Today, the majority of the Australian population are descendants of immigrants who arrived in this country in the 19th and 20th centuries, mainly from Scotland, England and Ireland.
The indigenous people of Australia are the natives of Australia, the natives of Tasmania and the Islanders of the Torres Strait. These three groups differ externally and there are cultural differences between them.
Immigrants from the British Isles began to populate Australia in 1788. Then, on the east coast, in the place of present Sydney, the first batch of exiles were 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 due to immigrants from England and some other countries almost tripled from 1851 to 1861 and reached 1 million people.
Over 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 it was the second ethnic group of the continent after the British. Among them were Lutherans who were persecuted, political and economic refugees, for example, who left Germany after the 1848 revolution.
Today, Australia has a population of 21,875 million, with an average density of 2.8. per 1 sq. km.
All Australian colonies constituted a federation in 1900. In the early years of the 20th century, Australia's nationwide economy grew stronger, leading to further consolidation of the nation.
After World War II, the government 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 Australia's population are British and Italians, Irish, New Zealanders, Dutch and Greeks, Germans, Vietnamese, Yugoslavs and Chinese.
In these years, the autochthonous population was about 400 thousand people, counting the inhabitants of the islands of the Torres Strait, which are of Melanesian origin. Australian Aboriginal people are characterized by higher levels of crime and unemployment, lower education and shorter life expectancy: they live 17 years less than the rest of the population.
The Australian population, as well as other developed countries, is characterized by a demographic shift towards older people, the number of pensioners has increased and the percentage of people of working age has decreased.
English is the official language of the country. They use a special option known as Australian English. About 80% of the population use English for home communication as their only language. Besides him, 2.1% of the population speaks Chinese at home, 1.9% - in Italian, and 1.4 - in Greek. Too many immigrants speak two languages. The languages of Australian Aborigines are spoken as basically only 50 thousand people, which is 0.02% of the population. Indigenous languages are gradually disappearing: to date, out of 200 languages, only about 70 remain.