100 Interesting Facts About Australia

When Australia stopped using the pound as its currency, some of the names suggested for the new currency were the austral, the oz, the boomer, the roo, the kanga, the emu, the digger, the Quid, the dinkum and the Ming before the government ultimately settled on the Australian dollar.

77. Rum was the main currency in early colonial Australia. NSW Corps officers bought up all the imported rum and established a 17-year monopoly on its trade. When Governor William Bligh tried to end it, he was deposed in the only armed takeover of government in Aussie history, known as The Rum Rebellion.

78. The temperance movement in Australia during WW1 successfully forced bars to close at 6 p.m. up until 1955. This did little to stop the amount of alcohol consumed and contributed to a culture of binge drinking, which has left its mark on Australian drinking culture to this day.

79. Anzac biscuits sold in Australia and New Zealand is legally required to be sold only if they are true to their original recipe and are never to be sold as cookies.

80. Indigenous Australian Aborigines inhale petroleum, and in 2005, the Government of Australia and BP began the usage of opal fuel in remote areas prone to petrol sniffing. Opal is a non-sniffable fuel (which is much less likely to cause a high) and has made a difference in some indigenous areas.

20,000 year-old fossilized human footprints were discovered in Australia which indicate the man who made them was running at the speed of a modern Olympic sprinter, barefoot, in sand.

82. In 1880, an Australian outlaw and this gang (Kelly Gang) smithed steel suits out of and held off the Victorian Police with their bulletproof armor.

83. Despite sharing the same oral language, British, Irish, Australian and American Sign Language are all completely different languages.

84. Although cannabis is illegal in Australia, there's a town named Nimbin in New South Wales revolving almost only around weed selling and weed tourism where cannabis is both sold and grown openly.

85. The US, Canadian and Australian consumption of cannabis per capita is more than double that of the Dutch, despite it being legal in Netherlands.

A border collie (Sophie Tucker) in Australia fell off a boat during a huge storm and swam 5 nautical miles through shark-infested waters and survived a month off wild goats until rescued by the coast guard

87. New Zealand is listed as a state of Australia in the Australian constitution and can join the Australian confederation if they choose to.

88. There's a stinging tree called the Gympie Gympie in Australia that produces a toxin so painful, it has driven people and animals to suicide. It has been described as being sprayed with hot acid and electrocuted at the same time. A soldier was reported to have shot himself after using the tree as toilet paper.

89. In 2002, while returning to the US, the USS John C. Stennis aircraft carrier stopped in Australia, where the sailors wore out the local sex workers to the point the brothel had to close down temporarily.

90. Members of the band "Good Charlotte" protested against KFC's treatment of chickens. Then in 2012 and 2013 appeared in a number of KFC commercials in Australia and even tried to set a world record for eating KFC on "Australia's Got Talent."

After phasing out the Australian 1 and 2 cent coins in 1991, they were melted down and used in the Sydney 2000 Olympics as Bronze Medals.

92. While playing cricket for Australia, David Boon is said to have consumed 52 cans of beer on a flight from Sydney to London in 1989.

93. There's a town in Australia where half of its population live in caves carved underground to stay away from the heat.

94. There is a perennial river named Merrica in New South Wales, Australia

95. Mary Donaldson, a 28-year-old Australian who worked at a real estate firm, met a Danish guy at a Sydney pub in the year 2000. He was Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark, and she is now the Crown Princess of Denmark.

Australian speed skater Steven Bradbury won a gold medal in 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, because everyone in front of him crashed, three races in a row.

97. Australian serial killer Ivan Milat lost 25kg from a failed hunger strike in prison when he was denied a PlayStation.

98. Cattle and sheep emit 11% of Australia’s greenhouse gasses. Switching over to kangaroos for meat production would eliminate this.

99. Australia uses the motion of the ocean to generate zero-emission electricity and desalinate water simultaneously

100. A 9-year-old girl in Australia who received a liver transplant does not need lifelong immunosuppressants because her blood types spontaneously changed from O negative to O positive to accommodate the donor's liver.