Almost Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know about Australia

Melbourne is the queen city of the south and the cultural centre of Australia. It has one of the world’s most equitable climates. Our Winter (that is Summer in British Columbia) sees daytime temperatures ranging from 8° C to 16° C. Summer can be very hot. Temperatures of 40° C to 45° C are common. Australians take pride in their convict past. Victoria was never a convict colony. Victoria made its mark during the gold rush of the 1850s and 1860s. We have a significant Chinese population that arrived during the gold rush times. As a result, we have some of the best Cantonese cuisine in the world! Our Italian migration has been sensational. We are among the world’s most polyglot countries and the food experience, especially in Melbourne, is second to none. Our wildlife includes 100 million kangaroos, extremely venomous snakes, remarkable mammals such as koalas (that are not really bears), and the amazing duck-billed platypus. Australians travel all over Australia. People from the south of the country tend to go to the tropical north. Like Canadians, Australians are and always have been extremely curious about the rest of the world and they travel extensively. Robyn tells me, having passed over the equator by ship, that when everybody was upstairs on deck watching the Neptune festivities, she was in her cabin watching water go straight down the plug hole. Not one swirl in either direction. I have absolutely no doubt that water drains in opposite directions in the northern and southern hemispheres. – Peter Z

AUSTRALIA AND CANADA

Australia and Canada are remarkably similar countries.

Both our countries are former British Colonies that became fiercely independent federations within the British Empire, now called the Commonwealth of Nations.

Canada’s population of 35 million and Australia’s 24 million people are spread across mostly uninhabitable countries. Regarding Australia’s population, 24% are foreign-born as opposed to 21% of Canada’s population.

Australia is the world’s smallest continent and the world’s largest island.

Both our countries are open economies. Canada is the world’s 12th-largest economy. Australia follows immediately behind as the 13th-largest economy.

Both our countries have experienced regional housing booms over the past few years, supported by strong banking sectors. The average weekly earnings in Australia are much the same as the average weekly earnings in Canada. Native Peoples At law, the native peoples in Canada are much closer to Australian aborigines than they are to American Indians.

Presently, there is a strong move by the Australian aboriginal community to have a referendum held in Australia to amend our Constitution to give specific rights to indigenous people.

In Canada, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 provided a major basis for legal recognition of native title to land in Canada. No similar recognition took place in Australia in early days, although the land rights movement in Australia has seen a large number of quasi treaties entered into between aboriginal peoples and State and Federal governments.