Kangaroos are about as common place as cows - if you drive around the countryside early in the morning or late in the afternoon, you are likely to see herds of them. They even come down out of the hills surrounding Canberra and can be seen in some of the grassy areas which run around and through the city. Koalas in the wild, on the other hand, are really tough to spot, as they sleep a lot during the day fairly high up in a tree.
Canberra is quite a city for the botanically-oriented. Besides having a spectacular (and free) national botanic gardens, just walking down streets is an adventure. As Canberra is a planned city, one of the plans was to plant trees of a single variety on each residential street. Thus driving around one can almost tell one's location by the type of trees on the street.
The school year is aligned with the calendar year, which is a lot more practical than the format in the Northern hemisphere. Their summer break, which falls around Christmas, is only 6 weeks long, with a few 2 week breaks interspersed throughout the year. Much more practical than the long summer breaks in the U.S., where kids get bored half way through and tend to forget a lot of what they learned in the previous year. Some regions are experimenting with shortening pre-tertiary education by a year, so kids would only go to school for 11 years after kindergarden.
The beer-drinking reputation of Australians is greatly exaggerated, though 10 years ago things were a bit wilder. It's not even a cheap vice, as a case of OK beer costs more than $20A($14US). For about $15AI can get a 6-pack of several North American beers (even Miller, ugh!). Wine is a much better buy. For $5Aone can get a respectable bottle of dry red, and buying by the case is usually good for 10-15%off.
Driving long distances is an integral part of Aussie life. People here think nothing of jumping into their cars and driving 8 hours to go visiting in Melbourne, or drive 5 hours to go shopping in Sydney. Because of this, cars tend to have lots of miles on them. It is quite common on the used car lot to see several cars with > 300,000 km on them. There are quite a few cars which still run on leaded gas (petrol). I guess with a population of 17 million over an area the size of the U.S. they don't care too much yet about air pollution. There are moves afoot, however, to raise the price of leaded gas so that more people will use the unleaded variety.
Prostitution and gambling are legal in most parts of Australia. "Houses of ill repute" advertise in the yellow pages under "Escort Services", with some advertising home delivery! It is usually kept pretty subdued in the papers, though, unless someone is trying to open a cat house in a residential area (they usually are located in and around industrial and shopping districts). Sports gambling is big business, with multiple pages of the newspapers taken up in various horse, dog, etc. race results. Each major city has at least one large casino, open 24 hours a day. Other venues are found at "clubs", where one needs to be a member, relative of a member, friend of a member, know someone who might be a member, etc. It all has to be done officially. At one airport you can become a temporary member for $5, which entitles you to use the club facilities (gambling, bar, game rooms, etc) at the airport.
Australia has yet to succomb to cable or pay T.V., though this may change in the near future. They don't understand what possible use there could be for more than 5 T.V. channels. The notion of information services to the home is similarly foreign to them.
Restaurants are quite varied here, though Italian and Thai seem to be the most popular. If they don't have liquor licenses, you can bring your own wine (some allow beer, none allow you to bring hard stuff), but they charge you a "corking fee" (you are not suppose to remove your own cork). They devise all sorts of ways around liquor restrictions, though. I was in a coffee shop which offered something called "Three Bean", which is a glass of Sambucca with 3 coffee beans floating in it. A very popular after dinner drink!
Australians are extreme Nationalists. If you think you are tired of seeing "Buy U.S. products" shoved down your throat, it is an order of magnitude more intense over here. All things made in Australia have that fact emblazoned all over them, and companies which are entirely Australian owned are quick to point out deficiencies in competitors with foreign investors. The big fear seems to be that Japanese are buying up major chunks of land and property.
There are lots of hot issues being debated in Australia these days. There is a large Aboriginal rights movement evolving out of a court decision last year granting Aboriginal people control over some of their traditional lands (which is most of the country). Australia is trying to decide if they should become a Republic (they still cowtow to the Queen of England). As usual, budget issues make headlines each day. There doesn't seem to be any way of passing anything containing any sort of tax increase, given the way the party system works. They do have an interesting practice, which is that if the parliament gets bogged down in too many issues and the number of bills passed becomes too small (I believe in the U.S. this is equivalent to gridlock), the Prime Minister can simply dissolve parliament and call for immediate elections (including, I believe, for his own job). They did this last year, and there were rumors that it might happen again in the not to distant future. Obviously it hasn't worked smoothly for Yeltsin, but it is a common enough practice here that they manage to work through it.