AUSTRALIA

Bauxite mine in Western Australia. Australia's established world reputation is that of a rich, underpopulated country prone to natural disasters, riding on the sheep's back, and otherwise heavily dependent on foreign investment. That was a reasonably fair description during the first century of white settlement, when wool exports reigned supreme. Later, more complex stereotypes added wheat, beef, lamb, dairy produce, and a range of irrigated crops to the list, but the key significance of farming and grazing was unchallenged. The image was essentially shattered by the growth of manufacturing and service industries and especially by the spectacular developments in mineral exploitation after World War II. In another sense, there was no break in continuity. Reliance on foreign investment and a built-in vulnerability to world markets made it difficult for Australians to divest themselves of their appointed roles as minor or peripheral players in an interconnected global system. After the 1960s the relative decline of manufacturing exposed other aspects of this entrenched dependency status. Australia's governments have usually shown a pronounced readiness to intervene in the economy, but it has been dominated all too easily by foreign interestsfirst by those of the United Kingdom, then by the United States and Japan, and latterly by the decisions of giant multinational corporations. Another distinctive feature is comparatively new. There has been a grudging acceptance within Australia of the vital economic and strategic significance of the Asia-Pacific region and a rising awareness of the opportunities to be grasped in that emergent part of the world. Its stunning economic successes pose uncomfortable questions for traditionalists and left-wing intellectuals alike. Resources Mineral resources The most important mineral reserves are located in Western Australia (iron ore, nickel, bauxite, diamonds, gold, mineral sands, and offshore natural gas), Queensland (bauxite, bituminous or black coal, lead, mineral sands, zinc, and silver), New South Wales (bituminous coal, lead, zinc, silver, and mineral sands), and Victoria (brown coal or lignite and offshore oil and natural gas). The largest known uranium reserves are in northern and northwestern Queensland, the Northern Territory, Western Australia, and South Australia. Australia has about 29 percent of the Western world's low-cost uranium resources, yet production has been small and discontinuous. It has been limited by the minuscule domestic demand and by strenuous objections from the environmental movement. Australia was considered to be roughly two-thirds self-sufficient in crude oil production during the late 1980s, when it was anticipated that Bass Strait production would shortly enter a period of sharp decline. There are abundant reserves of coal, natural gas, and uranium capable of meeting domestic and export demands over the medium term. Given current knowledge of these reserves, the present production rates of black coal could be sustained for 360 years; on the same reckoning, estimates suggest 55 years for natural gas and 120 years for uranium. Schoolgirls eating lunch in a Melbourne park. The immigration of people to Australia from Australian society is regarded in the wider world as essentially British or at any rate Anglo-Celtic, and until recently that was not too wide of the mark. The ties to Britain and Ireland were scarcely affected by immigration from other sources until the mid-20th century, although local concentrations of Germans, Chinese, and other ethnic groups had been established in the 19th century. But the complex demographic textures of the 1990s contrast quite sharply with the bland homogeneity of earlier decades, and they support lively controversy. In fact, the great population debate is a long-running affair that has drawn contributors from every walk of life since the beginning of the colonial era. After the mid-19th century, population growth was frequently adopted as an index of economic success and environmental adaptation, and the proximity of Asia's crowded millions deepened national insecurities. One of the first objectives of the new federal government, established in 1901, was the design of a White Australia policy to avoid diluting the Anglo-Celtic heritage. On its own, the policy was unproductive as well as discriminatory, but it was made more attractive by the blending of imperial and nationalistic sentiments that proclaimed population capacities of between 100 and 500 million in Australia's vast empty spaces. In the interwar period the Australian geographer Griffith Taylor argued that there were stringent environmental limits that would restrict Australia's population to 19 to 20 million persons at the end of the 20th century. Taylor was vilified and finally hounded out of his own country, but his environmental determinism, like his remarkable prediction, is well-remembered. The battles in the Pacific Ocean during World War II revived the old catch-cry, populate or perish, and a vigorous campaign was launched to encourage immigration from all parts of Europe. Initially, that did nothing to relax the emphasis on an exclusivist White Australia policy, and the nation's ethnic composition was only slightly affected. Over the next four decades, however, ethnic diversification gradually intensified, and the 1980s brought heated debates on the relative merits of publicly funded programs for assimilation and for multiculturalism. At the outset of this new era of policy formulation, the federal government preferred to maintain British and Irish immigration at a high rate, but those sources were soon deemed insufficient to meet rising expectations, and further assisted migration and private sponsorship agreements were negotiated with other European and Middle Eastern governments. In addition, most major world crises have introduced fresh waves of immigrants: refugees from Hungary and Czechoslovakia after the uprisings in the 1950s and '60s; from Lebanon and from Chile and other Latin American countries in the 1970s; and from Indochina (Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam) and China in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Between World War II and the late 1980s some 500,000 refugees and displaced persons arrived in Australia. In the late 1980s it was estimated that some 42 percent of the population had been born overseas or had at least one overseas-born parent. The big cities received the bulk of this postwar immigration. Melbourne's early lead in industrialization was very closely associated with the immigration boom, but Sydney eventually proved more attractive. The impact was not confined to these two capitals: whereas the overseas-born components accounted for just under 30 percent of the populations of Sydney and Melbourne in 1981, the national proportion was a sizable 22 percent. Each of the other state capitals and the industrializing provincial centres had proved attractive. The impact was much smaller in the rural districts, except for the irrigation areas. Substantially relaxed after 1966, the White Australia policy was officially abandoned in 1973, and thereafter increasing proportions of the annual immigration intake represented the non-European world, especially Asia. Thus far, most of the continuing debates on immigration have focused on cultural and economic issues and only peripherally on race, and (with the exception of the complex Aboriginal issues) Australians have been spared the kinds of interracial conflict that have scarred other immigrant societies. Recorded religious adherence has generally mirrored the immigrants' backgrounds. In every census since the early colonial era, most Australians have professed to be Christian, principally Anglican and Roman Catholic, but simple materialism has become more influential than Christianity. The Roman Catholic total population exceeded the Anglican for the first time in the later 1980s. The proportions registering as Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists increased quite sharply after the mid-1960s, but so did the totals of those indicating no religion or not replying to the appropriate question on the census form. In contrast to the white invaders who dispossessed them, traditional Aboriginal communities are intensely spiritual. Religion gave meaning to life, and the coordinating theme was the sustaining connection between land and people. Persecution and indifference failed to extinguish the flame, and inevitably landrights became the rallying cry of a political movement accompanying a highly publicized revival of Aboriginality. A national referendum on Aboriginal rights held in 1967 agreed to the transfer of legislative power over Aboriginal affairs from the states to the federal government, and this accelerated the revival. The steep postwar growth of the indigenous population is usually explained by the successful cultivation of greater pride in Aboriginality, the evolution of positive discrimination policies in education, health, and welfare, and the official adoption of a very generous definition of Aborigines and Torres Straits Islanders. The relatively youthful age-structures and high fertility rates of those enumerated under this collective title largely account for the continuing upward trend. On the negative side, infant mortality is unusually high and average life expectancy at birth is about 30 percent lower than that of the rest of the Australian nation. The total number of Aborigines and Torres Straits Islanders exceeded 228,000, or about 1.5 percent of the total population, in the late 1980s. This was an impressive increase on the 115,953 recorded in 1971, but it was eclipsed by the rise in the numbers of Asian-born Australians to 4.3 percent of the Australian total in 1989. Huge expenditures were made on Aboriginal affairs during the 1980s to the chagrin of much larger minority groups who have enjoyed less international visibility. Official federal policy is to encourage self-help and local autonomy, while improving the provision of essential services and the climate of opportunity. The stubborn obstacles to progress include residual prejudice and neglect in the white community and the lingering consequences of the vicious circle of poverty, ignorance, and disease in which native peoples were entrapped from their earliest encounters with whites. In numerical terms the most important Aboriginal concentrations are located in Queensland, New South Wales, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory. Until the later 1960s the Aboriginal population was not inaccurately described as being as rural as white Australia was urban. In the Outback, small numbers still lived in tribal societies and tried to maintain the traditional ways. Some were employed as highly skilled stockmen on the big stations; welfare payments and charitable organizations supported others on mission stations and government reserves. In the 1970s and '80s the drift of Aborigines to the towns and cities transformed the old patterns except in the Northern Territory, where the rural distribution remained predominant. Their migrations to the country towns have often left Aboriginal families as stranded fringe dwellers, a term with social as well as geographic connotations. In the larger centres, Aboriginal communities from widely differing backgrounds face innumerable hazards as they attempt to adjust to volatile urban politics. Recent politicizations and perceptions of common grievances have encouraged a unity of purpose and a sense of solidarity between urban and rural groups. The regional successes gained by the landrights campaigners in the Northern Territory and in Western Australia and South Australia were vital steps in the Australianization of the wider national Aboriginal community. Perhaps it is only slightly inflated to state that, taken in conjunction with anxious decisions made at state and federal levels to begin the rehabilitation of soils and vegetation ravaged by two centuries of aggressive white settlement, the process signified the dawning recognition of a binding moral imperative. The Aboriginal communities that have been awarded freehold or near-freehold rights over extensive areas have been made well aware that their management skills are under close observation. (For information on Aboriginal languages, see Australian Aboriginal languages.) Ayers Rock, Northern Territory, Australia. officially Commonwealth of Australia, the smallest continent and one of the largest countries on Earth, lying between the Pacific and Indian oceans in the Southern Hemisphere. The capital is Canberra. The continent is bounded by latitudes 10 and 44 S (about 2,450 miles [3,940 kilometres] from Cape York Peninsula in the north to Tasmania in the south) and by longitudes 112 and 154 E (about 2,700 miles [4,350 kilometres] from east to west). Australia is separated from Indonesia in the northwest by the Timor and the Arafura seas; from Papua New Guinea in the northeast by the Torres Strait; from the Coral Sea Islands Territory (in the Coral Sea), also in the northeast, by the Great Barrier Reef; from New Zealand in the southeast by the Tasman Sea; and from Antarctica to the south by the Indian Ocean. Australia has been called the Oldest Continent, the Last of Lands, and the Last Frontier. These descriptions typify the fascination with Australia overseas since World War II, but they are somewhat unsatisfactory. In simple physical terms the age of much of the continent is certainly impressivemost of the rocks providing the foundation of Australian landforms were formed during the Precambrian and Palaeozoic eras (3.8 billion to 245 million years ago)but the ages of the cores of all the continents are approximately the same. On the other hand, whereas the landscape history of extensive areas in Europe and North America has been profoundly influenced by events and processes that have occurred since the last Ice Ageduring, say, the past 25,000 yearsin Australia scientists must accommodate to a time scale extending over 250 million years. Australia is the last of lands only in the sense that it was the last continent, apart from Antarctica, to be discovered and explored by Europeans. At least 40,000 years before European explorers sailed into the South Pacific, the first Aborigines had arrived from Asia, and by 20,000 years ago they had spread throughout the mainland and its chief island outlier, Tasmania. When Captain Arthur Phillip of the British Royal Navy landed with the 1st Fleet at Botany Bay in 1788, there may have been between 250,000 and 500,000 Aborigines altogether, though some estimates are much higher. Largely nomadic hunters and gatherers, the Aborigines had already transformed the primeval landscape, principally by the use of fire, and, contrary to common European perceptions, they had actually established robust, semipermanent settlements in well-favoured localities. The American-style concept of a national frontier is also inappropriate. There was, rather, a series of comparatively independent expansions into the margins of the various colonies, which were not joined in an independent federated union until 1901. Again, frontier popularizations can be employed to suggest the existence of yet another extension of Europe and especially of an outpost of Anglo-Celtic culture in the distant antipodes. That image began to lose credibility after World War II. The most striking characteristics of the vast, three-million-square-mile (eight-million-square-kilometre) country are its global isolation, its low relief, and the aridity of much of its surface. Its isolation from other continents explains much of the strangeness of Australian plant and animal life; its low relief results from the long and extensive erosive action of the forces of wind, rain, and the heat of the sun during the great periods of geologic time when the continental mass was elevated well above sea level. Isolation is also a pronounced characteristic of much of the social landscape beyond the large coastal cities, but an equally significant feature of modern Australian society is the representation of a very wide spectrum of cultures drawn from many lands, a development that is transforming the original cultural orientation. Historically part of the British Empire and now a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, the Commonwealth of Australia is a relatively prosperous, independent nation. Australians are in many respects fortunate in that they do not share their continentwhich is only a little smaller than the United Stateswith any other nation. Extremely remote from their traditional allies and trading partnersit is some 12,000 miles (19,000 kilometres) from Australia to Great Britain via the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal and about 7,000 miles (11,000 kilometres) across the Pacific Ocean to the west coast of the United StatesAustralians are becoming rather more interested in the proximity of huge potential markets in Asia and in the highly competitive industrialized economies of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Like Canada and the United States, Australia is a political federation with a central government (the Commonwealth) and six constituent states (New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania). Each state has its own government, enjoying a limited sovereignty. There are also two internal territories: the Northern Territory, established as a self-governing territory in 1978, and the Australian Capital Territory (including the city of Canberra), which attained self-governing status in 1988. Major issues in resource development and environmental management have ignited controversies over the protection of states' rights and the federal (or Commonwealth) government's gradual accumulation of power. The federal authorities also govern the external territories of Norfolk Island, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Christmas Island, Ashmore and Cartier islands, the Coral Sea Islands, and Heard and McDonald islands and claim the Australian Antarctic Territory, an area larger than Australia itself. Papua New Guinea, formerly an Australian external territory, became an independent nation in 1975. Joseph Michael Powell Government Lake Burley Griffin and the Parliament House (right centre), Canberra, Australia. The constitution of Australia may be described crudely as an amalgam of the constitutional forms of the United Kingdom and the United States. Like the United Kingdom, it is a monarchy, and the British king or queen is the king or queen of Australia. As in the United Kingdom, also, the governments of the Commonwealth of Australia and of the Australian states are chosen from the majority party in their parliaments. Like the United States, Australia is a federation, and the duties of the federal government and the division of powers between the Commonwealth and the states are laid down in a written constitution. The constitution can be altered only by a referendum that gains the consent of a majority of all the electors and a majority in at least four of the six states, as well as majorities in both federal houses. Disputes arising out of the constitution are decided by the High Court of Australia. Although the monarch of Britain is also the monarch of Australia, the country is essentially independent. The functions of the present queen have been regarded as almost entirely formal and decorative and, except when she is in Australia, are exercised by a governor-general who resides in Canberra and by the state governors. Though formally the governor-general and the governors are appointed by the monarch, they are invariably recommended by the Australian governments, and in recent years there has been a growing tendency to choose Australians. By convention, the prime minister (the leader of the party or coalition of parties victorious in the general election) is the nation's chief executive. The sensational constitutional crisis of 1975, when the elected Australian Labor Party (ALP) government was dismissed by the governor-general, called into question the conventional assumptions about the relationship between the elected government and the British crown's representative. The complicity of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and of the British secret service in this event has been widely alleged and bitterly resented. Ensuing debates included fiery proposals to define and limit the powers and duties of the governor-general and to reexamine alliances with the United States. An influential minority supports the view that Australia should sever all remaining ties with the United Kingdom and declare itself a republic, in which case the post of governor-general would be abolished. Increasing ethnic heterogeneity has been adding weight to that argument since the 1960s, and, although it is generally accepted that the process of change must be evolutionary, another coup similar to that of 1975 would introduce a note of urgency. The constitution defines the form and duties of the federal government in some detail. The most important of these are defense, foreign policy, immigration, customs and excise, and the post office. Those powers not given to the federal government in the constitution (the residual powers) are left to the states: they are responsible for justice, education, health, and internal transport. Australia is a true parliamentary democracy. Both the federal upper house (the Senate) and the lower house (the House of Representatives) are directly elected by universal adult suffrage, with a minimum voting age of 18. All state lower houses are similarly elected. Voting in both federal and state elections is compulsory (with the exception of elections to South Australia's Legislative Council). Both preferential and proportional systems are current in Australia. The preferential approach (in which the voter numbers the candidates in order of preference on the ballot paper) allows minor parties an indirect influence on policy formation at the federal (House of Representatives) and state levels even where those parties do not win seats, since the votes of losing candidates may be reallocated in close contests. The other system in force is election by proportional representation, which ensures that parties divide the number of seats according to their shares of the vote. Its most important application is in elections to the federal Senate and to Tasmania's Assembly. Since federation, the political struggle in Australia has been between the ALP and a number of anti-Labor parties. For most of the years after 1949 the federal government was formed by a coalition between the Liberal Party of Australia, which broadly represented the concerns of private enterprise, and the National Party (formerly the Country Party), which represented the farmers, graziers, and other groups in the rural constituencies. The ALP developed into a typical Western social democratic party, retaining the support of the trade unions and normally preferring practical reforms to socialist theories. It has always had a left wing that espouses various brands of socialism. The Australian Democrats, formed in 1977, have drawn support away from the main parties. The deeply divided Communist Party of Australia gradually passed into oblivion in the late 1980s. Local government More than 800 local government authorities serve almost the whole of the settled area of Australia. Their main powers are derived from special legislation in each state that integrates them into the higher state administration. Federal initiatives in the 1970s upgraded the funding and therefore the capacities of this tier of government. Its functions are often described as the three Rsrates, roads, and rubbishbut in the densely settled suburbs the range extends from car parking, health and welfare, and recreation facilities to fire prevention, town planning, inspections and licensing, and the promotion of district attractions and amenities. officially Commonwealth of Australia the smallest continent and one of the largest countries on Earth, lying between the Pacific and Indian oceans in the Southern Hemisphere. The capital is Canberra. The continent is bounded by latitudes 10 and 44 S (about 2,450 miles [3,940 km] from Cape York Peninsula in the north to Tasmania in the south) and by longitudes 112 and 154 E (about 2,700 miles [4,350 km] from east to west). Australia is separated from Indonesia in the northwest by the Timor and the Arafura seas; from Papua New Guinea in the northeast by the Torres Strait; from the Coral Sea Islands Territory (in the Coral Sea), also in the northeast, by the Great Barrier Reef; from New Zealand in the southeast by the Tasman Sea; and from Antarctica to the south by the Indian Ocean. Area (including Tasmania) 2,966,200 square miles (7,682,300 square km). Pop. (1996) 17,892,423; (1997 est.) 18,508,000. Additional reading General works Works covering all aspects of the country include The Australian Encyclopaedia, 5th ed., 9 vol. (1988); John Shaw (ed.), The Concise Encyclopedia of Australia, rev. 2nd ed. (1988); Year Book of Australia; I. Kepars (comp.), Australia (1984), an annotated bibliography; and Australia: Terra Incognita?, an extensive special issue of Daedalus, vol. 114, no. 1 (Winter 1985). Physical and human geography Broad aspects of the geography are covered in Reg Morrison and Maggie Morrison, Australia: The Four Billion Year Journey of a Continent (1990); J.M. Powell, An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Restive Fringe (1988), which discusses the emergence of patterns of regional development, the impact of changing international pressures, and the roles of state and federal governments and the environmental movement; D.J. Walmsley and A.D. Sorenson, Contemporary Australia: Explorations in Economy, Society, and Geography (1988); J.S. Russell and R.F. Isbell, Australian Soils: The Human Impact (1986), on climate, geology, and vegetation as well as soils; Don Parkes (ed.), Northern Australia: The Arenas of Life and Ecosystems on Half a Continent (1984); and Michael Williams, The Making of the South Australian Landscape: A Study in the Historical Geography of Australia (1974). Geologic history Surveys of the geology of Australia are in T.W. Edgeworth David, The Geology of the Commonwealth of Australia, 3 vol., ed. and supplemented by W.R. Browne (1950); D.A. Brown, K.S.W. Campbell, and K.A.W. Crook, The Geological Evolution of Australia and New Zealand (1968); Australia Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology, And Geophysics, BMR Earth Science Atlas of Australia (197985); J.J. Veevers (ed.), Phanerozoic Earth History of Australia (1984); and W.V. Preiss (comp.), The Adelaide Geosyncline: Late Proterozoic Stratigraphy, Sedimentation, Palaeontology, and Tectonics (1987). John J. Veevers The land D.N. Jeans (ed.), Australia: A Geography, 2nd ed., vol. 1, The Natural Environment (1986), covers various aspects of the physical environment. Charles Francis Laseron, The Face of Australia: The Shaping of a Continent, 3rd ed. rev. by J.N. Jennings (1972); and J.L. Davies and M.A.J. Williams (eds.), Landform Evolution in Australasia (1978), are readable accounts of the evolution of the landscape. G.W. Leeper (ed.), The Australian Environment, 4th ed. (1970), surveys landforms, climates, soils, water and irrigation vegetation, crops and pastures, and animal production. Further information on climate is contained in J. Gentilli (ed.), Climates of Australia and New Zealand (1971). Australia, Division of National Mapping, Atlas of Australian Resources (1980 ), is an official compendium of maps on geology, geography (physical and human), and resources, with commentaries. Natural history and ecology are detailed in John Vandenbeld, Nature of Australia: A Portrait of the Island Continent (1988); D.A. Saunders, A.J.M. Hopkins, and R.A. How, Australian Ecosystems: 200 Years of Utilization, Degradation, and Reconstruction (1990); Geoffrey Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers: Australians Make Their Environment, 17881980 (1981); Allen Keast (ed.), Ecological Biogeography of Australia, 3 vol. (1981); and Stephen J. Pyne, Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (1991). Plant life is addressed in J.M.B. Smith (ed.), A History of Australasian Vegetation (1982); Australia Bureau of Flora and Fauna, Flora of Australia (1981 ), an extensive multivolume compilation; Noel C.W. Beadle, The Vegetation of Australia (1981); and R.H. Groves (ed.), Australian Vegetation (1981). Animal life is dealt with in P. Vickers-Rich et al., Vertebrate Palaeontology of Australasia (1991), an account of vertebrate history in Australia and the adjacent islands; Australia Bureau of Flora and Fauna, Fauna of Australia (1987 ), the most authoritative work on the modern Australian fauna; Michael Kennedy (ed.), Australia's Endangered Species (1990); and Eric C. Rolls, They All Ran Wild: The Animals and Plants That Plague Australia, newly annotated and illustrated ed. (1984), a readable account of the introduced and feral animals.The evolution of settlement patterns is examined in Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History, rev. ed. (1982), and Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia, rev. ed. (1982); J.C.R. Camm and John McQuilton, Australians: A Historical Atlas (1987); and R.L. Heathcote, Australia (1975). Charles Rowland Twidale Robert Terence Lange W.D.L. Ride The people James Jupp (ed.), The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People, and Their Origins (1988), a monumental work, surveys each national and ethnic group. Geoffrey Sherington, Australia's Immigrants, 17881978 (1980), is a short survey. Immigration policies, population growth, and ethnic diversity are explored in Robert Birrell, Douglas Hill, and Jon Nevill (eds.), Populate and Perish?: The Stresses of Population Growth in Australia (1984); Geoffrey Blainey, All for Australia (1984); I.H. Burnley, Population, Society, & Environment in Australia: A Spatial and Temporal View (1982); R.W. Connell and T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History (1980); and Lincoln H. Day and D.T. Rowland (eds.), How Many More Australians?: The Resource and Environmental Conflicts (1988). Alan W. Black and Peter E. Glasner (eds.), Practice and Belief: Studies in the Sociology of Australian Religion (1983), surveys religious behaviour. The Aboriginal question is very well covered in a large range of publications including C.D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (1970, reprinted 1983); and Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (1981). The economy Rodney Maddock and Ian W. McLean (eds.), The Australian Economy in the Long Run (1987); and Geoffrey Blainey, The Rush That Never Ended: A History of Australian Mining, 3rd ed. (1978), offer historical perspectives. Economic development, including discussions of the role of government, foreign investment, and environmental questions, is treated in Richard E. Caves and Lawrence B. Krause (eds.), The Australian Economy: A View from the North (1984); P.P. Courtenay, Northern Australia: Patterns and Problems of Tropical Development in an Advanced Country (1982); Brian Head (ed.), The Politics of Development in Australia (1986); R.L. Heathcote and J.A. Mabbutt, Land, Water, and People: Geographical Essays in Australian Resource Management (1988); Donald Horne, The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties (1964, reissued 1978); Humphrey McQueen, Gone Tomorrow: Australia in the 80s (1982); W.H. Richmond and P.C. Sharma (eds.), Mining and Australia (1983); Eric C. Rolls, A Million Wild Acres: 200 Years of Man and an Australian Forest (1981); W.A. Sinclair, The Process of Economic Development in Australia (1976); D.B. Williams, Agriculture in the Australian Economy, 2nd ed., rev. and enlarged (1982); and L.E. Woods, Land Degradation in Australia, 2nd ed. (1984). Administration and social conditions Commentaries on government and social conditions are included in the books above, to which might be added L.F. Crisp, The Parliamentary Government of the Commonwealth of Australia, 3rd ed. (1961); Hugh V. Emy and Owen E. Hughes, Australian Politics: Realities in Conflict (1988); James Jupp, Party Politics: Australia, 19661981 (1982); Hugh Stretton, Ideas for Australian Cities, 3rd ed. (1989); and Alan Barcan, A History of Australian Education (1980). Joseph Michael Powell Cultural life John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History (1988), is a short, thematic history from a cultural perspective. Geoffrey Serle, The Creative Spirit in Australia: A Cultural History (1987), provides a history of high culture. Standard texts on literature and painting are Leonie Kramer (ed.), The Oxford History of Australian Literature (1981); and Bernard Smith and Terry Smith, Australian Painting, 17881990, 3rd ed. (1991). Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee (eds.), Constructing a Culture: A People's History of Australia Since 1788 (1988), is a collection of historical essays on popular culture, while John Pilger, A Secret Country (1989), is a critical view of Australian society and culture. Works on Aboriginal art include Charles P. Mountford, Art, Myth, and Symbolism (1956); R.M. Berndt, C.H. Berndt, and John E. Stanton, Aboriginal Australian Art (1982); John E. Stanton, Painting the Country (1989); and Peter Sutton (ed.), Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia (1988). Further studies of Australian art and literature may be found in the bibliographies at the end of Australian literature; and Oceanic arts. John David Rickard Joseph Michael Powell Cultural life The beach at Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, a popular tourist destination. Australia's isolation as an island continent has done much to shapeand inhibitits culture. The Aboriginal peoples developed their accommodation with the environment over a period of at least 40,000 years, during much of which contacts with the outside world, often hinging on changing sea levels, appear to have been fleeting. The British, on the other hand, when they settled New South Wales as a penal colony in 1788, did so partly because of its remoteness. The convict heritage ensured that European perceptions of the environment were often influenced by the sense of exile and alienation. Yet often the distance from Britain, and the isolation it imposed, served to strengthen rather than weaken ties with the cultural metropolis. The ambivalence of the continuing colonial relationship, which has only been dismantled in the second half of the 20th century, has been a central cultural preoccupation in Australia. The European occupation of Australia dislodged many Aboriginal groups from their land and disrupted much of their culture. Nevertheless, Aborigines (or Kooris, as many prefer to call themselves) often retain a distinctive sense of place and kinship. In northern Australia important elements of the traditional culture survive. The success of Aboriginal art, locally and internationally, has in itself given rise to problems, because Aboriginal paintings and artifacts, created in a ceremonial context and belonging to the group concerned, do not adapt easily to the demands of the Western market and of private ownership. Much Aboriginal cultural endeavour, such as the plays of Jack Davis and the work of the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Theatre, serves as a means of rescuing an identity from the ravages of European settlement, while at the same time it seeks to interpret Aboriginal society to a white audience. The frontier has also exercised a powerful influence over the European imagination. For many years landscape dominated Australian painting, but the images were often Arcadian (as with the early Tasmanian painter John Glover) or were associated with pastoral settlement. The so-called Heidelberg school (in the late 19th century, Heidelberg was a semirural suburb on the fringe of Melbourne), influenced by both contemporary European Impressionism and Realism, created a romantic image of a sunlit, pastoral landscape: the works of Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, and Frederick McCubbin have become popular icons. After World War II, painters such as Russell Drysdale and Sidney Nolan were drawn to the dramatic isolation of the Outback, while Fred Williams' inspired deconstruction of landscape patterns has led some to acclaim him as Australia's greatest painter. Writers, too, in the 19th and early 20th centuries appeared to regard the bush and its inhabitants as providing the most suitable ingredients of a national culture. Of those associated with the weekly the Bulletin, sometimes referred to as the bushman's bible, Henry Lawson achieved most popularity and critical acclaim, though the latter has been reserved principally for his evocative short stories. Other writers, such as Joseph Furphy, Miles Franklin, Katherine Susannah Pritchard, and Vance Palmer, helped nourish the impression that the bush was the necessary source of Australian values. Yet the paradox is that even from its days as a penal colony Australia has been a characteristically urban society. Only, however, since World War II has there been a gradual acceptance of the urban reality of Australian life. Writers as diverse as Robin Boyd, Donald Horne, and Hugh Stretton, as well as the satirist Barry Humphries, drew attention to the significance of the suburban ethos in Australian culture. Australia's greatest novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, Patrick White, having exploited the mythic dimension of the Outback in Voss, revealed his ambivalence toward city and suburbia in novels such as Riders in the Chariot and The Vivisector. The urban counterculture of the post-1960s was also the starting point for a group of younger writers, including Frank Moorhouse and Helen Garner. Feminism, too, not only helped rediscover neglected women writers and artists, whose concerns were often urban, but rejected the overbearing masculinism of the bush tradition. The urbanization of Australian culture has been assisted by the development of more sophisticated cultural facilities and the advent of state subsidy for the arts. Most capital cities have acquired new art galleries and museums, or expanded existing ones, and built performing arts centres, of which the Sydney Opera House is the best-known, if not the best-equipped. The Australia Council presides over the funding of the arts. In this climate there has been a substantial development of Australian drama: playwrights such as Ray Lawler, David Williamson, Michael Gow, and Stephen Sewell have tended to assume an urban context. While the resurgent film industry still found mileage in the bush, particularly when seeking a foreign market (witness Paul Hogan's 1986 success Crocodile Dundee), filmmakers have also attempted to portray urban life. The Australia Council and equivalent agencies of the state governments help support opera and dance companies; of the latter, the Australian Ballet and the Sydney Dance Company have successfully toured abroad. The government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation also plays an important role as patron of the arts, particularly of music. It supports the principal symphony orchestra in each state and has played a significant role in encouraging composers, for, although Australians are said to be musically minded (both Nellie Melba and Joan Sutherland have been popular and respected figures), in the past the musical tradition, largely inherited from England, has not nurtured composition. The introduction of state subsidy of the arts was made possible by the prolonged prosperity of the postwar period, which also saw the extension of educational opportunities. While it has been Australians' preferred self-image that theirs is a democratic and relatively egalitarian society, very few, before the 1960s, had the opportunity of a tertiary education. The establishment of new universities and colleges and of scholarship schemes went some way to redress this injustice. Virtually all universities are state foundations with very modest private endowments. Given their responsibilities for primary and secondary schools (for even private schools receive state aid), governments, while professing the importance of education, can be very parsimonious in funding it. The growth of tertiary institutions has helped create a larger intelligentsia that has enriched cultural life, particularly through a range of academic and literary journals. The mass media, on the other hand, both press and commercial television, are basically in the hands of a few powerful owners, whose operations are subject to only limited government regulation. And although there is a lively publishing scene, most publishing houses, apart from the univer