Australia can be viewed in three ways; as an island, as a country and as a continent.
As an island, it is the world's largest.
As a country it is the sixth biggest in the world (after Russia, Canada, China, the U.S.A. and Brazil). It covers 7,682,300 square kilometres (Nicholson 1997) and is roughly the size of the continental United States, without the state of Alaska. Like the U.S.A, it is longer than it is tall, but unlike that country (which misses out on the tropic of cancer), Australia has a third of its land within the tropics.
And finally, as a continent, it is the worlds smallest.
Geographically, Australia distinguishes itself by its extreme flatness. It's biggest range is the Great Dividing range which separates the eastern coastal slice from the western majority of the continent. Read (1998) considers this range and the few others as relatively low tablelands and plateaus and not really mountain ranges.
It comprises a very distinct biogeographical realm that easily distinguishes itself from the Earth's other great biological regions that roughly correlate with the other continents.
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Ecosystems
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North Queensland
This area of Australia is very diverse because it is jam packed full of
very close, but very different, ecosystems, and their smaller
vegetation communities; coral reefs, sea grass communities, mangroves,
beaches, rocky shores, rainforest, wet sclerophyll forest, tropical
open forests and woodlands.
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Biology
Biogeography is the science that deals with the distribution around the globe of flora and fauna. Australia is often divided into three main terrestrial regions
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Nature 
