Today, the majority of Australia's population are descendants of immigrants who arrived in this country in the 19th and 20th centuries, mainly from Scotland, England and Ireland.
Indigenous Australians are Australian Aboriginals, Tasmanians and Torres Strait Islanders. These three groups are visually distinct and there are cultural differences between them.
Natives from the British Isles began to settle in Australia in 1788. Then on the east coast, on the site of present-day Sydney, the first batch of exiles landed, and the first settlement of Port Jackson was founded. Voluntary immigrants from England began to arrive here only in the 1820s, when sheep breeding began to develop in the country. When gold was discovered in the country, the population of Australia almost tripled from 1851 to 1861 due to immigrants from England and some other countries and reached 1 million people.
For 60 years, from 1839 to 1900, the population of Australia grew by more than 18 thousand Germans who settled in the south of the country; by 1890 itwas the second ethnic group of the continent after the British. They included persecuted Lutherans, political and economic refugees, such as those who fled Germany after the 1848 revolution.
Today the population of Australia is 21875 million people, with an average density of 2.8 people. per 1 sq. km.
All Australian colonies were federated in 1900. In the early years of the 20th century, the national economy of Australia strengthened, which led to further consolidation of the nation.
After the Second World War, the government of the country announced an ambitious program to stimulate immigration, as a result of which the population of Australia more than doubled. As a result, in 2001, 27.4% of the continent's population were people who were born abroad. The largest ethnic groups that make up the population of Australia are British and Italians, Irish, New Zealanders, Dutch and Greeks, Germans, Vietnamese, Yugoslavs and Chinese.
During these years, about 400 thousand people belonged to the autochthonous population, counting the inhabitants of the Torres Strait Islanders, who are of Melanesian origin. Australian Aboriginal people are characterized by higher levels of crime and unemployment, lower levels of education and shorter life expectancy: they live 17 years less than the rest of the population.
The population of Australia, like other developed countries, is characterized by a demographic shift towards older people, an increase in the number of pensioners andthe percentage of people of working age has decreased.
English is the official language of the country. Here they use a special variant known as Australian English. Approximately 80% of the population use English for home communication as the only language. Besides him, 2.1% of the population speaks Chinese at home, 1.9% Italian and 1.4% Greek. A lot of immigrants are bilingual. Australian Aboriginal languages are spoken as the main language by only 50 thousand people, which is 0.02% of the population. Indigenous languages are gradually disappearing: only about 70 out of 200 languages remain today.
