Australia is the world’s sixth largest country and its largest island. It is the only island that is also a continent, and the only continent that is also a country. It was the first continent conquered from the sea, and the last. It is the only nation that began as a prison. It is the home of the largest living thing on earth, the great barrier reef, and the most famous and striking monolith, Uluru. It has more things that will kill you than anywhere else. Of the world 10 most poisonous snakes, all are Australian. Five of its creatures — the funnel-web spider, box jellyfish, blue ringed octopus, paralysis tick and stonefish — are the most lethal of their type in the world. If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents (rips) of left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. Its a tough place.
Its creatures seemed to have evolved as if they had misread the manual. The most characteristic of them doesn’t run or lope or canter, but bounces across the landscape. 80% of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else. More than this it exists in an abundance that seems incompatible with the harshness of the environment. Australia is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents, only Antarctica is more hostile to life. This is a place so inert that even the soil is, technically speaking, a fossil.
A nuclear bomb went off in outback WA, near Banjawarn Station in the Great Victorian Desert, and no-one knew for over four years. The tremor registered on seismic equipment, and a few people (truckies and the like) reported seeing a sudden flash in the sky and hearing or feeling the boom of a mighty but far off explosion. The shock was consistent with a large meteorite strike, but no crater could be found. It was puzzled over for a day or two and then filed away as an unexplained curiosity. Then in 1995 Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese ‘doomsday cult’ was discovered, after a terrorist attack on Tokyo underground to have a 500,000 acre desert property in WA very near the site of the ‘mysterious event.’ There they found a laboratory complete with nuclear engineers. Apparently the group’s avowed aim was destruction of the world, and the bomb in the desert was a dry run for Tokyo.
We lost a Prime Minister. in 1967, Harold Holt He went for a walk on the beach one day in Victoria when he apparently plunged into the surf and simply vanished. No trace of him was ever found again. There is a memorial built in Melbourne for our lost PM...true to Aussie style — its a swimming pool.
The Bungle Bungles in the north-west area called the Kimberley’s are an isolated sandstone massif where aeons of harsh, dry winds have carved the landscape into weird shapes — spindly pinnacles, acres of plump domes, wave walls. The whole extends to about a thousand square miles, yet were not generally known of until the 1980s.
The Simpson Desert, an area bigger than some European countries, was named in 1932 after a manufacturer of washing machines. Alfred Simpson, who funded an aerial survey. Only in Australia can an expanse of 100,00 miles square be unnamed until 70 years ago.
(stolen from Bill Bryson’s Down Under. great book, if you are planning a trip to the Land of Oz anytime in the future, or you simply want a good read, I can’t express enough how good of a read this is!! For an outsider he captures our sense of humour and has an understanding of our culture that is exceptional and quite funny coming from an American!)
The Anna Creek cattle station in the South Australian Outback is by far the largest working cattle station (ranch) in the world. It covers a huge area of some 34,000 square kilometres. This makes the station bigger than the country of Belgium. By comparison, the largest ranch in the USA is around 6,000 square kilometres. The station has a carrying capacity of 16,000 head of cattle.
Population density in Australia is usually calculated in km2 per person, not people per km2.
It was estimated in 2007 that 22 per cent of Australians had a convict ancestor.
If you thought Australia was an island nation, you would be incorrect. The Principality of Hutt River is Australia’s “second largest country” formed when Leonard Casley, appalled by new government quotas on wheat production, seceded from the Commonwealth in 1970. The principality has around 13,000 citizens and is constitutionally valid. It has a post office and gift shop and welcomes visitors. You don’t need a passport to visit.
Temperatures in the desert areas have been recorded above 51 C (123 F) and at the other extreme the mountain snowfields have been as low as -23 F (-9 F). Australia is considered to be the driest continent with more than 70% of the land mass receiving less than 500mm (20 inches) of rain per year. The largest desert, the "Great Victoria Desert" is one and a half times the size of the UK
Australia's greatest folk hero was a bushranger named Ned Kelly who was finally captured at Glenrowan, Victoria, and hanged at the Melbourne Gaol (jail) on the 11th November 1880 where his last words were "Such is life"....
Australians often use opposites to describe people like a redhead is called "Blue" or "Bluey", a bald bloke will be called "Curly", a tall man will be called "Shorty", a silent fella will be nicknamed "Rowdy' and bastard, bitch, chicken, chook (a mature chicken) and possum are often used as a terms of endearment.
Besides Athens in Greece the largest Greek population in the world can be found in Melbourne, Victoria.
It's not summer until the steering wheel is too hot to hold. (how true!)
In Australia, we have a range of strange creatures, from cute to weird to plain deadly, for example a platypus is an odd-looking creature that appears to be a cross between a duck and a beaver with reptilian qualities (they lay eggs) and also mammalian ones. They live primarily in water and appear only to exist to confuse biologists. The Salt Water Crocodile on another scale, is the worlds largest reptile. They normally grow to around 4 metres in length but have been recorded up to 7 metres (23 feet). Australia’s spiders are extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill, but no-one knows why they have evolved with this ability. And of course, Australia is home to the most deadliest creature on earth- the box jellyfish. The tentacles of a box jellyfish carry enough wallop to kill a roomful of people, yet they live exclusively on tiny krill-like shrimp — creatures that hardly require a great deal of violent subduing.
So whose coming to visit? :)
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