Story#594
Kangaroos at the tee
The golf course had a local rule about kangaroos on the fairway. There were fourteen of them and none of them moved for anyone.
Australia
Wider than the Moon, emptier than almost anywhere, and stranger than its reputation.
20 entries · 8 stories, 12 fun facts
Australia at a glance
The practical numbers, before the stories.
- Capital
- Canberra
- Currency
- Australian dollar (AUD)
- Official language
- English (de facto; no official language in law)
- Climate
- Tropical and monsoonal in the north, arid through the centre, temperate in the southeast and southwest.
- Best time to go
- September–November and March–May
- Time zone
- UTC+8 to UTC+11 across three main zones
- Driving side
- Left
- Plugs and voltage
- Type I, 230 V
Worth knowing: Seasons are reversed. December is high summer and school holidays.
Planning a trip to Australia
The decisions that determine whether the trip works, whichever country you are going to.
Australia is wider east to west than the Moon is across, holds roughly 10,000 beaches, and keeps the largest structure ever built by living organisms just off its northeast coast. Most visitors see the sliver between Sydney and Cairns and come home convinced they have seen the country.
What follows is a mix of the famous and the odd: why Uluru is mostly underground, why the outback has more feral camels than Arabia, why wombat droppings are cubes, and how a single fence long enough to reach from Berlin to Kabul shaped a whole agricultural economy. Distances are the recurring theme. Plan fewer stops than you think you need.
Entries from Australia
Story#597
Driving the Nullarbor
Ninety miles straight, no curve at all. We passed four road trains and one cyclist who waved with an energy that suggested he had not seen anyone for a while.
Story#601
Cassowary crossing
The signs say dangerous. Then one walks out of the rainforest two metres in front of the car and you understand the signs completely.
Story#605
Sydney to Bondi at six
The coastal walk at six in the morning was full of runners, swimmers and one man doing tai chi on a rock. Nobody had a phone out.
Story#607
Uluru at the wrong hour
Everybody goes at sunset. We went at eleven in the morning in 38 degrees, saw four people, and the rock was a colour nobody photographs.
Story#611
The great ocean detour
We drove the whole road in one day, which is a mistake. Someone at a bakery in Apollo Bay told us to take three, and she was right.
Story#615
Tasmanian silence
We stood at Cape Grim in wind that had crossed the Southern Ocean untouched. It smelled like nothing at all, which is apparently the point.
Story#662
A sea that changed colour
The skipper said the reef changes every year now. He had been diving the same site for twenty-three years and pointed out exactly where the colour had gone.
Fun fact#790
Australia is wider than the Moon's diameter
Australia measures about 4,000 kilometres east to west, wider than the Moon's 3,475-kilometre diameter.
Fun fact#792
Australia has 10,000 beaches
Visiting a different Australian beach every day would take about 27 years to see them all.
Fun fact#794
The Great Barrier Reef is visible from space
Stretching over 2,300 kilometres, the reef is the largest structure built by living organisms.
Fun fact#796
Uluru is mostly underground
The visible rock is the tip of a formation that continues several kilometres below the desert surface.
Fun fact#798
Australia has a pink lake
Lake Hillier stays bubblegum pink even in a bottle, thanks to salt-loving microorganisms.
Fun fact#800
Tasmania has the cleanest air
Air measured at Cape Grim after crossing the Southern Ocean is among the cleanest on Earth.
Fun fact#802
Australia's longest fence runs 5,600 km
The Dingo Fence stretches further than the distance from Berlin to Kabul, built to protect sheep country.
Fun fact#804
Melbourne's laneways became galleries
Once service alleys, Melbourne's laneways now hold legal street art walls, tiny bars and coffee counters.
Fun fact#806
Sydney's opera house has a million tiles
Just over one million self-cleaning Swedish tiles cover the shells, in two subtly different finishes.
Fun fact#808
Australia has more camels than Arabia
Feral dromedaries introduced in the 1800s now number in the hundreds of thousands across the outback.
Fun fact#810
Kangaroos cannot walk backwards
Their tail and leg structure prevents reverse movement, which is partly why the kangaroo appears on the coat of arms.
Fun fact#812
Wombat droppings are cubic
Wombats produce cube-shaped droppings thanks to uneven intestinal walls, so the pellets do not roll off rocks.
Nothing matched that search on this page. Try a shorter word, or browse by destination.
Still deciding?
Australia is one of 36 countries in the library. Read straight through a continent, or start from the map of everywhere we have written about.