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] The term originally referred solely to Australia and gradually expanded in scope.
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, [17] is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. [18] Australia has a total area of 7,688,287 km 2 (2,968,464 sq mi), making it the sixth-largest country in the world and the largest in Oceania .
Australia is the only First World country on the Australia-New Guinea continent, although the economy of Australia is by far the largest and most dominant economy in the region and one of the largest in the world. Australia's per-capita GDP is higher than that of the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and France in terms of purchasing power ...
STORY: Large swathes of southeast Australia are underwater, forcing thousands to evacuate – and flood-hit regions are expecting more rain in the forecast.So why is Australia flooding?The floods ...
Western Australia is the largest state, covering just under one third of the Australian landmass, followed by Queensland, South Australia, and New South Wales. Australia also has several minor territories; the federal government administers a separate area within New South Wales, the Jervis Bay Territory , as a naval base and seaport for the ...