Australia and Oceania

14 to explore

• Watch Life around the world School of the Air in Alice Springs, Australia Alice Springs School of the Air teaches about 100 children who live on cattle stations, in remote communities and in other far-off places across Central Australia. Lessons began over two-way radio in 1951. Today students see their teachers on video over satellite internet.
• Watch Life around the world Te reo Māori in language nests, New Zealand A kōhanga reo, or "language nest," is an early-childhood center in New Zealand where young children are surrounded by te reo Māori, the Māori language, and Māori customs. Families started the first one in 1982 to help the language grow strong again.
• Watch Life around the world The 800 languages of Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea has more languages than any other country: Ethnologue lists 840 living indigenous languages there in 2026. Most have small communities of speakers. To talk across languages, many people use Tok Pisin, an official language, as well as English and Hiri Motu.
• Watch Life around the world Underground homes of Coober Pedy, Australia Coober Pedy is an opal-mining town in the desert of South Australia, where summer temperatures can reach 52 °C. Many residents live in dugouts, homes carved into the hillsides, where NASA reports the temperature stays at an almost constant 23 °C. Even some churches and hotels are underground.
• Watch Natural wonder Great Barrier Reef The Great Barrier Reef stretches about 2,300 kilometers along the coast of Queensland, Australia. It is made of about 2,500 separate reefs and more than 900 islands, built by tiny coral animals, and it is home to more than 1,500 kinds of fish.
• Watch Journey The first voyagers of the Pacific Over thousands of years, the ancestors of today's Pacific Islanders sailed double-hulled canoes across the Pacific and settled islands from Samoa and Tonga to Hawaiʻi, Rapa Nui and Aotearoa New Zealand. They had no compasses or maps: navigators read the stars, the ocean swells, the clouds and the birds.
• Watch Country Australia Australia is a country and the smallest continent, surrounded by ocean in the Southern Hemisphere. Much of its middle is dry and flat, most people live near the coast, and its animals include kangaroos, koalas and the platypus, a mammal that lays eggs.
• Watch Natural wonder Uluru Uluru is a huge sandstone rock in the desert of central Australia, rising 348 meters above the plain, with a base 9.4 kilometers around. The Anangu are its Traditional Owners, and the national park around it is run by Anangu and Parks Australia together.
• Watch Natural wonder Aoraki / Mount Cook Aoraki / Mount Cook is New Zealand's highest mountain, in the Southern Alps of the South Island. Its name joins its Māori name, Aoraki, with its English name, Mount Cook. The mountain is being pushed up where two of Earth's plates meet, and glaciers carve the valleys around it. In 2013 surveyors measured it at 3,724 meters.
• Watch Natural wonder Kakadu National Park Kakadu, in Australia's Northern Territory, is the country's largest national park. It stretches from a high sandstone cliff called the escarpment down to floodplains, mangroves and the sea. Aboriginal people have lived here for tens of thousands of years, and their rock paintings, some up to 20,000 years old, record their way of life.
• Watch Natural wonder K'gari K'gari, off the coast of Queensland in Australia, is the largest sand island in the world. Sand dunes rise up to about 250 meters, rainforest grows right on the sand, and about half of the world's perched dune lakes sparkle among the dunes. Once called Fraser Island, it was officially renamed K'gari, the Butchulla people's name for it, in 2023.
• Watch Country New Zealand New Zealand, also called Aotearoa, is an island country in the South Pacific. Its two main islands have snowy mountains, glaciers, volcanoes and deep fiords, and about 5.36 million people lived there in 2026.
• Watch City Sydney Sydney is Australia's largest city and the capital of the state of New South Wales. It surrounds Port Jackson, a harbor of countless bays, on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The British set up a convict colony here in 1788. Today the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House and its beaches are world famous, and about 5.45 million people lived in Greater Sydney in 2023.
• Watch Landmark Sydney Opera House The Sydney Opera House stands on a point of land in Sydney Harbour, Australia. Danish architect Jørn Utzon won a competition to design it in 1957, building began in 1959, and it opened on October 20, 1973. Its shell-shaped roofs are covered in more than a million tiles.