Hometown Australia

Connecting Australia's Communities

 

 

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Our Goal...

Our goal is to have all of the communities within Australia represented on our pages. If we don't have your hometown or community online, or if we are missing some valuable information about your town or city, please let us know by filling out and submiting the various forms found within our site.

We strive to not only provide extensive yellow pages, city info, classified ads, travel info, real estate info, calendars of events, forums, history, and interactive maps, but also your stories, memories, photos and anything else you can share with us as to why your town is YOUR hometown and why you love it so.

Each section of our community info pages is available for you the user to submit information about your hometown in the way of history, trivia, links, questions, photographs, classified ads, events and more.

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Hometown Australia is a brand new site and as such it doesn't have much on it yet.

We are building the site currently and hope to have some real content on it soon.

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This Week's Featured State or Territory

Australian Antarctic Territory

Etymology

The name Australia is derived from the Latin australis, meaning "southern". The country has been referred to colloquially as Oz since the early 20th century. Aussie is a common colloquial term for "Australian". In neighbouring New Zealand the term "Aussie" is sometimes applied as a noun to the nation as well as its residents.

Legends of Terra Australis Incognita—an "unknown land of the South"—date back to Roman times and were commonplace in medieval geography, although not based on any documented knowledge of the continent. Following European discovery, names for the Australian landmass were often references to the famed Terra Australis.

The earliest recorded use of the word Australia in English was in 1625 in "A note of Australia del Espíritu Santo, written by Sir Richard Hakluyt", published by Samuel Purchas in Hakluytus Posthumus, a corruption of the original Spanish name "Tierra Austral del Espíritu Santo" (Southern Land of the Holy Spirit) for an island in Vanuatu. The Dutch adjectival form Australische was used in a Dutch book in Batavia (Jakarta) in 1638, to refer to the newly discovered lands to the south. Australia was later used in a 1693 translation of Les Aventures de Jacques Sadeur dans la Découverte et le Voyage de la Terre Australe, a 1676 French novel by Gabriel de Foigny, under the pen-name Jacques Sadeur. Referring to the entire South Pacific region, Alexander Dalrymple used it in An Historical Collection of Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean in 1771. By the end of the 18th century, the name was being used to refer specifically to Australia, with the botanists George Shaw and Sir James Smith writing of "the vast island, or rather continent, of Australia, Australasia or New Holland" in their 1793 Zoology and Botany of New Holland, and James Wilson including it on a 1799 chart.

The name Australia was popularised by the explorer Matthew Flinders, who pushed for it to be formally adopted as early as 1804. When preparing his manuscript and charts for his 1814 A Voyage to Terra Australis, he was persuaded by his patron, Sir Joseph Banks, to use the term Terra Australis as this was the name most familiar to the public. Flinders did so, and published the following rationale:

There is no probability, that any other detached body of land, of nearly equal extent, will ever be found in a more southern latitude; the name Terra Australis will, therefore, remain descriptive of the geographical importance of this country, and of its situation on the globe: it has antiquity to recommend it; and, having no reference to either of the two claiming nations, appears to be less objectionable than any other which could have been selected.

In the footnote Flinders wrote:

*  Had I permitted myself any innovation on the original term, it would have been to convert it to AUSTRALIA; as being more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth.

This is the only occurrence of the word Australia in that text; but in Appendix III, Robert Brown's General remarks, geographical and systematical, on the botany of Terra Australis, Brown makes use of the adjectival form Australian throughout,—the first known use of that form. Despite popular conception, the book was not instrumental in the adoption of the name: the name came gradually to be accepted over the following ten years.

The first time that the name Australia appears to have been officially used was in a despatch to Lord Bathurst of 4 April 1817 in which Governor Lachlan Macquarie acknowledges the receipt of Capt. Flinders' charts of Australia. On 12 December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted. In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially as Australia.

The first map on which the word Australia occurs was published in St Petersburg in 1824. It is in Krusenstern's Atlas de l'Océan Pacifique.

 

 

 

 

Cities, Towns and Villages of Australia

... the best site around for all of your Hometown information!

Our searchable Yellow Pages provide you with an extensive list of businesses, churches, schools, government agencies and non profit organizations located in each hometown. So if you are looking for a product, service or a church, please visit our business listings to find the company or organization that is right for you.

Find the best reasons to travel to our hometown by visiting our Travel Guides, which have amazing deals on hotels and travel packages all across Australia.

Are you interested in finding out what is happening in your hometown? If so, please visit our free interactive and printable Calendar. Viewable in daily, weekly or monthly format these calendars show the current events of each community posted by residents. Garage sales, church suppers, town council meetings, school sports, concerts, sales and more! Post your events for FREE!

Our Free Classifieds categorized by province offer items such as used horse trailers, cars, trucks, motorcycles, outboard motors, books, horses, dogs, real estate listings including homes, businesses, and land, apartments for rent, boats and many other items that are for sale by owner. If you are looking for these items or if you have something to sell, please stop by and take a look.We also have employment opportunities and ads from folks looking for jobs.

Our History, Trivia and Facts Pages are populated with interesting, useless and random facts pertaining to each hometown's history, Australian history, family history and the history of names.

We review the postings on our Free Message Boards daily to ensure the appropriateness of the topics for visitors of all ages. These forums discuss such topics as school and government issues, local news, lost and found, missing persons and more.

Thank you for visiting Australia!