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The Commonwealth of Australia is governed as a parliamentary constitutional monarchy. It is geographically the sixth-largest country in the world, the only one to occupy an entire continent, and the largest in the region of Australasia/Oceania. Australia includes a number of secondary islands the largest of which is Tasmania, which is an Australian State.

Australia is unusual because the animal population evolved largely out of contact with the other continents. A very high percentage of Australian animals are endemic (found nowhere else) including about 70% of its birds and 95% of its mammals. Over time, marsupials filled most of the ecological niches that are occupied by placental mammals in most other parts of the world.

To be accepted into Australia under the migration program a person must be a skilled migrant or sponsored by a family member that already lives in Australia, a third class covers special eligibility migrants which includes Australians returning to Australia that had to give up citizenship to live overseas.

Despite perhaps poetry seeming out of the typical Australian character it played an important part in the founding of Australian literature. Two poets who vie for the position of greatest Australian poet are Christopher Brennan and Adam Lindsay Gordon. Gordon was not born in Australia but the Azores. Despite this he is often called the "national poet of Australia" and is the only Australian with a monument in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in England.

Darwin is the capital of the Northern Territory, and is a city of 109,419 people (2001 census) on Australia's far north-western coastline. Darwin is reputed to suffer more lightning-strikes than any other inhabited place in the world. It is also home to the Territory's only university, Charles Darwin University.

Perth is set on the Swan River, so named because of the native black swans. It is a sprawling city, extending to Joondalup in the north, Mandurah in the south and Mundaring in the east. The coastal suburbs take advantage of Perth's oceanside location and clean beaches. To the east, the city is bordered by a low escarpment called the Darling Scarp. Perth is on generally flat, rolling land - largely due to the high amount of sandy soils and deep bedrock.

Australia's myths originate in the outback, in the drovers and squatters and people of the barren, dusty plains, yet very few Australians live in the outback, or even in the milder countryside that is never more than an hour or two's drive from the cities in which they live. This was true even of the Australia of a century ago - since the gold rush of the 1850s, most Australians have been city-bound. Nevertheless, after a century or more spent absorbing the bush yarns of Henry Lawson and the poetry of Banjo Paterson from the comfort of armchairs in the suburbs, the myths are real.

Many Perth residents consider their city to be egalitarian and relaxed, with a relatively large middle class and a suburban lifestyle; however, as with all large cities, Perth does have pockets of extreme wealth and poverty. The population is easy-going and friendly, but can be parochial, especially towards the "Eastern States" which are often viewed with deep, but usually jocular, suspicion. This attitude can be attributed mainly to isolation — reflected in the widely-held belief that Perth is "the world's most isolated capital city".

The Australian aborigines , estimated to number as many as 350,000 at the time of the Europeans' arrival, was numbered at 386,049 (including Torres Strait Islanders, who are of Papuan descent) in 1996. Although still more rural than the general population, the aboriginal population has become more urbanized, with some two thirds living in cities. New South Wales and Queensland account for just over half of the Australian aboriginal population. In Tasmania the aboriginal population was virtually wiped out in the 19th century.

By far the largest part of Australia is desert or semi-arid — 40% of the land mass is covered by sand dunes. Only the south-east and south-west corners have a temperate climate and moderately fertile soil. The northern part of the country has a tropical climate: part is tropical rainforests, part grasslands, and part desert. The Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef, lies a short distance off the north-east coast and extends for over 1,200 kilometres. Uluru (until 1986 known as Ayers Rock), is the second largest monolith in the world and is located in central Australia (the largest being Mount Augustus in Western Australia). The largest city in the world by area (not by population) is Mount Isa in northern Queensland.