Victoria

Victoria is located in south-eastern Australia. It lies south of New South Wales and east of South Australia. It borders the Bass Strait and Southern Ocean. The second-smallest of all Australian states, it has a land area of 227,416 square kilometres and a coastline 2,512 kilometres long.

Known as the Garden State, Victoria's rich soil and mild climate were ideal for farming and made it a major supplier of vegetables to other regions in the eighteenth century. In the twenty-first century, Victoria is known not only for its agriculture but for its horticulture, with numerous parks, botanical gardens and nature reserves. The Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens in Melbourne is a World Heritage site, and numerous parks and wilderness areas throughout the state, including the Australian Alps National Parks and Reserves and Grampians National Park (Gariwerd), are on the National Heritage List. Sites that are sacred to Aboriginal peoples are also on the list and include the Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape in the Tyrendarra area and in the Mt Eccles Lake Condah area.

The state has a strong commitment to the environment and has implemented several initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and become more energy efficient. For several years, its capital, Melbourne, had the title of Greenest City of Australia. Other major cities in Victoria are Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo.

Historical Perspective

The first inhabitants of Victoria were Aboriginal peoples, who lived in the area for thousands of years. The first Europeans to sight the coast of Victoria were James Cook and his crew on the HM Endeavour in 1770. Naval lieutenant James Grant surveyed the coast in 1800 and named many of its features.

Several attempts were made to settle Victoria beginning in 1803, but it was not until 1834 that the first permanent European settlement, at Portland Bay, was established. A settlement at Melbourne was founded the next year. Settlers flocked to the area, and on 1 July 1851 Victoria separated from New South Wales and became a separate colony. After gold was discovered in Victoria, immigration increased, with people arriving from Great Britain, Ireland, Europe, North America and China as well as other colonies in Australia. Not long thereafter Victoria passed the Chinese Immigration Act 1855 to limit immigration of Chinese diggers, who were then subject to violent attacks. Gold boosted not only the population but the economy as well, and Victoria rapidly developed as it competed with New South Wales for supremacy.

Victoria joined the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, and Melbourne served as the capital of the new nation until 1927, when the federal parliament moved to the new capital city of Canberra, Australia Capital Territory.

Geography and Climate

Victoria has a warm and temperate climate in most of the state. Rainfall varies by region, with the south-central region receiving between about 600 and 1,000 millimetres a year and having annual average temperatures between 12 and 15 degrees Celsius. Alpine regions have much greater rainfall, with places such as Mount Buller receiving as much as 1,540 millimetres a year. Areas in the north-west have a local steppe climate, with average annual rainfall between 300 and 400 millimetres. Average annual temperatures there are between 15 and 18 degrees Celsius.

Victoria's terrain consists of mountain ranges and plateaus, valleys, plains and deserts. The Australian Alps, part of the Great Dividing Range, cover eastern Victoria. The Dandenong Ranges and Yarra Valley are to the east of Melbourne; the Macedon Ranges, to its north-west. The West Victorian Volcanic Plains, made up of basalt more than seven thousand years ago, stretch from Melbourne to Portland and meet the Grampians, a series of sandstone mountain ranges, in the south-west. The Big Desert lies in the north-west.

More than nine hundred types of native animals and more than forty-three hundred native plants are found in Victoria. Native animal species include penguins, Australian fur seals, kangaroos, wallabies, kookaburras, koalas, possums, wombats, flying foxes and platypus. A few of its native plants are acacias, eucalpyts, alpine ash, mountain ash, scrub cypress pine and ferns.

Economy

Service industries, agriculture, forestry, mining and manufacturing are major contributors to Victoria's economy. Victoria is a major centre of finance, banking, insurance and investment management services. Tourism is another driver of the economy. According to Victoria State Government, it contributed $21.6 billion to the state's economy, or about 6 per cent of the gross state product, in 2014–15 and employed about 7 per cent of the work force.

Trade is a vital part of the economy. According to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Victoria's major exports in 2014–15 were wool and other animal hair, beef and other meat, automobiles, dairy, fruit and nuts, aluminium and wheat. The state also exports services, including educational travel and consultation services.

Over a third of the Victorian work force was employed in healthcare, retail and manufacturing in mid-2016, with the largest percentage in the healthcare industry. The highest job growth in Victoria between 2000 and 2015 has come from education and training, healthcare and social assistance, construction, retail and professional, scientific and technical services. In the mid-2010s, the state targeted several priority growth sectors and invested in developing them. These sectors are food and fibre, pharmaceuticals, international education, transport and logistics, travel and tourism, arts and media, and technologies in medicine, defence, construction and energy.

Demographics

Victoria was the second-most populous state of Australia and had a population of26,966,789 in December 2023, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. It was the fastest-growing state in Australia between June 2015 and June 2016, with a growth rate of 2.1 per cent. However, as of 2023, West Australia was the fastest growing state. The majority of Victoria's population lives in Melbourne, which had a population of about 4.9 million people in 2023. Melbourne is the second-largest city in Australia, behind Sydney.

In the 2021 Census, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples made up 1 per cent of the population of Victoria. Over two-thirds of Victorians were born in Australia. Their most common ancestries were English, Australian, Irish, Scottish and Chinese. Among people born overseas, the top countries of birth were England, India, China, New Zealand and Vietnam. English was the only language spoken at home in about 67 per cent of households. Other languages spoken included Mandarin, Vietnamese, Greek, Punjabi, and Italian. Slightly less than 40 per cent of the population reported no religious affiliation, with 20.5 per cent of the population affiliated with Catholicism and 6.5 per cent with Anglicanism.

Bibliography

"Ecosystems." Parks Victoria, 2016, parkweb.vic.gov.au/park-management/environment/ecosystems. Accessed 17 June 2024.

Kane, Annie. "Australia's Greenest City: Adelaide Pulls ahead of Sydney and Melbourne." The Guardian, 11 Feb. 2016, www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/12/australias-greenest-city-adelaide-pulls-ahead-of-sydney-and-melbourne. Accessed 17 June 2024.

"Victorian Regions and Regional Cities." Regional Development Victoria, 26 July 2016, www.rdv.vic.gov.au/victorian-regions. Accessed 17 June 2024.

"Victoria's Early History, 1803–1851." State Library Victoria, 4 Jan. 2017, guides.slv.vic.gov.au/Victoriasearlyhistory. Accessed 17 June 2024.