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Australia is a continent cut into eight pieces, and the cut is easier to learn than almost any other country's: three of the borders are dead straight lines of longitude and latitude, and half the population lives in two of the eight. Every address, every phone number and every number plate on the continent names one of them, so a photograph almost always carries the answer somewhere in frame. This page is the whole set, and the game asks you to put each name where it belongs.
Six of the eight are states and two are territories, and the difference is where the power comes from. The states were self-governing British colonies before Australia existed: New South Wales from 1788, Tasmania split off as Van Diemen's Land in 1825, Western Australia was founded in 1829, South Australia in 1836, Victoria was separated from New South Wales in 1851 and Queensland in 1859. They federated on 1 January 1901 and kept everything they had not handed to the Commonwealth, which is why a state's powers are its own rather than Canberra's to lend.
The two territories were carved out afterwards, both in 1911. South Australia handed the top half of its holdings to the Commonwealth, which became the Northern Territory, and New South Wales surrendered a patch of the Southern Tablelands for a capital that was neither Sydney nor Melbourne, which became the Australian Capital Territory. Both now have their own parliaments, the Northern Territory since 1978 and the ACT since 1988, but those parliaments sit under ordinary Commonwealth acts, and federal parliament has overridden territory law more than once.
The borders themselves are the thing worth memorising, because most of them are arithmetic rather than geography. The 129th meridian east is the entire western border of the Northern Territory and South Australia, which is the long straight line a third of the way across the continent. The 26th parallel south separates the Northern Territory from South Australia. South Australia meets New South Wales along 141 degrees east and Queensland along 138 degrees east. Only two borders follow the land: the Murray River between New South Wales and Victoria, and the rivers and ranges that carry part of the Queensland line.
Population is where the map misleads worst. Western Australia is a third of the country by area and holds about one Australian in ten; the Northern Territory is nearly a fifth of it and holds about one in a hundred. New South Wales and Victoria together, which are a tenth of the land, hold well over half the people, and nearly all of that is in the coastal strip. Street view coverage follows the people, so the odds before you look at anything are strongly east coast.
The failure modes are mostly about scale and about the two territories. Canberra is not New South Wales even though its postcodes and its area code say New South Wales, and it is completely surrounded by it, so the ACT has to be placed from the map rather than from an address. Most of Western Australia does not look like Perth: the state runs from the tropics to the Southern Ocean and its interior is indistinguishable from South Australia's or the Territory's. The Queensland and New South Wales border country looks the same on both sides, which is what the plates and the postcodes are for. And Tasmania is easy to forget entirely, which costs a whole answer on a quiz with only eight of them.
Those four groups are how the map in the game is coloured, so the bands are visible while you play, and each can be played on its own from the start dialog. The southeast is the one worth drilling first: it holds half the answers on the map, the two smallest jurisdictions on the mainland, and almost all of the country's coverage.
The Stobie pole is the cleanest single-object clue in Australia. Look for a power pole made of two steel I-beams with a concrete slab poured between them, grey and square rather than round and wooden. It is a South Australian invention, it is still what the state builds with, and it barely crosses the border in either direction. Failing that, this is the state of gulfs: two deep inlets cut into the coast either side of Adelaide, which is a shape worth knowing on the map as well as in a photograph.
Red soil, spinifex, termite mounds and long unsealed roads put you here first, but the inland of Western Australia and Queensland look much the same, so confirm rather than assume. Two things confirm it. Postcodes start 08, so an address here is written with a leading zero, and this is the only place in the country where an open road is posted at 130 km/h. The Territory is also the answer to the top of the map: it reaches the Arafura Sea at Darwin and holds Uluru near its southern border.
Everything west of the straight line at 129 degrees east is this one state. There is no ambiguity about the border, and there is a great deal of state to fill: about 2.5 million square kilometres, more than Greenland, with almost everybody in it living in the southwestern corner around Perth. The other half of that fact is what makes it hard on the ground rather than on the map, since the wheatbelt and the Pilbara look like the rest of inland Australia and the clue has to come from an address or a plate.
A rectangle of land the size of a large city, punched out of New South Wales a hundred kilometres inland from the coast so that the new country's capital would sit in neither Sydney nor Melbourne. On the ground it is Canberra and almost nothing else: wide planned avenues, roundabouts, national institutions and suburbs on a grid of curves. It is the smallest target in this game by a long way, so the map gives it a slightly larger clickable area than its borders cover.
Six states and two internal territories, eight in total, which is what this game asks for. The states are New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania; the territories are the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory. Australia also administers external territories such as Norfolk Island, Christmas Island and the Cocos Islands, and a third internal one, the Jervis Bay Territory, which is 70 square kilometres on the New South Wales coast.
Where the authority comes from. The six states were self-governing colonies before Federation in 1901 and kept every power they did not hand to the Commonwealth, so their powers are their own. The two territories were created by the Commonwealth and govern themselves under ordinary federal law, which federal parliament can override. In daily life the difference is small, and both territories have had their own elected parliaments for decades.
Canberra, which is in the Australian Capital Territory rather than in any state. It was built for the purpose after Federation, on land New South Wales surrendered in 1911, because Sydney and Melbourne could not agree that the other should have it. Sydney is the largest city in the country and Melbourne the second, and neither is the capital.
Western Australia, at about 2.53 million square kilometres, which is roughly a third of the continent and about four and a half times the size of France. Queensland is second at about 1.73 million and the Northern Territory third at about 1.35 million. The smallest state is Tasmania at about 68,000 square kilometres, and the smallest jurisdiction of all is the Australian Capital Territory at about 2,400.
New South Wales, with around eight million, followed by Victoria with around seven million and Queensland with around five and a half. Those three hold about four Australians in five. At the other end the Northern Territory has around 250,000 people, fewer than a single outer suburb of Sydney, spread over a fifth of the continent.
Look for a postcode first, because the leading digit names the state: 2 New South Wales, 3 Victoria, 4 Queensland, 5 South Australia, 6 Western Australia, 7 Tasmania and 08 the Northern Territory, with Canberra an exception inside the 2600s. A phone number narrows it almost as fast, since 02 is New South Wales and the ACT, 03 is Victoria and Tasmania, 07 is Queensland and 08 is the three western and central jurisdictions. Number plates carry the name outright. Failing all of those, a Stobie pole means South Australia.
It has never had the population to press the case successfully. The land was South Australia's until 1911, when it was handed to the Commonwealth, and it has governed itself since 1978. A referendum on becoming a state was held in 1998 and was defeated, largely over the proposed terms rather than the principle, and statehood has been revisited several times since without a vote. Its roughly 250,000 people would make it much the smallest state.
Because they were drawn in London and Adelaide before anyone had seen the country they crossed. The 129th meridian east, which is the western border of the Northern Territory and South Australia, and the 26th parallel south between those two, were surveyed onto a map rather than found on the ground. The exceptions are in the southeast, where the Murray River separates New South Wales from Victoria and rivers and ranges carry part of the Queensland line, and that is also the part of the country the colonies actually occupied at the time.
No, there are three, and daylight saving splits them further. Eastern time covers Queensland, New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria and Tasmania; central time, half an hour behind, covers South Australia and the Northern Territory; western time, another hour and a half behind, covers Western Australia. Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia do not observe daylight saving, so for part of the year the country runs on five different clocks.
More administrative maps in the same shape: Canada Provinces, which is the other federation of a near empty continent, Argentina Provinces, South Africa Provinces and India States. If you would rather learn a country by its phone numbers, US Dialing Codes and Canada Dialing Codes ask the same question a different way.
