Australia

The Coral Sea Islands Territory is an external territory of Australia which comprises a group of small and mostly uninhabited tropical islands and reefs in the Coral Sea, north-east of Queensland, Australia. The only inhabited island is Willis Island. The territory covers 780,000 km (301,160 sq mi), most of which is ocean, extending east and south from the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef and includes Heralds Beacon Island, Osprey Reef, the Willis Group and fifteen other reef/island groups. Cato Island is the highest point in the Territory.

This is a list of selected Australian islands grouped by state or territory. Australia has 8,222 islands within its maritime borders.

The Arafura Sea, also known as the Arafuru Sea, lies west of the Pacific Ocean, overlying the continental shelf between Australia and Western New Guinea (also called Papua), which is the Indonesian part of the Island of New Guinea.

The Torres Strait (/ˈtɒrɪs/), also known as Zenadh Kes (pronounced [ˈzen̪ad̪ kes]), is a strait between Australia and the Melanesian island of New Guinea. It is 150 km (93 mi) wide at its narrowest extent. To the south is Cape York Peninsula, the northernmost extremity of the Australian mainland. To the north is the Western Province of Papua New Guinea. It is named after the Spanish navigator Luís Vaz de Torres, who sailed through the strait in 1606.

Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground or from a mine. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. In the United Kingdom and South Africa, a coal mine and its structures are a colliery, a coal mine is called a "pit", and above-ground mining structures are referred to as a "pit head". In Australia, "colliery" generally refers to an underground coal mine.

Coal mining has had many developments in recent years, from the early days of tunneling, digging, and manually extracting the coal on carts to large open-cut and longwall mines. Mining at this scale requires the use of draglines, trucks, conveyors, hydraulic jacks, and shearers.

A strip mall, strip center, strip plaza, shopping village or simply plaza is a type of shopping center common in North America and Australia where the stores are arranged in a row, with a footpath in front. Strip malls are typically developed as a unit and have large parking lots in front. Many of them face major traffic arterials and tend to be self-contained, with few pedestrian connections to surrounding neighborhoods. Smaller strip malls may be called mini-malls, while larger ones may be called power centers or big box centers. In 2013, The New York Times reported that the United States had 65,840 strip malls. In 2020, The Wall Street Journal wrote that in the United States, despite the continuing retail apocalypse that started in around 2010, investments and visitor numbers were increasing to strip malls. In 2024, the number of strip malls in the United States had grown to more than 68,000 nationwide.

In the United Kingdom and Ireland, such malls are called retail parks or retail outlets. They are usually located on the outskirts of towns and cities, and serve as an alternative to the high street in the UK or main street in Ireland. Retail parks have become popular due to the widespread use of cars and the ability to park close to the shops as opposed to restricted parking on high streets, many of which are pedestrianised.

The states and territories are the national subdivisions and second level of government of Australia. The states are partially sovereign, administrative divisions that are self-governing polities, having ceded some sovereign rights to the federal government. They have their own constitutions, legislatures, executive governments, judiciaries and law enforcement agencies that administer and deliver public policies and programs. Territories can be autonomous and administer local policies and programs much like the states in practice, but are still legally subordinate to the federal government.

Australia has six federated states: New South Wales (including Lord Howe Island), Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania (including Macquarie Island), Victoria, and Western Australia. Australia also has ten federal territories, out of which three are internal territories: the Australian Capital Territory, the Jervis Bay Territory, and the Northern Territory on the Australian mainland; and seven are external territories: the Ashmore and Cartier Islands, the Australian Antarctic Territory, Christmas Island, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, the Coral Sea Islands, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, and Norfolk Island that are offshore dependent territories. Every state and internal territory (except the Jervis Bay Territory) is self-governing with its own independent executive government, legislature, and judicial system, while the rest only have local government status overseen by federal departments.

The Federated States of Micronesia (/ˌmaɪkroʊˈniːʒə/ , abbreviated FSM), or simply Micronesia, is an island country in Micronesia, a region of Oceania. The federation encompasses the majority of the Caroline Islands (excluding Palau) and consists of four states—from west to east: Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, and Kosrae—that span the western Pacific just north of the equator for a longitudinal distance of almost 2,700 km (1,700 mi). Together, the states comprise around 607 islands and a combined land area of approximately 702 km or 271 sq mi.

The entire island nation lies across the northern Pacific accordingly: northeast of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, south of Guam and the Marianas, west of Nauru and the Marshall Islands, east of Palau and the Philippines, about 2,900 km (1,800 mi) north of eastern Australia, 3,400 km (2,100 mi) southeast of Japan, and some 4,000 km (2,485 mi) southwest of Honolulu of the Hawaiian Islands.

The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial relations among 44 countries, including the United States, Canada, Western European countries, and Australia, after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement until the Jamaica Accords in 1976. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent states. The Bretton Woods system required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars to within 1% of fixed parity rates, with the dollar convertible to gold bullion for foreign governments and central banks at US$35 per troy ounce of fine gold (or 0.88867 gram fine gold per dollar). It also envisioned greater cooperation among countries in order to prevent future competitive devaluations, and thus established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to monitor exchange rates and lend reserve currencies to countries with balance of payments deficits.

Preparing to rebuild the international economic system while World War II was still being fought, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied countries gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, also known as the Bretton Woods Conference. The delegates deliberated from 1 to 22 July 1944, and signed the Bretton Woods agreement on its final day. Setting up a system of rules, institutions, and procedures to regulate the international monetary system, these accords established the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which today is part of the World Bank Group. The United States, which controlled two-thirds of the world's gold, insisted that the Bretton Woods system rest on both gold and the US dollar. Soviet representatives attended the conference but later declined to ratify the final agreements, charging that the institutions they had created were "branches of Wall Street". These organizations became operational in 1945 after a sufficient number of countries had ratified the agreement. According to Barry Eichengreen, the Bretton Woods system operated successfully due to three factors: "low international capital mobility, tight financial regulation, and the dominant economic and financial position of the United States and the dollar."