Who discovered Australia? Which country discovered Australia first?

The Commonwealth of Australia is located in southwestern Oceania, bounded by the Pacific Ocean to the east and the Indian Ocean to the west. It borders Papua New Guinea to the northeast, Indonesia to the north, Polynesia and Melanesian Islands in the Pacific to the east, and New Zealand across the sea to the southeast. The land area is 7.6823 million square kilometers and the population is 15.75 million (1985). The early history is mainly British immigrants. About 25,000 years ago, the ancestors of the Australian aborigines settled here from Southeast Asia and lived in Tasmania, the southeastern part of the mainland. The indigenous people are called Tasmanians. The original Australian aborigines were divided into numerous tribal groups. They spoke different languages, made simple tools from wood, stone, bone, shells, etc., and made a living by gathering and hunting. In 1432, the Chinese landed near Darwin. There are records about the southern continent in some ancient Arabic and Chinese documents. Before the 16th century, Europe also had imaginations about the existence of an "unknown southern continent". In the 16th century, some European world maps depicted a continent connected to Antarctica. The first Europeans to sail to Australia were the Dutch. Since 1605, the Dutch W. Janz, D. Hartog, A.J. Tasman and others have successively surveyed and landed on some coasts of Australia. In 1642, Tasman discovered Tasmania, and in 1644 he discovered the north coast of the mainland. Tasman named Tasmania Van Diemen's Land after Van Diemen's Land, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. The Australian continent was called New Netherlands by the Dutch. Later, the British and French came one after another. In 1688, the Englishman W. Dampier landed near Golden Bay on the northwest coast of Australia. This was the first time Europeans landed on this continent. In 1770, the Englishman J. Cook sailed to the Pacific Ocean and landed at Botany Bay on the southeast coast of Australia. He took possession of this land in the name of King George III and named the land New South Wales. M. Flinders, a British naval officer who sailed to Australia at the end of the 18th century, suggested to the British government that the name of the continent should be Australia instead of New Netherlands. In 1786, the British government decided to colonize here. Later, the entire continent was explored many times, and it was named Australia in 1817.