Australia
An island continent of desert, reef, and coast
Australia is the only nation that occupies an entire continent, a vast, ancient landmass where most of the interior is arid outback and most of the people cling to a thin green rim along the coast. It is a country of dramatic contrasts: the red sandstone monolith of Uluru rising from the desert heart, the Great Barrier Reef stretching for two thousand kilometers along the northeast, and cosmopolitan cities like Sydney and Melbourne facing the sea. Home to the world's oldest continuous living cultures and to wildlife found nowhere else, Australia is a place apart.
The continent is remarkably flat and dry, worn down over geological ages, with the Great Dividing Range running parallel to the eastern coast and rising at Mount Kosciuszko to 2,228 meters, the highest point on the mainland. The interior is dominated by deserts and semi-arid plains, while the tropical north gives way to monsoon and rainforest. Offshore, the Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral reef system on Earth. Isolation has produced a unique biota of marsupials, monotremes, and eucalypts, much of it found nowhere else in the world.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have inhabited the continent for tens of thousands of years, sustaining the oldest living cultural traditions on the planet. British colonization began in 1788 as a penal settlement and expanded across the continent, with the federation of the colonies into a single nation in 1901. Modern Australia is a wealthy, multicultural democracy whose economy rests on mining, agriculture, education, and services, and which increasingly defines itself as an Asia-Pacific nation while reckoning with its colonial past and Indigenous reconciliation.