Australia

Australia is geographically the world's great island-continent. Politically, the mainland, with the adjoining island of Tasmania, forms the Commonwealth of Australia. This is under the British Crown and consists of the following six States, which were federated on 1 Ja?n., 1901, and are here named in the order in which they became separate colonies of the British Empire: New South Wales (1788); Tasmania (1803); Western Australia (1826); South Australia (1836); Victoria (1851); and Queensland (1859). The Commonwealth covers an area of 2,980,632 square miles. It is, territorially, about one-fourth smaller than Europe, one-sixth larger than the United States (excluding Alaska), over one and a half the size of the Indian Empire, more than fourteen times larger than Germany or France, and about twenty-five times larger than the British Isles. At the census of 1901 the population of the six States was as follows: New South Wales, 1,339,943; Western Australia, 182,553; Victoria, 1,201,341; Queensland, 503,266; South Australia, 362,604; Tasmania, 172,475. This gave the Commonwealth in 1901 a total population of 3,782,182. The official estimate of the total population for December, 1905, was 4,002,893. +