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Australia's comparative advantage in primary products is a reflection of the natural wealth of the Australian Continent and its small domestic market; 19 million people occupy a continent the size of the contiguous United States. The relative size of the manufacturing sector has been declining for several decades, and now accounts for just under 12 percent of GDP.

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

News Corporation was founded in Adelaide and its first newspaper was The News which was later merged with The Advertiser. John Fairfax Holdings owns The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age (Melbourne) and the most prominent financial newspaper, The Australian Financial Review. Rural and regional media is dominated by Rural Press Limited, with significant holdings in all States and Territories. Titles include The Canberra Times as well as The Land (New South Wales), Queensland Country Life, Stock and Land (Victoria), Stock Journal (South Australia) and Farm Weekly (Western Australia). Rural Press also has significant holdings in New Zealand and the United States.

Melbourne has twice ranked first in a survey by The Economist of "The World's Most Livable Cities", once in 2002, and again in 2004. It is sometimes classed as a "world city"; one study group ranks Melbourne, on the basis of relative availability of specialised "advanced services" as a "minor world city" comparable to cities such as Vancouver, Osaka, and Prague.

Although Australia was initially largely of British origin, and by the early 21st century was an overwhelmingly city-based society, receiving a large proportion of its cultural communication from either Hollywood and American TV networks, or home-grown productions that some claim are merely imitators.

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.

Despite the best intentions of government health schemes and cultural marketing initiatives, the traditional Australian palate is amply serviced by an extensive takeaway food industry.

Melbourne is the capital and largest city of the state of Victoria, and the second largest city in Australia, with a population of 52,117 in the Central Business District and 3,488,750 in the metropolitan area (census 2001).

The publicly funded Special Broadcasting Service carries TV and radio programmes in a variety of languages, as well as world news and documentary programming in English, and is seen as less highbrow than the ABC. SBS does have a small following, having the distinction of being the TV channel most likely to show soccer, the most played sport in Australia but said to be the least watched.