91 Gnarly Facts From the Land Down Under – Australia

When a mountain was found to be taller than Australia’s highest mountain, Mount Kosciuszko, their names were swapped so that Mount Kosciuszko remained the highest mountain in Australia.

52. The longest highway in the world is Highway 1 in Australia. Measuring approximately 14,500 km (9,000 mi), it circumnavigates the entire country.

53. In 2004, a supercolony of ants measuring 62 miles wide was discovered under Melbourne, Australia.

54. One of the most popular philosophical debates on debate.org is whether or not Australia actually exists.

55. The news reporter in Zootopia is a different animal depending on the region. For example, in the US release he's a moose, in Australia he's a koala, in Brazil he's a jaguar, and in Japan, he's a tanuki.

Australia’s largest ever petition of 792,985 signatures was submitted to parliament in 2000 to protest rising beer prices.

57. In Australia, “Black Friday” refers to a series of bushfires that wiped out whole towns and killed 71 people.

58. Citizens of the Commonwealth (Canada, Australia etc.) are allowed to vote in the United Kingdom.

59. Jackie Chan got the name Jackie while working as a construction worker in Canberra, Australia

60. NASA mapped the Earth at night and discovered that half of an uninhabited part of Australia is on fire, producing, even more, light than the capital cities.

The city of Perth in Western Australia is geographically the most remote city in the world (by land). The nearest city of more than 100,000 people is almost 1500 miles away. Perth is geographically closer to both Dili, East Timor (2,785 kilometres (1,731 mi)), and Jakarta, Indonesia (3,002 kilometres (1,865 mi)), than to Sydney (3,291 kilometres (2,045 mi)), Brisbane (3,604 kilometres (2,239 mi)), or Canberra (3,106 kilometres (1,930 mi)).

62. In 2011, sea levels around the world dropped by almost by 1 cm due to massive rainfalls across Australia.

63. Australia got its name by accident from 'Terra Australis' (meaning 'South Land') after it was mistaken for the world’s southernmost continent. If not for this mistake, Antarctica would have been Australia, and Australia would have been named ‘New Holland.’

64. The Murchison meteorite that crashed in Australia contains uracil and xanthine (guanine derivative) nucleobases (DNA components) that were proven to be of non-Earth origin/contamination due to the amount of carbon-13.

65. In Australia, someone loses an eye every year from a magpie attack. One magpie even managed to indirectly kill a 12-year-old boy by chasing him to a road where he was promptly hit by a car.

Australia has 10,685 beaches. You could visit a new beach every day for 29 years.

67. An Australian man named Don Ritchie lived across the street from the most famous suicide spot in Australia known as “the gap.” He lived there for 45 years and during that time he saved at least 160 people from committing suicide.

68. 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.

69. 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.

70. 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.

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.

72. 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.

73. 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.

74. 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.

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