Australia is the bigger and far richer country, while South Africa has the larger population. Australia covers 7,688,287 km², about 6.3 times South Africa’s 1,221,037 km², but its 2021 census counted 25.4 million people against the 62.0 million recorded by South Africa’s 2022 census, so South Africa has roughly two and a half times as many people on a sixth of the land. On IMF estimates for 2026, Australia’s nominal GDP per capita is about US$75,600, roughly ten times South Africa’s US$7,500. Australia’s capital is Canberra; South Africa splits its capital functions between Pretoria (executive), Cape Town (legislative) and Bloemfontein (judicial). English is the main language of Australia, spoken alone at home by 72% of residents in 2021, whereas South Africa has 12 official languages, with Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans the most common first languages.
The Flat Outback Against the Highveld Plateau
Australia is described as the flattest and driest inhabited continent. Most of its interior is low desert and scrub, and its high ground is modest: the Great Dividing Range runs down the eastern side of the country, separating a narrow, well-watered coast from the central lowlands, and its highest summit on the mainland, Mount Kosciuszko, reaches only 2,228 m. The country’s main river system, the Murray–Darling, drains much of the south-east, from southern Queensland through New South Wales and Victoria, to Lake Alexandrina in South Australia; the Murray alone runs 2,508 km and its basin covers about a seventh of the continent. Offshore, the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral reef, runs for more than 2,300 km along the north-east coast.
The emblem of the dry heart is Uluru, a sandstone monolith in the southern Northern Territory, 335 km south-west of Alice Springs. It is sacred to the Pitjantjatjara, one of the Aṉangu peoples, and forms, with Kata Tjuta, the Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
South Africa is built the other way round. Most of the country is a high interior plateau, ringed by the Great Escarpment, which drops to a comparatively narrow coastal belt. The highest, eastern stretch of that escarpment is the Drakensberg, where Mafadi reaches 3,450 m, more than 1,200 m higher than Kosciuszko; along the KwaZulu-Natal–Lesotho border the escarpment stays above 3,000 m. The mid-eastern and highest part of the plateau is the Highveld, where Johannesburg stands at 1,740 m. To the south-west lie the dry shrublands of the Great Karoo and, beyond them, the Kalahari in the north-west. The country’s longest river, the Orange, rises in the Drakensberg in Lesotho and flows 2,432 km west to the Atlantic, marking part of the border with Namibia on the way. South Africa has no reef to rival the Barrier Reef, but it has 2,798 km of coastline on two oceans, the South Atlantic and the Indian.
The result is that heat in the two countries comes from different directions. In Australia the interior is hot because it is low and dry; in South Africa altitude keeps the Highveld temperate, and the hottest ground is the deep interior of the Northern Cape, where the official national record of 48.8 °C was set at Vioolsdrif, on the Orange River, in January 1993. For a closer look at the escarpment and its peaks, see our guide to the Drakensberg plateau.
Sydney’s Seaboard Against Gauteng’s Inland Cities
Where people live follows the land. Australia’s population is heavily urbanised and concentrated on the eastern seaboard. Sydney and Melbourne each have more than five million people, and in 2018 some 67% of Australians lived in the Greater Capital City Statistical Areas, the metropolitan regions of the state and mainland territory capitals. Almost all of those capitals are ports. The inland outback, which makes up most of the map, is among the most thinly peopled land on Earth.
South Africa’s largest city is inland. Johannesburg grew on the Witwatersrand after gold was found there in 1886, and it remains the biggest city in the country, followed by the port cities of Cape Town and Durban. That inland pull is the legacy of the Mineral Revolution that began with diamonds near the Orange River in 1867, drawing workers from across southern Africa to the plateau. Australia’s own gold rush, which began in Victoria in 1851, had the opposite effect: its wealth flowed through Melbourne, a coastal city, and helped fix the population on the edge of the continent.
The age profiles differ too. South Africa’s 2022 census recorded a median age of 28, a young population. Australia’s growth has come largely through immigration, and South Africa has been one of its sources: the 2021 Australian census counted 189,207 residents born in South Africa, about 0.7% of the population.
English at the Dinner Table Against Twelve Official Tongues
Australia has no official language in law, but English is its national language in practice: at the 2021 census it was the only language spoken at home for 72% of the population. The next most common home languages were Mandarin (2.7%), Arabic (1.4%), Vietnamese (1.3%), Cantonese (1.2%) and Punjabi (0.9%). Before British settlement in 1788, Aboriginal Australians spoke more than 250 distinct languages; the 2021 census found 167 Indigenous languages still spoken at home by 76,978 people, among them Yumplatok (Torres Strait Creole), Djambarrpuyngu and Pitjantjatjara. Indigenous Australians made up 3.8% of the population.
South Africa has 12 official languages: Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, English, Pedi, Tswana, Southern Sotho, Tsonga, Swazi, Venda, Southern Ndebele and, since 2023, South African Sign Language. In the 2022 census the three most common first languages were Zulu (24.4%), Xhosa (16.6%) and Afrikaans (10.6%). English is a minority mother tongue but works as a common language of government and business, and it is the second most spoken language outside the home after Zulu. The census still asks people to place themselves in one of five population groups, a legacy of apartheid classification; in 2022 the results were 81% Black African, 8.2% Coloured, 7.3% White and 2.7% Indian or Asian.
Pilbara Iron Ore Against South African Platinum
Both economies are built partly on what lies underground, but the minerals differ. In 2019 Australia was the world’s largest producer of iron ore and bauxite and the second-largest of gold. Western Australia, where the Pilbara region holds the Mount Whaleback open-pit mine, became the world’s leading iron ore producer in 2014, and in 2020 iron ore became the first Australian commodity to earn A$100 billion in annual exports. Most of it goes to China, Australia’s biggest trading partner by a wide margin, whose appetite for iron ore, coal and liquefied natural gas has driven the trade.
South Africa is the world’s dominant source of platinum, producing 70% of mined output in 2024, along with 46% of chromium and 40% of manganese. Mining contributed about 6% of GDP in 2024, and the country still burns coal for most of its power, producing more than 200 million tonnes a year. Farming is changing the export mix: in 2025 South Africa overtook Spain as the world’s largest citrus exporter by volume, shipping about 2.9 million tonnes.
The gap in income per person is only part of the story. South Africa has the largest economy in Africa by nominal GDP, above US$450 billion in 2026, but its official unemployment rate stood at 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026 and its Gini coefficient of 0.67 ranks it among the most unequal countries in the world. About 37.9% of South Africans live below the lower-bound poverty line. Australia, by contrast, had the second-highest wealth per adult in the world in 2021, after Luxembourg, although its house prices in the big cities are among the most expensive anywhere.
Federation in 1901 Against Democracy in 1994
Australia’s six British colonies federated on 1 January 1901 as the Commonwealth of Australia. Canberra was chosen as a compromise between Sydney and Melbourne, and the Australian Capital Territory was formed in 1911 to hold it. The country is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy with the British monarch as head of state; a proposal to become a republic was put to a referendum on 6 November 1999 and rejected. Voting is compulsory for enrolled citizens aged 18 and over. The 1967 referendum gave the federal government power to legislate for Aboriginal Australians and brought them fully into the census.
South Africa became a single state later, and a democracy much later. The Union of South Africa was created on 31 May 1910 from the Cape, Natal, Transvaal and Orange River colonies after the Second Boer War. The National Party, elected in 1948, imposed apartheid, and a whites-only referendum made the country a republic on 31 May 1961, when it also left the Commonwealth. Nelson Mandela was released in 1990 after 27 years in prison, and the first universal elections were held in 1994. The division of capitals puts the president and cabinet in Pretoria, Parliament in Cape Town and the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein, while the Constitutional Court sits in Johannesburg; our article on why South Africa has three capitals explains how it works today. At the election of 29 May 2024 the African National Congress lost its parliamentary majority for the first time, winning 40% of the vote.
Wallabies Against Springboks, and the Ties Between Them
The two countries have met on battlefields as allies and on sports fields as rivals. Between 1899 and 1902 Australia sent more than 16,000 soldiers to fight for Britain in the Second Boer War, and more than 500 of them died; in both world wars Australian and South African troops served side by side in North Africa and elsewhere. Formal diplomatic relations began in 1947. Once apartheid took hold, Australia moved into the opposing camp: after taking office in December 1972 the Whitlam government barred racially selected sports teams, and Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser helped secure the 1977 Gleneagles Agreement on sporting contacts. Fraser later met Mandela in prison in 1986 as co-chair of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group, and Mandela toured Australia in October 1990.
Rugby union shows how the relationship has changed. Isolated for years, South Africa returned to hosting Test rugby in 1992 and staged the 1995 Rugby World Cup, opening it with a win over Australia before beating New Zealand 15–12 in the final. South Africa has since won the tournament four times and Australia twice, in 1991 and 1999, and the two sides still meet in the Rugby Championship, the southern-hemisphere competition that began in 1996 as the Tri Nations. The 2027 Rugby World Cup is due to be held in Australia. If you want to go deeper into the Australian side of the comparison, start with our guide to Uluru, the rock in the red centre that has come to stand for the whole continent.