Australia
Fact File
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
FAST FACTS
OFFICIAL NAME: Commonwealth of Australia
FORM OF GOVERNMENT: Federal parliamentary democracy
CAPITAL: Canberra
POPULATION: over 23,000,000
OFFICIAL LANGUAGE: English
MONEY: Australian dollar
AREA: 2,969,906 square miles (7,692,024 square kilometers)
MAJOR MOUNTAIN RANGES: Great Dividing Range,
Macdonnell Ranges
• MAJOR RIVERS: Murray-Darling, Murrumbidgee, Lachlan
Sports
• Australia is famous for its sport Aussie
Rules.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqymJ
pIhpPY
• ICC CRICKET WORLD CUP 2015 is on
there now.
Australian Food
• Kangaroo
Across the colonies, native kangaroo was preferable to salted meat
and was one of the main sources of meat. In Adelaide in 1845, high
demand for kangaroo from the new settlers pushed the price to an
'extraordinary' nine pence per pound'. In 1864, a recipe for kangaroo
steamer involved small diced meat, briefly cooked with a tablespoon of
milk, onion, salt and pepper then enriched with salt pork or bacon, plus
a spoonful of ketchup.
• Vegemite- a savory spread made from concentrated yeast extract.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Australia has seven territories:
Western Australia
Northern Territory
Queensland
South Australia
New South Wales
Victoria
Tasmania
• The Outback covers most of Australia.
• Most people think that the Outback is arid, but it receives
a fair amount of rain (averaging 200 to 250mm per year).
• Temperatures in the central deserts can reach 50
degrees in the summer, but plunge to as c-c-c-cold as
minus 10 in winter.
• More than 90% of the Australian
population live in urban areas on the
coastal fringes – the Outback is therefore
mostly uninhabited.
• The Outback doesn’t have a specific size or
location – it’s just a term that is used to describe
any sparsely populated areas of our country.
• Due to its low humidity and the lack of light
pollution, the Outback is one of the best places
in the world for stargazing. In fact, astronomers
can enjoy uninterrupted views of constellations,
planets and up to 5,500 stars!
• Bungle Bungles is located 80 km away
from the Great Northern Highway in the
Kimberley region.
• The national park, although famous by the
name of Bungle Bungles, is actually
known as Purnululu National Park. The
word 'Purnululu', from which the park
derives its name, means sandstone in the
language of the local Kija aboriginals.
• The name Bungle Bungles is the name
given to the range of rounded rock
formations of sandstone, that are lined
with alternate black and orange stripes.
• The Bungle Bungles was formed more than 350 million years ago,
during the Devonian period. The gradual weathering and erosion of
the sandstone rock led to the formation of cliffs.
• The orange and black stripes that are seen on the rocks are due to
orange silica and black lichen. The dark bands are of permeable
rock, which allow water to seep through, leading to a thick and
dense growth of algae, while the orange bands get their color from
oxidized iron compounds.
• Thousands of years before the arrival of the Europeans in Australia,
the aboriginals had settled in the region that is now known as the
Purnululu National Park.
•
The Royal Botanic Gardens are a picturesque haven for recreation and an
important resource for education, conservation, science and horticulture.
•
Established in 1846, the gardens extend over 36 hectares and display an
amazingly diverse collection of over 50,000 plants from around the world,
including rare and threatened species. Considered one of the finest
examples of Victorian-era landscaped gardens in the world, the Royal
Botanic Gardens hosts year-round events, picnics, weddings and tours.
•
The Ian Potter Foundation Children’s Garden is one of the most popular
features in the gardens, attracting over 150,000 young visitors each year.
Kids can play in the ruin garden, meeting place, wetland area, bamboo
forest, gorge, plant tunnel, rill and kitchen garden.
•
•
•
Port Arthur holds great historical significance within the history of Tasmania.
In 1830 Port Arthur started out as prison base for convicts in Tasmania.
Port Arthur is one of Australia's most significant heritage areas with the open
air museum officially Tasmania's top tourist attraction. During the day the
architectural splendour takes centre stage, but during the evening and the
cover of darkness the ever popular Ghost Tours take place.
Starting life as a flour mill and granary rather than a place of incarceration it
was converted into the four storey Penitentiary that is now famous partly
because of the growing convict number and the fact that it failed in its
original task of providing sufficient flour for the settlement.
•
Parliament House is the meeting facility of the Parliament of Australia. It is
located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. It was designed by
Mitchell/Giurgola and opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 9th May 1988.
Federal Parliament meetings were first held in Melbourne until 1927.
•
The principal desgin of the strucutre is based on the shape of two
boomerangs and is topped by an 81 metre flagpole. (The spire is 120
metres)
•
It contains 4,700 rooms and many areas are open to the public. The main
foyer contains a marble staircase and leads to the Great Hall which has a
large tapestry on display.
•
•
•
•
Castle Hill is a red rock monolith in the heart of Townsville offering
panoramic views and military history. There is a popular walking track.. A
road offers access for vehicles and pedestrians. The hill is just metres short
of being classified as a mountain.
The Hill’s vantage was used by visiting American soldiers during World War
II.
According to local legend, the visitors famously offered to demolish the hill
and use the rock to build a bridge to Magnetic Island. A World War II
observation bunker sits on one corner of the hill, which also boasts public
amenities, a function centre and car parking to those wanting to enjoy the
best view of Magnetic Island.
It rises to a height of some 286 metres (938 ft) above sea level and
dominates the city skylnie. It is one of the most distinctive natural features
on the Queensland Coast.
•
•
•
•
Uluru or Ayers Rock, is a large sandstone rock formation located 450km
(280 mi) away from Alice Springs in the middle of the Australian Outback.
Officially, the rock has a dual place name of Uluru / Ayers Rock.
The rock is a holy place for the Anangu tribe of Aboriginal people in
Australia who have been in the area for around 10,000 years. The first
foreign people to see Uluru were explorers led by English born Australian
William Christie Gosse, his group set eyes on Uluru, 19 July 1873 and
decided to call it Ayers Rock after Sir Henry Ayers, the Chief Secretary of
South Australia at the time.
Uluru is estimated to be around 600 million years old, it originally would
have sat at the bottom of a sea, but today it stands 348 m (1,142 ft) above
the flat desert and 863m above sea level. Amazingly, some 2.5km's of
Uluru's mass is believed to be underground.
• Sydney Opera House is one of the world’s most well known and
instantly recognizable live music venues. It is located in the
northeast of Sydney’s central business district.
• Over 7 million people visit the Opera House every year, making it
one of Australia’s biggest tourist attractions. About 1.2 million of
these attend a performance.
• The Opera House was designed by Jorn Utzon, an architect from
Denmark.
• The main concert hall can seat almost 2,700 people and contains
one of the world’s largest organs – it has 10,000 pipes.
• One of the 1,000 rooms in the opera house is named the Utzon
Room (after the building’s designer). It contains a woolen tapestry,
made from enough wool to stretch from Sydney to Perth, a distance
of about 2,040 miles.
• Australia’s Sydney Harbour Bridge, nicknamed ‘the coathanger’
because of the shape of its design, carries road, rail and pedestrian
traffic from Sydney’s business district to the North Shore.
• The bridge was opened in 1932, and it is just over 1,100 yards long.
It is also one of the tallest bridges in the world, with a height of 130
yards from water level to the top.
• Around 14,000 workers were employed to build the bridge between
1924 and 1932. Many of these workers were immigrants and they
were among the highest paid workers in the country at the time.
• Since 1998, tourists have been able to climb to the top of the bridge.
It takes almost four hours to climb up and down, and tours leave
every 20 minutes.
•
•
•
Due to its size and the number of things to do and discover, it is impossible
to see it all in a day or 2. If you only have one or two days available on your
itinerary, choose places from the things that interest you most.
Kangaroo Island statistics:509 km (318.2 miles) making it the second
largest of the southern Australian system of islands after Tasmania.
Population 4261 (2006 Census)
Explore the culture on the island, kangaroo wildlife and fauna.