A real size comparison of Australia and the United States and the U.K. in red
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. Indigenous Australians are distinguished as either Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders, who currently together make up about 2.7% of Australia's population.
During the period between 1788 and 1868, about 160,000 convicts were sent to Australia. What happened to them when they got to Australia depended on their skills or education, how they behaved themselves and some luck. The First Fleet carried 780 British convicts who landed in Botany Bay, New South Wales. Two more convict fleets arrived in 1790 and 1791, and the first free settlers didn' arrived until 1793. During this period, the colony of New South Wales was officially a penal colony comprising mainly of convicts, marines and the wives of the marines.
The majority of the 165,000 convicts transported to Australia were poor and illiterate, victims of the Poor Laws and social conditions in Georgian England. Eight out of ten prisoners were convicted for larceny of some description.
In the 2006 Australian Census residents were asked to describe their ancestry, in which up to two could be nominated. Proportionate to the Australian resident population, the most commonly nominated ancestries were.
Australian (37.13%)
English (31.65%)
Irish (9.08%)
Scottish (7.56%)
Italian (4.29%)
German (4.09%)
Chinese (3.37%)
Greek (1.84%)
Dutch (1.56%)
Indian (1.18%)
Lebanese (0.92%)
Vietnamese (0.87%)
Armenian (0.82%)
New Zealander (0.81%)
Filipino (0.81%)
Maltese (0.77%)
Croatian (0.59%)
Welsh (0.57%)
French (0.5%)
Serbian (0.48%)
Maori (0.47%)
Spanish (0.42%)
Macedonian (0.42%)
South African (0.4%)
Sinhalese (0.37%)
Hungarian (0.3%)
Russian (0.3%)
Turkish (0.3%)
American (0.28%)
Australia is a religiously diverse country and has no official religion.
The most commonly spoken languages other than English in Australia are Italian, Greek, German, Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Chinese languages, Indian languages, Arabic, Macedonian and Croatian, as well as numerous Australian Aboriginal languages
