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The earliest music of Australia was the folk music of the Australian Aborigines. Aboriginal music declined after European colonisation, and has only recently begun to be revived, often with modernised influences. Bands like Yothu Yindi have begun the popularisation of Aboriginal folk in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Australia has also been home to notable classical composers as well as artists working in popular music genres such as rock, jazz, country and electronic music.

While Australia has ubiquitous media coverage, the longest established part of that media is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the Federal Government funded organisation offering national TV and radio coverage. The ABC, like the BBC in Britain, is a non-commercial public service broadcaster, showing many BBC or ITV productions from Britain.

Debate about the role of the ABC continues, as many assign it a marginal role, and claim that American-influenced commercial TV and radio stations are far more popular choices. These critics claim that Australian children grow up watching Sesame Street and The Simpsons, eating fries at McDonalds, wearing baseball caps, speaking American slang, and some have never heard of Blinky Bill or the Magic Pudding. Television ratings are cited as backing this view, but it is less clear that these ratings tell the whole view. Certainly there have been many local television shows that have been successful, such as Skippy (in the late 1960s), Number 96 and The Box in the 1970s, Prisoner in the 1980s, and Neighbours and Home and Away (in the 1980s and 1990s), which have sometimes been even more successful abroad.

Rainfall in Australia is highly variable, with frequent droughts lasting several seasons. Occasionally a duststorm will blanket a region or even several states and there are reports of the occasional large tornado. Rising levels of salinity and desertification in some areas is ravaging the landscape.

English is the main official and spoken language in Australia, although some of the surviving Aboriginal communities maintain their native languages. A considerable number of first and sometimes second-generation migrants are bilingual; languages such as Italian, Cantonese and Greek are spoken in many communities.

To the visitor from the northern hemisphere, many of Australia's birds will immediately seem familiar - Australian wrens look and act very like northern hemisphere wrens, Australian robins seem to be close relatives of the northern hemisphere robins - but in fact the majority of Australian passerine birds are descended from the ancestors of the crow family, and the close resemblance is misleading: the cause is not genetic relatedness but convergent evolution.

Today's Australian cuisine is some of the most diverse available anywhere, due to the many cultural influences. Modern Australian cuisine has been heavily influenced by the country's South East Asian neighbours, and by the many waves of immigrants from there, and all parts of the world. Similarly, Greek, Lebanese and Italian influences are common. Fresh produce is readily available and thus used extensively, and the trend (urged by long-term government health initiatives) is towards low-salt, low-fat healthy cookery incorporating lean meat and lightly cooked, colourful, steamed or stir-fried vegetables.

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.