- published: 19 Apr 2013
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Australian people, or simply Australians, are the citizens of Australia. Australia is a multi-ethnic nation, and therefore the term "Australian" is not a racial identifier. Aside from the Indigenous Australian population, nearly all Australians or their ancestors immigrated within the past 230 years. Colloquial names used to refer to Australians include Aussies, and Antipodeans.
The mainstream Australian culture (occasionally defined as the Anglo-Celtic culture), is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of Western European migrants beginning with the early settlers from England, Scotland, and Ireland. The populations of Sydney, Melbourne and the other major cities are different from the demographics of rural Australia as a result of the differing migration patterns.
Australian people can refer to:
The earliest accepted timeline for the first arrivals of indigenous Australians to the continent of Australia places this human migration to at least 40,000 years ago most probably from the islands of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.
Australian Aborigines ( /æbəˈrɪdʒɨni/), also called Aboriginal Australians, from the Latin ab origine (from the origin), are people who are indigenous to most of the Australian continent — that is, to mainland Australia and the island of Tasmania. Since 1995 the Australian Aboriginal Flag (right), designed in 1971 by the Aboriginal artist Harold Thomas, has been one of the official "Flags of Australia" under section 5 of the Flags Act 1953.
The category "Australian Aborigines" — sometimes "Australian Aboriginals" or "Aboriginal Australians" or, more usually within Australia, simply "Aborigines" — is not itself indigenous, but is a classification invented by and for the purposes of the British colonisers after the beginning of colonisation in 1788. Until the 1980s, the legal and administrative criterion for inclusion in this category was solely biological, following biologically based conceptions of "race".
In the era of colonial and post-colonial government, access to basic human rights depended upon your race. If you were a "full blooded Aboriginal native ... [or] any person apparently having an admixture of Aboriginal blood", a half-caste being the "offspring of an Aboriginal mother and other than Aboriginal father" (but not of an Aboriginal father and other than Aboriginal mother), a "quadroon", or had a "strain" of Aboriginal blood you were forced to live on Reserves or Missions, work for rations, given minimal education, and needed governmental approval to marry, visit relatives or use electrical appliances.