Live From Australia - Fun Facts

In preparation for my trip to Australia, I ran across these Fun Facts:
Australians are called Aussies and New Zealanders are called Kiwis. They are different so don’t get the names confused.
Australia is one of the flattest land masses on the planet, its highest point rising 7,310 feet above sea level. Australia's Great Barrier Reef, its most famous natural treasure, is built from the same Pacific hard corals as the reefs surrounding the islands of Hawaii.Australia is home to hundreds of species that exist nowhere else in the world. Some, like the duck-billed platypus, are so bizarre that initial descriptions from explorers were dismissed as delusions or fabrications.Australia's earliest European settlement was a penal colony founded by the British in Botany Bay, so convicts formed the first wave of immigrants. In 1851 gold was discovered, stimulating a gold rush. The third group to sweep into the country was sheep ranchers. Given a country settled by convicts, ranchers, gold and opal prospectors, and miners, it's not difficult to see the roots of the Aussies' rough-and-tumble, fiercely independent, wild and woolly spirit; it's a version of our own wild west frontier.