Australia (country)



"In summer the bushfires rage and rage

And rage and rage on such beautiful days

And we fight them with water that runs through the cracks

Water we're desperately trying to save"

- The Cat Empire, "Wine Song"

Not New Zealand, the one next to it. Its formal name is the Commonwealth of Australia.

Aussie tropers just want to make sure that we know they're not all idiots. There are cities and everything. Very few Australians live in the outback.


 * Aussies With Artillery (The Australian Defence Force)
 * Australian Accent
 * Australian English
 * G Day Mate (Aussie Slang)
 * Australian Attitudes
 * Cultural Cringe
 * Tall Poppy Syndrome
 * Australian History
 * Australian Media
 * Australian Television Shows
 * Australian Movies
 * Australian Music
 * Australian Literature
 * Australian Politics
 * Australian School System
 * Australian States and Territories
 * Other Australian Towns and Cities
 * Australian Wildlife
 * Yowies and Bunyips and Drop Bears, Oh My!
 * Useful Notes/Christmas in Australia
 * First Australians (Indigenous Australians)
 * Australian Aborigines
 * Aboriginal Australian Myths
 * Torres Strait Islanders
 * The Poppy
 * Those Whove Come Across the Seas (Multiculturalism)
 * Sydney
 * Sport in Australia
 * Australian Rules Football
 * Cricket
 * The Ashes
 * Cricket Rules
 * Rugby League
 * Rugby Union

Australian companies:
 * ACTF
 * Madman Entertainment
 * Walt Disney Animation Australia

See also:
 * Awesome Aussie - Yes, there's a trope for how awesome we are.
 * The British Empire
 * The Common Law, the legal system inherited from The British Empire
 * Land Down Under, for Australia as it appears in fiction
 * Unit Confusion (Australia switched from Imperial to Metric in the 1960s rapidly and it worked fairly well - only the older Australians will still use Imperial, and only for estimates. Inches and feet still tend to be used for peoples' heights, somewhat interchangeably with metric, because it's easier to say "five foot seven" than "one-hundred and seventy centimetres" or "one point seven metres". While most people know roughly what a foot and an inch are, nobody uses miles except metaphorically.
 * It's amazing how often police reports give an unidentified suspect's height as 183 cm.
 * Old Money was used in Australia until it decimalised in 1966. No doubt it's used in fiction sometimes.

The Australian flag


This is the Australian national flag -- first adopted in 1901, modified a few times after that, then finally made properly official in its present form in 1954. It is a defaced version of the United Kingdom's "blue ensign" flag (flown at sea by ships in public service), which looks the same but without the stars. The national flag of New Zealand, as well as all of Australia's state flags, are also based on the blue ensign.

As they do look very similar, here are a couple of quick ways of telling the Australian and New Zealand flags apart:
 * The Commonwealth Star is present on the Australian flag where the NZ flag has a bank field. It's the large, white, seven-pointed star beneath the Union Jack, with the seven points standing for the six states plus the territories.
 * The design of the Southern Cross varies in a couple of ways:
 * 1: The Australian Flag has five stars, the New Zealand Flag only has four (omitting Epsilon Crucis in the middle).
 * 2: The stars are white on the Australian flag, and red with a white outline on the NZ flag. This is because New Zealand is communist.
 * 3: The NZ flag has all the stars with five points; the Australian flag has all the stars with seven points except for Epsilon Crucis, which has five.