Random Facts About Australia

All Australia Facts

• Australia is home to 20 of the world's 25 most venomous snakes, along with the Sydney funnel-web spider, whose bite can kill a child in 15 minutes, and the box jellyfish, often called the most venomous animal on Earth. Despite that fearsome lineup, deaths are rare thanks to widely available antivenom.
• The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth, made entirely of billions of tiny coral polyps stretching over 2,300 km and covering roughly 350,000 sq km. It's large enough to be seen from space, the only living structure that can be.
• Aboriginal Australians have the oldest continuous living culture on the planet, with archaeological and genetic evidence showing continuous habitation of the continent for at least 65,000 years, predating Stonehenge, the pyramids, and the Acropolis by tens of thousands of years.
• The platypus is one of only five egg laying mammal species left on Earth, and males carry venomous spurs on their hind legs, making it the world's only venomous mammal that lives in water. They also glow under UV light, a trait scientists only discovered in 2020.
• The Sydney Opera House took 14 years and more than 14 times its original budget to build, and its architect, Jorn Utzon, resigned in 1966 without ever seeing it finished. It finally opened in 1973 and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007.
• European settlement of Australia began on January 26, 1788, when 11 ships known as the First Fleet landed at Sydney Cove carrying 751 convicts and 252 marines and officials, after a 250 day voyage from England.
• Canberra only exists because Sydney and Melbourne couldn't agree on which of them should be Australia's capital. As a compromise, the constitution required the new capital to be built in New South Wales but at least 160 km from Sydney, and an international design competition picked the site in 1908.
• Voting has been compulsory in Australia since 1924, and turnout jumped from under 60% to more than 90% the very next election. It hasn't dropped below 90% since, roughly 30 percentage points higher than the average in countries where voting is optional.
• In 1935, Australia released 2,400 cane toads to control a beetle destroying sugar cane crops. The toads couldn't reach the beetles, which lived too high up the cane stalks, but they thrived anyway, and the population has since exploded into the hundreds of millions, poisoning native predators across the country.
• Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth, with about 70% of its land classified as arid or semi arid, receiving less than 350 mm of rain a year.
• Wombats are the only animal known to produce cube shaped droppings. Their intestines alternate between stiff and flexible sections, which mold the waste into cubes so it stays put on rocks and logs instead of rolling away, letting wombats mark their territory more effectively.
• Climbing Uluru was permanently banned on October 26, 2019, exactly 34 years after ownership of the sacred rock was formally handed back to its traditional owners, the Anangu people, who had asked visitors to stop climbing it for decades.
• Australia has about 3.3 sheep for every person, though that ratio used to be far higher. In 1990 there were 10 sheep per person, but decades of decline have brought the national flock down from 170 million to around 70 million today.
• Koalas are the only mammals besides primates known to have fingerprints, and they're so similar to human ones that even a microscope struggles to tell them apart, even though koalas and humans last shared a common ancestor more than 100 million years ago.
• Australia is both the world's smallest continent and its largest island, and the distinction comes down to geology rather than size. Unlike Greenland, the actual largest island, Australia sits on its own tectonic plate, which is what earns it continent status.
• Sydney's Harbour Bridge, nicknamed the Coathanger for its shape, took 8 years and 1,400 workers to build and opened in 1932. During the Great Depression it was also called the Iron Lung, because the jobs it created kept so many families breathing.
• The Melbourne Cup horse race has run every year since 1861 and is nicknamed 'the race that stops a nation', a trademarked phrase that's barely an exaggeration since Cup Day is still a public holiday in Victoria.
• Gold was discovered in New South Wales and Victoria in 1851, and the resulting gold rush nearly quadrupled Australia's population, from 438,000 to 1.7 million by 1871, as prospectors poured in from Britain, the US, and China.
• The kangaroo and emu on Australia's coat of arms weren't picked at random. Neither animal can walk backwards, the kangaroo because its tail acts as a counterweight while hopping and the emu because of how its legs are built, so together they symbolize a nation that only moves forward.
• Melbourne was ranked the world's most liveable city for 7 straight years until 2017 on the Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Liveability Index, and it still regularly lands in the global top 5.
• Kangaroos outnumber people in Australia roughly two to one, with an estimated 45 to 50 million kangaroos compared to about 25 million humans. Victoria and Tasmania are the only states where people still outnumber them.
• About 87% of Australians live within 50 km of the coast, more than 22 million people clustered around the edges of a continent whose vast, dry interior remains almost empty.
• Australian Rules Football was invented in Melbourne in 1858, blending elements of rugby, Gaelic football, and Indigenous ball games. A planned international exchange with England fizzled out in the 1880s, leaving it a sport almost uniquely Australian ever since.
• The oldest fossils on Earth, dating back roughly 3.45 billion years, were found in Western Australia's Pilbara region. Living versions of the same structures, called stromatolites, still grow today in Shark Bay, one of only two places in the world where they do.
• Australia's Dingo Fence is the longest fence on Earth, running 5,614 km to keep dingoes out of the continent's south east and protect sheep flocks. It was finished in 1885 and remains one of the longest human made structures anywhere.
• The Tasmanian devil is the world's largest surviving carnivorous marsupial, but a contagious facial cancer discovered in 1996 has since wiped out as much as 80% of the wild population, dropping numbers from around 140,000 to roughly 20,000.
• Australia is the world's fourth largest wine exporter by value, behind only France, Italy, and Spain, spread across 65 wine regions. Its most famous, the Barossa Valley, was founded by German settlers fleeing religious persecution in the 1840s, not by British colonists like most of the country.
• The Great Ocean Road, a 243 km stretch of coastal highway in Victoria, was built by about 3,000 returned soldiers between 1919 and 1932 as a memorial to the 60,000 Australians killed in World War I, making it the largest war memorial in the world.
• Australia's current national anthem, Advance Australia Fair, was written all the way back in 1878 but wasn't officially adopted until April 19, 1984, replacing God Save the Queen after a series of national polls spanning a full decade.

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