Portal:Australia/Featured picture/2007
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[edit] Featured pictures in 2007
- Week 1
New Year's Eve in Australia is celebrated with public events in most major centres. Celebrations typically include substantial fireworks displays and musical entertainment. The New Year's Eve event in Sydney is one of the largest celebrations in the world, with in excess of one million people gathering at vantage points around Sydney Harbour to view a fireworks centred on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Photo credit: Kvasir
- Week 2
Blue Lake is a large lake located in an extinct volcanic caldera in Mount Gambier. It is known as Waawor in the local Aboriginal language. During summer and the surrounding months, the lake takes on a vibrant blue colour, returning to a colder steely-grey colour for winter. The exact cause of this phenomenon is still a matter of conjecture but it is generally considered likely that it revolves around the warming of the surface layers of the lake during the summer months to around 25 degrees celsius, causing calcium carbonate to precipitate out of solution and enabling micro-crystallites of calcium carbonate to form. This results in a scatter of the blue wavelength of sunlight. The movement of planktonic life-forms within the lake during the seasons and during the day may also play a part in the visibility changes.
Photo credit: Aaron Allen
- Week 3
The Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) is located on the cultural boulevard of North Terrace in Adelaide. With a large collection of more than 30,000 works of art and more than 500,000 visitors annually, the AGSA is renowned for its leading collections of Indigenous Australian and colonial art, as well as for its innovative exhibitions. Located adjacent to State Library of South Australia, the South Australian Museum and the University of Adelaide, AGSA is part of Adelaide's cultural precinct. The gallery was established in 1881, and has existed at its current location since 1897.
Photo credit: K. Lindstrom
- Week 4
The Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) is located on the cultural boulevard of North Terrace in Adelaide. With a large collection of more than 30,000 works of art and more than 500,000 visitors annually, the AGSA is renowned for its leading collections of Indigenous Australian and colonial art, as well as for its innovative exhibitions. Located adjacent to State Library of South Australia, the South Australian Museum and the University of Adelaide, AGSA is part of Adelaide's cultural precinct. The gallery was established in 1881, and has existed at its current location since 1897.
Photo credit: K. Lindstrom
- Week 5
Heard Island and McDonald Islands is an Australian territory comprised of uninhabited, barren islands in the Southern Ocean, about two-thirds of the way from Madagascar to Antarctica. The islands have been a territory of Australia since 1947 and became a World Heritage Site in 1997. It contains the only two active volcanoes in Australian territory, one of which, Mawson Peak, is the highest Australian mountain.
Photo credit: NASA World Wind
- Week 6
The University of Sydney, established in Sydney in 1850, is the oldest university in Australia. It is a member of Australia's "Group of Eight" Australian universities that are highly ranked in terms of their research performance, and is one of the country's most prestigious educational institutions. In 2005, the University of Sydney had 45,966 students and 2,300 (full-time equivalent) academic staff, making it the second largest in Australia. The university's main campus has Oxbridge-inspired grounds and is situated in the south-west of the Sydney central business district.
Photo credit: User:KittySaturn
- Week 7
Campbell Park, together with Russell Offices, is the headquarters of the Australian Defence Force (ADF). It is located in Canberra, the national capital of Australia, in the suburb of Campbell. The building looks eastward across the Majura Valley and Canberra International Airport and backs onto Mount Ainslie. The main offices of the Department of Defence and the ADF's administrative headquarters are located in the Russell Offices.
Photo credit: Nick Dowling
- Week 8
The Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia (RFDS, informally known as The Flying Doctors) is an air ambulance service for those living in the remote inland areas of Australia. It is a not-for-profit organisation which provides both emergency assistance and primary health care to people who cannot easily access a hospital or general practice due to the prohibitive distances of the Outback. The service, founded in 1928 by The Reverend John Flynn, also assists with distance education.
Photo credit: Hossen
- Week 9
The Pinnacles Desert is an area of unique limestone formations within within the Nambung National Park in Western Australia. The desert contains many thousands of pillars, which rise up to five metres, with shape and texture having been defined by calcification processes and erosion. Since the The Pinnacles was incorporated into the national park in the 1960s, the area has become significant tourist attraction.
Photo credit: Sean Mack
- Week 10
Yulara is an isolated town in the Northern Territory of Australia, with approximately 3,000 inhabitants. More than three quarters of the residents of Yulara are from either overseas or another Australian state. The name is derived from a local Aboriginal word for howling and dingos. Located 18 kilometres by road from world heritage site Uluru and 55 kilometres from Kata Tjuta, Yulara was created in 1984 as an infrastructure hub to support tourism to the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park.
Photo credit: Manfred Wiesinger
