Captain Cook discovered Australia in 1770 - The continent had already been ‘discovered’ and fully occupied by Aboriginal nations who’d been living there for 60-80,000 years, the oldest continuous culture in the world. The Makkasans were trading for trepang (sea cucumbers of 400 years before Europeans discovered the continent. The Chinese visited in the 15th century, followed by the Dutch in the 1600s, then an even earlier Briton in 1688.
All Australians descended from convicts - England shipped more than 160,000 convicts to Australia between 1788 and 1868. But many of the early whites were soldiers, sailors, prospectors, whalers, miners, explorers, remittance men and free settlers. Australia has a very high migrant annual intake. A quarter of Australians were born overseas. One third are the children of migrants.
Australians speak English - English is the most common language. Aborigines had 250 to 300 languages (depending on how you define a dialect) and 50 of these are still spoken fluently from birth, with English or a pigeon or Creole as the 2nd, 3rd or 4th language. Census data shows that one in five people speak a language other than English at home, most commonly Chinese, Arabic and Vietnamese. It is common to hear other languages spoken in public places.
The toilets flush backwards - The ‘Coriolis effect’ is too weak to affect small bodies of water, so toilets flush both clockwise and anti-clockwise in both hemispheres.d in your browser.
Australians ride kangaroos - Kangaroos are not rideable. However, due to the reduction in their natural predator, the dingo, they do reach overpopulation levels when conditions are favourable. When this happens they could eat out all the grasses and herbs and starve to death, so culling attracts licensed hunters. Kangaroo leather is the softest in the world, much favoured for women's accessories and clothing. Kangaroo meat is lean and becoming very popular.
Koalas are bears - Koalas have no close relationship to bears. They are tree-dwelling marsupials, eat only the leaves of a few species of eucalyptus trees, and suckle their babies (joeys) in their pouches. They sleep 23 hours a day because gum leaves are tough to digest.
Sydney (or maybe Melbourne?) is the capital - When Australia was federated in 1901, Canberra was designed and built as the capital half-way between Sydney and Melbourne. The designer was Walter Burly-Griffin, a student of the American modernist architect, Fran Lloyd Wright.
Australia is hot - Some parts of the country at certain seasons and times of day are hot enough to fry an egg on a rock - hot enough to die of thirst quite quickly if one can’t find shade. And some parts are tropical with heavy rainfall and cyclone in summer. But the Snowy mountains have snow still clinging on in mid-summer, the temperate zones experience nightly frosts throughout the colder months. Melbourne dips to an average daily high of 14°C in the dead of winter — the same temperature you’d expect on a November’s day in London.
Australia is all outback - The country does have sparsely populated vast open spaces of severely arid and desert lands. But 86% of Australia’s 25 million people live in urban areas, most l along the east coast. About half live in Sydney and Melbourne.
Everyone looks like Chris Hemsworth or Margot Robbie - Few Aussies are buff, blonde and beachy, mostly the board surfers. The majority have brown or black hair, and a third range from yellow through honey, red, and copper, to chocolate and jet coal black. 65% of Australian adults are overweight, making diseases of obesity the single greatest cost to the public health service.
Australians love a shrimp on the barbie - Not really. They call them prawns. They do like charred seafood but also love steaks, sausages and poultry. The tastes in Barbecues are increasingly more fusion and international in style.
Qantas has never crashed - More than 100 people perished in Qantas aeroplanes between 1927 and 1951, although none in a jet airliner, which explains Qantas’ sterling reputation. Its reputation is to as good now as it once was, since maintenance operations were moved to cheaper countries offshore. Numerous minor incidents have been frequently reported in the news.
Australians drink Fosters - Many Aussies love a beer, but they drink a huge range of brands and styles. There’s also a class division. The middle and upper classes usually prefer wine. Australian consistently wins French and international wine competitions.
Everything’s trying to kill you - Snakes, spiders, ticks, mosquitoes, ants, leaches, crocodiles, sharks, octopi, dingoes — they all exist, but they’re keen to keep out of your way and will only attack if you try to handle them.
Australia is a small country - As an island nation with no land borders, maps don’t illustrate how truly enormous Australia is. Covering almost eight million square kilometres, Australia is actually the sixth largest nation on earth — so big, in fact, that you could squeeze Turkey, France, Egypt, Italy, Senegal, Uruguay and Spain inside its borders, and still have room for Germany, South Africa, Japan, Pakistan, Sweden, Thailand and the United Kingdom.
