
Australian ethnicity refers to the ethnic makeup of the over 25 million people who trace their roots to Australia. The country has a quite complex ethnic landscape, one which in many ways mirrors that of the United States, just on a smaller scale, as Australia has an indigenous people in the shape of Aboriginals, but the bulk of the population are descended from waves of settlers who arrived primarily from Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also from parts of Asia and elsewhere. Aboriginals make up just around 3.8% of the population today and are approximately 900,000 strong.[1] The dominant ethnic group are Australians of British descent, as it was Britain which began colonizing the continent in 1788. Over 30% of Australians are of English heritage, while one-in-ten identify as Irish Australians. Other significant groups include Italian Australians, Chinese Australians, Vietnamese Australians, Greek Australians, Croat Australians and Serb Australians. As such, Australia is an ethnically diverse country.[2]
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Australian history
While Australia’s history goes back tens of thousands of years to when it was inhabited by people from Asia, for most of that time the Aboriginal population was isolated from the rest of the world and the country was ethnically homogenous. However, this began to change from the late eighteenth century onwards when Britain established the first western colony here in New South Wales. This was a penal colony, inhabited by thousands of convicts from Britain and Ireland who built cities like Sydney under the orders of British soldiers and administrators. Once the penal colonies had expanded sufficiently, civilian settlers began to arrive, ushering the period of colonial Australia in the nineteenth century.[3]
In the first half of the nineteenth century Australia began to experience a growing amount of migration from other countries as the continent became a more attractive prospect for settlement, and as emigration from an overpopulated Europe grew. Many Italians, Germans, and Swiss made Australia their home from the 1840s onwards. There was also an influx of Chinese after the British had coerced Qing Dynasty China into ending its isolation from the rest of the world during the First Opium War (1839–42).[4]

By the start of the twentieth century numerous separate colonies had emerged across Australia, including Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, and Western Australia, generally corresponding to the modern states of Australia. These were united into the Commonwealth of Australia at the start of 1901. At the same time Australia became a self-governing dominion and took a major step towards independence, though it eventually became a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations.[5] Its foreign policy was influenced massively by Britain for much of the twentieth century, contributing significantly, for instance, to the First World War, notably the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) role at the disastrous Battle of Gallipoli against the Ottoman Turks.[6]
For much of the twentieth century Australia adopted an unofficial policy of opposing non-white migration to the country, though Eastern Europeans, Greeks and various peoples from Yugoslavia were welcomed in large numbers between the 1940s and 1980s. The influx of Vietnamese political refugees in the late 1970s and early 1980s following the end of the Vietnam War, which Australia had contributed 50,000 troops towards over the years, brought about a renewed acceptance of Asian migrants and today Australia is one of the most open countries in the world, with an ethnically diverse population.[7]
Australian culture

Australia’s culture is primarily that of a western country, mirroring the country’s historical development as a British colony. Yet it is also idiosyncratic, marked by a range of unique elements including the influence of Aboriginal culture, and also the peculiarities of the island’s protected ecosystems and mammal life. The varied geography of the continent has also shaped its culture, with the main centers of habitation being confined to a very small proportion of the country primarily along the eastern and south-eastern coastlines, with the bulk of the country dominated by the less hospitable bush country and the Outback. Sociologically Australians are known for espousing a specific sense of humor, one which is dry and self-deprecating and which may have developed out of a sense of being British outsiders and rejecting the more formal elements of British social conduct during the Victorian era.[8] Australian cuisine is centered on barbecues and meat, with a strong influence of Mediterranean food as well, in line with the warm climate. Australia has its own unique sporting traditions in the shape of Aussie Rules football, a sport which evolved as a mix of several sports, notably rugby and Gaelic football, the latter being indicative of the large Irish influence in the early history of British Australia.[9]
Australian languages
English is the dominant language in Australia and is the sole language spoken by over 70% of the population. Yet the 2021 national census also revealed that 22% of Australians speak a language other than English as their first language. This 22% is made up of a wide mix of different tongues. For instance, 2.7% of all Australians speak Chinese Mandarin as their first native language, 1.4% speak Arabic, 1.3% speak Cantonese and 1.2% speak Vietnamese. Below these, there are between 200,000 and a quarter of a million native speakers of Greek, Italian, Punjabi, Tagalog and Hindi. All of this points to the significant migration of Italian, Greek, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino and Indian people to Australia over the last century and a half.[10]
Despite the fact that there were probably no more than 1.25 million Aboriginals in all of Australia when the British First Fleet arrived in 1788, there were between 250 and 350 different languages and 800 dialects spoken by them. Roughly two-thirds of these have died out, but slightly more than a hundred are still spoken by some Aboriginals today, though the vast majority of these are endangered. Just over a dozen Aboriginal languages, including Warlpiri and Tiwi, are still being extensively used and transmitted from generation to generation of Aboriginals. These are primarily used in the Western Desert and other parts of Western Australian and the Northern Territory where Aboriginal customs are still strong and Aboriginals constitute a much higher percentage of the population.[11]
See also
Explore more about ethnicity estimates
- MyHeritage DNA at MyHeritage
- Ethnicities around the world at MyHeritage
- What Is My Ethnicity? How MyHeritage Estimates Ethnicities at MyHeritage Knowledge Base
- Where's My Ethnicity?!: Why An Ethnicity Might Not Show Up In Your DNA (and How To Find Evidence Of It Anyway) at MyHeritage Knowledge Base
- Australian records collection at MyHeritage
- Australian Adoptee Finds Siblings in Denmark with MyHeritage DNA at MyHeritage Blog
- Julie & Julie: Sisters with Same Name Find Each Other After 60+ Years, and the Similarities Are Staggering at MyHeritage Blog
- Australian indexes online for family history research you might not know at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Tips & Tricks for Researching in Australian Archives at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-peoples/estimates-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-australians/latest-release
- ↑ https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/ethnic-background-of-australians.html
- ↑ https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/Convicts_and_the_Colonisation_of_Australia,_1788-1868
- ↑ https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/gold-rushes
- ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-15675556
- ↑ https://anzacportal.dva.gov.au/wars-and-missions/ww1/where-australians-served/gallipoli
- ↑ https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/vietnamese-refugees-boat-arrival
- ↑ https://vovworld.vn/en-US/cultural-rendezvous/australian-sense-of-humour-598376.vov
- ↑ https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/australian-rules-football
- ↑ https://www.linguistico.com.au/most-common-languages-in-australia-2022/
- ↑ https://www.naa.gov.au/students-and-teachers/learning-resources/learning-resource-themes/first-australians/history/dispossession-and-revival-indigenous-languages