1. Australia's population will hit 24 million at 12.51am on Tuesday, AEDT. Here's a photo of some of us voting.
2. Our prime minister went for a swim one day in 1967 and was never seen again. We named a pool after him.
3. Another prime minister, Bob Hawke, once held a world record for drinking a yard glass of beer in 11 seconds. Here he is having another crack in 2012.
View this video on YouTube
4. Found off the coast of northern Australia, the box jellyfish has the most poisonous venom in the world. It will fuck you right up.
5. Australia is the largest island and the smallest and flattest continent on Earth, as well as the driest inhabited continent.
[Note: An earlier version of this post left out the word 'inhabited']
6. Before the New South Wales premier could officially open the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, a man on a horse came up and did it for him.
7. Australia's first police force was made up of the best behaved convicts.
8. Australia's first nude beach, Maslin beach in South Australia, plays host to the annual nude beach olympics.
9. In 1838, 300 women flashed their bums at the governor of Tasmania.
10. Wombats poo cubes.
11. The emu and the kangaroo feature on our coat of arms because they can't walk backwards.
12. Speaking of emus, we fought a war against them in 1932. We lost.
13. Australia recently had four prime ministers in three years because Australian politics is batshit insane.
14. While Australia has the world’s most venomous spiders, there have been actually been zero spider bite-related fatalities since 1979.
15. We invented cask wine. But here it's called goon and it's heaps of fun at parties.
16. Before Europeans arrived, there were between 350,000 and 1 million Indigenous people here, speaking between 350 and 750 distinct Aboriginal languages. The British pretended they didn't exist.
17. There is a place in Western Australia where space is closer than the nearest town.
18. Australia's koala population is being ravaged by chlamydia.
19. At 24,000 square km, South Australia boasts the world’s largest cattle station, Anna Creek. It’s bigger than Israel.
20. There are so many camels in the middle of Australia that we have exported them to the Middle East. The feral camel problem got so bad we started shooting them from helicopters.
21. When a kangaroo is born, it is blind, hairless and only a few centimetres long.
22. We are the world's biggest gamblers.
23. Australia’s cyclones were originally named after politicians a weatherman disliked. As a result, he was able to report that the pollies were “causing great distress” or “wandering aimlessly about the Pacific”.
24. Australia has 10,685 beaches, meaning you could visit a new beach every day for more than 29 years. They're all fucking lovely.
