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Australia has produced a wide variety of popular music. While many musicians and bands (some notable examples include the 1960s successes of The Easybeats and the folk-pop group The Seekers, through the heavy rock of AC/DC, and the slick pop of INXS and more recently Savage Garden) have had considerable international success, there remains some debate over whether Australian popular music really has a distinctive sound. Perhaps the most striking common feature of Australian music, like many other Australian art forms, is the dry, often self-deprecating humor evident in the lyrics.

Australia is home to perhaps the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world - that is, those of the Aboriginal Australians, an artistic tradition that began to receive international recognition in the late 20th century. It has also produced notable artists coming out of Western traditions whose most distinctively Australian feature is the gradual development of a way to represent the equally distinctive Australian landscape.

Australia is home to large and diverse populations of various other types of animal - snakes, lizards, insects, spiders, birds and fish.

According to Reporters Without Borders in 2004, Australia is in 41st position on a list of countries ranked by Press Freedom; well behind New Zealand (9th) and United Kingdom (28th). With the Howard government taking control of the Senate in mid-2005 after the 2004 election, media ownership regulations are likely to be relaxed so as to allow the further concentration of media ownership in the hands of a couple of entities.

Australia is unusual because the animal population evolved largely out of contact with the other continents. A very high percentage of Australian animals are endemic (found nowhere else) including about 70% of its birds and 95% of its mammals. Over time, marsupials filled most of the ecological niches that are occupied by placental mammals in most other parts of the world.

The Commonwealth of Australia is governed as a parliamentary constitutional monarchy. It is geographically the sixth-largest country in the world, the only one to occupy an entire continent, and the largest in the region of Australasia/Oceania. Australia includes a number of secondary islands the largest of which is Tasmania, which is an Australian State.

The Great Barrier Reef, by far the world's largest coral reef, lies a short distance off the north-east coast of Australia. Uluru, in central Australia, is the second largest monolith in the world.

Today, many tribal Aborigines lead a settled traditional life in remote areas of northern, central, and western Australia. In the south, where most Aborigines are of mixed descent, most live in the cities.

The Australian Capital Territory was created at the chosen site of the capital city Canberra in an area called the Molongo River Valley. Canberra was founded as a compromise between the two largest cities, Melbourne and Sydney. The name 'Canberra' is derived from the indigenous Ngunnawal language, which is loosely translated into English as "meeting place".