Australia and New Zealand

Australia and New Zealand is the UN's odd little subregion of two rich countries and a few specks — Norfolk Island, Christmas Island, and the Cocos Islands — sitting at the bottom of the world with a combined population of about 33 million on nearly eight million square kilometers. Australians and New Zealanders sometimes call the pairing Australasia, and they share a monarch, a language, a cricketing rivalry, and a founding as British settler colonies on land taken from Aboriginal and Māori peoples. But the two are not much alike physically: one is the flattest and driest inhabited continent, the other a wet, buckled, volcanic archipelago.

Australia is old. Its rocks have been eroding for hundreds of millions of years with no mountain-building to renew them, so the interior is a vast, low, arid plateau — the Outback — and the only real relief is the Great Dividing Range along the east coast, where Mount Kosciuszko manages just 2,228 meters. Almost everyone lives on a coastal fringe, and the Great Barrier Reef runs 2,300 kilometers along the northeast. New Zealand, by contrast, straddles the boundary of the Pacific and Australian plates: the Southern Alps are still rising, Aoraki / Mount Cook reaches 3,724 meters, the North Island is volcanic, and earthquakes are a fact of life.

Aboriginal Australians have been on the continent for at least 65,000 years, the longest continuous human culture known; Polynesian voyagers reached New Zealand only around 1300 and became the Māori. British colonization from 1788 was catastrophic for both. The modern states are prosperous, urban, and multicultural, with economies built on minerals and agriculture — iron ore, coal, and gas in Australia, dairy, meat, and wine in New Zealand — and increasingly on selling those things to Asia rather than to Europe. Their strategic position between the United States and China has become uncomfortable, and both now watch a Pacific whose politics are shifting quickly.

• Australia
  An island continent of desert, reef, and coast country in region
• New Zealand
  Two islands of mountains, fjords, and Maori heritage country in region
• Aoraki / Mount Cook
  New Zealand's highest peak, the cloud piercer of the Southern Alps defining feature
• Great Barrier Reef
  The largest living structure on Earth, a 2,300-kilometre coral system off Australia defining feature
• Great Dividing Range
  Australia's 3,500-km eastern cordillera defining feature
• Oceania
  The smallest continent, built around Australia and the Pacific isles located in
• Tasmania
  Australia's wild island state, a refuge of ancient forests and rare creatures region of