Assange disembarked from a private jet at Canberra airport on Wednesday night, waving to waiting media and cheering supporters before passionately kissing his wife, Stella, and lifting her off the ground.
He embraced his father John Shipton before entering the terminal building with his legal team.
Julian Assange embraced his wife Stella after arriving at Canberra Airport. (Mick Tsikas/AAP PHOTOS)
Assange has not spoken publicly since being released and did not appear at a Wikileaks media conference in Canberra, where Stella Assange said it was too soon to say what her husband would do next.
"Julian needs time to recover, to get used to freedom," she said.
"I want Julian to have that space to rediscover that freedom."
She said she believed her husband would one day be pardoned.
Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who has lobbied for years to free Assange, said he had spoken to him by phone after his plane landed.
Julian Assange's arrival in Australia ends a more than decade-long legal saga. (Lukas Coch/AAP PHOTOS)
Assange's arrival ends a saga in which he spent more than five years in a British high-security jail and seven years in asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London battling extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations and to the US, where he faced 18 criminal charges.
Those charges stemmed from WikiLeaks' release in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - one of the largest breaches of secret information in US history.
During a three-hour hearing held earlier in the US territory of Saipan, Assange pleaded guilty to one criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national defence documents but said he had believed the US Constitution's First Amendment, which protects free speech, shielded his activities.
"Working as a journalist I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified in order to publish that information," he told the court.
"I believed the First Amendment protected that activity but I accept that it was...a violation of the espionage statute."
Julian Assange pleaded guilty to conspiring to obtain and disclose classified documents. (EPA PHOTO)
Chief US District Judge Ramona Manglona accepted his guilty plea, noting the US government indicated there was no personal victim from Assange's actions.
She wished Assange, who turns 53 next week, an early happy birthday as she released him due to time already served in a British jail.
While the US government viewed Assange as reckless for putting its agents at risk of harm by publishing their names, his supporters hailed him as a hero for promoting free speech and exposing war crimes.
"We firmly believe that Mr. Assange never should have been charged under the Espionage Act and engaged in (an) exercise that journalists engage in every day," his US lawyer, Barry Pollack, told reporters outside the court.
He said WikiLeaks' work would continue.
Touchdown!— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) After enduring nearly 14 years of arbitrary detention in the UK, 5 years in maximum security prison, for his groundbreaking publishing work with @wikileaks, Julian Assange has arrived home on Australian soil.Free at last. #FreedomFlight pic.twitter.com/kbjjG9PSIoJune 26, 2024
Assange's British and Australian lawyer Jennifer Robinson thanked the Australian government for securing Assange's release.
Assange had agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count, according to filings in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
The US territory in the western Pacific was chosen due to his opposition to travelling to the mainland US and for its proximity to Australia, prosecutors said.
Politicians in Australia who had campaigned for his release raised concern about the guilty plea on US soil, saying he was a journalist who had been convicted for doing his job.
Assange spent more than five years in what Judge Manglona called one of Britain's harshest prisons and seven years holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London as he fought extradition.
While stuck at the embassy he had two sons with Stella, who had been one of his lawyers.
They married in 2022 at Belmarsh prison in London.
with Reuters and PA
