Australia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
This Australian trivia quiz has 148 free questions with answers and runs from the obvious to the obscure. The easy end covers the things everyone half-knows — the capital, the reef, the marsupials, Federation. Past that it gets specific: the Dutch ship that made landfall in 1606, the governor who pushed the modern name of the country, the fence that runs 5,614 kilometres to the Great Australian Bight, and the 1932 military operation that lost to a flock of emus. There is a full section on food and culture too, because that is where the country's trivia is at its strangest: why a lamington carries a governor's name, which racehorse gave the Tim Tam its name, what a jumbuck is, and how a barbecue outside a polling booth became the democracy sausage. Every question here was written against a primary or encyclopaedic source and carries the sentence it came from, so the answers hold up when someone at the table argues. Use it for a pub round, an Australia Day quiz, or a classroom.
30 of 148 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital city of Australia?
Canberra
Canberra was chosen in 1908 as a compromise site between rival Sydney and Melbourne; the planned city in the Australian Capital Territory became the seat of Parliament in 1927.
Q 02Which of these animals is a marsupial native to Australia?
Koala
Koalas are marsupials: the tiny newborn joey crawls into its mother's pouch and stays inside for about six months before it starts on eucalyptus leaves.
Q 03Which explorer made the first recorded European navigation of the strait between Australia and New Guinea?
Luís Vaz de Torres
Luís Vaz de Torres sailed through the strait in 1606, but Spain kept the discovery secret for more than 150 years; the passage now carries his name.
Q 04Which giant sandstone formation in Australia's Northern Territory is sacred to the Anangu people?
Uluru
Uluru rises 348 metres above the surrounding plain in the Northern Territory; the Anangu are its traditional owners, and its red colour comes from iron oxide in the arkose sandstone.
Q 05What is the upper house of Australia's federal parliament called?
The Senate
The Senate gives every state the same number of seats whatever its population, a design meant to protect the less populous states.
Q 06The crown-of-thorns, which eats coral on the Great Barrier Reef, is what kind of animal?
Starfish
Starfish of this spiny species strip living coral from the reef, so divers cull them one at a time by injecting vinegar or bile salts.
Q 07Sydney Opera House architect Jorn Utzon came from which country?
Denmark
Denmark's Jørn Utzon won the 1957 design competition but resigned in 1966 amid rows over rising costs, seven years before the building opened.
Q 08Which arid Australian region carries the world's longest dead-straight stretch of railway?
The Nullarbor
The Nullarbor, its name from the Latin for 'no tree', is so flat that the transcontinental railway runs hundreds of kilometres across it without a bend.
Q 09What is the highest mountain on the Australian mainland, rising to 2,228 metres?
Mount Kosciuszko
Mount Kosciuszko in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales is the mainland's highest peak at 2,228 metres; Paweł Strzelecki named it in 1840 after Polish patriot Tadeusz Kościuszko.
Q 10Which island lies across Bass Strait from the Australian mainland?
Tasmania
Tasmania lies about 240 kilometres south of Victoria across Bass Strait, a drowned land bridge: before seas rose after the last ice age, people could walk there from the mainland.
Q 11Which name did 17th-century Dutch charts give the Australian continent?
New Holland
New Holland (Nova Hollandia) was the name Dutch charts gave the continent from the 1640s; the Dutch mapped its northern and western coasts but never settled.
Q 12Which navigator popularised the name 'Australia' after sailing right around the continent in 1803?
Matthew Flinders
Matthew Flinders completed the first close circumnavigation of the continent in 1803 and championed the name Australia; his 1814 account was nonetheless titled A Voyage to Terra Australis.
Q 13Which governor of New South Wales formally recommended adopting the name 'Australia' in December 1817?
Lachlan Macquarie
Q 21What shape are the droppings a wombat leaves to mark its territory?
Cubes
Cubes take shape in the last stretch of the wombat's gut, where stiffer and stretchier sections of the intestine wall squeeze the drying droppings into flat-sided blocks.
Q 22Which island off Western Australia is famous for its quokkas?
Rottnest Island
Rottnest Island's quokkas were mistaken for large rats by Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh, who named it 'rat's nest' (Rottnest) in 1696.
Q 23The last thylacine died on 7 September 1936; since 1996 that date has been marked as what?
National Threatened Species Day
Lachlan Macquarie urged London to adopt the name Australia in a December 1817 dispatch; the Admiralty agreed in 1824 that the continent should officially carry it.
Q 14On 26 January 1788 the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove under which commander?
Arthur Phillip
Arthur Phillip reached Botany Bay first, judged it unfit for a settlement within days and moved the fleet north to Sydney Cove, where he raised the flag on 26 January 1788.
Q 15Which neighbour sent delegates to the 1890 Australian federation conference but never joined?
New Zealand
New Zealand's own commission of inquiry advised unanimously against joining in 1901, yet Australia's constitution act still names it as a possible state.
Q 16How many states make up Australia's federation?
Six
Six states grew out of six British colonies; the Northern Territory could have become the seventh, but its voters narrowly rejected statehood in a 1998 referendum.
Q 17Roughly how long ago did the first people reach Australia?
About 60,000 years ago
About 60,000 years ago fits most estimates, which run from 50,000 to 65,000 years; seas were much lower then, so far less open water lay between Asia and Australia.
Q 18Whose 1770 voyage brought the word 'kangaroo' into English?
James Cook
James Cook's expedition wrote down gangurru, the Guugu Yimithirr name for one kind of kangaroo, in 1770 while the ship lay beached for repairs after striking the Great Barrier Reef.
Q 19Which egg-laying Australian mammal has venomous spurs on the male's hind legs?
Platypus
The platypus has a duck-like bill, lays eggs, and the male carries venom in ankle spurs; when a specimen reached London in 1799, naturalist George Shaw suspected a hoax.
Q 20Which large rainforest bird of north Queensland has a horn-like casque and a dagger-like claw?
Southern cassowary
The southern cassowary is the rainforest's gardener: it swallows fallen fruit whole and spreads the seeds of dozens of trees whose fruit is too big for other animals.
National Threatened Species Day marks the death of the last known thylacine in a Hobart zoo in 1936, barely two months after the species was finally given legal protection.
Q 24In 1932 the army was sent into the Western Australian wheatbelt to cull rampaging emus with which weapon?
Lewis machine guns
Major G.P.W. Meredith's soldiers used Lewis machine guns in the 1932 'Emu War'; the emus scattered into small groups and the cull was abandoned as an embarrassment.
Q 25The Dingo Fence finishes on cliffs above which body of water?
The Great Australian Bight
The Great Australian Bight's clifftops are where the fence ends, thousands of kilometres from its start at Jimbour in Queensland; it was built to keep dingoes out of south-eastern grazing country.
Q 26In which South Australian mining town do many residents live in underground homes called dugouts?
Coober Pedy
Coober Pedy, about 850 kilometres north of Adelaide, calls itself the opal capital of the world; summer heat drove residents to cut homes and even churches into the rock.
Q 27What nickname does the Sydney Harbour Bridge owe to its arch?
The Coathanger
The Coathanger's steel arch was built out from both shores at once by creeping cranes; the two halves met in August 1930, and the bridge opened in 1932.
Q 28Which New York crossing was roughly copied for Sydney's harbour arch?
Hell Gate Bridge
Hell Gate Bridge was the model for Sydney's general design; builder Dorman Long also put up Newcastle's look-alike Tyne Bridge, which opened four years before Sydney's.
Q 29On which day of the year is the Melbourne Cup run?
First Tuesday of November
The Melbourne Cup is run at Flemington Racecourse on the first Tuesday of November; first held in 1861, it is a 3,200-metre handicap and Cup Day is a Melbourne public holiday.
Q 30What did the winner of the very first Melbourne Cup receive in 1861?
A gold pocket watch
A gold pocket watch, hand-beaten, went to the winner along with 710 gold sovereigns; the first proper trophy, a silver bowl made in England, did not appear until 1865.