LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Australia: Western Australia
built 276 days ago
That Australia is the world's driest continent has influenced the nature of its earliest photography. Its first recorded photograph was a daguerreotype of Sydney taken in 1841 by a certain Captain Lucas. The earliest surviving is a portrait taken in 1845. Until the advent of dry-plate technology, photography was confined to sites with available water. Thus large collections of wet-plate photographs of inland places, such as those preserved at the Benedictine Community of New Norcia in Western Australia, and of the Hill End goldfields in Victoria, are rare. Ironically... the world's largest surviving wet-plate negative, measuring 160 × 91.4 cm (63 × 36 in) and taken by Charles Bayliss (1850-97) in 1875, shows Sydney.
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The origin of the native tribes of Australia is one of the unsolved riddles of ethnology. An unknown number of these black-skinned people still live in their "wild" state, in small and scattered communities, over vast areas extending from Central Queensland almost to the coast of Western Australia. They have no acquaintance with metal nor with the bow and arrow, and their weapons of war and chase are (with the exception of the boomerang) of a very crude kind, wooden spears and clubs, stone tomahawks, etc. They are extraordinarily keen and skilful hunters. They are polygamous, given at times to cannibalism and infanticide, and have no permanent dwellings, no pottery, and no idea of cultivation of the soil. They die out fast whenever they come in contact with the white man and his vices.
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Australia has an enviable Western-style capitalist economy with a per capita GDP on par with the four dominant West European economies. Robust business and consumer confidence and high export prices for raw materials and agricultural products are fueling the economy. Australia's emphasis on reforms, low inflation, and growing ties with China are other key factors behind the economy's strength. Drought and strong import demand pushed the trade deficit up in recent years, although the trade balance improved in 2006. Housing prices probably peaked in 2005, diminishing the prospect that interest rates would be raised to prevent a speculative bubble. Conservative fiscal policies have kept Australia's budget in surplus since 2002.
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Australia has no state religion. In the 2006 census, 64% of Australians were listed as Christian: 26% as Roman Catholic, 19% as Anglican. 19% were listed as "No Religion" (which includes humanism, atheism, agnosticism, and rationalism); and a further 12% declined to answer or did not give a response adequate for interpretation. 5% were of non-Christian religions. As in many Western countries, the level of active participation in church worship is much lower than this; weekly attendance at church services is about 1.5 million: about 7.5% of the population.[50]
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Western Australia: Adventure Travelers keen to experience Western Australia’s wide range of activities must be prepared to cover a good deal of ground. For although the state has plenty of appropriate venues, including rivers, mountains and caves, they tend to be separated by enormous stretches of outback.. Traveling through the immense arid lands of Western Australia can... be thought of as an adventure in itself, one that makes your arrival in places like the Kimberley or the Pilbara all the more exciting. The Kimberley alone could supply a lifetime of thrills, with its vast plateaus and myriad gorges offering endless challenges for walkers, river runners, climbers and cavers alike. Similar opportunities abound in the Pilbara. Self-sufficiency and high-level bush skills are essential in these areas and in other remote parts of Western Australia, where emergency services may be a long way away.
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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 Jan., 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.
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