Since we're asking questions about you, could you tell us about the weather where you are? I tend to think of Australia as one big desert- or scrub-type biome, but I know that can't be true considering how big the continent is and the fact that the southern part is closer to Antarctica than the northern US is to the arctic, and it gets pretty freakin' cold in the northern US. (Also, what is it like culturally to have winter while most other prominent first-world countries are on summer break?)
Culturally there are two things that bug me:
Online advertisements that say “Coming this Summer!” instead of a month and people commenting on my Summer-relevant posts (eg put water out for wildlife and prevent heatstroke) saying “This is really confusing because it’s winter here.” (Oh America, it’s not always about you.)
I know most of the world sees Australia like this:
When our climate map really looks more like this:
And yes, you may notice, that is basically a stinkin’ frickin’ hot desert taking up most of the middle, but it’s our desert and we’re proud of it, thank you very much.
While we might be mostly desert, that’s not where the majority of our population lives. Most of our population is coastal, where the weather is marginally less murderous, but you can still find plenty of cyclones up north and black ice down south.
Up north we have a tropical zone, which includes some (relatively small) rainforests, mangroves and savanna.
Along the coats we have more woodlands and grasslands.
And we even have an alpine region. That’s right, Australia gets snow.
(Alpine National Park R.A. Stanley)
And Tasmania, the little island on the bottom that the world seems to forget about, gets super fricking cold.
I am currently residing in the so-called ‘bushfire’ one of the first map. We’re known for having very variable weather. It’s neither that hot nor cold here. Our average Summer high temperature is around 26 Celsius, and our winter lows around 6 Celsius. Our ‘hot’ days are about 32 Celsius, and it’s extremely rare for us to hit 40 like some parts of the country do. Likewise, it rarely gets below freezing here.
My Granny used to say is was similar to England but warmer than Scotland, if that helps you at all.
Now, an Ecologist could go into much more detail about the Eastern mountain ranges and how they cast a rain shadow over the rest of the continent, how the old geological soils have affected the vegetation and so on, but I’ve only given you an overview and thrown some pretty pictures in front of you to show you how diverse our continent can be.