Australia's knife-edge vote looked certain to bring a hung parliament, but it has also delivered the country its first Aboriginal and Muslim politicians in the lower house, and its youngest.
Neither the ruling Labor party or conservative opposition managed to secure enough seats to claim office in the closest race in decades, with the balance of power to fall to a handful of independent and minority MPs.
Among those elected to Australia's first hung parliament in 70 years is Bosnian-born union worker Ed Husic who claimed a seat for the Labor party in Sydney as the country's first Muslim MP. Baby-faced Wyatt Roy, 20, was elected to parliament as its youngest ever member, just hours after voting for the first time. Roy, a university student, snatched the key northern seat of Longman for the conservatives, with 52 percent of the vote.
"I don't think I was ever the likeliest candidate and I'm very, very proud of the work that the local campaign team did here," Roy said. "There's a lot of people out there in the community who put a great deal of faith and trust in me and I can't tell you how humbling an experience that really is."
The conservatives also looked on track to deliver Australia its first Aborigine to the lower house, with Ken Wyatt ahead of his rival in the Western Australian seat of Hasluck. Fewer than 400 votes separated him from sitting Labor MP Sharryn Jackson on Sunday, but Wyatt, who is of Noongar, Yamatji and Wongi heritage, said he was confident "we will fall over the line." "I think Australians have been very generous in the way we've come forward over the last 30 years," said Wyatt.
Aborigines were denied the vote for many years, and Wyatt will be only the third indigenous person elected to either house of parliament after Neville Bonner and Aden Ridgeway served in the Senate from 1971 and 1998 respectively.
Wyatt said he would use his first speech to pay tribute to former Labor leader Kevin Rudd for his historic February 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations of Aborigines removed from their families by white settlers.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard, meanwhile, said she started negotiating with independent lawmakers Sunday in a bid to cling to power because no major party won a majority of parliamentary seats in Australia's general elections.
Gillard said she hoped to enlist support for her center-left Labor Party and has held preliminary talks with three independents in the House of Representatives, an independent candidate whose seat is not yet assured and a lawmaker from the Greens party.
"It is clear that neither party has earned the right to government in its own right," Gillard told reporters. "It's my intention to negotiate in good faith an effective agreement to form government."
But Liberal leader Tony Abbott said the loss of voter support for Labor that cost the government so many of its 83 seats showed that Australians wanted the government to change.
Independent Tony Windsor said he planned to talk with fellow independents Bob Katter and Rob Oakeshott by telephone on Sunday to decide on issues including whether to negotiate a power deal with the major parties as a group or individually. All three were the only independents in the last parliament and all are former members of the Nationals party, which is a coalition partner of the Liberals. But all have said they are open to the prospect of supporting a Labor minority government.
Greens party leader Bob Brown said no agreement had been reached after a "cordial" conversation with Gillard, who was seeking the support of newly elected Greens lawmaker Adam Brandt. But Brandt had previously stated his preference for a Labor government.
An Australian government has not had to rely on the support of independent lawmakers to rule since 1943. Two independents had changed the government in the preceding three-year term by switching their allegiance from the conservatives to Labor.
