Australia is the only country that is also a whole continent, and it is the sixth-largest country in the world at about 7.7 million square kilometres. Around 27 million people live there, which sounds like a lot until you realise the United Kingdom has more than twice as many in a country 31 times smaller. Most of Australia is empty, most Australians live near the coast, and a lot of the animals live nowhere else on Earth.
A Country, a Continent and an Island
Australia is the only place that counts as all three at once. It is a country, it is the mainland of the continent sometimes called Oceania or Australasia, and it is an island — the largest one, if you decide Greenland is too big to count and is a continent's worth of land instead.
Geographers usually solve this by saying Greenland is the largest island and Australia is a continental landmass. Either way, you can sail all the way around it.
It is also the flattest continent and the driest inhabited one. Its highest mountain, Mount Kosciuszko, is only 2,228 metres — lower than plenty of hills in other continents.
The Outback
Around 70% of Australia is arid or semi-arid, and the vast dry interior is called the outback. Almost nobody lives there.
About 86% of Australians live in cities, and almost all of the population is squeezed into a strip near the eastern and southern coasts. Some outback cattle stations are bigger than small countries — Anna Creek Station in South Australia covers around 24,000 square kilometres, which is larger than Israel.
Children on remote stations used to be taught by the School of the Air, taking lessons over two-way radio. It still runs, using satellite internet now. The Royal Flying Doctor Service brings medical care by aeroplane to an area the size of Western Europe.
Uluru
Uluru is a single enormous rock rising 348 metres out of flat desert in the Northern Territory. It is about 3.6 kilometres long, and most of it is underground — geologists think it may extend several kilometres below the surface.
It is made of sandstone containing iron, and the iron rusts, which is why it is red. At sunrise and sunset it appears to change colour dramatically as the light angle shifts.
Uluru is a sacred site for the Anangu people, who have lived in the area for tens of thousands of years. Ownership was returned to them in 1985, and climbing the rock was permanently prohibited in October 2019 at their request.
The Great Barrier Reef
Stretching about 2,300 kilometres along the Queensland coast, the Great Barrier Reef is the largest structure ever built by living things. It is made of the skeletons of billions of tiny coral animals called polyps, laid down over thousands of years.
It contains around 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands, and is home to over 1,500 species of fish, six of the world's seven marine turtle species, and about 30 species of whale and dolphin.
It can be seen from space, and it is in trouble. Warmer seas cause coral bleaching, where the coral expels the colourful algae that live inside it and feed it, turning white. Bleached coral is not dead, but it will die if the heat lasts. Several mass bleaching events have hit the reef since 2016.
Animals That Live Nowhere Else
Australia broke away from the other continents around 45 million years ago and its animals evolved separately. Around 87% of its mammals, 93% of its reptiles and 45% of its birds are found nowhere else.
Most of the mammals are marsupials — they raise their young in a pouch. A newborn kangaroo is about the size of a jellybean and crawls into the pouch to finish developing. Kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and there are more of them in Australia than there are people.
The platypus is stranger still. It is a mammal that lays eggs, has a duck-like bill, webbed feet and a beaver-like tail, and the males have venomous spurs on their back legs. When the first specimen reached British scientists in 1799 they thought someone had sewn parts of different animals together.
The Dangerous Ones
Australia has a reputation for deadly wildlife, and some of it is earned. Of the 25 most venomous snakes in the world, most are Australian, including the inland taipan, whose venom is the most toxic of any snake.
The box jellyfish in northern waters is among the most venomous animals on the planet. The saltwater crocodile is the largest living reptile, up to seven metres long, and lives in rivers and estuaries across the north.
Here is the part that gets left out: hardly anyone dies. Australia averages around two snakebite deaths a year, and horses and cows kill more people than all the venomous animals combined. Antivenom, good hospitals and sensible caution do most of the work.
Try This: Why Australia Is Dry
Take a shallow dish of water and put it next to a full glass of water, both in the same warm spot. Come back a day later. The shallow dish will have lost a much larger share of its water.
Australia has the same problem on a continental scale. It is flat, so water spreads out thinly instead of collecting in deep lakes and fast rivers. It is hot, so evaporation is fierce. And the mountains it does have — the Great Dividing Range — run along the eastern edge, catching the rain before it reaches the interior.
Lake Eyre in South Australia is the country's largest lake and is usually a dry salt pan. It has completely filled only a handful of times in the last 150 years. When it does, millions of birds appear from thousands of kilometres away within days.
The Oldest Living Culture
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived in Australia for at least 65,000 years, which makes theirs the oldest continuous human culture known anywhere on Earth.
At the time Europeans arrived in 1788 there were around 250 distinct language groups and many more dialects. Around 120 of those languages are still spoken, and most are endangered, though there are active revival programmes.
Aboriginal knowledge includes navigation, fire management and astronomy passed down orally for thousands of years. Some stories describe coastlines that were flooded when sea levels rose after the last ice age, more than 7,000 years ago — which would make them among the oldest accurate accounts of real events anywhere.
Animals That Were Not Invited
Australia's isolation made its wildlife special, and it also made it fragile. Animals brought from elsewhere have caused enormous damage.
Twenty-four rabbits were released for hunting in Victoria in 1859. Within fifty years there were hundreds of millions, eating so much vegetation that whole areas turned to bare soil. Australia built rabbit-proof fences thousands of kilometres long and eventually used viruses to control them.
Cane toads were introduced in 1935 to eat beetles in the Queensland sugar cane. They ignored the beetles, bred rapidly, and spread across the north — they are poisonous, so native predators that try to eat them die. Foxes, feral cats, camels, water buffalo and prickly pear cactus all tell similar stories. Australia has lost more mammal species to extinction in the last 200 years than any other country.
Seasons Upside Down
Australia is in the southern hemisphere, so its seasons are the reverse of Europe's and North America's. Christmas falls in midsummer, and school summer holidays run from December to late January.
An Australian Christmas often involves a beach, cold seafood or a barbecue, and cricket on the television. Winter is June to August, and there is enough snow in the Australian Alps for ski resorts — more snow, in some years, than Switzerland.
Water going down the plughole does not actually reverse direction because of the hemisphere, whatever you may have heard. The Coriolis effect is far too weak at that scale; the shape of the basin decides it.
Bushfires and the Trees That Need Them
Fire is part of how the Australian landscape works. Many eucalyptus trees are adapted to it: their bark peels and burns, their oil-rich leaves catch easily, and some species have seed pods that only open in the heat of a fire.
Aboriginal peoples managed the land for tens of thousands of years with what is now called cultural burning — small, cool, patchy fires lit at the right time of year to clear undergrowth and prevent the enormous ones. Those practices are being reintroduced in several states.
The Black Summer fires of 2019 and 2020 burned around 24 million hectares, destroyed thousands of homes and killed or displaced an estimated three billion animals. Smoke from them circled the entire planet and was detected in South America within days.
Cities and Records
Sydney is the largest city with around 5.5 million people, followed by Melbourne. Canberra is the capital, and it exists because Sydney and Melbourne could not agree which of them should be, so a new city was built between them in 1913.
Perth is one of the most isolated major cities in the world — it is closer to Jakarta than to Sydney. The Indian Pacific train from Sydney to Perth includes a 478-kilometre stretch of dead straight track across the Nullarbor Plain, the longest straight railway anywhere.
Australia also has the world's longest fence. The Dingo Fence runs 5,614 kilometres across three states to keep dingoes out of the sheep country in the south-east, which makes it more than twice the length of the Great Wall of China's main section. To keep exploring, see the count of countries in Oceania and read about how islands form.
