Australia is the only country in the world that has a continent, but its history is extremely short. Before europeans arrived in Australia, the indigenous peoples were tribal and nomadic, with hundreds of thousands of people, but no country was established, so there is no historical documentation.
In 1606, Spanish navigators passed through the straits of northern Australia, but did not land, otherwise the First to discover Australia would have been the Spaniards. In the same year, the Dutch became the first recorded alien to land in Australia and named the site New Holland.
In 1770, Captain Cook of the British Royal Navy landed on the east coast of Australia, named the area New South Wales, and declared it a British territory. The British used Australia as a place of exile, and in 1788 the British fleet arrived in Australia with more than 1,500 men, half of whom were prisoners. On 26 January, they established the first British colonial district in Sydney, so it also became Australia's national day.
In 1790, British freedmen gradually began to migrate to Australia, expanding inland, with Sydney as the center. In 1817, the British named the entire continent Australia. The discovery of gold in Melbourne in 1851 quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of gold prospectors, including Chinese, to distinguish it from San Francisco in the United States, which the Chinese called the New Golden Mountain. In 1900, the six British colonial districts held a referendum agreeing to merge into one country and establish a unified Commonwealth of Australia.
The two major cities of Sydney and Melbourne competed for capitals and finally decided to build a new town in the middle of the two cities, Canberra, as the capital, and moved the capital to Canberra in 1927. In 1931 Australia became an independent state in the British Commonwealth. This is the history of Australia.