Australia (continent)

• 1. Introduction

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  Australia the continent is not the same thing as Australia the country. That distinction matters more than most people realize. The landmass beneath the country stretches far beyond its political borders, reaching north through Torres Strait to encompass the island of New Guinea and south through Bass Strait to include Tasmania. Scientists and geographers have wrestled for generations over what to call this place: Sahul, Meganesia, Australinea, Australia-New Guinea. Each name carries a different theory about what the continent really is and where its edges lie.

  At 8.56 million square kilometres, the Australian continent is the smallest of the seven traditional continents. It is also the lowest, the flattest, and the second-driest landmass on Earth, after Antarctica. Those superlatives point to something unusual about its geological character, a stability and age that sets it apart from every other continent.

  The questions this documentary will explore run deep. How did a single vast landmass become multiple nations and thousands of distinct cultures? Why does this corner of the Earth harbour such a disproportionate share of the world's unique animal species? And why have geographers argued for over a century about whether to call this place a continent at all?

• 2. What to Call It

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  Scottish cartographer John Bartholomew wrote in 1873 that there were six great divisions of the Earth, listing Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania. Australia, in his framework, was simply part of that broader Pacific grouping. The concept of Australia as its own named continent did not gain traction in English-speaking countries until the 1950s.

  The debate had older roots. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle speculated about a large landmass in the southern hemisphere to balance the known lands of the north. Ptolemy expanded on that idea in the 2nd century AD. Macrobius placed the word Australis on his 5th-century maps, and the hypothetical continent Terra Australis appeared on European maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. Scientists as late as 1767 were still arguing for its existence on theoretical grounds alone.

  Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon made the first documented European landing on the continent in 1606, touching Cape York Peninsula. Even so, the naming problem persisted for centuries. The term Oceania was originally coined as a great division of the world in the 1810s. American author Samuel Griswold Goodrich, writing in his 1854 book History of All Nations, treated Oceania as one of three continents alongside the New World and the Old World.

  British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, in his 1879 book Australasia, noted that Oceania was the word continental geographers favoured for this island world. He considered it to stretch as far as the Aleutian Islands in the north Pacific. That definition proved impossible to standardize: 19th-century geographers divided Oceania along lines that were often explicitly racial, carving it into Australasia, Malaysia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.

  The naming of the continent itself went through several archaeological revisions. Before the 1970s, researchers called the ancient Pleistocene landmass Australasia. In the early 1970s, the term Greater Australia was introduced. At a 1975 conference, the name Sahul was extended from the Sahul Shelf to cover the entire continent. In 1984, the name Meganesia was proposed, meaning great island or great island-group, and biologists widely adopted it. Another biologist, Richard Dawkins, coined Australinea in 2004. The United Nations, recognizing Oceania as one of the world's five major continental divisions since 1947, uses a definition that encompasses a vast sweep of Pacific territories from American Samoa to Hawaii.

• 3. Ice, Sea, and Separation

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  About 18,000 BC, at the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum, the continent looked nothing like it does today. Sea levels were lower, and what are now separate landmasses were a single connected territory called Sahul. New Guinea, Tasmania, and mainland Australia were all joined. The Arafura Sea, Torres Strait, and Bass Strait did not yet exist.

  The continental shelf connecting these lands is only half covered by water shallower than 50 metres, and that shelf spans about 2.5 million square kilometres including the Sahul Shelf and Bass Strait. The shallowness is the geological signature of what was once dry land.

  Over the following 8,000 to 10,000 years, rising seas transformed the continent. When the last glacial period ended around 10,000 BC, Bass Strait formed and separated Tasmania from the mainland. Then between roughly 8,000 and 6,500 BC, the northern lowlands flooded, cutting off the Aru Islands, New Guinea, and the Tasmanian and mainland Australian landmasses from one another.

  The continent's geological stability is ancient. Its lands were joined with Antarctica as part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana until the plate began drifting north about 96 million years ago. Since then, the Australian landmass has sat near the middle of its tectonic plate, which is why it currently has no active volcanoes. It is the only continent on Earth with that distinction. Papua New Guinea, however, is a different story: positioned along the Pacific Ring of Fire, it has several volcanoes and is prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. Puncak Jaya, at 4,884 metres above sea level, is the highest point on the continent. Mount Wilhelm in Papua New Guinea is the second highest.

• 4. First Peoples

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  Indigenous Australians, including Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander peoples, arrived on the continent at least 50,000 years ago according to archaeological evidence, with more recent research suggesting possibly 65,000 years ago. They had migrated from Africa to Asia around 70,000 years ago before making that crossing to the continent.

  The earliest known human remains from the continent were found at Lake Mungo, a dry lake in the southwest of New South Wales. Those remains include what may be one of the world's oldest known cremations, pointing to religious ritual at an early stage of human history. Dreamtime, the spiritual tradition that underpins Aboriginal culture, is also part of the oldest continuing tradition of art in the world.

  Papuan habitation in New Guinea is estimated to have begun between 42,000 and 48,000 years ago. When Europeans first reached New Guinea, the people there already had a productive agricultural system and used tools of bone, wood, and stone. Trade between New Guinea and neighbouring Indonesian islands was documented as early as the 7th century. By the 13th century, archipelagic rule extended over New Guinea, and the Sumatra-based empire of Srivijaya had engaged in trade with western New Guinea, initially taking sandalwood and birds-of-paradise as tribute.

  On the 23rd of April 1770, British explorer James Cook made his first recorded direct observation of Indigenous Australians at Brush Island near Bawley Point. Six days later, on the 29th of April, Cook and his crew made their first mainland landfall at what is now called the Kurnell Peninsula, where he made first contact with an Aboriginal group known as the Gweagal. Captain Arthur Phillip then led the First Fleet, comprising 11 ships and about 850 convicts, into Sydney on the 26th of January 1788. Phillip described Sydney Cove as being, in his words, without exception the finest harbour in the world.

• 5. Life That Went Its Own Way

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  For about 40 million years, Australia-New Guinea was almost completely isolated from the rest of the world. That isolation shaped an ecology unlike any other on Earth.

  Marsupials and monotremes once existed on multiple continents, but only in Australia-New Guinea did they out-compete placental mammals and come to dominate the landscape. The reasons are three. First, while much of the world cooled dramatically and lost species, the continent was drifting northward at a pace that roughly cancelled out the global temperature drop, keeping conditions stable enough for an extraordinary number of species to evolve into distinct ecological niches. Second, the continent's isolation meant very few outside species arrived to compete. Third, scattered pockets of fertile soil in an otherwise ancient, infertile landscape created conditions for unusual co-evolution.

  The results are striking. About 83% of the mammals, 89% of the reptiles, and 93% of the amphibians found on the Australian mainland are endemic to Australia. Around 800 bird species call Australia and its territories home, and 45% of those are found nowhere else. Songbirds are thought to have evolved roughly 50 million years ago in the portion of Gondwana that later became Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and Antarctica, before spreading across the globe.

  New Guinea holds its own ecological records. It has about 600 species of reef-building coral, equal to 75% of the world's known total. There are 578 species of breeding birds, of which 324 are endemic. The New Guinea highlands, despite being close to the equator, hold many species that once ranged across the entire continent but now survive only in those cooler altitudes, threatened by population growth.

  The ocean straits that opened between the islands as sea levels rose were narrow enough to allow plant dispersal but wide enough to block the exchange of land mammals between Australia-New Guinea and Asia. That invisible barrier is why the fauna on either side of Wallacea looks so different today.

• 6. A Continent of Many Nations

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  Papua New Guinea has more languages than any other country on Earth: over 820 indigenous languages, representing 12% of the world's total. Most of those languages are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people. It is also one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world, with an estimated 7,000 different cultural groups, and one of the most rural, with only 18% of its population living in urban centres.

  West Papua, the Indonesian region on the western half of New Guinea, is home to an estimated 44 uncontacted tribal groups. The region was administered as a single Indonesian province until 2003, when it was divided into the provinces of Papua and West Papua. Special Autonomy status was granted to Papua province in 2001, though implementation has been partial and often criticised.

  Australia, by contrast, is highly urbanised and holds the world's 14th-largest economy with the second-highest human development index globally. Since 1945, more than 7 million people have settled there, drawn from more than 200 countries. Sydney alone has more than 250 different languages spoken within it, with about 40% of residents speaking a language other than English at home. Melbourne holds the largest Greek-speaking population outside of Europe. The Bombing of Darwin on the 19th of February 1942, the largest single attack ever mounted by a foreign power on Australia, underscored the vulnerability of a vast, sparsely settled continent at the edge of a world at war.