Brisbane is the capital and most populous city in the Australian state of Queensland and the third most populous city in Australia. Brisbane’s metropolitan area has a population of over 2 million, and the South East Queensland urban conurbation, centred around Brisbane, encompasses a population of more than 3 million. The Brisbane central business district stands on the original European settlement and is situated inside a bend of the Brisbane River approximately 23 kilometres from its mouth at Moreton Bay. The metropolitan area extends in all directions along the floodplain of the Brisbane River valley between the bay and the Great Dividing Range. While the metropolitan area is governed by several municipalities, a large proportion of central Brisbane is governed by the Brisbane City Council which is Australia’s largest Local Government Area by population. The demonym of Brisbane is Brisbanian, but is known to be Brisbanite.

Brisbane is named after the river on which it sits which, in turn, was named after Scotsman Sir Thomas Brisbane, the Governor of New South Wales from 1821 to 1825. The first European settlement in Queensland was a penal colony at Redcliffe, 28 kilometres (17 mi) north of the Brisbane central business district, in 1824. That settlement was soon abandoned and moved to North Quay in 1825. Free settlers were permitted from 1842. Brisbane was chosen as the capital when Queensland was proclaimed a separate colony from New South Wales in 1859.

The city played a central role in the Allied campaign during World War II as the South West Pacific headquarters for General Douglas MacArthur. Brisbane has hosted many large cultural and sporting events including the 1982 Commonwealth Games, World Expo ’88 and the final Goodwill Games in 2001. Brisbane is the largest economy between Sydney and Singapore and in 2008 it was classified as a Beta− world city in the World Cities Study Group’s inventory by Loughborough University. It was also rated the 16th most livable city in the world in 2009 by The Economist.

Other Information

• Established: 1824
• Area: 5904.8 km² (2,279.9 sq mi)
• Time zone: AEST (UTC+10)
• County: Stanley
• State District: various (38)

Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia and the fifth-largest city in Australia. Adelaide has an estimated population of more than 1.2 million. The adjectival form “Adelaidean” is used in reference to the city and its residents.

Adelaide is a coastal city situated on the eastern shores of Gulf St Vincent, on the Adelaide Plains, north of the Fleurieu Peninsula, between Gulf St Vincent and the low-lying Mount Lofty Ranges. The suburbs reach roughly 20 km (12 mi) from the coast to the foothills but sprawl 100 km (62 mi) from Gawler at its northern extent to Sellicks Beach in the south.

Named in honour of Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, queen consort to King William IV, the city was founded in 1836 as the planned capital for a freely settled British province in Australia. Colonel William Light, one of Adelaide’s founding fathers, designed the city and chose its location close to the River Torrens in the area originally inhabited by the Kaurna people. Light’s design set out Adelaide in a grid layout, interspaced by wide boulevards and large public squares, and entirely surrounded by parkland. Early Adelaide was shaped by religious freedom and a commitment to political progressivism and civil liberties, which led to the moniker “City of Churches”.

As South Australia’s seat of government and commercial centre, Adelaide is the site of many governmental and financial institutions. Most of these are concentrated in the city centre along the cultural boulevard of North Terrace, King William Street and in various districts of the metropolitan area. Today, Adelaide is noted for its many festivals and sporting events, its food, wine and culture, its long beachfronts, and its large defence and manufacturing sectors. It ranks highly in terms of liveability, being listed in the Top 10 of The Economist’s World’s Most Liveable Cities index in 2010 and being ranked the most liveable city in Australia by the Property Council of Australia in 2011.

Other Information

• Population: 1,203,873 (2010)
  • Density: 659/km² (1,706.8/sq mi) (2006)
• Established: 28 December 1836
• Area: 1826.9 km² (705.4 sq mi)
• Time zone:  ACST (UTC+9:30)

Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia and the fourth most populous city in Australia. The Perth metropolitan area has an estimated population of almost 1,700,000.

The metropolitan area is located in the South West Division of Western Australia, between the Indian Ocean and a low coastal escarpment known as the Darling Range. The central business district and suburbs of Perth are situated on the banks of the Swan River. Shortly after the establishment of the port settlement of Fremantle, Perth was founded on 12 June 1829 by Captain James Stirling as the political centre of the Swan River Colony. As the business and administration centre for the resource-rich state, Perth has grown consistently faster than the national average.

Perth became known worldwide as the “City of Light” when city residents lit their house lights and streetlights as American astronaut John Glenn passed overhead while orbiting the earth on Friendship 7 in 1962. The city repeated the act as Glenn passed overhead on the Space Shuttle in 1998. Perth is tied for eighth place in The Economist‘s 2011 list of the World’s Most Livable Cities.

Other Information

• Population: 1,696,062
  • Density: 308/km² (797.7/sq mi)
• Established: 1829
• Area: 5386 km² (2,079.5 sq mi)
• Time zone: AWST (UTC+8)
• State District: Perth (and 41 others)
• Federal Division: Perth (and 10 others)

Canberra is the capital city of Australia. With a population of over 345,000, it is Australia’s largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall. The city is located at the northern end of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), 280 km (170 mi) south-west of Sydney, and 660 km (410 mi) north-east of Melbourne. A resident of Canberra is known as a “Canberran”.

The site of Canberra was selected for the location of the nation’s capital in 1908 as a compromise between rivals Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s two largest cities. It is unusual among Australian cities, being an entirely planned city. Following an international contest for the city’s design, a blueprint by the Chicago architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin was selected and construction commenced in 1913. The Griffins’ plan featured geometric motifs such as circles, hexagons and triangles, and was centred around axes aligned with significant topographical landmarks in the Australian Capital Territory.

The city’s design was heavily influenced by the garden city movement and incorporates significant areas of natural vegetation that have earned Canberra the title of the “bush capital”. The growth and development of Canberra were hindered by the World Wars and the Great Depression, which exacerbated a series of planning disputes and the ineffectiveness of a sequence of bodies that were to oversee the development of the city. The national capital emerged as a thriving city after World War II, as Prime Minister Robert Menzies championed its development and the National Capital Development Commission was formed with executive powers. Although the Australian Capital Territory is now self-governing, the federal government retains some influence through the National Capital Authority.

As the seat of the government of Australia, Canberra is the site of Parliament House, the High Court and numerous government departments and agencies. It is also the location of many social and cultural institutions of national significance, such as the Australian War Memorial, Australian National University, Australian Institute of Sport, National Gallery, National Museum and the National Library. The Australian Army’s officer corps are trained at the Royal Military College, Duntroon and the Australian Defence Force Academy is also located in the capital.

As the city has a high proportion of public servants, the federal government contributes the largest percentage of Gross State Product and is the largest single employer in Canberra. As the seat of government, the unemployment rate is lower and the average income higher than the national average, while property prices are relatively high, in part due to comparatively restricted development regulations. Tertiary education levels are higher, while the population is younger.

other Information

• Population: 358,222(31 March 2011)
• Density: 428.6/km² (1,110.1/sq mi)
• Established: 12 March 1913
• Area: 814.2 km² (314.4 sq mi)
• Time zone: AEST (UTC+10)
• State District: Molonglo, Ginninderra, Brindabella
• Federal Division: Canberra, Fraser

Hobart is the state capital and most populous city of the Australian island state of Tasmania. Founded in 1804 as a penal colony, Hobart is Australia’s second oldest capital city after Sydney. In 2009, the city had a greater area population of approximately 212,019. A resident of Hobart is known as a “Hobartian”. The city is located in the state’s south-east on the estuary of the Derwent River. The skyline is dominated by Mount Wellington at 1,271 metres (4,170 ft) high.

The city is the financial and administrative heart of Tasmania, also serving as the home port for both Australian and French Antarctic operations.

Hobart was named Australia’s 6th most sustainable city, by the Australian Conservation Foundation in 2010. For economic and social innovation, Hobart was the 11th placed in Australia in 2009, and listed as an innovation influencer city in the Innovation Cities Global Index scoring equal with Reykjavik, Katowice and Casablanca by 2thinknow.

Other Information

• Population: 214,705 (June 2010)
  • Density: 895/km² (2,318.0/sq mi)
• Established: 20 February 1804
• Area: 1357.3 km² (524.1 sq mi)
• Time zone: AEST (UTC+10)
• State District: Denison, Franklin
• Federal Division: Denison, Franklin

The hoop’s great day in the saddle followed a Boxing Day double at Randwick courtesy of Serenissima and Referees, both for Darley Australia’s head trainer, Peter Snowden.

McEvoy landed the treble and a race-to-race double on the Adam Spitzer-trained Smart Punch after wins on Chiamaka for Paul Perry and Altavilla for Snowden.

And it was Snowden who was happiest to see McEvoy enjoying a winning run.

“He’s a very hard worker and it was always going to take a little while for him to adjust to Australian racing, but we’re starting to form a good combination,” he said.

“He’s had his critics but Kerrin is riding so well at the moment and nobody deserves the success more than he does.”

Multiple suspensions have interrupted McEvoy’s return to Australia from the UK in August to be the No. 1 rider for Darley Australia and he has not only come under fire from stewards but from punters and the media alike.

McEvoy, who won this year’s Caulfield Cup on All The Good for Godolphin, took the treble in his stride and said it was crucial for him to continue working hard.

“Everything’s going well but I’ll just be keeping my head down and putting in the hours,” he said.

“It was always going to take a bit of time to re-adjust but I’m feeling very good about my riding.”

Spitzer praised McEvoy for his patient ride on Smart Punch who was held up until the last 100m in the Golden Slipper On Sale Handicap (1300m) before bursting through to defeat Triple Down by a short head.

“Kerrin was brilliant, he never panicked at any stage and when the gap came he pounced, he’s a top rider,” Spitzer said.

Smart colt Chiamaka, who started at $4.40, benefited from a perfectly rated front-running ride by McEvoy to easily account for $2.60 favourite Tinjirarni in the Caravan And Camping Show April 18-25 Handicap (1100m).

McEvoy took advantage of barrier one, driving Chiamaka to the lead.

And on straightening, Tinjirarni was travelling fourth and was looming as a danger but Chiamaka kicked in the final 200m and quickly put paid to his rivals, going on to defeat the favourite by 1 1/4 lengths.

Stable representative Nathan Perry said he expected Chiamaka to run a bold race second-up this preparation following his fifth to Putheron at Gosford on December 11 over 1100m.

“His work at home has been very good leading into this and we were quietly confident and Kerrin gave him every chance with a perfect ride,” Perry said.

Herald Sun

Defense Minister Joel Fitzgibbon says he has welcomed an Iraqi parliamentary resolution authorizing foreign troops to remain in the Gulf nation until the end of July 2009.

Fitzgibbon said Wednesday it would be up to Iraq to decide if Australian forces remain beyond that deadline.

American troops can stay until the end of 2011 under a separate security agreement.

Australia withdrew its combat troops from Iraq in June but still has a small noncombat presence in the country.

The Associated Press

Clarke has expensive tastes – buying fiancee Lara Bingle a $300,000 Aston Martin for Christmas – but he also has common sense in spades.

His rise from Pup to Top Dog is assured after he provided the batting glue (88 off 208 balls) that stuck Australia’s wonky top order together in the most important Test match of the year.

Clarke copped some flak on Boxing Day when he had compiled a painstaking 36 off 157 balls which had some MCG fans nodding off in their seats.

His cautious day-one knock included an incredible 132 dot balls, making sure he didn’t fall for South Africa’s bait of bowling wide of the wicket to induce rash shots.

With every run likely to be gold on a difficult MCG pitch and a slow outfield, Clarke made certain he was there at stumps, which is more than could be said for Michael Hussey and Andrew Symonds.

After a well-earned sleep, Clarke returned to the MCG a different man and smashed anything wide or full to the boundary with the full force of his flashing blade and scorched 52 off 51 balls Saturday morning.

Reversing his plans of the first day, Clarke decided attack was the best form of defence and quickly showed his intent by hoisting a short ball from Makhaya Ntini over the fine leg fence.

“It’s a very good example of just hanging in there,” former Test captain Mark Taylor said in television commentary.

“Yesterday (Friday) he couldn’t hit them off the square.

“It turns around as a batsman and Michael Clarke has given a great example of that in this innings.”

Clarke had gone from gritty to swashbuckling and it was only his disappearing batting partners at the other end that prevented him from scoring his first Boxing Day Test century.

Nevertheless, it was still his highest score at the MCG and an innings that could be invaluable in the context of the series.

The flashy 27-year-old was being hailed as Australia’s next Test captain before he had earned the tag – in fact, before he had even played a Test.

Now he has earned it with his toughness both on and off the field.

He has now played Test cricket under Ricky Ponting for more than four years and has all the tools of the trade to become Australia’s 43rd Test captain.

Clarke proves he has mettle to lead – Cricket – Fox Sports

The great Aussie action hero has been vanquished, felled by something close to the wince-inducing blow that Jackman’s Wolverine delivered to the crotch of an enemy mutant in the most memorable fight scene of X-Men 3. His attacker, devoid of all mercy, lets out a long and sustained giggle. Jackman wags his head as if to shake off the pain the way a wet dog shakes off water. “No more hitting Daddy in the penis,” he finally croaks.

It’s a clear, crisp Sunday afternoon in Jackman’s home town of Sydney, Australia, and Jackman — along with his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, and three-year-old daughter and assailant, Ava — is aboard a 48ft boat cutting its way across the waters of Sydney Harbour. It’s a leisurely family cruise. Jackman is loose and relaxed, his face darkened with a faint scruff of beard. He is tall, lean and unfailingly polite. The caustic edge many Australian men display — a good-natured chip on the shoulder that manifests itself in conversational jousting — is absent. Jackman’s casual graciousness seems more British, evoking more the native England of his parents than the rough-and-tumble colony of his birth.

In between amusing his daughter, Jackman gives a starboard tour of the Sydney waterfront, pointing out an oddly extravagant house with a palm tree jutting through its roof (“I’ve been in that house. Inside, it’s literally like you’re in Tahiti. Kind of cheesy”), as well as Nicole Kidman’s expansive three-storey villa. The Jackmans, he says, watched the last New Year’s Eve fireworks with Kidman, Jackman’s co-star in the drama Australia directed by Baz Luhrmann, aboard a yacht that Sting rented for the night. With Kidman’s husband, Keith Urban, on the guitar, “everyone got up and sang a song,” Jackman says. “Then a friend who was staying with me started singing Roxanne a cappella,” a decidedly ballsy move, it would seem, on Sting’s boat. “But Sting said all right, and he got up, too.” Next he points to a dazzlingly white stuccoed Victorian mansion planted on the coastline. “And that house, there? That’s where we filmed the Darwin party scene,” he says, talking about the film Australia.

Australia — and, by extension, Australia — has been a primary focus for Jackman since 2006, when the actor was tipped to replace Russell Crowe in the leading-man slot. (Crowe reportedly dropped out for financial reasons, grumbling: “I don’t do charity work for major studios.”) The second-world-war-era epic has Jackman playing a rough cowboy (or drover) who undertakes a huge cattle drive to save the ranch of a high-strung widow (that’s Kidman). “He brings enormous Aussie charm to the role and this laid-back swagger, which I think hasn’t been seen on screen for a long time,” gushes Kidman. “I think Baz brought something very different out of Hugh.” The film has become something of a national endeavour, not unlike the effort that went into Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, which put neighbouring New Zealand on the map. Luhrmann not only filmed this down-under Gone with the Wind in Australia, he filled the marquee with an entirely Aussie cast and crew and paired up with Tourism Australia so the film could be used as bait for visitors. Then there’s the title: in Australia anyway, definitely a risk. “There’s some anxiety that goes with it,” Jackman admits. “It better be good, right? Australians aren’t going to go, ‘Oh, I didn’t like that,’ if they didn’t. No, they’ll be angry. But Baz has earned the title.”

And Jackman, it’s fair to say, has earned the role. Or any role, for that matter, since in his 10-year film career he has played nearly every kind: the darkly obsessed magician in The Prestige; his Tony award-winning run as the flamboyant, ultra-gay entertainer Peter Allen in the Broadway musical The Boy from Oz; the voice of a penguin in the animated Happy Feet; and the woolly, adamantium-clawed comic-book mutant Wolverine in the X-Men movies.

That kind of range is the definition of the job, but Jackman, 40, extends his brand of method acting to his body as well (Happy Feet excluded). Hence the nine months of daily yoga he practised to pull off the lotus position for 2006’s The Fountain, plus the additional three months’ practice it required to be able to do it underwater — all for a movie barely anyone paid to see. (Yeah, he’s heard of body doubles. Stuntmen, too. Not interested.) Or the total body transformation he achieved to play Wolverine. The former gym-phobe (“I never understood why people went to the gym; I thought it was ridiculous,” Jackman says) undertook a gruelling routine — up to two hours of weightlifting, five days a week. Ditto for Australia, for which the lean actor needed to pack on the thick muscle of an outback cattle drover. “Hugh’s amazing because he has such athleticism,” says Kidman. “He could barely ride at the beginning of the film, but by the end he was a great horseman.”

“For a year and a half I’ve been quite strict on my eating,” Jackman says. He adopted the diet of an Australian bodybuilding champ who “wakes up at four in the morning, has egg whites on dry toast, then goes back to bed so he gets some food in him before he trains at 6am”.

Jackman is so modest he won’t even take credit for being modest, chalking it up to national character. “I love the way in America people go, ‘I’m good at making coffee. I’m going to make you some great coffee,’ ” he says. “Here you’d say, ‘Let me make you coffee,’ and if someone says it’s great, you go, ‘Aw, I just fluked it. Usually it’s crap what I make, but I just got lucky today.’” He offers a variation on that theme when asked about his versatility as a performer. It’s an Aussie thing, he explains. “Look at the business here in Australia,” he says. “With a population of just 20m, you can’t be too fussy. You have to be able to do everything. That may be some of the reason Australian actors have done well. There’s more versatility to what they can do. Plus, we have a saying here: Have a go. We don’t like people who play things safe. It’s not enough just to be successful. You have to take a bit of a risk.”

Have a go, you mug: it’s as good a summation as any for Jackman’s life so far. But it’s slightly misleading at the same time, because while Jackman may sometimes leap without looking, once he leaps his commitment is fervent, and possibly even obsessive. Don’t believe him for a second when he says he just fluked it.

Jackman is the youngest of five children of Chris Jackman, an English-born accountant, and Grace Watson, who abandoned the family and moved back to England when Hugh was eight. It was by all accounts a searing split for Hugh, who was left to the roughshod care of his siblings while his father worked until 6.30 or 7 at night. Though his youth was comfortable — “I was raised in a white, leafy suburb north of Sydney with private schools,” he says — it wasn’t, at least to him, normal. Normality was what he craved, which may be why his earliest ambition was to be an accountant like his dad. “I wanted to do his job,” he says. “He had a calm power about him when he was at work. He had a secretary.”

As with most Australians, a yearning to travel eventually set in. “Part of that is our isolation,” Jackman says. Australia might be a big country, but it can feel like a small island tucked far away from the rest of the world. If we were to turn this boat due east, we’d cover lots of blue — 7,000 miles of it — before landfall in South America.

Hugh Jackman on Australia, marriage and religion – Times Online

Incoming search terms:

• hugh jackman body
• hugh jackman eyes
• hugh jackman on marriage

Consumers, civil-rights activists, engineers, Internet providers and politicians from opposition parties are among the critics of a mandatory Internet filter that would block at least 1,300 Web sites prohibited by the government — mostly child pornography, excessive violence, instructions in crime or drug use and advocacy of terrorism.

Hundreds protested in state capitals earlier this month.

“This is obviously censorship,” said Justin Pearson Smith, 29, organizer of protests in Melbourne and an officer of one of a dozen Facebook groups against the filter.

The list of prohibited sites, which the government isn’t making public, is arbitrary and not subject to legal scrutiny, Smith said, leaving it to the government or lawmakers to pursue their own online agendas.

“I think the money would be better spent in investing in law enforcement and targeting producers of child porn,” he said.

Internet providers say a filter could slow browsing speeds, and many question whether it would achieve its intended goals. Illegal material such as child pornography is often traded on peer-to-peer networks or chats, which would not be covered by the filter.

“People don’t openly post child porn, the same way you can’t walk into a store in Sydney and buy a machine gun,” said Geordie Guy, spokesman for Electronic Frontiers Australia, an Internet advocacy organization. “A filter of this nature only blocks material on public Web sites. But illicit material … is traded on the black market, through secret channels.”

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy proposed the filter earlier this year, following up on a promise of the year-old Labor Party government to make the Internet cleaner and safer.

“This is not an argument about free speech,” he said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “We have laws about the sort of material that is acceptable across all mediums and the Internet is no different. Currently, some material is banned and we are simply seeking to use technology to ensure those bans are working.”

Jim Wallace, managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby, welcomed the proposed filter as “an important safeguard for families worried about their children inadvertently coming across this material on the Net.”

Conroy’s office said a peer-to-peer filter could be considered. Most of today’s filters are unable to do that, though companies are developing the technology.

The plan, which would have to be approved by Parliament, has two tiers. A mandatory filter would block sites on an existing blacklist determined by the Australian Communications Media Authority. An optional filter would block adult content.

The latter could use keywords to determine which sites to block, a technology that critics say is problematic.

“Filtering technology is not capable of realizing that when we say breasts we’re talking about breast cancer, or when we type in sex we may be looking for sexual education,” Guy said. “The filter will accidentally block things it’s not meant to block.”

A laboratory test of six filters for the Australian Communications Media Authority found they missed 3 percent to 12 percent of material they should have barred and wrongly blocked access to 1 percent to 8 percent of Web sites. The most accurate filters slowed browsing speeds up to 86 percent.

The government has invited Internet providers to participate in a live test expected to be completed by the end of June.

The country’s largest Internet provider, Telstra BigPond, has declined, but others will take part. Provider iiNet signed on to prove the filter won’t work. Managing director Michael Malone said he would collect data to show the government “how stupid it is.”

The government has allocated 45 million Australian dollars ($30.7 million) for the filter, the largest part of a four-year, AU$128.5 million ($89 million) cybersafety plan, which also includes funding for investigating online child abuse, education and research.

One of the world’s largest child-advocacy groups questions such an allocation of money.

“The filter may not be able to in fact protect children from the core elements of the Internet that they are actually experiencing danger in,” said Holly Doel-Mackaway, an adviser with Save the Children. “The filter should be one small part of an overall comprehensive program to educate children and families about using the Internet.”

Australia’s proposal is less severe than controls in Egypt and Iran, where bloggers have been imprisoned; in North Korea, where there is virtually no Internet access; or in China, which has a pervasive filtering system.

Internet providers in the West have blocked content at times. In early December, several British providers blocked a Wikipedia entry about heavy metal band Scorpion. The entry included its 1976 “Virgin Killer” album cover, which has an image of a naked underage girl. The Internet Watch Foundation warned providers the image might be illegal.

Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom have filters, but they are voluntary.

In the United States, Pennsylvania briefly imposed requirements for service providers to block child-pornography sites, but a federal court struck down the law because the filters also blocked legitimate sites.

In Australia, a political party named the Australian Sex Party was launched last month in large part to fight the filter, which it believes could block legal pornography, sex education, abortion information and off-color language.

But ethics professor Clive Hamilton, in a column on the popular Australian Web site Crikey.com, scoffed at what he called “Net libertarians,” who believe freedom of speech is more important than limiting what children can access online.

“The Internet has dramatically changed what children can see,” said the professor at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, noting that “a few extra clicks of a mouse” could open sites with photos or videos of extreme or violent sex. “Opponents of ISP filters simply refuse to acknowledge or trivialize the extent of the social problem.”

The Associated Press: