Australia

Australia is a country and a continent too.

The ocean is all around it. The middle is hot and dry. Most people live near the sea. The capital city is called Canberra.

Australia is a country that covers a whole continent, the smallest one on Earth. It lies in the Southern Hemisphere, with the Indian Ocean on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. It is the sixth-largest country in the world, and the only one of the six biggest countries that is completely surrounded by water.

Much of Australia is flat and very dry. Mountains called the Great Dividing Range run along the east, and most people live along the coast, especially the east coast. The capital is Canberra. About 27.9 million people lived in Australia in March 2026.

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is both the smallest continent and one of the largest countries, lying between the Pacific and Indian oceans in the Southern Hemisphere. Geoscience Australia gives its area as 7,688,287 square kilometers, about five percent of the world's land, which makes it the sixth-largest country after Russia, Canada, China, the United States and Brazil.

Britannica calls it the flattest continent and, after Antarctica, the driest. Its low relief comes from very long erosion by wind, rain and sun, and most of the rocks under its landscapes formed in Precambrian and Paleozoic time. The Great Dividing Range runs along the Pacific side, and most of the 27,921,150 people counted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics at 31 March 2026 live along the coastal rim, especially in the east.

Canberra is the capital city of Australia.

Sydney is a big city by the sea. Its opera house has white roofs shaped like shells. Uluru is a giant rock in the middle of the country.

Canberra was built to be Australia's capital. An American architect, Walter Burley Griffin, won a worldwide contest to design it, building began in 1913, and Parliament moved there from Melbourne in 1927.

Sydney grew around Sydney Cove, where British settlement began in 1788. Its Opera House, designed by the Danish architect Jørn Utzon and opened in 1973, has roofs shaped like huge shells. Far inland, the sandstone rock of Uluru rises more than 300 meters above flat plains, and its color changes from red to violet to orange as the light changes.

Canberra, in the Australian Capital Territory about 240 km southwest of Sydney, was chosen as the federal capital in 1909, after the colonies federated in 1901. Walter Burley Griffin's plan won a worldwide competition launched in 1911, construction began in 1913, and on May 9, 1927, the federal Parliament formally moved there from Melbourne.

The Sydney Opera House, awarded to the Danish architect Jørn Utzon by an international jury in 1957 and inaugurated in 1973, is described by UNESCO as a masterpiece of 20th-century architecture; Ove Arup's engineering helped make its shell roofs possible, and it was inscribed in 2007. In the center of the continent, the sandstone monolith of Uluru and the domes of Kata Tjuta rise abruptly more than 300 m above sandplains and woodland. Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park (inscribed 1987) has been home to the Anangu people, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara speakers of the Western Desert, for tens of thousands of years, and their traditional law, the Tjukurpa, is the foundation of the park's living cultural landscape.

The middle of Australia is very dry.

It can be very hot there. Off the east coast is the Great Barrier Reef. It is made of coral, and more than 1,500 kinds of fish live there. In the southeast, people ski on high mountains in winter.

Australia is the flattest continent, and except for Antarctica it is the driest. Big deserts cover the middle and west: the ten largest together cover about 18 percent of the mainland. Summers can be long and hot, and the highest temperature ever recorded in Australia was 50.7 °C, at Oodnadatta in 1960.

In the southeast are the highest mountains on the mainland, in the Snowy Mountains and the Victorian Alps, where people ski in winter; Mount Kosciuszko is the tallest, at 2,228 meters. Off the northeast coast lies the Great Barrier Reef, the world's biggest coral reef system, with about 2,500 separate reefs and more than 900 islands.

Britannica describes a vast area of low relief and arid, sparsely populated land, the Outback, while the coastal rim, where most people live, is more varied and relatively more fertile. Geoscience Australia lists ten large mainland deserts covering about 1,371,000 km², 18 percent of the mainland, the biggest being the Great Victoria Desert at 348,750 km². Recorded extremes run from 50.7 °C at Oodnadatta (1960) to −23 °C at Charlotte Pass (1994).

The mainland's highest peaks are in the Snowy Mountains and Victorian Alps, part of the Great Dividing Range; Mount Kosciuszko reaches 2,228 m. Higher still is Mawson Peak (2,745 m), the summit of the active volcano Big Ben on Heard Island, an Australian territory about 4,100 km southwest of Perth that holds the country's only active volcanoes. Geoscience Australia adds that peaks in the Australian Antarctic Territory, such as Mount McClintock (3,490 m), are higher again. Offshore, UNESCO describes the Great Barrier Reef (inscribed 1981) as the world's most extensive coral reef ecosystem: about 348,000 km² with some 2,500 reefs and over 900 islands, spanning 14 degrees of latitude.

Kangaroos hop across Australia.

A mother kangaroo carries her baby in a pouch. Koalas live in eucalyptus trees and eat their leaves. The platypus has a bill like a duck, and it lays eggs.

Australia has been far away from other continents for a very long time, and many of its animals live nowhere else. The red kangaroo, the largest living marsupial (a mammal whose babies grow in a pouch), lives in the dry inland and can be up to 1.4 meters long, plus a tail up to a meter long.

Koalas live in eucalyptus forests and eat the leaves of certain kinds of eucalyptus. The platypus and the echidna are the only mammals on Earth that lay eggs. The emu, Australia's tallest native bird, stands 1.6 to 1.9 meters tall and lives across most of the continent.

Britannica links Australia's distinctive wildlife to its long isolation from other continents. Its fauna includes the only living egg-laying mammals, the platypus and the echidnas, which form the order Monotremata; the platypus depends on rivers, streams and other fresh water in eastern Queensland and New South Wales, much of Victoria and all of Tasmania. The red kangaroo, the largest living marsupial, is an animal of the arid and semi-arid zone, with males up to 1.4 m long in the body.

The koala has a patchy range from northern Queensland to southern Victoria and southeastern South Australia, and feeds on the foliage of only certain eucalypts. The emu, at 1.6 to 1.9 m, is the tallest native bird. Extinction is a serious concern: Britannica records some 20 mammal and 20 bird species presumed lost during the period of European settlement, and small and medium-sized ground mammals and ground-nesting birds have been hit hardest by clearing for farms and by introduced animals such as rabbits, foxes and feral cats.

About 28 million people live in Australia.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were the first people there. Many families came from other countries too. Barbecues, pizza and pasta are popular foods.

About 27.9 million people lived in Australia in March 2026, and more than 8 in 10 live in towns and cities. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the first Australians, made up 3.2 percent of the population in the 2021 census.

More than a quarter of people were born in another country. English is the main language, and about 1 in 5 people speak another language at home, such as Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Cantonese or Punjabi. Food mixes many traditions: barbecues are a favorite pastime, and Italian dishes such as pizza and pasta are among the most popular.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated 27,921,150 people at 31 March 2026, growing by 1.4 percent a year, mostly through migration. In the 2021 census, 812,728 people (3.2 percent) identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, and about one in ten of them used an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander language at home. Some 27.6 percent of all residents were born overseas.

Australia's constitution names no official language; English is the de facto national language, and in 2021, 22.8 percent of people used another language at home, Mandarin (2.7 percent) being the most common. Britannica notes that the 1901 'White Australia' policy tried to keep out migrants not of British or European descent, and that later immigration built a multicultural society. Australian cooking draws on Anglo-Celtic, Aboriginal and immigrant traditions, from barbecues to pizza and pasta, and traditional Aboriginal foods of the Outback, called bush food, include kangaroo, emu and witchetty grubs.