A country that is a whole continent

Australia

The sixth largest country in the world, the only one occupying an entire continent, and the emptiest of them all: twenty-seven million people in almost eight million square kilometres, most of them packed into a narrow strip of coast.

Australia is a state of the southern hemisphere that makes up a continent, and it also takes in several small islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans. It was cut off from the rest of the land masses tens of millions of years ago, and that isolation explains its wildlife: 87 % of the mammals living there live nowhere else.

In figures

States and territories

The country is divided into six states and two mainland territories, each with its own capital:

• States
  • New South Wales — Sydney
  • Victoria — Melbourne
  • Queensland — Brisbane
  • South Australia — Adelaide
  • Western Australia — Perth
  • Tasmania — Hobart
• Territories
  • Northern Territory — Darwin
  • Australian Capital Territory — Canberra

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Read on through the history of the country, or its wildlife.