-[Mr. Kapa] Austria, home of Vegemite, that big red rock, and an unparalleled supply of deadly nature.
Come over for a trip, see the Great Barrier Reef, the Sydney Opera House, or get nibbled on by a shark.
Except, that's not Austria. It's Australia.
Similar though their names are, one is a continent completely surrounded by the sea; the other,
a small mountainous country with not one salt water port to its name.
They're also over 12,000km apart, which means when Vienna puts the champagne in the fridge,
Canberra already celebrates New Year's.
Different as these two may be, mix-ups still happen, and not just to the ignorant or uneducated.
Whether it's a news channel, US President, or UN Secretary-General, everyone gets it wrong sometimes.
-Hey man, you're from Austria right? -Yup.
-Ever seen any Kangaroos? -Sure. We have this thing where I'm from,
where you pay a few bucks and then you can watch Kangaroos all day long.
-Wow!
-It's called a zoo.
-[Mr. Kapa] And it doesn't stop there. Send a letter from not-Europe to Austria, and there's a non-zero chance
it'll go to Australia instead.
To prevent any confusion, just write 'Austria, Europe' on the envelope. You know, just to be sure.
-Wait a second, if these countries are so different, how come their names are nearly identical?
-[Mr. Kapa] Well actually, they're not. -Nonsense! They clearly...
-[Mr. Kapa] Shh... Austria's name, in its official national language of German, is Österreich.
A good reminder that English country names, and their local counterparts can vary wildly.
As inhabitants of Germany, Hungary, Finland, China, Japan, both Koreas and a bunch of other countries,
will happily tell you. Back in the long, long ago of Medieval Europe,
Austria is still called Marchia Orientalis - the Eastern borderland, as in east of Bavaria,
and only includes a Slovenia-sized piece of land along the Danube.
But Marchia Orientalis is Latin, spoken only by the noble and pious, so the people just germanised that,
into Ostarrichi, and through centuries of territory gains and loses, dukes, kings, emperors and lots of inbreeding,
that name pretty much sticks, but morphs into the even harder to pronounce - Österreich.
Internationally, that's no good.
Non-German speakers need an option to say the name without dislocating their jaws.
[Jaw snaps] [Screaming]
So they go with the latinised Austria instead.
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Australia, as a whole, only get's a name when Dutch sailors stumble upon this continent-sized heap of land
and christen it New Holland. Name it, though they do, due to some imaginative yarn-spinning,
the dutch expect mountains of gold and treasure there, and when it turns out neither will be found, yet,
they're so bitter with disappointment that they decide to just not settle there at all.
This leaves the continent open to the British, who, upon arrival, make no such mistake, and promptly combine the
needs for expansion and relieving over-crowded prisons to colonise the place with thousands of convicts.
[Kangaroo slaps]
Now that the continent is in British hands, New Holland won't do anymore.
To come up with a new name, the British reach into the shoebox of antiquity and pull out Terra Australis.
The name of a legendary huge continent that should be somewhere in the southern hemisphere.
By 1824, European sailors have crossed the southern hemisphere far and wide, but come up short on that
large landmass in the south.
So the British, not willing to let the perfectly good name go to waste, use it for the closest thing to
Terra Australis they know, and at the stroke of a quill, New Holland becomes Australia.
So you see, no connection there. Well, barely any connection. Because back in 1606,
the year the Dutch first land on the shores of Australia Fair,
Spanish sailors discover an island in the south Pacific, now a part of Vanuatu, they believe to be Terra Australis.
They claim it for the Spanish crown, and in honour of the Spanish king,
descendant of the Austrian house of Habsburg, called the island Austrialia del Espiritu Santo.
But in the time without auto-spellcheck, first, the 'i' in there goes missing, and eventually,
only the Espiritu Santo part of the name survives. Concealing that centuries ago, these two oft-confused
names merged to mark a Vanuatuan island.
To conclude: Austria is a small alpine country in central Europe & Australia is a continent-sized country
separating the Indian Ocean from the South Pacific. The names only vary by two letters;
both refer to compass directions - one to the south, one to the east;
while an island that is not part of Australia was initially named Austrialia, after Austria, by Spaniards,
looking for Terra Australis.
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