World’s largest island, full of unique experiences and places to explore. Famous for its miles of pristine beaches, tropical islands and the rugged outback. It’s also one of the countries with the most venomous animals, and home to the most poisonous animal on earth - the Box Jellyfish. But don’t let that stop you from having an adventure of your life in Australia.
Take a look at our list of 20 Interesting Facts about Australia, and more on topic of Mountains and Adventures.
View from the summit of Mount Kosciuszko
Factfile.
1. Australia is huge, actually the 6th largest country in the world, and it’s wide as a distance between London and Moscow. It’s also the only continent covered by a single country.
2. Australia was the second country in the world, after New Zealand, which allowed women to vote.
3. The oldest fossil in the world was found in Australia. It’s 3.4 billion years old!
4. The longest fence in the world is in Australia. It’s 5,614km long and was built to keep dingoes from the fertile land.
5. Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest living organism. It’s often listed as one of the Seven Wonders of Natural World.
6. Qantas, Australia’s airline company, once powered an interstate flight with cooking oil.
7. When the platypus was first sent to England, people believed that Australians were making a joke sewing the bill of a duck to a rat. Male platypus has a strong venom that can actually kill a small dog!
8. Wombat, a small marsupial native to Australia, has a cube-shaped poop, which helps him mark his territory.
9. The Box jellyfish kills more people in Australia than sharks, crocodiles and stonefish combined.
10. Vegetation cover almost 91% of Australia’s land, and most of its flora and fauna cannot be found anywhere else in the world.
11. Australia is a fairly flat country, with relatively few mountain ranges given its size. The highest mountain is Mt. Kosciuszko with a height of 2228m (7,310ft) above sea level.
12. The Australian Alps receive more snowfall than Switzerland.
13. Australia is the only continent in the world without an active volcano.
14. The largest monolith in the world is Uluru (Ayers Rock), a large sandstone rock formation in the Northern Territory in Central Australia. It stands 348 m (1,142 ft) high, rising 863 m (2,831 ft) above sea level, and has a total circumference of 9.4 km (5.8 mi).
15. The tallest animal-made structures in the world are termite mounds that can be found in Australia.
16. If you’d combined all the sails from the Sydney Opera House, they would make a perfect sphere. The architect was said to be inspired while eating an orange.
17. Australians call English people “Pome”, which is an acronym for Prisoners Of Mother England.
18. Two animals on Australia’s coat of arms are Kangaroo and Emu. They were chosen because they can’t walk backwards, to reflect the forward-thinking culture.
19. Emu is a large flightless bird that can run as fast as 45km/h (28mph).
20. You probably heard the story that kangaroo got his name when Captain James Cook first came to Australia and asked the Aborigines in English what was the name of the animal and they answered “I don’t understand”. This is in fact untrue. Recent linguistic fieldwork has confirmed the existence of a word gangurru in the northeast Aboriginal language of Guugu Yimidhirr, referring to a species of kangaroo.