> As a white person, they both look like average white people with Northwestern European heritage to me. If you had a room with 100 random white people, I guarantee you I couldn't pinpoint to the Aussies or Germans by looks alone.

That sounds pretty racist to me. Would you say the same about people from Uganda as opposed to the Caribbean, or Japan from China? That they all look the same?

There's a loaded grenade of a question.

Here's the thing though, a "white person" from Australia is a blandly generic European, they look like they could of come from Scotland, or Germany .. then of course you can start looking at European Australians and picking out people with deep ancestral roots to Spain, Italy, Serbia | Croatia, etc.

Modern Germany is a greater melting pot of origin stories than it once was - although to be frankly honest much of the population of Neukölln in Berlin look as though they might be from Melbourne, Australia - and they don't look at all like the 'Aryan Race' archetypes certain Germans of the 1920s were so fond of.

Forget "race" - it's a question of whether any family traits and features that started out strongly eveident are still present or not.

The greater truth is that outside of any obvious strong features, Australians come from all over; 25% of the current population was born outside of Australia, and with the exception of indigenous Australians and first settler, early convicts, soldiers that stayed on for land, servant families of the rich, very early gold rush adventurers, etc very few people in Australia are descended from anybody here prior to 1850.

Following 1850 the Australian population quadrupled rapidly from under half a million outsiders as prospecters poured in.

Conversely, the population of Japan largely looks Japanese in origin and it's generally not hard to pick those who don't have several generations there behind them.