Australia is officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the largest country in Oceania and the world's sixth-largest country by total area. The neighboring countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and East Timor to the north; the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east; and New Zealand to the south-east. Australia's capital is Canberra and its largest urban area in Sydney.
For about 50,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians who spoke languages classifiable into roughly 250 groups
