You've been to Australia, haven't you?
Australia is essentially the fragment of a great plateau land of Archean rocks.
Of these eighty churches, twelve were in the United Kingdom, twenty on the continent of Europe, sixteen in North America, three in South America, ten in Asia, nine in Africa, six in Australia, two in New Zealand, one in Jamaica and one in Melanesia.
This included Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
From Torres Strait to Dampier Land the shelf spreads out, and connects Australia with New Guinea and the Malay Archipelago.
The land mass of Australia rises to a mean height much less than that of any other continent; and the chief mountain systems are parallel to, and not far from, the coast-line.
Australia presents a contour wonderfully devoid of inlets from the sea except on its northern shores, where the coast-line is largely indented.
Western Australia, again, is not favoured with many inlets, Exmouth Gulf and Shark's Bay being the only bays of any size.
With the exception of Tasmania there are no important islands belonging geographically to Australia, for New Guinea, Timor and other islands of the East Indian archipelago, though not removed any great distance from the continent, do not belong to its system.
In New South Wales, but close to the Victorian border, are found the loftiest peaks of Australia, Mount Kosciusco and Mount Townsend, rising to heights of 7328 and 7260 ft.
An eastern system in South Australia touches at a few points a height of 3000 ft.; and the Stirling Range, belonging to the south-western system of South Australia, reaches to 2340 ft.
The absence of active volcanoes in Australia is a state of things, in a geological sense, quite new to the continent.
The southwest coast is watered by a few streams, but none of any size; amongst these is the Swan, upon which Perth, the capital of Western Australia, is built.
In South Australia there are 38 deep bores, from 20 of which there is a flow of 6,250,000 gallons a day.
The great rivers of Australia, draining inland, carve out valleys, dissolve limestone, and spread out their deposit over the plains when the waters become too sluggish to bear their burden farther.
- The states of Australia are divided by natural boundaries, which separate geographical areas having different characters, owing, mainly, to their different geological structures.
The sea does not appear to have extended completely across Australia, breaking it into halves, for a projection from the Archean plateau of Western Australia extended as far east as the South Australian highlands, and thence probably continued eastward, till it joined the Victorian highlands.
These marine deposits are not found anywhere along the eastern coast of Australia; but they occur, and reach about the same height above sea-level, in New Guinea, and are widely developed in New Zealand.
Earth movements are still taking place both along Bass Strait and the Great Valley of South Australia, and apparently along the whole length of tht southern coast of Australia.
Araucaria Cunninghami, the Moreton Bay pine, is a tall tree abundant on the shores of Moreton Bay, Australia, and found through the littoral region of Queensland to Cape York Peninsula, also in New Guinea.
Here may be noticed three genera of large extinct marsupials from the Pleistocene of Australia whose affinities appear to ally them to the wombat-group on the one hand and to the phalangers on the other.
Australia is bounded by the Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea and Torres Strait; on the E.
The outer edge of this ledge is roughly parallel to the coast of Western Australia, and more than 150 m.
Australia possesses one mountain which, though not a volcano, is a " burning mountain."
The coastal belt of Australia is everywhere well watered, with the exception of the country around the Great Australian Bight and Spencer Gulf.
At Bajo de Velis, in San Luis, the plants belong to the " Glossopteris flora," which is so widely spread in South Africa, India and Australia, and the beds are correlated with the Karharbari series of India (Permian or Permo-Carboniferous).
Wallace, this author is of opinion that marsupials did not effect an entrance into Australia till about the middle of the Tertiary period, their ancestors being probably opossums of the American type.
Taking opossums to have been the ancestors of the group, the author considers that the present writer may be right in his view that marsupials entered Australia from Asia by way of New Guinea.
The single species, which is a native of western and southern Australia, is about the size of an English squirrel, to which its long bushy tail gives it some resemblance; but it lives entirely on the ground, especially in sterile sandy districts, feeding on ants.
A separate family, Notoryctidae, is represented by the marsupial mole (Notoryctes typhlops), of the deserts of south Central Australia, a silky, golden-haired, burrowing creature, with a curious leathery muzzle, and a short, naked stumpy tail.
All are animals of small or moderate size and arboreal habits, feeding on a vegetable or mixed diet, and inhabiting Australia, Papua and the Moluccan Islands.
The terrace closest to the land, known as the continental shelf, has an average depth of 600 ft., and connects Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania in one unbroken sweep. Compared with other continents, the Australian continental shelf is extremely narrow, and there are points on the eastern coast where the land plunges down to oceanic depths with an abruptness rarely paralleled.
The Great Barrier Reef forms the prominent feature off the north-east coast of Australia; its extent from north to south is 1200 m., and it is therefore the greatest of all coral reefs.
There are no other rivers of importance in South Australia, but the Torrens and the Gawler may be mentioned.
Westward of South Australia, on the shores of the Australian Bight, there is a stretch of country 300 m.
A narrow Cambrian sea must have extended across central Australia from the Kimberley Goldfield in the north-west, through Tempe Downs and the Macdonnell chain in central Australia, to the South Australian highlands, central Victoria at Mansfield, and northern Tasmania.
The Mesozoic begins with a Triassic land period in the mainland of Australia; while the islands of the Australasian festoon contain the Triassic marine limestones, which fringe the whole of the Pacific. The Triassic beds are best known in New South Wales, where round Sydney they include a series of sandstones and shales.
ALBANY, a municipal town in the county of Plantagenet, West Australia, on Princess Royal Harbour, a branch of King George Sound, 352 m.
The following statistics are interesting: - The enormous development of the wheat-growing industry is These figures do not include the wheat ground into flour and sent by way of British Columbia to Asia and Australia, nor the wheat retained by the farmers for seed.
A governor has been appointed since 1885, some importance being foreseen for the islands in connexion with the cutting of the Panama canal, as the group lies on the route to Australia opened up by that scheme.
Nearly allied is the jumping Antechinomys laniger, of East Central Australia, an elegant mouse-like creature, with large oval ears, elongated limbs, a long and tufted tail and no first hind toe.
The one species, from Western Australia, is the largest member of the family, being about the size of a rabbit, to which it bears sufficient superficial resemblance to have acquired the name of "native rabbit" from the colonists.
The Silurian system was marked by the retreat of the sea from central Australia; but the sea still covered a band across Victoria, from the coast to the Murray basin, passing to the east of Melbourne.
The second and marine type of the Jurassics occurs in Western Australia, on the coastal plain skirting the western foot of the western plateau.
Rhyn snorted and faced Sasha, the brother charged with governing Australia, and the first to abandon the Council in favor of serving the Dark One.
The city is the largest in British Columbia, and is the chief Canadian shipping port for Japan, China, Australia and the islands at which the C.P.R.
But they have been separated by the foundering of the Coral Sea and the Tasman Sea, which divided the continent of Australia from the islands of the Australasian festoon; and the foundering of the band across Australia, from the Gulf of Carpentaria, through western Queensland and western New South Wales, to the lower basin of the Murray, has separated the Archean areas of eastern and western Australia.
How 'bout Australia for the next HQ site?
No doubt eastern Australia then extended far out into the Tasman Sea.
The visits to the United Kingdom of properly organized teams of bowlers from Australia and New Zealand in 1901 and from Canada in 1904 demonstrated that the game had gained enormously in popularity.
