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Our Natural Environment

The Australian continent is a land like no other. Its animals, plants and landscapes have evolved over millennia, and there are about a million different natural species in Australia. More than 80 per cent of the country’s flowering plants, mammals, reptiles and frogs are unique to Australia, along with most of the fish and almost half the birds.

Australia has more than 140 species of marsupials, including koalas, wombats and the Tasmanian devil, now found only in the Tasmanian wilderness. More than 750 species of birds have been recorded in Australia, 350 of which are found nowhere else in the world. Among them are the kookaburra, the rainbow lorikeet and fairy penguins. There are also 55 different species of macropods—the kangaroo family—native to Australia. They vary greatly in size and weight, ranging from half a kilogram to 90 kilograms.

The country has a real commitment to conserving its natural heritage and has a range of protection procedures in place. Despite the vast size of the continent however, the majority of Australians live on the coast and in major cities - around 75 per cent of Australia's population lives in urban areas.

Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth. Its interior has one of the lowest rainfalls in the world and about three-quarters of the land is arid or semi-arid. These arid areas extend from the large central deserts to the Western coast. Soils in these areas are characteristically very infertile compared to other deserts of comparable aridity. This has presented Australians with the challenge of how best to manage the variety of regions our continent possesses to meet the competing demands of agriculture, economy and conservation

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Content on this page sourced from Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade fact sheets.