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While Australia has ubiquitous media coverage, the longest established part of that media is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the Federal Government funded organisation offering national TV and radio coverage. The ABC, like the BBC in Britain, is a non-commercial public service broadcaster, showing many BBC or ITV productions from Britain.

Hobart is the state capital of Tasmania, Australia's island state, and has a mild, temperate, maritime climate with four distinct seasons. Being in the southern hemisphere, summer is December to February.

In common with many other developed countries, Australia is currently experiencing a demographic shift towards an older population, with more people retiring and fewer people of working age. Similarly, a large number of Australian citizens (950,000 as of 2004) live outside of their home country. This number (almost 5%) represents a higher per capita percentage of overseas residents than many other countries including the United States. This phenomenon was, until recently, given little attention by the Australian government and media, but the term Australian Diaspora has now joined the Australian vocabulary.

Sydney is a significant global and domestic tourist destination and is regularly declared to be one of the most beautiful and livable cities in the world, admired for its harbour, beautiful coastline, warm and pleasant climate and cosmopolitan culture. Sydney significantly raised its global profile in recent years as the host city of the 2000 Summer Olympics. The city's name is pronounced "SID-nee".

Today, many tribal Aborigines lead a settled traditional life in remote areas of northern, central, and western Australia. In the south, where most Aborigines are of mixed descent, most live in the cities.

The cinema of Australia has a long history—in fact, it is claimed that the first feature-length film, was actually an Australian production, The Story of the Kelly Gang. During the late 1960s and 1970s in influx of government funding saw the development of a new generation of directors and actors telling distinctively Australian stories.

Many plants that grow in Australia have special features to combat the forces of nature. Symbiosis is very common, as are plants with sunken stomata and large root stock. The plants are very hardy, and are generally able to quickly establish themselves so as not to miss available nutrients.

To the visitor from the northern hemisphere, many of Australia's birds will immediately seem familiar - Australian wrens look and act very like northern hemisphere wrens, Australian robins seem to be close relatives of the northern hemisphere robins - but in fact the majority of Australian passerine birds are descended from the ancestors of the crow family, and the close resemblance is misleading: the cause is not genetic relatedness but convergent evolution.

Australia is home to the Great Artesian Basin - an important source of water for people and cattle in the parched outback. This basin is the world's largest and deepest fresh water basin.

With a population of approx. 170,000 people in the city proper (known as the "city of Sydney") and a metropolitan area population exceeding 4 million, the Sydney metropolis is the larger of the two main financial, transport, trade and cultural centres of Australia (the other being Melbourne, Sydney's long term rival to the title of pre-eminent Australian city).

Australia's population has more than doubled since the end of World War II, spurred by an ambitious postwar immigration program. In the 19th century, Australia enacted strong measures to prevent immigration by nonwhites. After World War II, immigration from Greece, Turkey, Italy, and other countries increased Australia's cultural diversity. In 1973, Australia officially ended discriminatory immigration policies, and substantial Asian immigration followed. By 1988 about 40% of immigration to Australia was from Asia, and by 1997 Asians constituted about 5% of the population. The indigenous population, the Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, make up 2.2% of the population, according to the 2001 Census. In 2001, the political campaign was dominated by issues of immigration and national security and there still remains substantial anxiety among Australians concerning immigration.

Sydney is the capital city of the Australian state of New South Wales and Australia's largest and oldest city, founded in 1788.

The Australian Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state; there is no state religion in Australia. Although the nation is broadly secular and few are church-goers, three-quarters of Australians are nominally Christian, mostly Catholic or Anglican. A diverse range of other religions are practised.