Fodor's Exploring Australia

Landscape Girded by nearly 23,000 miles of coastline, the "island continent" has a simple threefold structure. The Western Plateau Almost two-thirds of the land surface belongs to the Western Plateau, a vast and arid tableland covering most of Western Australia, South Australia, the Northern Territory and part of Queensland. Mostly flat and low-lying, it is interrupted by spectacular individual features like Ayers Rock (Uluru) and the Olgas (Kata Tjuta), by rocky strongholds like the Kimberley and Arnhem Land, and by rugged ridges like those of the MacDonnell, Flinders, and Hamersley Ranges. The plateau is an ancient land whose fertility was leached away by rains that fell millions of years ago, leaving arid wastes with evocative names like the Nullarbor Plain or the Sturt Stony Desert. Similarly, winds that ceased to blow long ago left achingly repetitive patterns of sand dunes. Except in the tropics, rainfall is not only minimal but also irregular; none may fall for years, then sudden downpours will fill the normally vacant riverbeds, though the rainwater soon disperses to the great salt lakes. Much of the area is uninhabited or very thinly settled, with a population measured in hundreds of square miles per person. Only to the west of the Darling Ranges, on the relatively fertile coastal plains around the great city of Perth, are there extensive farmlands and a network of settlements linked by roads and railroads. Elsewhere, settlements exist in isolation as ports, mining towns, and staging posts along an interminable highway, or, increasingly, as centers for Outback tourism. The Great Dividing Range Running down the whole of Australia's eastern coastline from Cape York in the far north to the hills and highlands of New South Wales and Victoria in the south, the Great Dividing Range leaps Bass Strait to reappear in the mountains of Tasmania. It is here that the continent's highest peaks are found: Mount Kosciuszko in New South Wales (7,316 feet), Mount Bogong in Victoria (6,516 feet) and Mount Ossa (5,305 feet) in Tasmania. However, much of the area is not made up of mountains but of high plateaus, from which rivers run eastward across the coastal plain. The bulk of the country's population lives here, clustering for the most part in the metropolitan areas around the great coastal state capitals of Sydney (New South Wales), Melbourne (Victoria), Adelaide (South Australia), and Brisbane (Queensland). Rural settlement is relatively dense in the valleys between the uplands and all along the fertile strip extending into the tropics along the Queensland coast. The only inland city of any size is Canberra, the artificially implanted federal capital. Central Eastern Lowlands Between these two great geographical divisions run the Central Eastern Lowlands, sloping down gradually from the east toward the interior. A series of broad basins succeed one another, from the southern rim of the Gulf of Carpentaria through Queensland's Channel Country to the area drained by the country's greatest river system, the Murray/Darling/Murrumbidgee. Here in the Outback, grazing animals outnumber people by a factor of several hundred to one, and rural life depends as much on unreliable rainfall as on the state of world markets. Mineral wealth has created a small number of towns like Broken Hill and Mount Isa, linked by interminably long roads and railroads to the coast. Lifestyle Australia has long been a land where people feel themselves to be basically equal and as good as the next person. Money and the making of it are admired, but this does not mean that the monied become beings apart. There is an openness about social contacts that is surprising to many visitors. When Australians say "How are you?" there's a good chance that they actually mean it, and will enjoy hearing your answer (especially if yFodor's Travel Publications, Inc. Staff is the author of 'Fodor's Exploring Australia' with ISBN 9780679030034 and ISBN 0679030034.