Do you really know Australia?
No kangaroos, no Sydney Opera House, no capital-city trap. These six questions dig into Australia's strangest animals, longest structures and inventions you use every day.
Did you know?
- Male platypuses have a venomous spur on each hind leg, used mainly against rival males in the breeding season. The venom is not deadly to people, but it causes intense pain that can last for days or even weeks, and ordinary painkillers barely help.
- Australia has the world's largest population of wild dromedary camels. Camels were imported in the 1800s to carry supplies across the dry interior, and when trucks and railways replaced them, many were released. Their descendants now roam huge areas of the outback.
- Australia's Great Barrier Reef is the largest structure on Earth built by living organisms. It is made by tiny coral polyps, each only a few millimetres across, which build limestone skeletons that pile up over thousands of years. Parts of today's reef grew on top of older reefs that formed when sea levels were very different.
Australia's unusual side
Australia has been separated from other landmasses for tens of millions of years, and that isolation explains much of what makes it unusual. Its animals evolved in their own direction, its deserts cover most of the interior, and nearly nine in ten Australians live near the coast. The continent is also very old and flat, worn down by time, which is why its highest peak, Mount Kosciuszko, is only about 2,228 metres, lower than many mountains in the Alps.
Mammals that break the rules
The platypus and the echidnas are monotremes, mammals that lay eggs, and all living monotremes are found only in Australia and New Guinea. They feed their young with milk, yet have no nipples; the milk seeps from patches of skin. Australia is also home to most of the world's marsupials, such as kangaroos, koalas and wombats, whose young are born tiny and develop in a pouch. A wombat's pouch opens backwards, towards its hind legs, so it does not fill with soil while the mother digs.
Inventions that went worldwide
Australia has produced some surprisingly familiar technologies. Graeme Clark's team in Melbourne developed the multi-channel cochlear implant, first implanted in 1978, which has helped hundreds of thousands of people hear. In 1988 Australia issued the world's first polymer banknote, and by 1996 all its notes were plastic, making them harder to forge and longer-lasting. The Hills Hoist, a rotary clothes line invented in Adelaide in the 1940s, became a symbol of the Australian backyard.
Reefs, rocks and snow
The Great Barrier Reef stretches around 2,300 kilometres along Queensland's coast and is made up of thousands of individual reefs and hundreds of islands. In the centre of the country, Uluru rises about 348 metres above the plain, and much more of the rock lies hidden underground. It is sacred to the Anangu people, and climbing it has been banned since 2019. Few visitors expect snow, yet the Australian Alps receive enough each winter to support ski resorts in New South Wales and Victoria.