 Western Australia is Australia's largest state in area, covering the western third of the mainland, and is bordered by South Australia and the Northern Territory. It is, after the Sakha Republic in Russia, the second largest subnational entity (statoid) in the world. Despite this the population is only 2,105,800 making up 10% of Australia's total population.
The people of Western Australia, West Australians or Western Australians, are often colloquially referred to as sandgropers because of the insect found on sand dunes around Perth. The bulk of Western Australia consists of the extremely old Yilgarn craton and Pilbara craton which merged with the Deccan of India, Madagascar and the Karoo and Zimbabwe cratons of Southern Africa, in the Archean Eon to form Ur, one of the oldest Supercontinents on Earth (3,200-3,000 million years ago). Because the only mountain-building since then has been of the Stirling Range with the rifting from Antarctica, the land is extremely eroded and ancient, with no part of the State today above 1,245 metres (4,085 ft) AHD (at Mount Meharry in the Hamersley Range of the Pilbara region). Most parts of the State form a low plateau with an average elevation of about 400 metres (1,200 ft), very low relief, and no surface runoff. This descends relatively sharply to the coastal plains, in some cases forming a sharp escarpment (as with the Darling Range/Darling Scarp near Perth). The extreme age of the landscape has meant that the soils are remarkably infertile and frequently laterised. Even soils derived from granitic bedrock contain an order of magnitude less available phosphorus and only half as much nitrogen as soils in comparable climates in other continents. Soils derived from extensive sandplains or ironstone are even less fertile, being even more devoid of soluble phosphate and also deficient in zinc, copper, molybdenum and sometimes potassium and calcium. 
The first inhabitants of Australia arrived from the north approximately 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. Over thousands of years they eventually spread across the whole landmass. These Indigenous Australians were well established throughout Western Australia by the time European ships started accidentally arriving en-route to Batavia (now Jakarta) in the early seventeenth century.
The first European to visit Western Australia was a Dutch explorer, Dirk Hartog who on 26 October 1616 landed at (what is now known as) Cape Inscription, Dirk Hartog Island. For the rest of the 17th century there were many other Dutch travellers who also, usually unintentionally, encountered the coast. By the late 1700s, British and French sailors had also begun to explore the Western Australian coast. The origins of the present state began with the establishment of a British settlement at King George Sound in 1826 (later named Albany from 1832). The settlement was founded in response to concern about the possibility of a French colony being established on the coast of Western Australia. In 1829, the Swan River Colony was established on the Swan River by Captain James Stirling. By 1832, the British settler population of the colony had reached around 1,500. The two separate townsites of the colony developed slowly into the port city of Fremantle and the Western Australian capital city Perth
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