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Australia's Landmark Facts

• Australia's most famous landmark is Uluru or Ayers Rock, the biggest monolith (single block of stone) in the world, 348 m high and 9 km around.

• Uluru is the tip of a huge bed of coarse sand laid down in an inland sea some 600 million years ago.

• Lake Eyre is Australia's lowest point, 15 m below sea level. It is also its biggest lake, but it is normally dry and fills only once every 50 years or so.

• The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest structure made by living things.

• Nullarbor plain is a vast, dry plain in southern Australia. Its name comes from the Latin nulla arbor (`no tree').

• Shark Bay is famous for its sharks and dolphins.

• Shark Bay is also famous for its stromatolites, the world's oldest fossils, dating back 3.5 billion years. These are pizza-like mats made by colonies of blue-green algae.

• The Murray-Darling River is Australia's longest river (2739 km long).

• The Great Barrier Reef is a coral reef off the coast of Queensland in northwest Australia.

• The Great Barrier Reef is the world's biggest coral reef, over 2000 km long.