Australia is the world's fifth largest country and smallest continent. It is also the lower and flatter stretch of land and driest continent. Contains more desert than any other continent in the world, two-thirds of its land being barren. It has a very short coastline to an area so large, outside the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Great Australian golf, there are very few bays along the total of 19,000 km of coastline.
The continent lacks obvious forms of relief: there are no big rivers and the mountains are to low. The highest australian peak, the Koscinsko of the the Australian Alps located on the border between South Wales and Victoria has a height of only 2.228 m, less than half the height of Mont Blanc.
The australian continent can be divided into three main regions: the Western Australian Shield or Western Plateau, the Eastern Plateau and the Great Artesian Basin. The Shield is a plateau which largely overlaps with the State of Western Australia, consisting mainly of isolated rock formations 5,703,000 million years old.
The most notable of these outcrops are Peninsula Arnhem and Kimberley Plateau in north-west. Eastern Plateau is a mountainous region with a width of about 500 km, forming the Great Dividing Range. Highest peaks have a height of only 1500 m. New England Mountains and Blue Mountains in the south have heights between 900-1500 m.