Fauna of Australia
The fauna of Australia consists of a huge variety of animals. This high level of endemism can be attributed to the continent's long geographic isolation, tectonic stability, the effects of an unusual pattern of climate change on the soil and flora over geological time. A unique feature of Australia's fauna is the relative scarcity of native placental mammals; the marsupials — a group of mammals that raise their young in a pouch, including the macropods and dasyuromorphs — occupy many of the ecological niches placental animals occupy elsewhere in the world. Australia is home to two of the five known extant species of monotremes and has numerous venomous species, which include the platypus, scorpions, jellyfish, molluscs and stingrays. Uniquely, Australia has more venomous than non-venomous species of snakes; the settlement of Australia by Indigenous Australians between 48,000 and 70,000 years ago, by Europeans from 1788, has affected the fauna. Hunting, the introduction of non-native species, land-management practices involving the modification or destruction of habitats have led to numerous extinctions.
Some historical examples include the paradise parrot, pig-footed bandicoot and the broad-faced potoroo. Unsustainable land use still threatens the survival of many species. To target threats to the survival of its fauna, Australia has passed wide-ranging federal and state legislation and established numerous protected areas. Both geologic and climatic events helped to make Australia's fauna unique. Australia was once part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, which included South America, Africa and Antarctica. Gondwana began to break up 140 million years ago; the establishment and evolution of the present-day fauna was shaped by the unique climate and the geology of the continent. As Australia drifted, it was, to some extent, isolated from the effects of global climate change; the unique fauna that originated in Gondwana, such as the marsupials and adapted in Australia. After the Miocene, fauna of Asian origin were able to establish themselves in Australia; the Wallace Line—the hypothetical line separating the zoogeographical regions of Asia and Australasia—marks the tectonic boundary between the Eurasian and Indo-Australian plates.
This continental boundary prevented the formation of land bridges and resulted in a distinct zoological distribution, with limited overlap, of most Asian and Australian fauna, with the exception of birds. Following the emergence of the circumpolar current in the mid-Oligocene era, the Australian climate became arid, giving rise to a diverse group of arid-specialised organisms, just as the wet tropical and seasonally wet areas gave rise to their own uniquely adapted species. Australia has a rich mammalian fossil history, as well as a variety of extant mammalian species, dominated by the marsupials however there is limited taxonomic research into Australia's mammals; the fossil record shows that monotremes have been present in Australia since the Early Cretaceous 145–99 MYA, that marsupials and placental mammals date from the Eocene 56–34 MYA, when modern mammals first appeared in the fossil record. Although terrestrial marsupials and placental mammals did coexist in Australia in the Eocene, only the marsupials have survived to the present.
Non-volant placental mammals made their reappearance in Australia in the Miocene, when Australia moved closer to Indonesia, rodents started to appear reliably in the fossil record. The marsupials evolved to fill specific ecological niches, in many cases they are physically similar to the placental mammals in Eurasia and North America that occupy similar niches, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. For example, the top predator in Australia, the Tasmanian tiger, bore a striking resemblance to canids such as the gray wolf. For the most part, mammals are not a visible part of the faunal landscape, as most species are nocturnal and many arboreal. Two of the five living species of monotreme occur in Australia: the platypus and the short-beaked echidna; the monotremes differ from other mammals in their methods of reproduction. The platypus—a venomous, egg-laying, duck-billed amphibious mammal—is considered to be one of the strangest creatures in the animal kingdom; when it was first presented by Joseph Banks to English naturalists it was thought to be so strange that it was a cleverly created hoax.
The short-beaked echidna is strange, covered in hairy spikes with a tubular snout in the place of a mouth, a tongue that can move in and out of the snout about 100 times a minute to capture termites. Australia has the world's largest and most diverse range of marsupials. Marsupials are characterised by the presence of a pouch; the carnivorous marsupials—order Dasyuromorphia—are represented by two surviving families: the Dasyuridae with 51 members, the Myrmecobiidae with the numbat as its sole surviving member. The Tasmanian tiger was the largest Dasyuromorphia and the last living specimen of the family Thylacinidae died in captivity in 1936; the world's largest surviving carnivorous marsupial is the Tasmanian devil.
Immigration history of Australia
The immigration history of Australia began with the initial human migration to the continent around 80,000 years ago when the ancestors of Australian Aboriginals arrived on the continent via the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and New Guinea. From the early 17th century onwards, the continent experienced the first coastal landings and exploration by European explorers. Permanent European settlement began in 1788 with the establishment of a British penal colony in New South Wales. From early federation in 1901, Australia maintained the White Australia Policy, abolished after World War II, heralding the modern era of multiculturalism in Australia. From the late 1970s there was a significant increase in immigration from Asian and other non-European countries. Australia is a signatory to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and recognises the right of asylum; the first inhabitants in Australia were the ancestors of the present indigenous people. Whether these first migrations involved one or several successive waves and distinct peoples is still subject to academic debate, as is its timing.
The minimum accepted time frame places presence of humans in Australia at 40,000 to 43,000 years Before Present, while the upper range supported by others is 60,000 to 70,000 years BP. In any event, this migration was achieved during the closing stages of the Pleistocene epoch, when sea levels were much lower than they are today. Repeated episodes of extended glaciation resulted in decreases of sea levels by some 100–150 m; the continental coastline therefore extended much further out into the Timor Sea than it does today, Australia and New Guinea formed a single landmass, connected by an extensive land bridge across the Arafura Sea, Gulf of Carpentaria and Torres Strait. It is theorised that these original peoples first navigated the shorter distances from and between the Sunda Islands to reach Sahul. Archaeological evidence indicates human habitation at the upper Swan River, Western Australia by about 40,000 years ago; the ancestral Australian Aboriginal peoples were thus long established and continued to develop and settle through much of the continent.
As the sea levels again rose at the terminus of the most recent glacial period some 10,000 years ago the Australian continent once more became a separated landmass. However, the newly formed 150 km wide Torres Strait with its chain of islands still provided the means for cultural contact and trade between New Guinea and the northern Cape York Peninsula. Several thousand years ago the Melanesian Torres Strait Islander peoples were established in the Torres Strait Islands, commerce and contact was continued via this route although there is little evidence to suggest immediate influences extended much further south. A more sporadic contact along the northern Australian coast was maintained by seafarers across the Timor and Arafat Seas, with substantial evidence of Macassan contact with Australia in the centuries prior to European arrival, evidence of earlier contacts and exchanges by other groups. However, these exchanges do not appear to have involved any extended settlement or migrations of non-Aboriginal peoples to the region.
According to a 2013 German study by a team of researchers on Indigenous Australian DNA genes reveal that a wave of migrants from India arrived in Australia about 4,230 years ago. It shows that the Indian migrants settled in Australia before Captain James Cook's first recorded contact with the Australian coastline; the study suggests that up to 11 per cent of Aboriginal Australians DNA derives from Indians. During the migration period, dingos first appeared in the fossil suggests that the Indians took their dingos with them and they may have brought stone tools called microliths; this study overturns the view that Australian continent was isolated from the time it was first colonised about 45,000–50,000 years ago until Europeans discovered Australia in the eighteenth century. Doctor Mark Stoneking, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology had explained that the DNA link could have been by people moving, physically travelling from India directly to Australia, or their genetic material could have moved in terms of contact between India and neighbouring populations who had contact with other neighbor populations and there would have been contact with Australia.
Professor Alan Cooper, from the University of Adelaide's Centre for Ancient DNA, says that the Indian influence may well have played a role in the development of the Australian Aboriginal culture. It has taken a while for the Indian influence to be discovered because Indigenous Australians have been hesitant to participate in these kinds of genetic studies. After the loss of the United States, Britain experienced overcrowding of its prisons and sought to ease the problems by transportation of its prisoners. In 1787 the First Fleet of 11 ships and about 1350 people under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip sailed for Australia. On 26 January 1788 a landing was made at Sydney Cove; the new colony was formally proclaimed as the Colony of New South Wales on 7 February. Other transport fleets bringing further convicts as well as freemen to the colony followed; as a result of agitation by the free settlers in Sydney, transportation of convicts to Sydney ended in 1840. It continued to the colonies of Van Diemen's Moreton Bay for some years longer.
The small settlement of Perth, founded in 1829 on the Swan River in Western Australia by free settlers, failed to prosper and asked for convicts. In
History of Australia since 1945
The history of Australia since 1945 has seen long periods of economic prosperity and the introduction of an expanded and multi-ethnic immigration program, which has coincided with moves away from Britain in political and cultural terms and towards increasing engagement with the United States and Asia. In 1944, the Liberal Party of Australia was formed, with Robert Menzies as its founding leader; the party would come to dominate the early decades of the post-war period. Outlining his vision for a new political movement in 1944, Menzies said: In April 1945, Prime Minister John Curtin despatched an Australian delegation which included attorney-general and minister for external affairs H V Evatt to discuss formation of the United Nations. Australia played a significant mediatory role in these early years of the United Nations lobbying for an increased role for smaller and middle-ranking nations and a stronger commitment to employment rights into the U. N. Charter. Evatt was elected president of the third session of the United Nations General Assembly.
When Labor Prime Minister John Curtin died in July 1945, Frank Forde served as Prime Minister from 6–13 July, before the party elected Ben Chifley as Curtin's successor. Chifley, a former railway engine driver, won the 1946 election, his government introduced national projects, including the Snowy Mountains Scheme and an assisted immigration program and pursued centralist economic policies – making the Commonwealth the collector of income tax, seeking to nationalise the private banks. At the conference of the New South Wales Labor Party in June 1949, Chifely sought to define the labour movement as having: With an uncertain economic outlook, after his attempt to nationalise the banks and the coal strike by the Communist-dominated Miners Federation, Chifley lost office at the 1949 federal election to Menzies' newly established Liberal Party, in coalition with the Country Party. After World War II, Australia launched a massive immigration program, believing that having narrowly avoided a Japanese invasion, Australia must "populate or perish."
As Prime Minister Ben Chifley would declare, "a powerful enemy looked hungrily toward Australia. In tomorrow's gun flash that threat could come again. We must populate Australia as as we can before someone else decides to populate it for us." Hundreds of thousands of displaced Europeans, including for the first time large numbers of Jews, migrated to Australia. More than two million people immigrated to Australia from Europe during the 20 years after the end of the war. From the outset, it was intended that the bulk of these immigrants should be from the British Isles, that the post-war immigration scheme would preserve the British character of Australian society. Although Great Britain remained the predominant source of immigrants, the pool of source countries was expanded to include Continental European countries in order to meet Australia's ambitious immigration targets. From the late 1940s onwards, Australia received significant waves of people from countries such as Greece, Malta, Germany and the Netherlands.
Australia sought these immigrants, with the government assisting many of them and they found work due to an expanding economy and major infrastructure projects. The Australian economy stood in sharp contrast to war-ravaged Europe, newly arrived migrants found employment in a booming manufacturing industry and government assisted programs such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme; this hydroelectricity and irrigation complex in south-east Australia consisted of sixteen major dams and seven power stations constructed between 1949 and 1974. It remains the largest engineering project undertaken in Australia. Necessitating the employment of 100,000 people from over 30 countries, to many it denotes the birth of multicultural Australia. In 1949 the 1941–1949 Labor government was defeated by a Liberal–National Party Coalition government headed by Menzies. Politically, Menzies Government and the Liberal Party of Australia dominated much of the immediate post-war era, defeating the Chifley Government in 1949, in part over a Labor proposal to nationalise banks and following a crippling coal strike influenced by the Australian Communist Party.
Menzies became the country's longest-serving Prime Minister and the Liberal party, in coalition with the rural based Country Party, won every federal until 1972. As in the United States in the early 1950s, allegations of communist influence in society saw tensions emerge in politics. Refugees from Soviet dominated Eastern Europe immigrated to Australia, while to Australia's north, Mao Zedong won the Chinese civil war in 1949 and in June 1950, Communist North Korea invaded South Korea; the Menzies government responded to a United States led United Nations Security Council request for military aid for South Korea and diverted forces from occupied Japan to begin Australia's involvement in the Korean War. After fighting to a bitter standstill, the UN and North Korean signed a ceasefire agreement in July 1953. Australian forces had participated in such major battles as Maryang San. 17,000 Australians had served and casualties amounted to more than 1,500, of whom 339 were killed. During the course of the Korean War, the Menzies Government attempted to ban the Communist Party of Australia, first by legislation in 1950 and by referendum, in 1951.
While both attempts were unsuccessful, further international events such as the defection of minor Soviet Embassy official Vladimir Petrov, added to a sense of impending threat that politically favoured Menzies’ Liberal-CP government, as the Labor Party pushed centralist economics and split over concerns about the influence of the Communist Party over
History of Australia (1851–1900)
The History of Australia refers to the history of the indigenous and colonial peoples of the Australian continent during the 50-year period which preceded the foundation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. The discovery of gold, beginning in 1851 first at Bathurst in New South Wales and in the newly formed colony of Victoria, transformed Australia economically and demographically; the gold rushes occurred hard on the heels of a major worldwide economic depression. As a result, about two per cent of the population of Britain and Ireland immigrated to NSW and Victoria during the 1850s. There were large numbers of continental Europeans, North Americans and Chinese; the rushes began in 1851 with the announcement of the discovery of payable gold near Bathurst by Edward Hargraves. In that year New South Wales had about 200,000 people, a third of them within a day's ride of Sydney, the rest scattered along the coast and through the pastoral districts, from the Port Phillip District in the south to Moreton Bay in the north.
In 1836 a new colony of South Australia had been established, its territory separated from New South Wales. The gold rushes of the 1850s brought a huge influx of settlers, although the majority of them went to the richest gold fields at Ballarat and Bendigo, in the Port Phillip District, which in 1851 was separated to become the colony of Victoria. Victoria soon had a larger population than New South Wales, its upstart capital, outgrew Sydney, but the New South Wales gold fields attracted a flood of prospectors, by 1857 the colony had more than 300,000 people. Inland towns like Bathurst, Goulburn and Young flourished. Gold brought great wealth but new social tensions. Multiethnic migrants came to New South Wales in large numbers for the first time. Young became the site of an infamous anti-Chinese miner riot in 1861 and the official Riot Act was read to the miners on 14 July – the only official reading in the history of New South Wales. Despite some tension, the influx of migrants brought fresh ideas from Europe and North America to New South Wales – Norwegians introduced Skiing in Australia to the hills above the Snowy Mountains gold rush town of Kiandra around 1861.
A famous Australian son was born to a Norwegian miner in 1867, when the bush balladeer Henry Lawson was born at the Grenfell goldfields. In 1858 a new gold rush began in the far north, which led in 1859 to the separation of Queensland as a new colony. New South Wales thus attained its present borders, although what is now the Northern Territory remained part of the colony until 1863, when it was handed over to South Australia; the separation and rapid growth of Victoria and Queensland mark the real beginning of New South Wales as a political and economic entity distinct from the other Australian colonies. Rivalry between New South Wales and Victoria was intense throughout the second half of the 19th century, the two colonies developed in different directions. Once the easy gold ran out by about 1860, Victoria absorbed the surplus labour force from the gold fields in manufacturing, protected by high tariff walls. Victoria became the Australian stronghold of protectionism and radicalism. New South Wales, less radically affected demographically by the gold rushes, remained more conservative, still dominated politically by the squatter class and its allies in the Sydney business community.
New South Wales, as a trading and exporting colony, remained wedded to free trade. Gold produced sudden wealth for a few, some of Australia's oldest wealthy families date their fortunes from this period, but employment and modest prosperity for many more. Within a few years these new settlers outnumbered the convicts and ex-convicts, they began to demand trial by jury, representative government, a free press and the other symbols of liberty and democracy. Contrary to popular myth, there was little opposition to these demands from the colonial governors or the Colonial Office in London, although there was some from the squatters. New South Wales had had a elected Legislative Council since 1825; the Eureka Stockade of 1854, an armed protest by miners on the Victorian goldfields, the debate that followed, served as a significant impetus for democratising reforms. The rebellion came about as a result of opposition to government mining licences. Licence fees had to be paid regardless of whether a digger's claim resulted in any gold and less successful operators found it difficult to pay their licence fees.
Official corruption was another concern. In November 1854, thousands of diggers rallied to call for the abolition of the licence fee and the vote for all males. A Reform League was formed, with some of its leaders linked to the Chartist movement in England. On 30 November, a mass burning of licenses took place and protesters marched to the Eureka Diggings and constructed a stockade. Led by Peter Lalor, 500 men swore an oath under a flag featuring the Southern Cross and prepared to defend the stockade. On 3 December, the colonial troops attacked the stockade and a twenty-minute battle ensued in which 22 diggers and 5 soldiers were killed. Thirteen diggers committed for trial were all acquitted and the following year the government granted the demands of the rebels. In the subsequent 1855 elections, Peter Lalor became the first Member of the Legislative Council for the seat of Ballarat. In 1855 New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania were granted full responsible government, with bicameral parliaments in which the lower houses were elected.
The upper houses remained dominated by government appointees and representatives of the squatters, worried that the radical democrats might try to seize their vast
History of Indigenous Australians
The History of Indigenous Australians began at least 65,000 years ago when humans first populated Australia. The origin of first humans to populate the southern continent remains a matter of conjecture and debate; some anthropologists believe they could have arrived as a result of the earliest human migrations out of Africa. Although they migrated to the territory named Australia, through Southeast Asia they are not demonstrably related to any known Asian or Polynesian population. There is evidence of genetic and linguistic interchange between Australians in the far north and the Austronesian peoples of modern-day New Guinea and the islands, but this may be the result of recent trade and intermarriage. At the time of first European contact, it is estimated that between 315,000 to 750,000 people lived in Australia, in diverse groups, but upper estimates place the total population as high as 1.25 million. A cumulative population of 1.6 billion people has been estimated to have lived in Australia over 65,000 years prior to British colonisation.
The regions of heaviest Indigenous population were the same temperate coastal regions that are the most populated. In the early 1900s it was believed that the Aboriginal population of Australia was leading toward extinction; the population shrank from those present when colonisation occurred in 1788 to 50,000 in 1930. Post-colonisation, the coastal Indigenous populations were soon absorbed, depleted or forced from their lands; the greatest population density was to be found in the southern and eastern regions of the continent, the Murray River valley in particular. Although the Indigenous Tasmanians were driven to extinction, other Aboriginal Australians maintained successful communities throughout Australia. Technologies and hunting practices varied according to the local environment, it is believed that the first early human migration to Australia was achieved when this landmass formed part of the Sahul continent, connected to the island of New Guinea via a land bridge. It is possible that people came by island hopping via an island chain between Sulawesi and New Guinea and the other reaches North Western Australia via Timor.
The exact timing of the arrival of the ancestors of the Aboriginal Australians has been a matter of dispute among archaeologists. The most accepted date for first arrival is between 40,000–80,000 years BP. Near Penrith in New South Wales, since 1971 numerous Aboriginal stone tools have been found in Cranebrook Terraces gravel sediments having dates of 45,000 to 50,000 years BP; when these results were new they were controversial, but more recent dating of the same strata in 1987 and 2003 has corroborated these dates. A 48,000 BCE date is based on a few sites in northern Australia dated using thermoluminescence. A large number of sites have been radiocarbon dated to around 38,000 BCE, leading some researchers to doubt the accuracy of the thermoluminescence technique. Radiocarbon dating is limited to a maximum age of around 40,000 years; some estimates have been given as as from 30,000 to 68,000 BCE. Earlier dates are requiring new techniques such as optically stimulated luminescence and accelerator mass spectrometry, the evidence for an earlier date of arrival is growing.
Charles Dortch has dated recent finds on Rottnest Island, Western Australia at 70,000 years BP. The rock shelters at Malakunanja II and of Nauwalabila I show evidence of used pieces of ochre – evidence for paint used by artists 60,000 years ago. Using OSL Rhys Jones has obtained a date for stone tools in these horizons dating from 53,000–60,000 years ago. Thermoluminescence dating of the Jinmium site in the Northern Territory suggested a date of 116,000 plus or minus 12,000 BCE. Although this result received wide press coverage, it is not accepted by most archaeologists. Only Africa has older physical evidence of habitation by modern humans. There is evidence of a change in fire regimes in Australia, drawn from reef deposits in Queensland, between 70 and 100,000 years ago, the integration of human genomic evidence from various parts of the world supports a date of before 60,000 years for the arrival of Australian Aboriginal people in the continent. Humans reached Tasmania 40,000 years ago by migrating across a land bridge from the mainland that existed during the last glacial maximum.
After the seas rose about 12,000 years ago and covered the land bridge, the inhabitants there were isolated from the mainland until the arrival of European settlers. Short statured aboriginal tribes inhabited the rainforests of North Queensland, of which the best known group is the Tjapukai of the Cairns area; these rainforest people, collectively referred to as Barrineans, were once considered to be a relic of an earlier wave of Negrito migration to the Australian continent, but this theory no longer finds much favour. Mungo Man, whose remains were discovered in 1974 near Lake Mungo in New South Wales, is the oldest human yet found in Australia. Although the exact age of Mungo Man is in dispute, the best consensus is that he is at least 40,000 years old. Stone tools found at Lake Mungo have been estimated, based on stratigraphic association, to be about 50,000 years old. Since Lake Mungo is in south-eastern Australia, many archaeologists have concluded that humans must have arrived in north-west Australia at least several thousand years earlier.
In 2012, the results of large-scale genotypin
Military history of Australia
The military history of Australia spans the nation's 230-year modern history, from the early Australian frontier wars between Aboriginals and Europeans to the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 21st century. Although this history is short when compared to that of many other nations, Australia has been involved in numerous conflicts and wars, war and military service have been significant influences on Australian society and national identity, including the Anzac spirit; the relationship between war and Australian society has been shaped by the enduring themes of Australian strategic culture and its unique security dilemma. As British offshoots, the Australian colonies participated in Britain's small wars of the 19th century, while as a federated dominion, an independent nation, Australia fought in the First World War and Second World War, as well as in the wars in Korea, Malaya and Vietnam during the Cold War. In the Post-Vietnam era Australian forces have been involved in numerous international peacekeeping missions, through the United Nations and other agencies, including in the Sinai, Persian Gulf, Somalia, East Timor and the Solomon Islands, as well as many overseas humanitarian relief operations, while more they have fought as part of multi-lateral forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In total, nearly 103,000 Australians died during the course of these conflicts. For most of the last century military service has been one of the single greatest shared experiences of white Australian males, although this is now changing due to the professionalisation of the military and the absence of major wars during the second half of the 20th century, it continues to influence Australian society to this day. War and military service have been defining influences in Australian history, while a major part of the national identity has been built on an idealised conception of the Australian experience of war and of soldiering, known as the Anzac spirit; these ideals include notions of endurance, ingenuity, larrikinism and mateship. The Gallipoli campaign was one of the first international events that saw Australians taking part as Australians and has been seen as a key event in forging a sense of national identity; the relationship between war and Australian society has been shaped by two of the more enduring themes of Australian strategic culture: bandwagoning with a powerful ally and expeditionary warfare.
Indeed, Australian defence policy was linked to Britain until the Japanese crisis of 1942, while since an alliance with the United States has underwritten its security. Arguably, this pattern of bandwagoning—both for cultural reasons such as shared values and beliefs, as well as for more pragmatic security concerns—has ensured that Australian strategic policy has been defined by relations with its allies. Regardless, a tendency towards strategic complacency has been evident, with Australians reluctant to think about defence issues or to allocate resources until a crisis arises. Reflecting both the realist and liberal paradigms of international relations and the conception of national interests, a number of other important themes in Australian strategic culture are obvious; such themes include: an acceptance of the state as the key actor in international politics, the centrality of notions of Westphalian sovereignty, a belief in the enduring relevance and legitimacy of armed force as a guarantor of security, the proposition that the status quo in international affairs should only be changed peacefully.
Multilateralism, collective security and defence self-reliance have been important themes. Change has been more evolutionary than revolutionary and these strategic behaviours have persisted throughout its history, being the product of Australian society's democratic political tradition and Judaeo-Christian Anglo-European heritage, as well its associated values and economic, political and religious ideology; these behaviours are reflective of its unique security dilemma as a European island on the edge of the Asia-Pacific, the geopolitical circumstances of a middle power physically removed from the centres of world power. To be sure, during threats to the core Australia has found itself defending the periphery and as a result, it has become involved in foreign wars. Throughout these conflicts Australian soldiers—known colloquially as Diggers—have been noted, somewhat paradoxically, for both their fighting abilities and their humanitarian qualities. From 1788 until 1870 the defence of the Australian colonies was provided by British Army regular forces.
Marines protected the early settlements at Sydney Cove and Norfolk Island, however they were relieved of these duties in 1790 by a British Army unit recruited for colonial service, known as the New South Wales Corps. The New South Wales Corps subsequently was involved in putting down a rebellion of Irish convicts at Castle Hill in 1804. Soon however shortcomings in the corps convinced the War Office of the need for a more reliable garrison in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. Chief of these shortcomings was the Rum Rebellion, a coup mounted by its officers in 1808; as a result, in January 1810 the 73rd Regiment of Foot arrived in Australia. By 1870, 25 British infantry regiments had served in Australia, as had a small number of artillery and engineer units. Although the primary role of the British Army was to protect the colonies against external attack, no actual threat
Protected area
Protected areas or conservation areas are locations which receive protection because of their recognized natural, ecological or cultural values. There are several kinds of protected areas, which vary by level of protection depending on the enabling laws of each country or the regulations of the international organizations involved; the term "protected area" includes Marine Protected Areas, the boundaries of which will include some area of ocean, Transboundary Protected Areas that overlap multiple countries which remove the borders inside the area for conservation and economic purposes. There are over 161,000 protected areas in the world with more added daily, representing between 10 and 15 percent of the world's land surface area. By contrast, only 1.17% of the world's oceans is included in the world's ~6,800 Marine Protected Areas. Protected areas are essential for biodiversity conservation providing habitat and protection from hunting for threatened and endangered species. Protection helps maintain ecological processes that cannot survive in most intensely managed landscapes and seascapes.
Protected areas are understood to be those in which human occupation or at least the exploitation of resources is limited. The definition, accepted across regional and global frameworks has been provided by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in its categorisation guidelines for protected areas; the definition is as follows: A defined geographical space, recognized and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values. The objective of protected areas is to conserve biodiversity and to provide a way for measuring the progress of such conservation. Protected areas will encompass several other zones that have been deemed important for particular conservation uses, such as Important Bird Areas and Endemic Bird Areas, Centres of Plant Diversity and Community Conserved Areas, Alliance for Zero Extinction Sites and Key Biodiversity Areas among others. A protected area or an entire network of protected areas may lie within a larger geographic zone, recognised as a terrestrial or marine ecoregions, or a crisis ecoregions for example.
As a result, Protected Areas can encompass a broad range of governance types. Indeed, governance of protected areas has emerged a critical factor in their success. Subsequently, the range of natural resources that any one protected area may guard is vast. Many will be allocated for species conservation whether it be flora or fauna or the relationship between them, but protected areas are important for conserving sites of cultural importance and considerable reserves of natural resources such as. Of all global terrestrial carbon stock, 15.2% is contained within protected areas. Protected areas in South America hold 27% of the world's carbon stock, the highest percentage of any country in both absolute terms and as a proportion of the total stock. Rainforests: 18.8% of the world's forest is covered by protected areas and sixteen of the twenty forest types have 10% or more protected area coverage. Of the 670 ecoregions with forest cover, 54% have 10% or more of their forest cover protected under IUCN Categories I – VI.
Mountains: Nationally designated protected areas cover 14.3% of the world's mountain areas, these mountainous protected areas made up 32.5% of the world's total terrestrial protected area coverage in 2009. Mountain protected area coverage has increased globally by 21% since 1990 and out of the 198 countries with mountain areas, 43.9% still have less than 10% of their mountain areas protected. Annual updates on each of these analyses are made in order to make comparisons to the Millennium Development Goals and several other fields of analysis are expected to be introduced in the monitoring of protected areas management effectiveness, such as freshwater and marine or coastal studies which are underway, islands and drylands which are in planning. Through its World Commission on Protected Areas, the IUCN has developed six Protected Area Management Categories that define protected areas according to their management objectives, which are internationally recognised by various national governments and the United Nations.
The categories provide international standards for defining protected areas and encourage conservation planning according to their management aims. IUCN Protected Area Management Categories: Category Ia — Strict Nature Reserve Category Ib — Wilderness Area Category II — National Park Category III — Natural Monument or Feature Category IV — Habitat/Species Management Area Category V — Protected Landscape/Seascape Category VI – Protected Area with sustainable use of natural resources Protected areas are cultural artifacts, their story is entwined with that of human civilization. Protecting places and resources is by no means a modern concept, whether it be indigenous communities guarding sacred sites or the convention of European hunting reserves. Over 2000 years ago, royal decrees in India protected certain areas. In Europe and powerful people protected hunting grounds for a thousand years. Moreover, the idea of protection of special places is universal: for example, it occurs among the communities in the Pacific and in parts of Africa.
The oldest le
