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Useful Notes: Australia

The country that kills everybody.

"In summer the bushfires rage and rage
And rage and rage on such beautiful days
And we fight them with water that runs through the cracks
Water we're desperately trying to save"

—The Cat Empire, "Wine Song"

Not New Zealand, the one next to it. Its formal name is the Commonwealth of Australia.

Note that, contrary to stereotypes, very few Australians live in the outback. There are cities and everything (89% live in urban areas.)

Aussies With Artillery (The Australian Defence Force)
Australian Accent
- Australian English
- G'Day Mate (Aussie Slang)
Australian Attitudes
- Cultural Cringe
- Tall Poppy Syndrome
Australian History
Australian Media
Australian Politics
Australian School System
Australian States And Territories
- Other Australian Towns And Cities
Australian Wildlife
- Yowies and Bunyips and Drop Bears, Oh My
Christmas In Australia
First Australians (Indigenous Australians)
Ned Kelly
The Poppy
Those Whove Come Across The Seas (Multiculturalism)
Sydney
Sport In Australia

Australian companies:

See also:

Awesome Aussie
Boxing Kangaroo
The British Empire
The Common Law, the legal system inherited from The British Empire
Everything's Better With Platypi
Kangaroos Represent Australia
Land Downunder, for Australia as it appears in fiction
Unit Confusion (Australia switched from Imperial to Metric in the 1960s rapidly and it worked fairly well - only the older Australians will still use Imperial, and only for estimates. Inches and feet still tend to be used for peoples' heights, somewhat interchangeably with metric, because it's easier to say "five foot seven" than "one-hundred and seventy centimetres" or "one point seven metres". While most people know roughly what a foot and an inch are, nobody uses miles except metaphorically.
- It's amazing how often police reports give an unidentified suspect's height as 183 cm. That's six feet, to the nearest centimetre.
Old British Money was used in Australia until it decimalised in 1966. No doubt it's used in fiction sometimes.
Everything Trying to Kill You, as there is significant Truth in Television with just how close to a Death World Australia, or at least the Outback can be. Especially when trees and even the ground itself have been known to cause casualties.

The Australian flag

It has the Southern Cross on it

This is the Australian national flag — first adopted in 1901, modified a few times after that, then finally made properly official in its present form in 1954. It is a defaced version of the United Kingdom's "blue ensign" flag (flown at sea by ships in public service), which looks the same but without the stars. The national flag of New Zealand, as well as all of Australia's state flags, are also based on the blue ensign.^note

As they do look very similar, here are a couple of quick ways of telling the Australian and New Zealand flags apart:

The Commonwealth Star is present on the Australian flag where the NZ flag has a bank field. It's the large, white, seven-pointed star beneath the Union Jack, with the seven points standing for the six states plus the territories. ^note
The design of the Southern Cross varies in a couple of ways:
- 1: The Australian Flag has five stars, the New Zealand Flag only has four (omitting Epsilon Crucis in the middle).
- 2: The stars are white on the Australian flag, and red with a white outline on the NZ flag. This is because New Zealand is communist.
- 3: The NZ flag has all the stars with five points; the Australian flag has all the stars with seven points except for Epsilon Crucis, which has five. ^note