Australia

Photo: Ayers Rock

Australia's Aborigines believe their ancestors formed massive Ayers Rock, or Uluru.

Photograph by Mark Laricchia/Corbis

In a world rendered distressingly small and close quartered, its very name breathes size and distance. • Ptolemy, the ancient Greek geographer, believed there must be a great, unknown southland at the bottom of the globe. • But the Flinders Ranges, the Great Barrier Reef—what fantastic imagination could have dreamt of such wonders? • Born a British penal colony, Australia today is a land of groomed suburbs and rugged outback adventures, vast beyond dreaming, a place of endless surprise.

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