Five Things You Probably Don’t Know About Australia

Most foreigners imagine Australia as a laid-back country with lots of sunshine, great beaches, excellent sports and more kangaroos than you can shake a stick at. Yet, you might be surprised at how many everyday things were invented in Australia, or by Australians.

To prove the point, here are five Australian surprises:

1. The Secret Ballot. Henry Chapman of Melbourne invented a secret ballot system in 1855. In 1856, the independent colonies of South Australia and Victoria adopted this secret ballot system, soon known around the world as the Australian Ballot. New Zealand followed in 1870, the UK in 1872, and Canada in 1874. The first US presidential election in to use Australian Ballot was in 1892.

2. The black box’ flight recorder. In 1954, Aussie David Warren conceived the idea of a protected recording of the flight crew's conversation that would survive a crash. He wrote a report entitled A Device for Assisting Investigation into Aircraft Accidents. As a demonstration was needed, the first device was designed and built, using steel wire as the recording medium. It was fully automatic for fit-and-forget operation with a "memory" mechanism that stored four hours of pilot voice and instrument readings, at the rate of eight per second up to the moment of an accident. This original demonstration unit is now displayed in the Science Museum, Melbourne.

3. World’s first movie. Hollywood? Paris? London? No, the world's first feature length film -The Story of the Kelly Gang - was produced in Australia in 1906. This Tait brothers' production toured Australia for more than twenty years, and also was shown in New Zealand and Britain. Earlier, in 1892, the Salvation Army’s Limelight Department in Melbourne produced Soldiers Of The Cross, a major multimedia production with 3,000 feet of film and 200 coloured glass slides. Around 2000 people attended the premiere at the Melbourne Town Hall on September 13, 1900. In 1902 Herbert Booth took it around the world. In that same year, Cecil B. De Mille saw Soldiers of the Cross in the United States. It ignited his imagination and he went on to become creator of such Hollywood blockbusters as The Ten Commandments (1923) and The Sign of the Cross (1932).)

4. Pick the Aussie in US TV drama Without a Trace. Easy: its star, Anthony LaPaglia! Adelaide-born Anthony won a Golden Globe Award as FBI agent Jack Malone, and an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor playing Daphne Moon’s brother Simon in the sitcom Frasier. In the 1980s LaPaglia was a soccer goalkeeper for Adelaide City and West Adelaide. (Actually, there are two Aussies in Without a Trace. The other is Poppy Montgomery, who plays FBI agent, Samantha Spade).

5. Immigrate to Oz in a couple of hours. Well, not yet: but Australian scientists are working on air-breathing supersonic combustion ramjet engines called Scramjets. These could make possible two-hour flights from Melbourne to London. In a two-nation experiment that could provide a major boost to scramjet technology, Australian and U.S. defence interests will conduct a controlled scramjet experiment at Mach 10, or about 11,000km an hour, at Woomera, South Australia.

Bonus Australian surprise: In 2001, Assyl Haidar launched LIVEINaustralia.com (LIA), an innovative internet-based company that streamlines the application process for Australian migration visas. Up until now, more than 80,000 people from more than 200 countries have used LIA’s services to maximise their chance of success. On top of that, the company has a database of over 835,000 categorised prospects.

Warning: now you know more about Australia, you might end up moving there!