Australia

Location: Indian Pacific Oceans
Population: 21,215,250
Capital: Canberra
Language Spoken: Original language is English. Many other languages are retained by minorities, including Italian, German, Greek, Vietnamese, Chinese dialects and Aboriginal languages.
Country Dialling Code: +61
Currency & Money: Australian Dollar (AUD; symbol A$)
Exchange facilities are available for all incoming and outgoing flights at all international airports in Australia. International-class hotels will exchange major currencies for guests. It is recommended that visitors change money at the airport or at city banks.
Major credit cards are accepted. Use may be restricted in small towns and outback areas, as is ATM availability. Traveller cheques are widely accepted in major currencies at banks or large hotels. However, some banks may charge a fee for cashing traveller's cheques. To avoid additional exchange rate charges, travellers are advised to take traveller's cheques in a major currency.
Weather: Australia is in the southern hemisphere and the seasons are opposite to those in Europe and North America. There are two climatic zones: the tropical zone (in the north above the Tropic of Capricorn) and the temperate zone. The tropical zone (consisting of 40% of Australia) has two seasons, summer (‘wet') and winter (‘dry'), while the temperate zone has all four seasons.Spring to summer: Warm or hot everywhere, tropical in the north, and warm to hot with mild nights in the south.Autumn to winter: Northern and central Australia have clear warm days, cool nights; the south has cool days with occasional rain but still plenty of sun. Snow is totally confined to mountainous regions of the southeast.Drought is becoming more widespread with southeast Queensland, Victoria and South Australia all badly affected.

Sydney Opera House

The Sydney Opera House is an expressionist modern design, with a series of large precuts concrete 'shells', each taken from a hemisphere of the same radius, forming the roofs of the structure, set on a monumental podium. Planning for the Sydney Opera House began in the late 1940s when Eugene Goossens, the Director of the NSW State Conservatorium of Music, lobbied for a suitable venue for large theatrical productions. The normal venue for such productions, the Sydney Town Hall, was not considered large enough. By 1954, Goossens succeeded in gaining the support of NSW Premier Joseph Cahill, who called for designs for a dedicated opera house. It was also Goossens who insisted that Bennelong Point be the site for the Opera House. Cahill had wanted it to be on or near Wynyard Railway Station in the north-west of the CBD. The building covers 1.8 hectares (4.5 acres) of land, and is 183 meters (605 ft) long and 120 meters (388 ft) wide at its widest point. It is supported on 588 concrete piers sunk up to 25 meters below sea level. Its power supply is equivalent to that of a town of 25,000 people, and is distributed by 645 kilometers of electrical cable. The roofs of the House are covered in a subtle chevron pattern with 1,056,006 glossy white and matte cream Swedish-made tiles, though from a distance the shells appear a brilliant white. Despite their self-cleaning nature, the tiles are still subject to periodic maintenance and replacement. The Concert Hall is contained within the western group of shells, the Opera Theatre within the eastern group. The scale of the shells was chosen to reflect the internal height requirements, rising from the low entrance spaces, over the seating areas and up to the high stage towers. The minor venues (Drama Theatre, Playhouse, and The Studio) are located beneath the Concert Hall, as part of the western shell group. A much smaller group of shells set to one side of the Monumental Steps houses the Benn long Restaurant. Although the roof structures of the Sydney Opera House are commonly referred to as shells (as they are in this article), they are in fact not shells in a strictly structural sense, but are instead precuts concrete panels supported by precuts concrete ribs. Apart from the tile of the shells, and the glass curtain walls of the foyer spaces, the building's exterior is largely clad with aggregate panels composed of pink granite quarried in Tarana. Significant interior surface treatments also include off-form concrete, Australian white birch plywood supplied from Watcheye in northern New South Wales, and brush box glulam. The competition was launched by Cahill on 13 September 1955 and received a total of 233 entries from 32 countries. The criteria specified a large hall seating 3000 and a small hall for 1200 people, each to be designed for different uses including full-scale operas, orchestral and choral concerts, mass meetings, lectures, ballet performances and other presentations. The winner, announced in 1957, was Jørn Utzon, a Danish architect. The prize was £5,000. Utzon visited in Sydney in 1957 to help supervise the project. His office moved to Sydney in February 1963. The Fort Macquarie Tram Depot, occupying the site at the time of these plans, was demolished in 1958, and formal construction of the Opera House began in March, 1959. The project was built in three stages. Stage I (1959–1963) consisted of building the upper podium. Stage II (1963–1967) saw the construction of the outer shells. Stage III consisted of the interior design and construction (1967–73).