Here’s a bit of Aussie history for you while we’re on our way. Australia gets its name from the Latin “australis” (southern). Legends about “Terra Australis Incognita” — an “unknown land of the South” — go back as far as Roman times. But people lived in Australia for thousands of years before the Romans. These are the Aborigines peaceful hunter-gatherers with a sophisticated culture and religion. But then everything changed. Europeans discovered Australia in 1606 but it wasn’t until England lost the American colonies in 1770 that it found a use for the huge “empty” island far away in the southern hemisphere — as a penal colony (like a large outdoor jail). 

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