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[Andrew Stevens]

Sure, European ancestry.  That doesn't make me British though?  Just a strange comment to make that Australia is 85% British, which it isn't.

Trevor, my 85% British came from a different methodology than the 85% European.  I hadn't seen the breakdown which said 85% European until after I wrote my initial comment or I would have realized there was something wrong with my numbers.  My initial comment was based on the following table of reported Australian ancestries:

    * Australian (37.1%)
    * English (31.6%)
    * Irish (9.1%)
    * Scottish (7.7%)
    * Italian (4.3%)
    * German (4.1%)
    * Chinese (3.4%)
    * Greek (1.8%)
    * Dutch (1.6%)
    * Indian (1.2%)
    * Lebanese (0.9%)
    * Pole (0.8%)
    * Vietnamese (0.8%)
    * New Zealander (0.8%)
    * Filipino (0.8%)
    * Maltese (0.7%)
    * Croats (0.6%)
    * Welsh (0.5%)
    * French (0.5%)
    * Serbs (0.45%)
    * Spanish (0.4%)
    * South African (0.4%)
    * Sinhalese (0.4%)
    * Macedonian (0.4%)
    * Hungarian (0.3%)
    * Russian (0.3%)
    * Turks (0.3%)

So I added up Australian (assuming this meant that the person's country had been in Australia for a long time and therefore was descended from Britain), English, Irish, and Scottish and came up with 85%.  (The Irish will, I hope, forgive me for lumping them in with the British.)  What I didn't know was that I was double-counting some people.  This list allowed people to choose more than one ancestry and the total adds up to about 111%.  So clearly, 85% is too high.  Some of those people probably claimed both English and Scottish or both English and Australian.  Moreover, I hadn't really considered that a small percentage of people who said Australian actually meant to say Australian, i.e. indigenous Australian.   

However, it's still got to be at least 70% British or Irish, yes?  If we add up all the nationalities above that are not English, Australian, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh (thereby assuming that everybody who said German or some other nationality did not say one of those as well), we get 25.2% (and that's counting dubious nationalities like New Zealand and South African who may very well have ancestry which traces to the British Isles).  Add another 3% for the indigenous Australians and we get 28.2%.  That leaves about 71.2% which is probably covered by the British Isles.  Of course, America is also more British if we count the Irish (there are more people descended from the Irish in America than there are Irish left in Ireland).  Lumping the Irish and Scots-Irish in with the English, America would be about 25-30% British, easily overtaking the Germans as the primary ethnic group, though well short of a majority.

And, by the way, Trevor, I never said you were descended from the British.  Are you descended from a different European nationality?  It looks like Australia has about 15% non-British Europeans.

[Andrew Stevens]

Foolish me.  I didn't even think about Trevor's last name.  Obviously, you're one of the 4.1% of German descent.  (David, of course, is Scottish as is, probably, commenter Tim.  My Scottish ancestry is Clan Cameron, by the way.)  Can't say for Geoff and Tony since I'm not sure their last names have ever been mentioned. 

[Trevor (MMM)]

As I have said all along - I have no bones with the 85% ancestry bit - but to then extrapolate that to a reason for your theory?

[Andrew Stevens]

What theory?  On this thread, all I said was that it was more correct to say that Australia was descended from the English than to say that America was descended from the English.  I extrapolated no theory from that.  I was just responding to Chicken of Doom's analogy of America being descended from the English in reference to the Dals and the Kaleds.

Looking at this thread, I think you've mixed up two different threads.  On another thread, I did talk about how America still doesn't know anything about Doctor Who, but that doesn't have anything to do with the relative descent of the two nations so much as that Australia gets its television from three major sources - Britain, the U.S., and its own home-grown television while the U.S. gets virtually all of its major television home-grown.  I assume this is because of differences in country size.  The U.S. is big enough to create all of its own television itself while Australia isn't and must import.

[Chicken of Doom]

I should probably qualify my earlier comment - I am of course aware that the US can't be boiled down to being the descendants of a single racial group, and it would be slightly more accurate to talk in terms of cultural descent, but either way I was intentionally talking in very broad, crude terms.  If we prefer we can talk about Australia, or Canada - which was 'British North America' until comparatively recently, regardless of its ethnic composition.  Indeed, Britain still manages to be considered British despite its varied ethnic history.

However - this REALLY REALLY REALLY isn't the point I was making!

So, if we forget the existence of the US for a moment, let's use the example of the British and the French instead.  If a British person tells you that he is descended from the English of the Regency period, who fought a great war with the French, would you find this incompatible with another British person claiming that he's descended from the people of the 1400s who fought a war with the French that sounds VERY different to the one you heard about before?

History is Long.  That's one of the most noticeable things about it.  Why on earth shpuld we assume that the entire history of Skaro has been covered by a handful of exposition scenes in two or three TV stories?

For what it's worth, the Big Finish audios take the approach that the Dals were the ancients from whom the Kaleds were culturally descended, which would be analogous to the influence of the Ancient Greeks on Victorian civilisation, say.  Whatever we think of Big Finish audios, this is a perfectly sensible theory, and I'm kind of amazed that the Dals/Kaleds thing is even seen as a contradiction anymore...

[Andrew Stevens]

Chicken of Doom, if you read my original post on the matter, you'll see that I didn't miss your actual point.  We're just a digressive lot around here.

[Tim K]

Sorry. I'm still back about four posts ago with a calculator trying to add up the percentages.

Andrew - I am NEVER going to assume that you pull figures out of the air. I need someone just like you to figure out my taxes... then the whole Dal/Kaled divide.