Contemporary Australia Society - A Study on its History, Culture and Diversity

Running head: CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA SOCIETY
CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA SOCIETY
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1CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA SOCIETY
Australia, the only country in the world that covers an entire continent within it, is
highly popular for its rich culture, history, tradition and diverse society. The modern
Australian society differs notably from the Australia of the early European settlement as well
as its colonial times from the Australia at the times between the Second World War and the
1901 Federation. This paper is going to elaborate on the contemporary Australian society.
The contemporary Australian society is been considered to be a product of its very
own history. It in fact, just like many other countries, is very complex to understand without
having an in-depth knowledge about its past. The history of Australia began on the day when
Captain James cook had arrived at the Botany Bay in HMS Endeavour in the year 1770 as
well as formally took the possession of east coast of the New Holland for Britain. It was the
continent that was already been inhabited at that point for thousands of years by one of the
races that was steeped in tradition and culture (Yiftachel, 2016). However, it was the day
when the world, particularly the Britain came to the Australian region. The Australian society
has undergone a massive change from the parochial to the Cosmopolitan Australia. To look
back, the Europeans did not learn to that extent from the aboriginal inhabitants on how to live
in this country. As stated by Rowe (2018), “In every dimension, social, economic or political,
{Australian} colonies were not a home grown product, but adaptation of British ways of life
to an entirely new environment”. They used to import their crops, animals, political
institutions, technologies, religions, laws, diseases and prejudices from the Europe,
particularly from England. This took their toll on the Australian land and the people living
there but in a short period of time, they also took a hold and determined the nature of the
Australian identity for the next 150 years and its economy to this day.
In the past 200 years, the Australia has developed enormously as a society, as an
economy and as a political entity. Its concept of “fair go” had undergone a significant
transformation as the country has moved from parochial and isolationist colonial region to a

2CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA SOCIETY
contemporary cosmopolitan society (Laughland, Skrbis & Tranter, 2017). In the beginning,
the country was comprised of many individual colonies and the very first to established
among them was the New South Wales colony , which was administered from Britain. Each
of those colonies were greatly dependent on England for the reasons of supplies as well as
human capital.
The contemporary Australian society is solely a diverse and multicultural society. As
according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011 Australian Census, more than quarter of
the total population of Australia was born overseas in that year (Collett & Alsop, 2017). The
most commonly used language was English. Furthermore, six among the leading 10 ancestors
have reflected the heritage of Europe in Australia with 2 remaining ancestries being Indian
and Chinese (Ng & Metz, 2015). Today, the Australian countrymen speaks about 200
different languages including forty aboriginal languages. Apart from English, Chinese is the
most commonly spoken language in the country. With the same, there is an enormous
religious diversity in Australia with about 61% reporting affiliation to Christianity and 22%
reporting to Non religion.
It is also to note that most recently, the Australians are warming up for extending the
principle of the ‘fair go’ to the lesbian and gay people fighting for the right of marriage
equality in the country. It is one of the most important breakthrough as because of the fact
that in earlier days, this sexual orientation of homosexuality was being criminalised. There
might be many exemptions still present in the legislative changes of ‘fair go’, significantly
the recent application of the ‘fair go’ ethos to the asylum seekers arriving on the boats.
However, the massive evolution of the word ‘fair go’ in the last 200 years suggest that the
contemporary understanding of the people about this term is possibly going to change in the
coming years.