Just a Few Fun Facts about Australia

Everybody calls Australia the land down under but if you turn the map around so that Australia would be in the Northern Hemisphere, the country would sit on top of the world! Everyone knows that Australia has a huge Outback and that a national sport is called Walkabout, traversing the Outback on foot.

Everyone knows that kangaroos are indigenous to Australia, that the first white settlers in the country were British prisoners, and that Australia has the highest per capita betting in the world.

A Never-ending Love Affair

Aussies love slots which they call pokies from the word poker even though pokies have nothing at all to do with poker!

Did You Know Facts about Australia

So, let’s see how many interesting facts about Australia we can fit into the rest of this short article!

• *  2000 years ago, give or take a few hundred years, there was a rumour of a land in the south. The land had not officially been discovered yet but the geographers of the time used the Latin term australis meaning south to designate this land. That’s why Australia is in the Southern Hemisphere and where the name comes from!

• *  Most Australians live along the long coasts. Sydney is called a warm city with cold people and Melbourne is called a cold city with warm people.

• *  In our Euro-centric and Northern Hemisphere-centric world, most people don’t know how big Australia really is. Texas is really big, right? California is really big, right? Well, Australia is about as big as all of the 48 contiguous United States. That means all the states without Alaska and Hawaii.

• *  Australia is so big that it literally dwarfs the size of Europe. In the same distance from one end of Australia to the other, you need to go from the coast of Portugal all the way to central Russia.

• *  Australia is so big that the southern city of Melbourne, is influenced climatically by Antarctica whilst the northernmost city of Darwin is influenced by the equator.

• *  There are five countries in the world that are bigger than Australia. Can you name them all? We’ll tease you for now and give you the answer down under!

• *  Australia has so many beaches that you couldn’t possibly visit all 10,000 of them. That is unless you hit the big progressive jackpot and became instantly wealthy!

• *  Melbourne was considered the most livable city in the world for seven straight years until Vienna took over the top spot. What does Vienna have that Melbourne doesn’t? A very long history and a lot of old buildings. Plus some nice museums.

• *  The government tried to prohibit guards at the Capital building from referring to people as “mate”. The ban, such as it was, lasted only one day.

• *  Native animals outnumber people in large numbers. There are so many termites that the hillocks they create are the largest animal-made structures in the world. There are three times as many sheep as people and twice as many kangaroos.

• *  In addition to kangaroos there are many other animals that are native to Australia. The koala lives in trees and eats vegetation. Many kids on jungle gyms in Northern Hemisphere parks imagine that they are koalas. The platypus was a trivia answer in the 1950’s Ripley’s Believe it or Not. It looks like a duck but doesn’t sound like a duck so it probably isn’t a duck!

• *  Camels might not be native to Australia but there so many camels in Australia that exporting them to the desert countries of the Middle East is a big business.

• *  The most famous indigenous living things in Australia to divers are the corals in the Great Barrier Reef.

• *  There are well over 1000 species of spiders in Australia. Most of them are not poisonous! On the other hand, there are so many poisonous snakes that we suggest you get away fast if you see a snake. Don’t let Crocodile Dundee get you thinking that you can kill one and eat it; just get away!

• *  Australia is an island but it is unlike most island nations in the world since Australia doesn’t have any active volcanoes. In contrast, Indonesia has a few!

• There is a high school in Chicago where over 100 languages and dialects are the primary languages of students. Australia has that broken by a mile or 1.6 kilometres. There are over 200 dialects and languages spoken in Australia. Mandarin and Cantonese make the top five (after English that is) because of the large immigrant Chinese population. Arabic is up there because, Arabic speakers have immigrated in large numbers in this century. Greek makes the top of the list because there are about 150,000 Greeks in Melbourne alone. You probably can’t name the next language on the list.

• *  Australia is the flattest continent in the world but it also has one of the snowiest mountain ranges in the world. The Australian Alps get more snow than those other Alps. Hurricanes in Australia are called Willy Willies.

Australia Welcomes Visitors

Australia is a very welcoming country. It might take a long time to fly in to the country but many who do fly in don’t want to fly out again.

Answers to the Burning Questions

The five largest countries in the world are Russia, China, Canada, the United States, and…..Brazil. Most people get Brazil wrong.

The fifth most spoken language in Australia after English and those other four is….Vietnamese.

A Land of Plenty and Plenty of Interesting Facts

We just touched upon the many things that make Australia so interesting and beckoning to people from all over the world. Feel free to call an Aussie "mate" but expect to be gently mocked if you try to put on an Aussie accent.

Not possible if you aren’t a native. Think what an Aussie would sound like if one parent was Cantonese and the other Arabic! Then mix in some native Australian for good measure!