I've already written guides for some of Civilization VI's vanilla newcomer civs and leaders, so now I'm going to move onto one of the DLC civilizations that makes its first appearances in the franchise: John Curtin's Australia. This civ and leader are part of the "Deluxe Edition DLC". If you purchased the Deluxe Edition of the game, then you received this DLC (among others) for free when it was released. If you do not own the Deluxe Edition, then this DLC costs $5 USD.

Australia is currently the sixth largest country in the world (by land area) and is the only contemporary country that occupies an entire mainland continent. The continent was inhabited by the hunter-gatherer aboriginal Australians as long as 70,000 years ago, but very little is known about their history and culture. It is believed that they arrived on the continent via land bridges in Southeast Asia (probably connecting Indonesia and New Zealand to mainland Asia). The Dutch were the first Europeans to reach Australia in 1606, but it was the English that began colonizing the island-continent in 1788 to act as a penal colony in response to the recent American independence, which lead to a rapid decline in the native population. By the mid 1800's, Australia had ended the prisoner transport, and the colony began its transition into a full-blown nation.

John Curtin was the prime minister of Australia throughout most of World War II. He was appointed after the previous prime minister, Robert Menzies, was deposed by his own party. Curtin aligned Australia closely with the United States, which upset many British traditionalists, but proved instrumental in preventing the Japanese capture of the Philipines from turning into an invasion of mainland Australia. Curtin's leadership during the war, and his popular social service programs allowed him to coast to a mid-war re-election victory in 1943, but he did not complete that term due to rapidly-deteriorating health that lead to his death in 1944. He remains one of Australia's most beloved prime ministers.

DISCLAIMER:
Civilization VI is still very early in its life-cycle. Strategies for the game (and for specific leaders and civs) may change as Firaxis applies balance patches, introduces new features, or expands the game through DLC or expansion packs, or as the Civ community discovers new strategies. As such, the following strategy guide may change from time to time. I will try to keep it up-to-date, and will make notations whenever changes are made. I'll also post links in the official 2K forums and CivFanatics, where I'll also report any changes made. If possible and practical, I will try to retain the original content of the strategy for posterity.

I welcome any feedback or suggestions that readers wish to offer. Feel free to post on the linked forums, or by posting a comment at the bottom of the page.

This guide is up to date as of the Fall 2017 patch (ver. 1.0.0.194) (Southeast Asia DLC)

In Civilization VI, Australia is a civilization that favors expansion along coasts and wherever they have access to pasture animal resources. John Curtin is a defensive leader who can act as a sort of "sleeping giant" "world police", who can churn out a large military quickly if he is ever the target of a war or if he liberates another player (or city state) city.

I really like Civilization VI! Of course, it has its share of nagging problems (some of which have been resolved already) - any game of this size and scope is likely to have issues at release. I've already been thinking of some ideas for how the game could be improved in expansions and DLC, and I'd like to spend a few posts to share some of those ideas with you now.

In my review of the game, I mentioned that oceans feel like they've regressed a bit since Beyond Earth: Rising Tide, in that they've returned to feeling like lifeless dead space on the map. Even though they're more important for Holy Sites and Campuses, mountains are also still mostly dead space on the map. They act as obstacles, and that's basically it. In expansions and DLC, I would like to see some of this space become more alive and useful. I'd like to spend this first suggestion post going over some ideas that I have for expanding the ocean mechanics, and for taking advantage of more of the map's dead space.

I have posted a link to this blog on Civfanatics at:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/using-more-of-the-dead-space-in-the-map.610171/.
Feel free to discuss through the comments on this post, or via the linked forum topic!

Improve coastal cities

I'm very underwhelmed with coastal cities right now. Water tiles have very little utility. They provide small yield, can't have districts (other than a single harbor per city), and generally lack production. Coastal cities with lots of water are, thus, very unproductive and not really worth building. I think there's a couple ways to resolve this.

Harbors could provide a small amount of production. Or perhaps Harbors could act similarly to lighthouses from Civ V and provide production on sea resources. Or they could provide production on all adjacent sea tiles (so that placement is still important, and more of those empty sea tiles become useful and worth working, and you actually have to work them in order to get the benefit (as opposed to the Harbor just having an adjacency bonus). If we want to only use adjacency bonuses, then another alternative might be for Harbors to provide +1 production per adjacent coastal resource and +0.5 gold per adjacent water tile. That way, even cities that don't have clustered water resources can still have valuable locations for harbors.

Coastal and island cities lack production and have limited space to build districts.

Another way to improve coastal cities would be to have some more early policies that benefit coastal cities. Perhaps the Maritime Industries policy could be changed to "+1 production in coastal cities, and +1 production from Harbors". Alternatively, Maritime Industries could be similar to the Veterancy policy, and it could provide "+33% production towards Harbor districts and buildings for that district". Or we could have policies that do both! A new policy could be added that provides the bonus production for early naval units. Maybe there can even be a whole extra early-game civic (maybe called "Seafaring" or "Way-finding") that has some policies and buffs towards coastal and island civilizations.

The lack of production for coastal cities could also be offset by giving them more gold and/or food for growth (in order to support a specialist economy)...