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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 has been applied to two continents. Originally, it was applied to the south polar continent, or sixth continent, now known as Antarctica.The name is a shortened form of Terra Australis which was one of the names given to the imagined (but undiscovered) land mass that was thought to surround the south pole.
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 .
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.
As of the 2021 Census, there are approximately 46,720 people in Australia who were born in Brazil, and around 24,377 people who claimed Brazilian ancestry, making the total number of people with Brazilian connections in Australia approximately 71,097. [7] Sydney is home to the highest proportion of Brazilian-born immigrants.
From the Kikuyu word Kirinyaga a contraction of Kirima nyaga "Ostrich mountain", so called because the dark shadows and snow-capped peak resemble the plumage of a male Ostrich. The neighbouring Kamba tribe do not have the "R" and "G" sound in their language and called it "Keinya" when acting as guides to a German explorer.
The Commonwealth of Australia comprises the mainland of the Australian continent, the major island of Tasmania, other nearby islands, and various external territories. [1] Neighbouring countries are Indonesia , East Timor , and Papua New Guinea to the north, the Solomon Islands , Vanuatu , and New Caledonia to the north-east, and New Zealand to ...