Australian Landmarks Trivia Quiz

Answer: Mount Warning

In 1770 when Captain James Cook was exploring the east coast of Australia, and more particularly the area located near what we now recognise as the coastal border between New South Wales and Queensland, he almost had a disaster on the sharp reefs that lurked everywhere in the nearby waters.

He had to quickly change course to avoid the possibility of his ship, "The Endeavour", being wrecked. As a result, he gave the name Mount Warning to the distinctively shaped mountain that could be seen in the distance, to serve as an alarm alert for all future ships in the area.

This mountain and surrounding area is now listed and protected as one of the Australian National Heritage sites. It is also recorded in the United Nations World Heritage lists. Long before the arrival of Europeans to Australia, the Bundjalung indigenous people used this mountain for various ceremonial rites.

They referred to it as Wollumbin, a name meaning "cloud-catcher". Its alternative name was "fighting chief of the mountain". Perhaps this is in reference to the fact that Mount Warning is a caldera, all that remains of a huge volcano that once dominated this landscape.

Answer: Todd

This river is as dry as a bone for 95% of every year. It rises in the MacDonnell ranges, makes its way through the centre of Alice Springs, and then away on its long journey inland, through part of the very dry Simpson Desert, before "emptying" into Lake Eyre.

This is an area of Australia that is also dry for the majority of the time. In other words, the Todd river is the river you have when you don't have a river at all. It's just a dry bed. But do they hold races on it I hear you ask? Why of course they do. Such is the peculiar Australian sense of humour that every year a regatta is held on the Todd - a dry one.

This is called the Henley-on-Todd regatta and the event draws thousands of people from all over Australia. Did I mention our peculiar sense of humour? Competitors line up gravely beside their boats, climb aboard with due ceremony, and then lift up those boats - which have no bottoms - with a rousing cheer, and take off for the lick of their lives, holding their bottomless boats, down the length of the course of the dry regatta on the non-existent river.

In fact, this annual event is insured AGAINST water in the river bed, a peculiarity that is somewhat understandable, given the design of the boats.

Answer: Jenolan Caves

The Jenolan Caves are found in the Blue Mountains, a mountainous area of New South Wales. They are comprised of extraordinarily lovely calcite formations that are shown off to their best by strategically placed lighting here and there. Scientists have estimated the caves to be at least 350 million years old, yet still they continue to exist and develop today, giving our fleeting lives a glimpse of a timelessness that is hard to conceive.

The original Aboriginal people who inhabited this area of Australia believed that the waters running through the caves held curative properties, and gently carried their ill loved ones deep into the heart of the caves to be bathed in these waters.

The Jenolan Caves are just so beautiful that it's hard to describe them in words, but it's more than that somehow.

A strange and peaceful serenity creeps over you when entering them, one that is almost spiritual in its effect.

Answer: Opal

Coober Pedy is located 850 kilometres north of Adelaide, South Australia, in a roasting hot, incredibly dry, extremely unappealing, treeless area of this country. The small township itself in 2011 had a population of 853 men, 743 women, a few suicidal goannas and 1,000,000 lost dreams.

The picture you see to your right are mining shafts, Hell holes in the ground. Coober Pedy has seventy of these fields spread over a wide area. It is the biggest supplier of opals in the world. The opals can go hang as far as I'm concerned. Nobody in their right mind would want to live out there. Those who do are rewarded financially if they strike it lucky and are paid big money by the mining company to stay there and work in the mines. So hot is it in this place that people live in houses under the ground. Even the local churches are built underground.

It they remained on top of the ground, they'd all be closer to Hell than Heaven in the terrible heat in this place. Oh my goodness, they actually advertise interesting attractions for Coober Pedy as the undergound mines, the sole tree which was built out of scrap metal - and the graveyard.

Answer: Cape Byron

Vice-Admiral John Byron (1723-1786) was known by his peers as Foul-Weather Jack because of his propensity for sailing into extremely bad weather during the course of his ocean voyages. Captain Cook (1728-1779) named Cape Byron on his journey of discovery up the east coast of Australia in 1770 after his fellow seaman, and not, as many people think, after Foul-Weather Jack's wild and reckless grandson, Lord Byron, who lived from 1788 until 1824.

Not that you can tell from this old photograph, but the beautiful Cape Byron today has an incredibly lovely view up and down the east coast of our land as far as the eye can see. Yet, there was a price to pay. Where once serene wilderness was all that could be experienced from this vantage point, a place where one could sit and dream for hours in happy solitude, today the nearby town of Byron Bay, and Cape Byron by default, is bursting at the seams with houses, motels, high rise apartments, discos, supermarket, pubs, thousands of jostling tourists all year round, noise, loud music - and developers as far as the eye can now see instead. I lived there for ten years from the late 1970s, and, at that stage, it was still a relatively sleepy fishing village with a population of only a couple of thousand people. Today, sadly, it's more of a three ring circus. Obviously one cannot halt progress and development, but Cape Byron and its surrounds will forever remain a glaring testament to unchecked and reckless development gone wrong. Perhaps it should have been named after the poet Lord Byron after all.

Answer: Barossa Valley

The Barossa Valley wine industries were noted right from the beginning as being different from the rest of Australia's blossoming wineries, in that they were established by German settlers in this country, rather than those from Britain. Following persecution in their own country, many of these far-sighted Germans wine developers, particularly so from the Prussian province of Silesia, had fled to the safety of Australia in the early 1800s.

A South Australian company, wanting to develop this area of our nation with any form of agricultural industry, chartered three ships to bring over 500 of these freedom seeking settlers. Following various attempts at growing other crops, it would be the grape growing achievements in this area in the Barossa Valley that gave birth to our large and successful wine industry. Now into the 21st century, the list of wines produced from the Barossa Valley are more than impressive, and are exported all over the world.

They include Penfolds, Peter Lehmann, Orlando Wines, Yalumba and many others. Grape varities grown include Cabernet, Sauvignon, Riesling, Chardonnay, and Shiraz just to name a few.

Answer: The Pinnacles

Amazingly so, the Pinnacles are actually the remains of compressed seashells from a period when this entire area was under the ocean millions of years ago. There they sit, these strange sentinels of another time long gone, with nothing around them but whispering, shifting sands.

It's a rather spooky feeling really, but at the same time - no, it's just plain spooky. Every so often, you'll come across one which also has the long dead remains of old giant tree roots hanging from its sides. This gives an even eerier effect, making them look a little like zombies waiting to be brought back to life. Astonishingly so, most Australians, except for a small handful of Aboriginal people, and a few passing emus and kangaroos, had never heard of the Pinnacles until early in the 1960s, such is their isolation from populated areas. Once "discovered" however, the tourists began to pour in, and they haven't stopped coming since. Late in the afternoons, as the sun begins to set each day and play over the Pinnacles, eerie shadowy shapes begin to flit around these mysterious guardians of the past, an altogether unsettling experience if you're of a superstitious mind.

Not that I am - oh drat! I just broke a mirror. Seven years of bad luck!

Answer: Eaglehawk Neck

People actually live on this tiny isthmus. The 2006 Australian census revealed that 269 people inhabited this rather hazardous mini stretch of land which faces the open sea on one side, and a large body of water on the other. It seems to be somewhat equivalent to walking the plank, as the ocean in that part of Tasmania is particularly dangerous. The notorious Port Arthur prison was built on that Tasmanian Peninsula during the 18th century, a place renowned for its harsh treatment of convicts. The only means of escape was across that narrow isthmus which was fiercely guarded by half-starved large dogs placed at intervals across its length. Nor were the waters safe under any circumstances as these were teeming with man-eating sharks.

Today that old prison is now considered a World Heritage site. Its empty cells and silent corridors seem to reek of despair and desperation - and that's just from the tourists who get lost there. Sorry, I couldn't resist that. The prison really is said to be haunted by the tortured and lost souls who lived out their terrible lives within its walls, separated forever from the world by a small and narrow isthmus which was virtually impossible to cross. The worst thing perhaps about all this is that, of the 1646 graves that remain on the peninsula, only a small handful are marked. These were those of the guards who died there. The rest belong to the convicts, and cry out there still today, as nameless and forgotten as the poor convicts that rest within their sorrowful confines.

Answer: Three Sisters

These rocks, comprised of sandstone, were formed over millions of years by the erosive action of wind and rain. They were initially part of the one whole, but now stand as stark reminders of the power of nature. According to Aboriginal legend, three sisters named Meehni, Wimlah and Gunnedoo were once members of the local Katoomba tribe. Forbidden by the laws within their tribe, they made the mistake of falling love with three strapping young lads from another neighbouring tribe of aboriginals. What with one thing and another, and although the girls agreed to be obedient to the law, those passionate young men weren't at all pleased with the decision and began scheming to kidnap them. When a Katoomba elder was told of this, he turned the three girls into that famous rock formation we know as the Three Sisters. This was done to protect the girls from the passion of their swains, but unfortunately in the violent battle that ensued between the two tribes, that elder was bumped off - and nobody knew how to turn the three sisters back into human form again.

Did I pique your interest with this legend? Now, sadly, I have to inform you that there is a very strong possibility that this was not an Aboriginal Dreamtime story after all. A local historian of note, Dr Martin Thomas, has recently revealed in his 2004 work "The Artificial Horizon: imagining the Blue Mountains" that this so called Aboriginal legend was simply a yarn created by a non-Aboriginal local man back in the 1920s to drum up trade and encourage visitors into the area. I call that downright mean, don't you? Not the fact that some idiot back in the 1920s made the entire tale up, but that one of our beautiful Aboriginal legends has turned out to be completely untrue. They'll be telling us there's no Santa Claus next.

Answer: Shark Bay

Shark Bay is located 800 kilometres north of Western Australia's capital city, Perth. It covers a coastline of almost 1,500 kilometres and an area of 10,000 square kilometres, yet in this entire massive region, it only has a population of some 1,000 people. It consists of an impressive array of peninsulas, islands and steep, soaring cliffs. The beautiful but lonely Zuytdorp Cliffs, pictured in this photo, are just one of these.

Shark Bay is incredibly important as a zoological centre. It is home to a huge number of dugongs, bottlenose dolphins, two dozen Australian mammals (all under threat of extinction), an amazing 250 diferent families of birds, and 150 separate reptiles. Included in the amazing array of over 300 different sea creatures are beautiful whales, stingrays, and those frightening sharks. Shark Bay has many more features than those listed here, some of which are of significant importance to the rest of the world. This includes, for example, the largest seagrass bank on the face of the globe. Thankfully this unique area can never be destroyed or developed or inundated with visitors. It is now listed as part of one of our most precious National Parks, and is way too isolated to tempt developers of any sort, no matter how greedy they may be.