Australia vs United Kingdom

Australia is 32 times larger than United Kingdom — 7,741,220 against 243,610 km². United Kingdom is 2.5 times more populous than Australia — 69,487,000 against 27,614,411 people.

Side by side

Population density

United Kingdom is 80 times more densely populated than Australia — 285 against 4 people per km². Density is where area and population interact, and it often reverses the impression the headline figures give — a large country with a small population can feel emptier than a small crowded one by an enormous margin.

Practical differences

• Different currencies: the Australian dollar and the British pound.
• Australia spans 5 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — Oceania and Europe.

Australia

The sixth-largest country in the world and the only one that covers an entire continent. The Great Barrier Reef runs about 2,300 km and is the largest structure made by living organisms on Earth, visible from orbit. Around eighty percent of its mammals, reptiles and flowering plants exist nowhere else. Melbourne and Sydney are within roughly a hundred thousand people of each other, and which counts as the largest city depends on where the boundary is drawn.

United Kingdom

Made up of Great Britain, the north-east of Ireland and around 6,000 smaller islands. No point in the UK is more than about 113 km from the sea. Ben Nevis, the highest point, is 1,345 m, which is modest — but the country has around 31,000 km of coastline once every inlet is counted.

Neutral facts only. Nothing here addresses politics, government, economics or which country is preferable in any respect — population is the one figure that dates, and it carries its year.