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Australia

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Advance Australia fair.
—Peter Dodds McCormick

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the southern hemisphere comprising the mainland of the world's smallest continent, the island of Tasmania and a number of other islands in the Indian, Southern and Pacific Oceans. Australia claims approximately two-fifths of Antarctica, but this is not widely recognized. It is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations and its head of state is the monarch, King Charles III. Australian English is the de facto national language.

Quotes

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  • Dreamtime,
    The first ones lived, those of long ago.
    They were the Wandjinas—
    Like this one here, Namaaraalee.
  • Namaaraalee is highest, he made it all,
    We must keep those ways he pointed out.
    • Recounted by Sam Woolagoodjah, elder of the Worrorra people of the Kimberley. Translated by Andrew Huntley from the prose version of Michael Silverstein. Reported in The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986), p. 1

17th century

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1690s

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  • The Inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the world. ... And setting aside their human Shape, they differ but little from Brutes.
  • New Holland is a very large tract of land. It is not yet determined whether it is an island or a main continent; but I am certain that it joyns neither to Africa, Asia, or America.
    • William Dampier, quoted in William Clark Russell, William Dampier (1889), ch. 3

18th century

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1770s

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  • From what I have said of the Natives of New-Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb'd by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff &c., they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholesome Air. ... In short they seem'd to set no Value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them; this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities.
    • James Cook, Journal entry (23 August 1770), Voyage of the Endeavour

1780s

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  • The loss of America what can repay?
    New colonies seek for at Botany Bay.
    • John Freeth (d. 1808), "Botany Bay", in The New London Magazine (1786)

1790s

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  • From distant climes, o’er widespread seas we come,
    Though not with much èclat or beat of drum;
    True patriots we; for be it understood,
    We left our country for our country’s good.
    No private views disgraced our generous zeal,
    What urged our travels was our country’s weal;
    And none will doubt but that our emigration
    Has proved most useful to the British nation.
    • Attributed to Henry Carter (d. 1806) and George Barrington (b. 1755)
    • Prologue, written for the opening of a theatre at Sydney (16 January 1796)

19th century

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1850s

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  • That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there.
  • But with all its golden advantages, Australia has yet greater for the emigrant who prefers the comforts and decencies of life to bartering his soul for gold. In Australia, as elsewhere, Mammon carries his curse with him, and his worshippers must partake of it. Drunkenness, debauchery, crime, and immorality, in every shape, are the characteristics of such a society as is now gathering in the gold districts. There are thousands of respectable families in England whose interest it would be to emigrate, but who would not encounter such a condition for all the gold Australia contains.
    • George Butler Earp, The Gold Colonies of Australia, and Gold Seeker’s Manual (London: George Routledge, 1853), p. 2
  • All aristocratic feelings and associations of the old country are at once annihilated ... It is not what you were, but what you are that is the criterion.
    • John Sherer, an English digger; in The Gold-Finder of Australia: How He Went, How He Fared, and How He Made his Fortune (London: Clarke, Beeton & Co., 1853), p. 10
  • Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest.
  • There is a land where summer skies
    Are gleaming with a thousand dyes,
    Blending in witching harmonies;
    And grassy knoll and forest height,
    Are flushing in the rosy light,
    And all above is azure bright — Australia!

1870s

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  • The hot wind, born amid the burning sand of the interior of the vast Australian continent, sweeps over the scorched and cracking plains, to lick up their streams and wither the herbage in its path, until it meets the waters of the great south bay; but in its passage across the straits it is reft of its fire, and sinks, exhausted with its journey, at the feet of the terraced slopes of Launceston.
  • Australia's sons let us rejoice,
    For we are young and free;
    We've golden soil and wealth for toil,
    Our home is girt by sea;
    Our land abounds in Nature's gifts
    Of beauty rich and rare;
    In hist'ry's page, let ev'ry stage
    Advance Australia fair.
    In joyful strains then let us sing,
    Advance Australia fair.

1880s

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  • Australia has rightly been named the Land of the Dawning. Wrapped in the midst of early morning, her history looms vague and gigantic.
    • Marcus Clarke, as quoted in the preface to Poems of the Late Adam Lindsay Gordon (1880)

1890s

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  • Australia’s a big country
       An’ Freedom’s humping bluey,
    An’ Freedom’s on the wallaby
       Oh! don’t you hear ’er cooey?
    She’s just begun to boomerang,
       She’ll knock the tyrants silly,
    She’s goin’ to light another fire
       And boil another billy.
  • So we must fly a rebel flag,
       As others did before us,
    And we must sing a rebel song
       And join in rebel chorus.
    We’ll make the tyrants feel the sting
       O’ those that they would throttle;
    They needn’t say the fault is ours
       If blood should stain the wattle!
  • O Radiant Land! o'er whom the sun's first dawning
       Fell brightest when God said, "Let there be light";
    O'er whom the day hung out its bluest awning
       Flushed to white deeps of star-lustre by night!
    • John Farrell, "Australia", st. 1, in Australasia Illustrated, vol. 1 (Picturesque Atlas Publishing Co., 1892) [1]
    • The last line is also quoted as "Whitening to wondrous deeps of stars by night."
  • Do you know, Mr Hopper, dear Agatha and I are so much interested in Australia. It must be so pretty with all the dear little kangaroos flying about.
  • For the first time in the world's history, there will be a nation for a continent, and a continent for a nation.
    • Edmund Barton (1890s), as quoted in as quoted in Colin A. Hughes, Mr. Prime Minister: Australian Prime Ministers, 1901–72 (1976)

20th century

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1900s

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  • Are you for Light, and trimmed, with oil in place,
    Or but a Will o’ Wisp on marshy quest?
    A new demesne for Mammon to infest?
    Or lurks millennial Eden ’neath your face?
  • And our reward? In this wan land,
      In clientage of Greed,
    Despised, polluted, maimed and banned,
      To wander and—to breed.

1910s

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  • I love a sunburnt country,
       A land of sweeping plains,
    Of ragged mountain ranges,
       Of droughts and flooding rains.
    I love her far horizons,
       I love her jewel-sea,
    Her beauty and her terror—
       The wide brown land for me!
  • Aboriginies, n. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.
  • Australia, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.
  • The hard, resentful look on the faces of all bushmen comes from a long course of dealing with merino sheep. The merino dominates the bush, and gives to Australian literature its melancholy tinge, its despairing pathos. The poems about dying boundary-riders, and lonely graves under mournful she-oaks, are the direct outcome of the poet’s too close association with that soul-destroying animal. A man who could write anything cheerful after a day in the drafting-yards would be a freak of nature.
  • All men are born free and equal; and each man is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of horse racing.
    • Banjo Paterson, "Australian Declaration of Independence", Racehorses and Racing, ch. 1, epigraph. Reprinted in R. Campbell and P. Harvie (eds.) Song of the Pen (1972), p. 275
  • I saw bank booms... land booms, silver booms, Northern Territory booms, and they all had one thing in common—they always burst.
    • Banjo Paterson, quoted in Clement Semmler, The Banjo of the Bush (1975)
  • This is a rune I ravelled in the still,
    Arrogant stare of an Australian cow.
    • Bernard O'Dowd, "The Cow", ll. 1–2, in The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse (1918), p. 133

1920s

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  • For we have here a beautiful land that none could e’er knock down,
    The brightest jewel that ever was known in dear old George's crown;
    The brightest jewel that ever was known and never can be a failure.
    Although the damn Labor party is doing its best to ruin Australia...
    • Randolph Bedford, "The Prize Poem", in The Bulletin Book of Humorous Verses and Recitations (1920)
  • “You feel free in Australia.” And so you do. There is a great relief in the atmosphere, a relief from tension, from pressure. An absence of control or will or form. The sky is open above you, and the air is open around you. Not the old closing-in of Europe. But what then? The vacancy of this freedom is almost terrifying.

1930s

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  • Australia is a unique country. All countries are unique, but this one is particularly so. ... The flora and fauna are primitive, and for the most part harmless to man, but to the visitor there is another element, of terror, in the Spirit of the Place. The blossoming of the waratah, the song of the lyrebird, typify the spirit of primitive loveliness in our continent; but the wail of the dingo, the gauntness of our tall trees by silent moonlight, can provide a shiver of terror to a newcomer.
  • The things which are most characteristic of Australia, in landscape as in life, have only been truly seen by those who have steeped themselves in the atmosphere of the land.
  • To this country of fertility, sunshine, and vast spaciousness they have brought whatever civilization Europe had to give them, and have added to it the fruits of their own inventiveness.
What Great Britain calls the Far East is to us the near north.
—Robert Menzies
  • What Great Britain calls the Far East is to us the near north.
    • Robert Menzies, policy speech (1939), quoted by C. Hartley Grattan, "An Australian–American Axis?", in Harper's Magazine, vol. 180 (May 1940), p. 562

1940s

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  • [C]ulturally there is a vast amount of hard work to be done before the average Australian has ordinary tolerance and understanding of American life and thought.
    • C. Hartley Grattan, "An Australian–American Axis?", in Harper's Magazine, vol. 180 (May 1940), p. 569
  • We are the sons of Australia,
    Of the men who fashioned the land,
    We are the sons of the women
    Who walked with them, hand in hand;
    And we swear by the dead who bore us,
    By the heroes who blazed the trail,
    No foe shall gather our harvest,
    Or sit on our stockyard rail.
  • Australia to the world lay hid in night:
    God said, "Let Grattan be!" and all was light.
    • G. V. Portus, review of Introducing Australia (1942); cp. Pope's epitaph for Newton. Quoted in Laurie Hergenhan, No Casual Traveller (1995), ch. 10, p. 200
  • Never was a continent naturally so clean, and made so dirty, as Australia. There was not an animal pest, scarcely a vegetable pest; fools and the old world supplied them all.
  • There was a bushman serving at Pentridge a sentence for horse stealing. He was a very honest man. He would not think of stealing a penny, but a horse was a different matter.

1950s

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  • Above our writers—and other artists—looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon culture. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the characteristic Australian Cultural Cringe—appearing either as the Cringe Direct, or as the Cringe Inverted, in the attitude of the Blatant Blatherskite, the God's-Own-Country and I'm-a-better-man-than-you-are Australian bore.
    • A. A. Phillips, "The Cultural Cringe", in Meanjin (1950)
    • Quoted by Paul Keating in a speech in the House of Representatives (27 February 1992), addressing monarchists:
      Even as it walked out on you and joined the Common Market, you were still looking for your MBEs and your knighthoods, and all the rest of the regalia that comes with it. You would take Australia right back down the time tunnel to the cultural cringe where you have always come from.
  • White Australia must not be regarded as a mere political shibboleth. It was Australia's Magna Carta. Without that policy, this country would have been lost long ere this. It would have been engulfed in an Asian tidal wave.

1960s

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  • Distance is the continual theme and has been one of the main conditioning factors in Australian history. She was distant and dependent, a continent swinging on a long chain in antipodean darkness.
  • Isolation became something of a cult in Australia before the advances of applied science, particularly the cable and the aeroplane, broke it down. The Australians, as they early came to call themselves, felt protected by it. They were alone to grow in their own way, to make their mistakes in private.
  • The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter.
    The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place.
    The bora ring is gone.
    The corroboree is gone.
    And we are going.

1980s

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  • If Australia had not been settled as a prison and built by convict labor, it would have been colonized by other means; that was foreordained from the moment of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay in 1770. But it would have taken half a century longer, for Georgian Britain would have found it exceptionally difficult to find settlers crazy or needy enough to go there of their own free will.

21st century

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2000s

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  • With its weird red earth and its alien flora and fauna... Australia was the eighteenth-century equivalent of Mars.

2010s

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  • You can take them out of England, but you just can't take the convict out of them.
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  • The dictionary definition of Australia on Wiktionary
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