Some call it the world’s smallest continent. Others say it’s the world’s largest island. Either way … Australia is BIG! The distance from Perth to Cairns is about 3,500 km (2,000 miles), which is roughly the same as Gibraltar to St Petersburg, Vancouver to New Orleans or Tokyo to Hanoi.
The maps below are drawn to the same scale and give a good idea of relaive sizes.
Australia is almost exactly the same size as the USA (minus Alaska) but has only 23 million people to America’s 300 million. Apart from the coastal fringes, it is a dry sunbaked land. The south has a temperate (sometimes cold) climate and the top third is in the tropics. I took the photograph of Cradle Mountain (Tasmania) just before Christmas (our mid-summer). Snow closed the area to cars a few days later.
If I’d stayed at home, on the Gold Coast, I could have been down on the beach in a subtropical paradise of palm trees and golden sand.
Or I could have holidayed up north, in the tropical wetlands near Darwin.
Another choice would have been the dry interior, which stretches all the way from the coastal mountains in the east to the Indian Ocean in the west.
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